Przyczynek do opisu tybetańskiej fauny - pszczoła w poezji miłosnej Dalajlamy VI

• Authors: Galiński Juliusz

Title variants

EN

Contribution to the Description of the Tibetan Fauna - Bee in the Love Poems of the Sixth Dalai Lama

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

When interpreting poetry readers rely on their own experiences in order to better understand the text. Alas, these experiences happen to be misleading when the author comes from a vastly different place and time than the reader. This is certainly true in the case of the Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso, whose love poetry is still being admired and treasured – both by Tibetan and foreign readers. In his poetry, bees are depicted as lovers being in an intimate relationship with flowers. However, the bees he described couldn’t be Western honeybees, apis mellifera, as previous translators of his works assumed. From the depictions of bees in his works, I concluded it was probably either apis laboriosa or apis dorsata. This discovery adds a new layer to interpreting his poetry, based on the behavior of these species and their cultural meaning. The comparison between the bee-flower relationship and romance was inspired by kāvya – Indian court literature. Tsangyang Gyatso wasn’t the first Tibetan artist to write about bees. Centuries before him yogis Milarepa and Shabkar Tsogdruk Rangdrol featured them in their autobiographies. The symbolism of the bee was present in the Tibetan Bon religion, having the goddess of travel Lam lha seated upon a golden bee.

Keywords

EN

Bees; Tsangyang Gyatso; Tibetan literature; Tibetan poetry; love poetry; human-animal relations

• Publisher: Polskie Towarzystwo Orientalistyczne
• Journal: Przegląd Orientalistyczny
• Year: 2020
• Issue: 4 (276)
• Pages: 283-297

Contributors

author

Galiński Juliusz

• Uniwersytet Warszawski

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Identifiers

DOI

10.33896/POrient.2020.4.1