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19 - The Tibetan Calendar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2014

Nachum Dershowitz  and
Edward M. Reingold
Nachum Dershowitz
Affiliation:
Tel-Aviv University
Edward M. Reingold
Affiliation:
Illinois Institute of Technology
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Summary

The Tibetan system of astronomy and astrology is extremely complex. It takes five years to study and master it at the Astro Division of the Tibetan Medical and Astro Institute in Dharamsala, India. Students learn to calculate everything by hand in the traditional manner, on a wooden board covered with soot upon which one writes with a stylus. There is no complete ephemeris compiled in which to look up figures. One of the main aspects of the training is the mathematics involved in all the calculations.

—Alexander Berzin (1986)

Calendar

Several calendars are in use in Tibet. In this chapter we discuss the official Phugpa or Phukluk version of the Kālacakra (“Wheel of Time”) calendar, derived from the Kālacakra Tantra, translated into Tibetan from the Sanskrit in the eleventh century, used by the majority of Tibetans today, and sanctioned by the Dalai Lama. (The other widely used version is the Tsurphu.) The calendar is similar to the Hindu lunisolar calendars, somewhere between the arithmetic simplicity of the old Hindu version, and the astronomical complexity of the modern Hindu. There are also regional variants, because the calculated astronomical events are in terms of local time. The Bhutan, Mongolian, and Sherpa calendars are very similar.

Type
Chapter
Information
Calendrical Calculations , pp. 315 - 324
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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