Tibetan astrology

What Tibetan astrology is

Tibetans call the discipline tsi or tsi-rig, the science of calculation, and the name is exact. At its core is a body of arithmetic for reckoning time: where the sun and moon stand, when the month turns, which element rules the year. Around that arithmetic Tibet built a way of reading a person's life, a way of choosing dates, and a medical astrology that tells the physician when a treatment will help and when it may harm. It is less a fortune-telling art than an account of how the cycles of time move through the world and through the body at once.

The tradition is a synthesis, and it says so openly. Tibetan astrologers speak of two main sources, Kar-tsi, White Astrology from India, and Nag-tsi, Black Astrology from China. Behind both lies the older world of the native Bon religion, with its spirits of place and its rites of protection. Buddhism holds the three together.

Three sources

Bon. Before Buddhism reached Tibet, its people read omens, honoured the forces of earth, water, fire and air, and dealt with the spirits of mountains, lakes and soil. Bon texts place time and space under the rule of powerful deities, and much of the protective ritual still attached to Tibetan astrology, the thread-crosses and ransom offerings, comes from this layer.

China. Tradition says the Chinese princess Wencheng brought astrological and geomantic texts when she married King Songtsen Gampo in 641, and that she used them to site the Jokhang temple in Lhasa. The Chinese sage Kongtse, a Tibetan figure who takes his name from Confucius, became the patron of divination. From this stream came the five elements, the twelve animals, the eight trigrams and the nine-square Lo Shu. Tibetans called it Black Astrology after their name for China, the black country, for the dark clothing its people wore.

India. The second great wave came with the later spread of Buddhism in the 11th century, when Tibetan translators worked with Indian scholars on the Kalachakra Tantra, the Wheel of Time. Its first translation, by Gyijo Dawa Özer, is dated to 1027, and that year became the start of the first Rabjung, the sixty-year cycle Tibetans have counted by ever since. The Kalachakra carried a complete Indian astronomy, and Tibet named it White Astrology after India's white clothing.

From monastery to state

Over the next centuries Tibetan scholars turned these imports into a single system. Sakya masters wrote on calculation in the 12th and 13th centuries. Rangjung Dorje, the Third Karmapa (1284–1339), composed a compendium of astrology that founded the Tsurphu school. In the 15th century Phugpa Lhundrub Gyatso and Khedrub Norsang Gyatso revised the Kalachakra calculations, and their Phugpa school became the official calendar of the Dalai Lamas' government.

The decisive step came under Desi Sangye Gyatso (1653–1705), regent to the Fifth Dalai Lama. His White Beryl codified astrology, calendar and geomancy, and his Blue Beryl did the same for the Four Tantras of medicine. From then on astrology and medicine were taught as twin sciences, and in 1916 the Thirteenth Dalai Lama founded the Men-Tsee-Khang in Lhasa as an institute for both. It was refounded in exile in Dharamsala in 1961.

Kar-tsi and the Wheel of Time

The Kalachakra teaches time on three levels. The outer Kalachakra is the cosmos: the world system and the paths of the sun, moon and planets, from which the calendar and the eclipses are computed. The inner Kalachakra is the body, where the same cycles repeat as the movement of the winds (rlung, Sanskrit prana) through the channels and centres of the subtle body. The alternative Kalachakra is the path of practice, the meditation and deity yoga meant to free the practitioner from both cycles. The idea that outer time and inner time run on the same wheel is the foundation of Tibetan medical astrology.

White Astrology tracks the five factors of the Indian almanac: the weekday, the lunar day, the lunar mansion (one of 27 divisions of the moon's path, the nakshatras), the combination called yoga, and the half-lunar-day called karana, of which there are eleven kinds. A smaller Indian branch, Yang-char, the astrology of the rising vowels, links the Sanskrit vowels to the elements and the breath and was used for weighing a person's vitality and for choosing moments of decisive action.

The calendar

The Tibetan calendar is lunisolar. Its months follow the moon, but they must stay in step with the seasons, and the Kalachakra fixes the ratio: 67 lunar months equal 65 solar months. The gap is closed by doubling a month roughly every 32.5 months.

The day is harder still. A lunar day, tshe-zhag, is the time the moon takes to gain twelve degrees on the sun, one thirtieth of the cycle from new moon to new moon. Because both bodies move at changing speeds, a lunar day can run anywhere from about 20 to about 27 hours. The calendar gives each solar day the number of the lunar day in force at daybreak, reckoned at about 5 in the morning. A short lunar day that starts after one dawn and ends before the next never gets a date, so the month skips a number. A long one that spans two dawns gives its number to both days, so the month repeats a number. Tibetan calendars routinely have two 15ths or no 4th.

The Phugpa and Tsurphu schools use slightly different constants for the sun's mean position, so they place their doubled months differently. Most years they agree, but sometimes Losar, the New Year, falls a month apart in the two, which moves festivals, rituals and the dates for compounding medicine along with it. Each year the astrologers publish an almanac, the lo-tho, that sets all this out day by day.

Nag-tsi and the five elements

Where White Astrology says when, Black Astrology says what kind of time it is. Its working method, Jung-tsi, elemental astrology, rests on five elements taken from China: Wood, Fire, Earth, Iron and Water. Tibetan usage says Iron where Chinese sources usually say Metal. They are not the five elements of Tibetan medicine (earth, water, fire, wind and space), which describe the make-up of matter. In Jung-tsi they describe qualities of time and how they meet.

Two cycles govern those meetings. In the mother-son cycle each element gives rise to the next: Water feeds Wood, Wood feeds Fire, Fire makes Earth of its ash, Earth bears Iron, and Iron gathers Water. In the enemy-friend cycle each element defeats another: Water puts out Fire, Fire melts Iron, Iron cuts Wood, Wood exhausts Earth, and Earth dams Water. Every judgement in Jung-tsi, from a year's prospects to a couple's match, comes down to which of these relations holds between the elements involved.

The founding myth tells of a great golden tortoise that rose from the primordial waters with the knowledge of astrology on its shell. The chart painted on its belly is the Sipa Khorlo, with the twelve animals, the eight Parkha and the nine Mewa set out in rings. It hangs over Tibetan doorways as protection. It is easy to confuse with the Bhavachakra, the Wheel of Life, but the two do different jobs: the Wheel of Life maps karma and the six realms of rebirth, while the Sipa Khorlo maps time.

The animals and the sixty years

The twelve animals are the Mouse, Ox, Tiger, Hare, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Bird, Dog and Pig. Each carries its own element, direction and gender. Joined with the five elements, each taken twice, male then female, they produce sixty named years such as Fire-Horse or Wood-Snake. The Tibetan cycle has one difference from the Chinese: it begins with the Fire-Hare year, the year 1027, rather than with the Wood-Mouse. The seventeenth Rabjung began in 1987, and 2026 is a Fire-Horse year.

The weekdays carry planetary rulers as in India, and each birth animal has its own days: a la day and a life day that favour it and an obstacle day that works against it. Astrologers consult them in choosing dates.

The nine Mewa

The Mewa, literally 'moles' or 'birthmarks', are the numbers one to nine laid out as the Lo Shu magic square, in which every row, column and diagonal adds up to fifteen. Each has a colour, an element and a place on the compass.

The ruling Mewa of the year steps down by one each year, so a full return to the same Mewa, element and animal takes 180 years, three Rabjungs known as the upper, middle and lower cycles. The Mewa of one's birth year is the natal Mewa, and handbooks give each number a character: the white ones are linked to gods and good fortune, the black two to hardship early in life, the yellow five to sudden illness and loss. Further Mewas are derived from it for life-force, body, power and fortune, and together they are read as signs of past karma and present tendencies.

The eight Parkha

The Parkha are the eight trigrams of the I Ching, built from broken and unbroken lines: Li, Khon, Dva, Khen, Kham, Gin, Zin and Zon. They place the elemental forces around the compass and are the basis of Tibetan geomancy. A person's Parkha for the year is found by counting through them by age, from Li clockwise for a man and from Kham counter-clockwise for a woman.

From the Parkha come four good and four bad directions for the year.

The five life-forces

The most distinctive part of Tibetan astrology, and the one with no exact parallel in India or China, is its reading of a person through five forces, each expressed as an element.

• Srog, life-force: the root of one's existence, given by the element of the birth animal. A person born in a Horse year has a Fire life-force.
• Lu, body: health and physical resistance, read from a table that gives each of the sixty years its own body element, separate from the year's ruling element.
• Wangthang, power: wealth, standing and the capacity to get things done, given by the element of the birth year. A Fire-Mouse year gives a Fire power.
• Lungta, wind-horse: luck and success, the element that lets things go one's way. Its flags are the prayer flags strung across Himalayan passes.
• La, the soul: a subtle, protective essence that can be weakened or lost. Its element is the mother of the life-force element, so a Horse's Fire life-force has a Wood la.

The astrologer compares each of these with the elements of the current year, month and day. Where the year's element is the mother or the friend of a force, that force is supported; where it is its enemy, the force is under strain. A damaged la is serious because the life-force depends on it.

For a difficult year the tradition offers remedies rather than resignation: prayers, offerings, the raising of prayer flags, and the Namkha, a thread-cross woven in the five element colours on crossed sticks according to the person's elements. The Namkha is a Bon rite, taught widely in the West by Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, and it is consecrated by a teacher before use.

Sowa Rigpa: astrology and medicine

Tibetan medicine, Sowa Rigpa, the science of healing, is where the astrology does its most practical work. Its root text, the Four Tantras (Gyüshi), received its final form in the 12th century and is credited to the physician Yuthok Yönten Gönpo. The text is set in Tanadug, a city of medicine where the Medicine Buddha teaches an assembly of sages. Its first book lays out the whole of medicine as a tree with 3 roots, 9 trunks, 47 branches and 224 leaves.

In this medicine everything is made of five elements, earth, water, fire, wind and space, and in the body they appear as three nyepa, often translated as humours.

Health is the balance of the three humours with the seven bodily constituents and the three wastes. Each humour has five kinds. Wind, for example, is divided into life-sustaining wind in the head, ascending wind in the chest that gives speech, pervasive wind from the heart that moves the limbs, fire-accompanying wind that keeps the digestive fire, and descending wind that expels waste.

Medical astrology

Because the inner and outer wheels of time turn together, the humours rise and fall with the hour, the season and the sky, and the Tibetan physician, the amchi, reads them that way. In pulse diagnosis the doctor lays three fingers on each wrist and reads organs under each fingertip, and the same pulse means different things in summer and in winter, because each season has its own normal pulse. The Four Tantras also give ten distinct times for taking medicine, before, during or after food and between mouthfuls, according to the disorder.

The most striking use of astrology in medicine is the tracking of the la. The texts describe it moving through the body over the lunar month: it starts at the foot at the new moon (the left for men, the right for women), rises through the legs and trunk to the crown of the head at full moon, and descends again by the thirtieth day. Bloodletting and moxibustion must never be applied at the place where the la rests that day, because harming it would weaken the patient's life-force. Some lunar days are generally better for beginning treatment than others; the 8th, 15th and 30th are held auspicious for religious practice.

The precious pills

The link reaches into pharmacy. Tibetan medicine classifies its substances by six tastes, each made of two elements, and uses them to raise or calm the humours.

The most prized formulas are the rinchen rilbu, the precious pills, compounded from dozens of plant, mineral and metal ingredients. Many contain tsothel, a processed mercury compound whose preparation is among the longest and most guarded procedures in the tradition. Tradition requires both to be made on astrologically chosen dates, with the physicians visualising themselves as the Medicine Buddha and reciting his mantra over the work. For the tradition, a medicine made at the wrong time and without the rites is only matter.

That principle now meets modern regulation. Large-scale producers in China and in exile have moved to factory standards of manufacture, which require year-round production and uniform batches, and many traditional physicians argue that dropping the astrological calendar and the empowerments changes what the medicine is. Scientific opinion on the safety of the mercury preparations remains divided.

Reading it today

Tibetan astrology is still practised: the almanac is published every year, families consult astrologers over births, marriages, building and funerals, and the Men-Tsee-Khang still trains astrologers alongside doctors. For a reader who comes to it from Western astrology, the useful thing to notice is how differently it frames the question. It does not ask which sign a person is. It asks how the elements of a person meet the elements of the time, and what can be done to bring them into balance.

Tibetan medicine and its astrology are presented here as a cultural and historical tradition. They are not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, and traditional preparations, especially those containing metals, should never be taken without qualified supervision.