Anklebones and Poetry

In my continuing battle to understand Jakdan's poetry, I am currently wrestling with the following lines in Tolgiralame orire uculen:

ede

waliyaha jušuhun baju,

hohoko gosihon misun,

naracun hican,

buyenin duyen,

beye gincihiyan,

weri basucun,

geren-i geigen,

gisun-i fesin,

At this point in the poem Jakdan has become fed up with his miserable lot in life, and he wants to make a change.

Therefore

I’ve thrown out the sour dregs,

I’ve discarded the bitter fermented bean paste,

I long for the simple life,

I desire indifference,

for myself to be the beautiful one,

and the other to be the butt of jokes,

geren-i geigen,

gisun-i fesin,

How are we supposed to read these last two lines?

The easiest one to make sense of is gisun-i fesin. The word fesin refers to a handle, such as the handle of a sword or whip, and gisun is language or speech. There are very few ways to read this other than "handle of language", but what does that actually mean? Given the immediate context in the poem, it makes sense to read this line as referring to something that Jakdan wants, and since earlier in the poem Jakdan expresses envy towards people who are smooth talkers, I believe the best reading is something like "control over language" or "to be adept at language". The same semantic connection could be made in English by saying "having a handle on language".

The more difficult one is geren-i geigen. The word geren has meanings like "a crowd; the many; the multitude", while the word geigen refers to one of the ways that the anklebone (gacuha) can land. But what is the significance of this side of the gacuha?

Both Jakdan and the Staatsbibliothek poet(s) make references to geigen. SB 4.12 has the following lines:

utala sure,

tutala menen,

entekengge jata,

tentekengge geigen,

uttungge nekeliyen,

tuttungge jiramin,

Meaning:

So wise as this,

so stupid as that,

jata like this,

geigen like that,

thin in this way,

fat in that way,

The lines above pair antonyms with each other, so wise/stupid, thin/fat. We should conclude, then, that geigen is being used as an antonym for jata, which means (according to the Qianlong dictionary) "a weak or inferior person", or (according to Amyot) "an ordinary person without talent". So we can understand geigen to mean a talented or superior person.

This works well with Jakdan's other use of geigen in Soktorolame gingsiha ucun, where he concludes his description of the most fortunate people in society by saying:

ne je

niongnio deji,

geigen amban.

Most importantly

and best of all,

[they are] talented officials.

(There is a double-entendre in the last two examples which the reader is free to investigate, around the fact that geigen and geihen are homonyms, but that isn't strictly related to the topic of this post.)

My question now is: What is the connection between the meaning of "talented" and some particular side of the gacuha?

In the Mongolian practice of divination with anklebones, the anklebone is treated as having four sides. Two of these sides are considered "convex" and are treated as lucky, while the other two sides are considered "flat" and treated as unlucky. Of the two lucky sides, one is said to come up about three times more frequently than the other, and the same distribution is said to exist for the unlucky sides.

Norman's lexicon has an expression meke ceke tuwambi, "to see who is better, to compete", where meke and ceke are vaguely described as sides of a gacuha. The word ceke seems to come from Mongolian cege, meaning "the flat" (or unlucky) side of an anklebone, and is described in the Qianlong dictionary as oncohon, "face up". The word meke is not from Mongolian as far as I can tell, but would presumably mean the "convex" (or lucky) side, and is described in the Qianlong dictionary as umušuhun, or "turned over".

If geigen is one of the sides of a gacuha, and it is used in the meaning of "talented", it seems likely that it refers to the less frequent "lucky" side, the one that is worth most and hardest to achieve. This is the side called the "horse" in Mongolian.

So what does geren-i geigen mean as a full phrase? I think the best possible reading is "the most talented one in the crowd" or "the luckiest one in the crowd".

Hong Taiji's three offices for handling documents

In 1636 (天聰十年) Hong Taiji established three offices for the handling of archival documents. I'm interested in how this reflects Hong Taiji's views on the difference between "history" (suduri) and "precedent" (kooli). Prior to this event, the Mongolian word suduri (a loanword ultimately from Sanskrit sūtra) was not used to refer to records of past events, only the word kooli was used.

The three offices were:

National Office of History (gurun-i suduri ejere yamun)

The functions of this office were:

• To record the emperor's speeches and edicts
• To store documents written by the emperor's own hand
• To compose the following types of documents to be read before the throne
• Records relating to the emperor's handling of military and government affairs
• Texts connected with rituals addressed to Heaven (abka wecere bithe)
• To compile and compose histories from the following sources
• Texts related to rites performed at ancestral temples
• Historical texts of ancestors over the generations
• Funerary stelas
• All secret documents
• Back-and-forth communications with officials
• All documents submitted to the throne
• To decide which of the following are suitable for recording as history
• Letters of posthumous enfeoffment
• Text to be made into seals (? doron de arara bithe)
• Communications with foreign and guest nations

Office of Secret Documents (narhūn bithei yamun)

There may be something wrong with the Manchu text here, because this description ends with a noun phrase and no verb. It appears to me this reads as follows:

• To consign the following types of documents to the temple of Confucius for ritual purposes
• Documents exchanged with foreign nations
• Whatever documents have been submitted by [other] nations
• Accusations of wrongdoing
• Documents issued by the emperor
• Imperial rescripts to be given to civil and military officials
• Texts to be left with people who have died. (There is no verb to say what is to be done with these documents)

Office for Promulgating Precedents

The functions of this office were:

• To write explanations of good and bad precedents across the generations since ancient times, and to report them to the emperor
• To discuss these with the Heir Apparent
• To teach the princes
• To promulgate precedents to the masses

How to Tell Time in Classical Manchu

There is an almanac in Manchu at the Bibliotheque Nationale, which lists (among many other interesting things) the time at which the sun was expected to rise and set at different locations in Mongolian and Manchu areas on calendrically important dates in 1769. The tables in this almanac give us examples of how to state the time in Classical Manchu down to the minute.

The time of day was expressed in three parts: erin, kemu and fuwen. There were twelve erin in one day, so a single erin was 120 minutes long, and they were named after the cyclical animals. The day started at 1:00 AM with the hour of the ox.

erin	Start	End
ihan	1:00 AM	2:59 AM
tasha	3:00 AM	4:59 AM
gūlmahūn	5:00 AM	6:59 AM
muduri	7:00 AM	8:59 AM
meihe	9:00 AM	10:59 AM
morin	11:00 AM	12:59 PM
honin	1:00 PM	2:59 PM
bonio	3:00 PM	4:59 PM
coko	5:00 PM	6:59 PM
indahūn	7:00 PM	8:59 PM
ulgiyan	9:00 PM	10:59 PM
singgeri	11:00 PM	12:59 AM

There were eight kemu in one erin, so each kemu was fifteen minutes long, and they were divided into two groups. The first group were the ujui kemu and the second group were the tob kemu. Of each group, the first kemu was called uju ("head"), and the other three were numbered one through three. This is interesting in part because the word ujui is usually synonymous with emuci (both usually meaning "first"), but here they have different meanings.

kemu	Start	End
ujui uju	+0:00	+0:14
ujui emu	+0:15	+0:29
ujui jai	+0:30	+0:44
ujui ilaci	+0:45	+0:59
tob ujui	+1:00	+1:14
tob emuci	+1:15	+1:29
tob jai	+1:30	+1:44
tob ilaci	+1:45	+1:59

There were fifteen fuwen in one kemu, so the fuwen is identical to one minute, and they were simply numbered one through fourteen, with the first fuwen left unnamed.

fuwen	Minute
(none)	+0:00
emu/emuci	+0:01
jai	+0:02
ilaci	+0:03
duici	+0:04
sunjaci	+0:05
ningguci	+0:06
nadaci	+0:07
jakūci	+0:08
uyuci	+0:09
juwanci	+0:10
juwan emuci	+0:11
juwan juweci	+0:12
juwan ilaci	+0:13
juwan duici	+0:14

So, if you wanted to say 2:57 PM, you would start with the erin, which would be honin (starting at 1:00 PM). Within that erin you would be in the second half (tob), and three full kemu will have already passed, putting you in the tob ilaci kemu (2:45 PM - 2:59 PM). Within that kemu you would be in the twelfth fuwen.

As with dates and places in Manchu, you always start big and go small. So, if you wanted to express 2:57 pm on the 8th of February, 1769, you would write it as follows:

Reign	abkai wehiyehe	Qianlong
Year	gūsin duici aniya	thirty-fourth year
Month	aniya biyai	first month
Day	juwan juwe de	on the twelfth day
erin	honin erin-i	Hour of the Sheep
kemu	tob ilaci kemu-i	second half, after three kemu have passed
fuwen	juwan juweci fuwen	twelfth minute

Manchus of the Water

(This post is partially inspired by a recent article by Andreas Hölzl which delves extensively into the "Riverside Hypothesis", holding that the name manju comes from the name of a river, possibly the Amur, possibly from a Proto-Tungusic form like *mamgo.)

On the 27th of November, 1619, an emissary came to Nurhaci's court from the Ligdan Khan of the Chakhar Mongols. He bore a letter that began as follows:

döčin tümen monggul-un eǰen baγatur činggis qaγan-u ǰarlaq, usun-u γurban tümen manǰu-yin eǰen kündülen gegen qaγan mendü buyu oo?

An Order from the Hero Chinggis Khan, Ruler of the Four Hundred Thousand Mongols, to Kündülen Gegen Khan, Ruler of the Thirty Thousand Manchus of the Water: Are you healthy?

Ligdan Khan opens with this greeting as a way of asserting his authority over Nurhaci. To him, this is an order (ǰarlaq) not a letter (bičig), and his authority to issue this order came from his position as heir to Chinggis Khan, as well as the numerical superiority of the Mongols over the Manchus.

But why does Ligdan Khan refer to "Manchus of the Water", and what does that mean?

Some context can be found in Nurhaci's response, in which he says that Ligdan Khan is living in the past. Those four hundred thousand Mongols that Ligdan Khan referred to were reduced to sixty thousand when the Hongwu emperor took the Yuan capital, and Ligdan Khan was not even the ruler of all of those Mongols that remained.

If the rest of Ligdan Khan's salutation is couched in terms dating back to the Yuan dynasty, then it seems likely that his use of the expression "Thirty Thousand Manchus of the Water" is also a conscious archaicism. If so, what does it refer to?

The Chinese translators of the Manju-i Yargiyan Kooli rendered this expression as 水濱三萬人, "thirty thousand people of the river banks," so from their perspective it seems the term referred to the fact that the Manchus lived along rivers. This was definitely true of the Manchus of Nurhaci's time (despite the often-repeated claim that the Jurchens were nomadic), and was probably true of the Jurchens during Yuan times. Indeed, the centrality of rivers is even baked into the Manchu origin myth.

If you recall the story, the divinely conceived boy Bukuri Yongšon floats down a river from the Long White Mountain to a ford where people come to get water. There he makes himself a throne of willow and artemesia--two plants that grow on river banks--and is discovered and made a prince of the local people.

While they might sometimes bring mythological beings down from the mountains, rivers also provide access to fish and trade routes. More than that, the rivers in Manchuria provided access to gold and iron, both of which were gathered by panning river sand.

Given the wealth that rivers bring to those who live along them, it makes sense to me that the ethnonym manju might ultimately come from a term referring to people living along rivers, though the exact etymology of the name may still be debated.

Dream within a dream

I'm working through Jakdan's Handan Dream, which opens with a discussion of the idea that we all live within a Great Dream. In this section I have collided with the following couplet, which I find relatively easy to parse, but quite difficult to understand:

yaya tolgin bisirengge niyalma inu seci, 

yaka niyalmai banjirengge tolgin waka biheni

The syntax here is easy to see, thanks to the parallel lines. Both lines contain a proposition, the first bracketed by the conditional seci, the second by the finite but interrogative biheni. The propositions are both copular, with the first line being of the form NP1 NP2 inu (NP1 is NP2), and the second is simply the negative of that same form, NP1 NP2 waka (NP1 is not NP2). In each case NP2 is a single word (niyalma, tolgin) and NP1 is a quantifier (yaya, yaka) followed by a relative expression (tolgin bisirengge, niyalmai banjirengge).

So it's pretty clear how all the lines are structured, but getting meaning out of it has been tough for me.

My difficulties lie in the relative expressions. Looking at tolgin bisirengge, at first it seems like it ought to mean "what exists in a dream." However, the phrase "what exists in a dream" should actually be tolgin de bisirengge, as attested by examples I have found elsewhere. We are missing the de in the relative expression, so that can't be the right reading.

Instead, I think we have to read this as "that in which a dream exists", or "that which has a dream". If we take it this way, yaya tolgin bisirengge niyalma inu would mean "Each thing in which a dream exists is a person". If you think of dreams as existing in people, then this makes sense.

Moving on to niyalmai banjirengge, the difficulty here is that the verb banjimbi can be transitive ("give birth to") or intransitive ("be born; become; live"). We could read this as "that at which a person is born; becomes; lives" or "that which a person gives birth to". We cannot read this as "that which gives birth to a person" because that would be niyalma banjirengge without the genitive -i.

I think we should go with the intransitive reading in this case, because we have no reason to believe that it would be idiomatic in Manchu to say that a person gives birth to dreams. This forms a nicer parallel with the first line, and gives us a rhetorical question: yaka niyalmai banjirengge tolgin waka, "What does a person live in that is not a dream"?

These two copular phrases are linked together as P1 seci, P2 biheni. It is tempting to take seci...biheni as an if-then clause, but I don't think the mundane idea of dreams residing in people logically leads us to the metaphysical conclusion that people live in dreams. I think Jakdan means to contrast these two statements with each other and call out the curious idea that dreams are within people, while at the same time people live within the Great Dream.

So putting all of that together, the best I can come up with is:

While every dream is said to exist within a person,

is there any person who does not live in a dream?