Navel of the Demoness : Tibetan Buddhism and Civil Religion in ...

20 the navel of the demoness
the particular volume in which they are be found. 9 The Nepali documents from
Te’s archive are identified according to the numbering scheme used in Madhab
Lal Karmacharya’s unpublished compilation (Karmacharya n.d.).
Where it is necessary to reproduce Tibetan words, I have opted for a
simple, roughly phonetic rendering. At their first appearance, these words are
accompanied by a Tibetan orthographic form based on the Wylie system, one
of the standard conventions for transliteration (Wylie 1959).
The people of Te speak a dialect of a Tibeto-Burman language that is
called Seke in Mustang. ‘‘Seke’’ has been abbreviated as ‘‘Sk.’’ (and to avoid
confusion, ‘‘Sanskrit’’ as ‘‘Ssk.’’); ‘‘Tk.’’ (for Teke or Tepeke) denotes words that
are used in Te but may not be generally current in Seke. Many words in Seke
have Tibetan cognates (‘‘Tib.’’), and in some cases I have indicated this relationship.
My knowledge of Seke is not particularly good. The people of Te all
speak South Mustang Tibetan fluently as a second language, and this was the
medium in which I usually communicated with them. This language—one
of several dialects of Western Tibetan—is mutually incomprehensible with all
forms of colloquial Tibetan occurring outside Mustang, including the language
spoken in Lhasa and Central Tibet. Words in South Mustang Tibetan are
prefixed with ‘‘SMT,’’ for ‘‘South Mustang Tibetan’’ (which itself subsumes a
number of slightly different dialects). Since I do not wish to reduce either Seke
or the Tibetan dialect of Mustang to the status of divergences from standard
literary Tibetan, it might be pointed out that the symbol < is used here as
much in the sense of ‘‘cognate with’’ as ‘‘derived from.’’
Insofar as it is closely related to Thakali, Tepeke belongs to ‘‘the Gurung
Branch of the Bodish Section of the Bodic Division of the Tibeto-Burman
Family of Sino-Tibetan languages’’ (Mazaudon 1978: 157, citing Shafer), although
it should be mentioned that a growing number of scholars are challenging
the validity of the taxon ‘‘Sino-Tibetan.’’ 10 While Tepeke surely shares a
common ancestry with Tibetan, the latter has reentered the language at a
variety of points in more recent times. To cite just two examples of vocabulary:
the Tepeke word for ‘‘moon’’ is lhanyi; the second syllable, nyi, corresponds to
Tib. nyi [ma], ‘‘the sun,’’ while lha is probably an archaic pronunciation of Tib.
zla, which in modern Tibetan is pronounced da; but the term for ‘‘month,’’ Tib.
zla ba, follows the Tibetan pronunciation dawa. The term for money in coin,
mar, is undoubtedly derived from the word for ‘‘gold’’ in certain Tibeto-Burman
languages (including Zhangzhung). To signify gold itself, Teke uses both mar
and the Tibetan ser (Tib. gser).
A number of terms also attest to the likelihood that aspects of the Tepas’
(and other Seke-speakers’) agrarian technology were acquired by contact with a
Nepali- or at least Indo-Aryan-speaking population, either in Mustang itself or