Divining with Achi and Tārā: Comparative Remarks on Tibetan Dice and Mālā Divination, Tools, Poetry, Structures, and Ritual Dimensions
Translated an introduced by Jan-Ulrich Sobisch; with contributions by Solvej Nielsen
Divining with Achi and Tārā is a book on Tibetan methods of prognostics with dice and prayer beads (mālā). Jan-Ulrich Sobisch offers a thorough discussion of Chinese, Indian, Turkic, and Tibetan traditions of divination, its techniques, rituals, tools, and poetic language. Interviews with Tibetan masters of divination introduce the main part with a translation of a dice divination manual of the deity Achi that is still part of a living tradition. Solvej Nielsen contributes further interviews, a mālā divination of Tārā and its oral tradition, and very useful glossaries of the terminology of Tibetan divination and fortune telling. Appendices provide lists of deities and spirits and of numerous identified ritual remedies and supports that are an essential element of a still vibrant Tibetan culture.
Dr. Jan-Ulrich Sobisch is a Tibetologist, and is a faculty member of the Center for Religious Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where he conducts research on tradition-building processes in Tibet and works on issues related to the relationship between religion and science and the importance of religious concepts for the reconciliation of international conflicts.
Solvej Hyveled Nielsen is a writer and translator, who studied Buddhist Studies and Tibetology; she has translated several Tibetan texts into English.
Sobisch, Jan-Ulrich, and Solvej Hyveled Nielsen. Divining with Achi and Tārā: Comparative Remarks on Tibetan Dice and Mālā Divination, Tools, Poetry, Structures, and Ritual Dimensions. Leiden: Brill, 2019. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004402621
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