Stupa With Prayer Flags

photo by Marischat

Tibetan New Year

by Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Tibetan New Year, or Losar, begins on the new moon in February or March, the time of the first spring thaw on the high plains of Tibet. It is usually close to, but not necessarily the same day as, Chinese New Year. The Tibetan calendar runs in 60 year cycles, each year represented by one of the twelve animals (same as Chinese) and one of the elements (water, fire, wood, metal, and earth).

For Tibetans, the start of the new year is a sacred time, a time to be with family and with one's faith. It is also a joyous time of feasting and celebration. However, because it is a time of transition, the ending of one yearly cycle and the beginning of a new one, it is also an uncertain and ambiguous time, a moment of great danger. Careful attention and the common exertion of all positive forces in the community are required to ensure that the passage into the new year will turn out fortuitously. Ian Baker writes in Tibet--Reflections from the Wheel of Life (Abbeville Press, New York, 1993): "With the same attention that would be given a newborn infant, rites are performed in the last days of the waning year to dispell obstacles and ensure a harmonious transition into the next cycle....One's actions on the first days of the new year set the course for the ensuing twelve months, and during the parties, feasts, and gambling events in which Losar abounds, Tibetans take vigilant care to avoid negative encounters or states of mind. As one Tibetan explains, 'To quarrel, cry, or lose one's temper is regarded as most inauspicious, unlucky, and a sure sign of bad times to come.'"

The celebration of Losar begins in the days leading up to the actual new year's day. During this time, debts are settled, quarrels are resolved, new clothes are made, houses and monasteries alike are cleaned from top to bottom, walls are painted, stone steps are rubbed and oiled, and dozens and dozens of kapse (fried Losar twists) are made. The family's best carpets and finest silver are brought out. Good luck signs are placed in strategic locations. Butter lamps are lit. Flowers are placed on altars. Piles of juniper, cedar, rhododendron, and other fragrant branches are prepared for burning as incense.

On the night of the dark moon, new year's eve, the family gathers around a steaming hot dumpling soup called gutuk, which literally means ninth soup. Everything must be nine. There must be at least nine ingredients and everyone must eat at least nine bowls. Some of the dumplings have surprises wrapped into them. As the meal begins, each person opens one of these special dumplings. The object one finds will indicate, much like a fortune cookie, that person's personality. According to Rinjing Dorje's Food in Tibetan Life (Prospect Books, London, 1985), if one finds salt, that is a good sign and means that one is all right; the one who finds wool is very lazy; coal indicates maliciousness; chili points out the one who is rough spoken; a white stone foretells a long life; sheep pellets are a good sign and means that one is very clever; and butter says that one is very sweet and easy going. Some families also insert slips of paper with more explicit messages, making the dumplings true fortune cookies.

At the end of the meal, everyone takes what is left in their bowl and dumps it back into the wok, as well as a piece of hair, fingernail, and old clothing. The chimney is cleaned and the dirt from that is also put into the wok. A dough effigy which represents the collective evil and ill will of the past twelve months is made and put in on top of everything else. The wok is then taken out late at night and deposited in the middle of an intersection of roads or paths with much shouting, ringing of bells, and beating of pots and pans so that the contained evil can be dispersed in all four directions. This ceremony, called lue, is done to get rid of all the negative forces at the end of the year so that the new year can begin unencumbered.

On the morning of the first day of the new year, Tibetans rise before dawn, bathe, put on their new clothes and finest jewelry, and then together make offerings at the family shrine of barley flour mixed with butter and sugar which represents a plentiful grain harvest in the coming year, and yogurt which represents a plentiful supply of animal products in the coming year. Each family member receives a derka, a pinch of freshly made butter placed at the top of one's forehead, a plate of kapse or fried Losar twists, and a cup of thick Tibetan butter tea. Then the family goes to visit monasteries and nunneries to offer white greeting scarves called katas, food, and other donations to the monks and nuns. Monks and nuns make offerings to the heavens by burning great piles of fragrant juniper and cedar branches as well as by throwing handfuls of toasted ground barley flour called tsampa up into the air. People visit relatives and friends, feast on rich holiday foods, drink homemade barley beer called chang and distilled homemade liquor called arag, gamble at dice and card games, and sing and dance around huge bonfires at night. The feasting and festivities continue for six or seven days.

This is also the time that households erect new prayer flags. Prayer flags are square pieces of fabric with prayers printed on them, strung together to hang on a rooftop or from a large bamboo flagpole. Each flutter of a flag in the wind is another recitation of the prayer printed on it, for the benefit of the family.

Tashi deleg!

~ Frances Kai-Hwa Wang ~

http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/asian/Article_Detail.asp?Article_ID=886

Address:

www. wtv-zone.com/WolfDogCircle/LotusNet/Losar2004.html
link no longer active

Shirley in Utah

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Dzogchen/

Bodhi Leaf

photo by Laurence Ranson

Timeless

Up from behind the green slope of heaven

children are appearing

singing a Golden Buddha-Land song.

I am washing my hands

in the happy music -

just a stone buddha

melting into Spring water.

Timeless.

~  Eric Ashford  ~

"For centuries people in many parts of the world have developed harmonic singing traditions (overtone singing, overtoning, toning, harmonic chant, subfundamental chant, multiphonic singing, khoomei - throat singing, vocal fry, etc), and nowhere has it reached greater refinement than in central Asia.  You may have heard the high whistling melodies, expressive warbles, and intense low croaking tones of Tuvan throat singers.  A similar folk tradition occurs among the herdsmen of Mongolia.  Certain groups of Tibetan Buddhist monks practice a deep subfundamental type of sacred harmonic chant..."

http://www.spectralvoices.com/secondpg.htm