Wind Horse - Knowledge

256: 169: 558: 45: 31: 158: 413:. Its appearance is supposed to bring peace, wealth, and harmony. The ritual invocation of the wind horse usually happens in the morning and during the growing moon. The flags themselves are commonly known as windhorse. They flutter in the wind, and carry the prayers to heaven like the horse flying in the wind. 234:

Windhorse has several meanings in the Tibetan context. As Karmay notes, "the word is still and often mistakenly taken to mean only the actual flag planted on the roof of a house or on a high place near a village. In fact, it is a symbol of the idea of well-being or good fortune. This idea is clear

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high in the mountains." The ritual is traditionally "primarily a secular ritual" and "requires no presence of any special officiant whether public or private." The layperson entreats a mountain deity to "increase his fortune like the galloping of a horse and expand his prosperity like the boiling

469:, "protective warrior spirit") to one of the four brothers. The brothers who received the goat and dog choose not to participate, and their animals therefore do not become drala. Each of the brothers represents one of the six primitive Tibetan clans ( 428:, respectively. However, regarding the origin of the animals as a tetrad, "neither written nor oral explanations exist anywhere" with the exception of a thirteenth-century manuscript called "The Appearance of the Little Black-Headed Man" ( 440:

mountain spirit) kills his son-in-law, Khri-to, who is the primeval human man, in a misguided attempt to avenge his daughter. The nyen then is made to see his mistake by a mediator and compensates Khri-to's six sons with the gift of the

94:, it was included as the pivotal element in the center of the four animals symbolizing the cardinal directions and a symbol of the idea of well-being or good fortune. It has also given the name to a type of 544:

incorporated variants of many of the elements above, particularly windhorse, drala, the four animals (which he called "dignities"), wangtang, lha, nyen and lu, into a secular system of teachings he called

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Karmay traces several antecedents for the wind horse tradition in Tibet. First, he notes that there has long been confusion over the spelling because the sound produced by the word can be spelt either

503:"smoke offering to the gods") ritual, in which juniper branches are burned to create thick and fragrant smoke. This is believed to increase the strength in the supplicator of the four 461:. The first four brothers then launch an exhibition to kill robbers who were also involved with their mother's death, and each of their four animals then becomes a personal 196:, "human dharma"). Windhorse was predominantly a feature of the folk culture, a "mundane notion of the layman rather than a Buddhist religious ideal," as Tibetan scholar 480:

and sometimes Gesar and his horse are depicted with the dignities in place of the windhorse. In this context the snow lion, garuda and dragon represent the Ling (wylie:

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bears no relation to Buddhism," over the centuries it became more common for Buddhist elements to be incorporated. In particular, in the nineteenth century lamas of the

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Samtay further reasons that the drift in understanding from "river horse" to "wind horse" would have been reinforced by associations in Tibet of the "ideal horse" (

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On prayer flags and paper prints, windhorses usually appear in the company of the four animals of the cardinal directions, which are "an integral part of the

832: 827: 792: 822: 432:), and in that case a yak is substituted for the snow lion, which had not yet emerged as the national symbol of Tibet. In the text, a 780: 629: 58: 812: 817: 807: 268: 586: 287: 525: 512: 496: 405:

in the lower corners. In this context, the wind horse is typically shown without wings, but carries the

255: 189: 181: 113: 549:. It is through Shambhala Training that many of the ideas above have become familiar to westerners. 398: 168: 574: 546: 484:) community from which Gesar comes, while the tiger represents the family of the Tagrong (wylie: 477: 417: 131: 541: 243:, the 'decline of windhorse,' when the opposite happens. The colloquial equivalent for this is 776: 625: 425: 228: 260: 208: 197: 125: 91: 52: 231:," and windhorse was increasingly given Buddhist undertones and used in Buddhist contexts. 601: 421: 216: 349:"dragon horse," because in Chinese mythology dragons often arise out of rivers (although 298:, indicating that some degree of ambiguity must have persisted at least up to his time. 557: 105: 801: 476:

The four animals (with the snow lion replacing the yak) also recur frequently in the

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