The Preservation of Oral Tradition

The Preservation of Oral Tradition Michael Oppitz Up to the early 1960ies the fundamental question to anthropologists: ›whom and what do they study?‹ could be answered in a single statement: their field are societies without writing, societies based on the oral transmission of knowledge. This included the assumption that such societies lived far from the central power of those nation states, on the fringes of which they eked out their living – predominantly tribal societies in remote places. Only in the decades that followed, this simple proposition lost its irrevocable validity. Centre and periphery diminished their clearly marked separation; elementary knowledge in and the application of writing became a more widespread practice; a common set of communication means, gaining one after the other global distribution (such as roads, radio, books and newspapers, telephone, television, , mobile phones and computers), helped to reduce the former contrasts between those that claimed literacy for themselves and those that had done without. In the course of these developments, the job of the anthropologist shifted and widened its former orientations. However, the old and basic dichotomy between oral and scriptural societies has not lost its conceptual value. The reason is, first of all, that many human groups retain certain domains of their cultural expression on a purely verbal, non-literate level, even if their everyday dealings with the outside world run along the lines of written documents and communications. One of these domains is their corpus of mythological texts, which can be recited or sung whenever certain ritual events occur: recited by heart and never noted down on paper. In such cases, the physicality of a recital does not rely on a scripted document, but on the performance actualized by memory alone. Other domains that have prevailed in an oral form, are proverbs, sayings, idiomatic expressions, folksongs and popular poetry, not only in former non-literate societies, but also in those that are proud about their grand literary past. Thus, it may be useful to recollect for a moment the implications of this old anthropological confrontation of oral versus scriptural societies, for this opposition extends far beyond the mere distinction between the use or non-use of written texts. One may speak of an opposition with serial extensions, a watershed: on the one hand an organized state, on the other acephalic, stateless societies; centralized power vs. peripheral communities; impersonal administration vs. kin based regulations; unified jurisdiction vs. customary law; lowland population vs. mountain people; wet rice cultivation vs. swidden (potato) agriculture; fertile fields vs. rough and barren country; highly refined cultural standards vs. backward living; cosmopolitan vs. peasant lifestyle; world religion, based on books vs. local religion, based on flexible mythology. This last opposition puts the major religious systems such as Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam – despite their acknowledged mutual antagonisms and differences in history – for once on the same side of the watershed; and those that exist without sacred books and, consequently, without doctrine, on the other. The antithesis between societies with and those without writing points toward conflicts and clashes: it marks a relation between force and subjugation. Power is on the side of those who employ the written word toward those who cannot: taxes, conscription, corvée labour, enslavement, aggression and arrogance, forced education in favour of a uniform state language and to the detriment of local and tribal languages, – all these violent interventions have happened due to an unequal skill to employ the written word. As Lévi-Strauss has said: ›Writing rather seems to favour exploitation than to enlighten mankind.‹ But the hill people, the small societies on the fringes, have not always accepted their fate of subjugation vis-à-vis their pen-holding valley rulers. At times they have revolted; they have moved down to the capitals, pitchfork or bow-and-arrow in hand to protest against their lot; on occasion, they have burned down the official records of the central state as an act of emancipation; in other cases they have withdrawn further and further into remote regions in guerrilla-like retreat; in yet other cases they have made illiteracy a conscious, a deliberte, a political choice; or they have countered their defeat with cunning humour. One of these counters has found expression in a mythical tale, variations of which have been found in a great number of tribal societies all over the Himalaya and in adjacent mountain regions of South Asia. I shall recall a few of these tales from different surroundings, which will finally lead to the Naxi. In all such stories, the basic, self-imposed question to those who lack the art of writing, is the same: How come that at present we don’t have this craft, although in the remote past we did? The common theme of these stories may be labelled as: The loss of writing. A Gurung version A local pajyu, shaman of the Gurung people and Mila, a famous Tibetan monk and poet, have decided on a competition in various sportive disciplines. The last and decisive of these is a race to the nearby Mount Kailash. Who reaches first on the top, shall be granted religious hegemony in the region. The pajyu rides his drum to the peak, while Mila takes the first rays of the sun and wins. Startled, the pajyu topples head over heels downhill, breaking his drum into two parts, of which only one half remains intact. This is the origin of the shaman’s one-sided drum. Full of anger, the pajyu throws all his books into the fire. Seeing the damage, his helping spirit reminds him of his healing duties; but how will he sing and recite his ritual texts without books? Confused, the shaman eats all the ashes of his burned-down books, and whenever he has to do a ritual, he will drink plenty of alcohol, belch up his swallowed texts and recite them word for word from memory. And the lama, though winner of the contest, will have to rely forever on his written books. A Wa version A trickster called Glieh Neh sends all men of the village to war with a neighbouring tribe, while he, staying home, seduces all women, beguiling them with music and recitals from books. When the men return home, they put Glieh Neh with all his musical instruments and books into a wooden coffin and lower him into the river. Drifting downstream, the coffin is finally fished out of the water by down-river-people. As soon as Glieh Neh is released from his coffin, he plays his instruments and chants verses from his books. The down-river-people are enchanted by his performance and adopt him as a member of their tribe. Glieh Neh, in gratitude, teaches them his musical skills and the art of writing. The Wa people upstream, however, remain poor musicians and are left, henceforeward, illiterate. A Qiang version The first shaman (shüpi) knew how to read and write, he had some books. Every three years he undertook a journey to a faraway Lama to renew his supply. On one return trip, exhausted, he took a nap under a tree. Passing sheep ate all his books. A flat-nose-monkey (Rhinopitecus roxellana), hearing the shaman’s misfortune, suggested that he should acquire the book-eating sheep, kill it, eat it and make a drum from the hide, which he did. As soon as he started to play the drum, the shüpi could recite instanteneously all lines that had been written down in the consumed books – from memory. From this day on he did not need books any longer, since the beat of the drum inspired him to all the verses he needed. When he got home, he made the monkey his tutelary; and at the death of his helpful friend, he made a hat from the monkey skin. Hereafter, whenever he was to prepare a ritual, he wore the monkey hat, wrapped the skull of the animal in layers of printed paper and set it in front of him like an altar. A Naxi version The first Naxi shaman, Dtô-mbà Shí-lô, and the Buddhist Lama Mila decided on a climbing race to the top of Ngyù-ná-shí-lô Ngyù Mountain. He who would reach the peak first, should gain all the books hidden there. Mila, starting prematurely at midnight, rode up the mountain, flying on his drum, whereas Shí-lô departed too late at sunrise, taking the first ray as his vehicle. Due to his early start, the Lama won the race and claimed all the books for himself. Full of anger, the shaman caused a wind, scattering leaf by leaf all of Mila’s newly acquired treasures. When he tried to reassemle the books, Mila could not put them back in the right order. Shí-lô helped him, and for this the Lama thanked him with his pants. That is why Lamas don’t have trousers since then; and their books are kept, since that day onward, carefully between heavy wooden covers. Instead of books the shaman received a flat-bell and a drum – two tools which enabled him to chant all his ritual texts from memory. The correct wording of his chants would come to him by looking at the leaves of trees or by closing his eyes, reading inwardly. As time went by, Shí-lô would make scratches into the stems of trees and onto the surface of stones – as memory markers for his recited texts. These carvings he called ›marking wood, marking stone‹ (ssî dgyú lû dgyú) which became the expression for writing pictographs. And thus originated the pictographic script. What characterizes these four tales (and many similar ones current in many other Himalayan and South Asian mountain societies), is their ambiguous evaluation. On the one hand they admit that a society lacking the gift of literacy is in a strongly disadvantageous position in comparison to one that is blessed by it. On the other hand, this loss is also judged as an advantage: It strengthens the ressources of memory; it grants individual self-reliance; and it supports collective independence for those who resist external intervention. Illiteracy can be read as a positive feature, as a stance against repression; it is an anarchist tool. And that explains why in none of these stories the loss of literacy comes across as a major catastrophy. The Qiang lose their books to some stupid sheep on account of a sleepy religious specialist, but gain instead a wise animal helper and the tools for mechanical recollection. In the Wa case, literary and musical skills are exiled, resulting from one trickster cuckolding the entire male population of his village; the happy winners are those who admit the adulterer into their circle. The Gurung and the Naxi versions of the story are in part very similar, despite the fact that both societies live two thousand kilometers apart and have never heard of their respective existence. In both stories two different creeds, one Tibetan and Buddhist and one tribal and shamanistic, fight for the monopoly over books. In both cases the Tibetan side wins, while the losing shamanist side acquires the better techniques for the oral transmission of knowledge. The myths on the loss of writing tell yet another story. In the Asian mountain societies, where these stories prevail and where non-literacy is not a fate, but an active practice (or at least has been until recently), there is none where writing is completely unknown, – contrary to what has been reported from many South American Indian, in particular Amazonian tribal groups. All Asian non-literate societies are encircled by larger collective bodies, in which writing is the major and constitutive cultural accomplishment. These surrounding bodies are modern states or former empires and kingdoms. And the remote mountain people, pushed to the edges, have always been well aware of the powerful tongs of the written word attempting to swallow or constrict them. When they claim that once upon a time they had been in the possession of their own scriptures, but by unlucky circumstances had forfeited them, then this may pass as a fiction of self-esteem, a proud measure against the assessment of inferiority; but it may also pass as a constructive stance, a deliberated declaration: we don’t want writing! We know, where it leads to! We are not illiterate, we are anti-literate! The oscillation between book culture and oral tradition, which charcterizes most of the indigenous tribal groups in highland Asia, may disclose yet a third perspective, to which the Naxi story points. After the skill of writing has been lost to the Tibetan, the original Naxi dtô-mbà is not only left with a refined ability to memorize, he becomes also the creator of pictographs. Cut off from one of the great writing cultures, he gains two things at once: a superb memory and a new script, one that is designed for his own group exclusively. A writing system of their own has been invented not only by the Naxi – there are several non-literate local cultures which have attempted to gain independence from an engulfing high literate civilization by creating a script just for themselves (Yao, Sui and Yi being examples); but the Naxi script of pictographic writing stands out for its ingenuity, its aesthetic appeal and the intermediary place it occupies between oral and recorded text. By its very nature the pictographic invention of the Naxi is neither a phonetic notation system in the common sense, nor an abstract system of depicted symbols. It draws, in the first place, recognizable pictures of physical objects and living beings on the paper; and for abstract terms and concepts it supplies, in the seond place, a certain amount of logograms and ideograms. It mediates between a verbal texture to be spoken out and a pictorial substance alluding to this verbal texture. Halfway between painting (or drawing) and script the Naxi pictographs should not be called a writing system in the conventional meaning of the word. This is revealed, when one takes a closer look at the religious context, in which Naxi pictographs find their sole application. Ingeneous as they may be as visual signs, the pictographs do not note down ad hoc pronounced statements, ideas or figments of thought; they serve instead, as a supportive kind of aide-mémoire, a pre-existing oral text. Without such prefabricated narrative or descriptive texts, available on call and waiting to be performed by an expert who has stored them ready-made in his mind all along, Naxi pictographic books would miss their purpose. They need a dtô-mbà priest able to recite word for word the entire text to which the pictographic signs are just visual memory helpers: nameplates, signposts, street signs on a word route. When a series of pictographs are aligned on the page of a book and continue their alignment on the pages that follow, the content of the book can be guessed with ease – thanks to these painted road signs; but the pictographs-in-line will not convey the literal corpus of the entire text, nor will they transmit the verbal art of the oral creation. These conditions imply consequences for the preservation of Naxi pictographic books. Collecting, catalogueing and restoring Naxi manuscripts as physical objects, both for the present and for posterity, is certainly the most elementary archival task. But these pictorial books – many of them superb items of calligraphic art, masterpieces in fact – are just visual surface material for the treasures hidden behind them: a priceless stock of oral literature. But these treasures can be lifted only in constant collaboration with the religious experts, who have handed them down from mouth to ear to mouth in a long line of succession. To be fully present and appreciated, oral literary works of this kind need performative enactment. They need life staging in authentic séances. And in order to grant these performances any duration, serious efforts must be taken to record them on tape and film – and then to transcribe and perhaps to translate these. Only under these conditions the oral literary works will continue to exist in a manifest form. Efforts of this kind, consuming time and expenses, will be beneficial in their own right, i.e. position and save Naxi traditions in the light they deserve; but they will be also a step forward towards a comparative oral literature in the making, covering the entire Himalayan region. The preservation of oral tradition can thus be undertaken with varying intentions in mind: on a local scale, focussed on the Naxi; and trans-regionally, on a comparative basis, bringing other local traditions into view and focus. This second perspective may receive a few remarks. Naxi scholars or those who have studied other minorities within the confines of China, might be less aware of research that has been accomplished over the years in other tribal and indigenous societies in the wider Himalayas, especially in respect to oral literature. The results bear some weight. In Nepal, for instance, which opened to foreign researchers in the late 1950ies, considerable fieldwork has been done in the decades that followed, not least in ritual, mythology and the performance of verbal arts. These studies, made in locally focussed detail, were concentrated particularly on linguistic and formal features of oral ritual texts and their enactment in situ. Several bodies of oral literature were thus assembled: András Höfer delivered a close-up philological study to the ritual texts of the Tamang healers (bombo); Simon Strickland and Yarjung Tamu recorded the oral literature of the Gurung shamanic bards (the pajyu and khlibri); Gregory Maskarinec transcribed and translated the shamanic chants of West Nepal’s blacksmith caste (kami jhakri); Anne de Sales and the author of these lines devoted themselves to the mythological texts of Magar shamans (ramma); Philippe Sagant concentrated his attention on the local healers (mangpa) of the Limbu; Nicholas Allen investigated the ritual chants of the Thulung Rai shamans (seleme); and Martin Gaenszle those of the Mewahang Rai (makpa). Each of these studies (and several others, not mentioned here), after digging down their mines for years, surfaced invaluable jewels of oral literature, never seen before. The results of these prospectors’ mining industry should properly be called ›orature‹. To compare these discoveries of oral traditions in the western parts of the Himalayas with those of the Naxi and other indigenous groups in the east, is a promise to cast insights on a number of astounding similarities. As has been noticed already in the tale concerning the loss of writing, certain myths in the Naxi dtô-mbà repertoire find a counterpart on distant shores in other Himalayan regions (like in this case the Gurung in the Annapurna region of Central Nepal) – without the slightest indication of any direct contact. Such plot similarities prove that myths can and do indeed migrate, even if the groups that call them their own, do not migrate themselves. Mythical tales have a chance to travel almost boundlessly (even beyond the borders of language families), particularly when they are attractive. On their jouneys, the plots naturally change from one telling to the next, each becoming a variation of the former. And they travel not only in space, they travel also in time. The proof are analogies between mythological tales of present day Himalayan societies and those of pre-Buddhist texts found in ancient Tibetan caves. Prefered subjects of origin myths are crime and catastrophy stories: murder, fraud, deception, slander and incest are the expected deeds at the beginning of genesis serials. The acting characters constitute a closed society of blood relatives and affines; and the crimes committed by these protagonists, precede and even generate the establishment of social rules and customs. Order comes out only of chaos: that’s what origin stories tell. But the mythological corpus of a local society is not only made of strong narrative events with highly dramatic complots; origin myths are partly composed of auxiliary chants with very little or no narrative substance. To this second group may be counted chants relating the invention and correct course of ritual acts; the fabrication of prototypes of tools and objects needed for these acts (as enumerated in the socalled index books of the Naxi); chants to be sung when auxiliary spirits have to be asked for help, or when metaphysical beings are to be called in; enemies to be sent away or destroyed; routes of ritual journeys to be designed; altars to be built or saced grounds to be outlined. Apart from their content, mythical and ritual chants invite also to comparisons of their formal features. One of the most constant feature in the formal make-up of myths – and more generally of sung verse – is the construction principle of parallelism. This technique, it is true, is also widespread in classical Chinese poetry, but in tribal ritual verse it takes most often a different shape. In classical Chinese verse each syllable that receives a parallel member has to be different from its positional and grammatical counterpart, whereas the verbal art of the shamans requires that two parallel word sequences be almost identical, reduplicate one another, with the exception of one word to be different. This way of producing parallel verses leads to a minimalistic progress of narrative matter and has two advantages:it permits the lay audience to follow with greater ease the progression of the performed content; and it simplifies the learning process for the bardic beginner. Slow motion by way of minimal plot development is a very effective memory technique; a supplementary aide-mémoire is provided by the style of knowledge transmission: Ritual chants are taught and learned, as a rule, during real ritual situations, by antiphonic performance: a master, who knows the entire text by heart, recites a parallel section first, and the pupil will repeat this same section as echo singer, and so on down the whole chant. Over time and after many a séance, the pupil will be as versed as his master and, in consequence, can become a precentor, a lead singer himself. Mythical chants performed in ritual events are regularly accompanied by sound and music. The most characteristic instruments in the entire Himalayan range to produce the acoustic background in shamanic séances are the frame-drum (nep. dhyangro, nax. ndâw-k’ò) and flat-bell (tib. shang, nax. dsî-lèr), in this order of importance. One is made of wood and hide, one of metal. Both these instruments fulfill a range of tasks that go beyond the mere job of background music. Both provide the beat and rhythm for the adaequate metre, in which a chant has to be performed. And both are used, when the religious specialist is changing from immobility to regulated dance. The drum in particular guides the steps of the dancing shaman; and when he neither sings or dances, the rhythms of the drum announce dramatic moments of the ritual event. Both instruments send sound waves beyond the physical world, out into the world of metaphysical beings. Both drum and flat-bell are ancient pacemakers for the vital maintenance of oral tradition. Another formal feature, common in Himalayan ritual practice (and in Naxi dtô-mbà ritual arrangements as well) is an equal treatment of acts and words. Not only that specific ritual actions are carried out simultaneously with chants that deal precisely with the primordial staging of these acts – in the hope to duplicate the effects of both. Each chant of a ritual event – just like any physical action – is taken as a constituent part, as a modular element of the entire ceremonial procedure. Together, the full repertoire of ritual chants and the sum total of ritual acts, make a complete modular tool set, out of which each individual ceremony is composed. The type of ceremony at hand can be deduced from the specific selection of modules, the specific composition of words and acts in every individual case. As all ceremonies take their elements from a common stock, it becomes clear, why in certain parts they look alike and different in other parts. Why attempt a thorough study of Naxi pictographic books? The foregoing remarks may offer a few clues to an answer. 1. Naxi pictographs take an original position in the history of writing systems. Measured against other scriptural inventions, the Naxi system is of minor range, scope, and time depth. On a global scale, these inventions constitute a long line of independant creations down the ages, starting in the 31st century BC with cuneiform writing in Sumerian Mesopotamia; followed from the 28th century BC onward by the Egyptian hieroglyphs; around the 14th century BC writing in ancient China was initiated by iscriptions carved on oracular bones for scapulimancy, prototypes to character writing; from the 14h to the 12th century BC flourished the Mykean Linear B syllable script, followed by the Phoenician and Greek alphabets two centuries later; from the 5th century BC to the 3rd century AD Tifinagh or Tuareg writing is attested; the earliest Maya glyphs in Mesoamerica go back to the 3rd century BC; and Rock Art, both in Native America and in Aboriginal Australia, with petroglyphs and pictographic drawings, cover a considerble stretch of centuries. Compared to these and other famous systems, the Naxi pictographs cannot claim but a very short span of life-time, since they first appeared only a few centuries back. Their interest in the history of writing must not be sought in their age. 2. The pictographs, as created by Naxi genius, mark an intermediary step between oral and scriptural culture. They were invented long time after the oral texts to which they would offer mnemotechnical aid, were already resounding in the ritual performances of the dtô-mbà priests. They are visual testimony to an invisble literature, fixed in the minds of initiated experts and only real when converted by them into audible verse. 3. Naxi pictographs mediate between writing and painting. As drawings they belong to the realm of painting; and in their purpose to allude to words and word sequences to be enacted orally, they belong to the realm of language. Various theories have been put forward as to the origin of Naxi pictographs, one of them being that they were developed from ancient rock drawings. The problem with this idea is that model and copy, the prehistoric rock drawings and the later pictographs, bear not the slightest resemblances at all. Another theory seems much more plausible: the derivation of Naxi pictographs from Tibetan thangka painting. The arguments are convincing. First of all, Naxi local civilization has developed and grown – besides the constant influence from China – in close vicinity to Tibetan civilization, from where many influences have migrated to northern Yunnan. These influences are strongest in the religious sphere, one segment of which is Buddhist thangka painting, which, by the way, has also existed in Naxi monastic circles, long before pictographs were conceived. Now, if one compares the shape and image of certain figures, the resemblances between those of Tibetan thangkas and those of Naxi pictographs are striking, the main differences being the colour and fullness of the Tibetan predecessors and the black-and-whiteness and reduction of detail, characteristic for the pictographs. These changes in design are comprehensible, if one considers the difference in purpose. As far as their genesis is concerned, one could call the pictographs as reduced thangka images, made handy for their change of function. 4. If the thangka theory for the genesis of Naxi pictographs is plausible, an intensified study in the history of Naxi scroll painting should follow, not just for itself, but also for the transformations it has undergone toward the simplified signs of the pictographs. 5. The interlock of scroll painting and pictographic writing will be a joint effort to study the aesthetic genius of a people at the crossroads of different cultures: Tibetan, indigenous and Chinese. It will strengthen Naxi self-esteem and carve out an artistic identity quite unique in the rugged mountains of the Himalayas. 6. Naxi art history, as suggested here in its wider perspective, can help to illuminate an interesting intellectual past in combination with a regional political history. 7. Naxi pictographs and the preservation of their dtô-mbà books will open the gates to one superb sample of Intangible Heritage, about which a lot of ink has been spilled on Unesco and other institutional levels. Intensified research will reveal a local knowledge of encyclopedic dimensions. 8. Naxi research invites to multiple comparative studies in etnography, mythology, ritual and religion on a transregional basis. 9. Such comparisons, rooted in oral literary traditions, will elucidate new paths and interconections between different local societies over a vast territory and through different times and epochs – contemporary Himalayan ethnic groups, pre-Buddhist Tibet, Dunhuang, Bon and shamanic traditions, as well as north Asian practices and world views. Such research visions must go hand in hand, in the Naxi case, with concrete preservation programmes, some of which have been formulated since quite a while; and some have also been accomplished. The idea for ›a united pool of dtô-mbà manuscripts‹ is now more than twenty years old. As these documents are scattered in public and private libraries over the entire globe, it has been out of the question from start to assemble them all physically at one location; but to assemble as many as possible in digital form, and so make them available anywhere, seemed a managable, if time consuming and costly task. This plan is still on the agenda; and some remarkable steps toward its realization have been taken. The joint efforts needed to advance the plan for an encyclopedic digital library of Naxi manuscripts are layered: Step one: It must be explored, where collections of manuscripts are stored and what might be their approximate volume; a rough estimate comes to a magnitude of 15.000 to 20.000 manuscripts worldwide, which amounts to approximately 600.000 manuscript pages in total. Step two: All collections, public and private, holding dtô-mbà manuscripts, must pass through a process of self-reflexion – that ownership should imply open access to the respective treasures; from this understanding the willingness should derive for a worldwide collaboration between the different holders. Step three: Those responsible for collections, must be persuaded that preservation cannot mean to keep their stocks in permanent archival slumber, but that their raison d’être must rely on stimulating re-vitalization; such attempts toward vitalization require financial expenditure. Step four: Cultural and research institutions, be they maintained by Chinese Government, by other States or by international bodies, such as Unesco, as well as by private collectors, should join their potentials for adequate sponsorship. Step five: Local experts of Naxi manuscripts – those who can read the texts hidden inside the pictographic books – should be found and won for collaboration, as as long as this is possible: to recite on tape and film the oral texts, up to now extant only in potential guise; and enrich them with linguistic and interpretative comments. And sixth and final step: An international brigade of scholars must be welded together(Naxi, Chinese, American and European), who take into their hands the recording, transcription, translation and publication of the oral literary treasures thus brought to light. Such communal aims should guide the individual work of all field-workers down in their own mines – in the awareness that all oral traditions of the wider Himalayan region are interrelated and that each preservational act on a local scale is beneficial to all. 11