-This article is reproduced from the official account: Go to Tibet-
Every year when the tourist season comes, everyone starts to have a “Tibet Dream” again, wanting to visit Tibet. Today, I would like to spread common sense to everyone, and stop being “attracted” by business gimmicks.
“Tibetan drifting” for many years, I know that the first thing many people do when they come to Lhasa is to find the “yellow house” on Barkhor Street. It is said that this is the place where Tsangyang Gyatso and his lover Maggie Ami dated. “Love lovers” come here to meet one after another, and some people even hype that Tsangyang Gyatso is a Dalai Lama trapped by love, and so on.
Many Tibetan compatriots told me about this matter, and they felt very uncomfortable: It used to be a cloth shop on Barkhor Street, why did it suddenly become a dating place in recent years? Also discredit the sixth Dalai Lama!
Does Tsangyang Gyatso really have a lover named Maggie Ami?
Today I share an article published by the famous Tibetologist, professor of the School of Humanities of Tsinghua University, and director of the Sino-Tibetan Buddhism Research Center of Renmin University of China, Mr. Shen Weirong, in the “Oriental Morning Post”. Disappointing” means that from the perspective of the Tibetan language, “Maggie Ami” is simply impossible to be the name of a beautiful Tibetan woman. Mister is spreading common sense and rectifying the name of the Buddha!
In the summer of 2009, I took a group of students on a study tour to Tibet, and the first stop was the holy city of Lhasa. One morning, a student who was somewhat literary and artistic said to me mysteriously: “Teacher, I went to Maggie Ami last night.”
“Maggie Ami? Where is that? “
“Ah! Teacher, you don’t know that Maggie Ami is a yellow house on Barkhor Street. It is said that it was the place where Tsangyang Gyatso and his lover Maggie Ami met privately. Now it is a Tibetan restaurant, but famous. “
I laughed when I heard that, this must be another thing that a good-for-nothing person is afraid that the world will not mess up to fool people . I once read that the sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso , said, “Elegant loves evil, loves Shaoai, the secret garden of the harem, and sometimes has a quiet joy. He is also easy to wear and travel in a small way, hunting in the city of Lhasa. At first he was still secretive, but in the end The Potala Palace where he lives is not a convenient door, and he holds the key in his hands. At night, he goes out through the convenient door. He changes his name to Dangsang Wangbo. He goes to Lhasa restaurants and slave girls. “ So, I treat them as novelist words and laugh them off.
Unexpectedly, there are always people who like to talk about the ancients, and they must let the scandal stories of Tsangyang Gyatso be true. This is great, not only his lover has a name and surname, but even the place where they meet privately has been exposed, which is really unbelievable.
It is said that “Maggie Ami” is not the only one in Lhasa, it also has branches in Beijing, Kunming and other places, and it is a very popular public entertainment place. I guess the fans of Tsangyang Gyatso who like to go to “Maji Ami” today probably want to get back a little bit of the feeling of “making offerings to Qing Tianyi Lama”, right?
When you come here, you may think, “restore my true colors, and there are still lovers in the world?” But I dare to say something that may disappoint “there are lovers in the world”. Even if Cangyang Gyatso brought the manifestation of Bodhisattva and came here to play samadhi in the world, he did “forget about worrying on happy days in meditation, and have a lot of fun in the palace of secret theater”, I can guarantee that this poor Buddha has never met A lover named “Maggie Ami”, because “Maggie Ami” cannot be the name of a Tibetan beauty at all.
So, how did such a “Maggie Ami” who sounds like a nose and eyes appear? Who is “Maggie Ami”? I probably don’t need to find out who created the name “Maggie Ami” for the first time. Baidu Encyclopedia says that “Maggie Ami” is the prepositional form of “Maggie Amy”. Tracing back to the source, then this “Maggie Ami” is probably still the image of a woman who often lingers in the poet’s heart mentioned in the first of the sixty [six] love songs written by Tsangyang Gyatso—” Maggie Mama” is derived here.
This love song was first translated by Mr. Daoquan as follows:
From the top of the mountain in the east, the bright white moon came out.
The face of “unborn mother” has gradually appeared in my heart.
Later, Mr. Liu Jiaju translated it as:
On the east mountain, there is a bright moonlight;
At this time, the loving mother’s face could not help haunting Nong’s heart.
A few years later, Mr. Zeng Yan adapted it into a poem called Qijue:
There are many shadows and illusions in my heart, turning into a beautiful woman;
Just like the moon on Dongshan Mountain, gently stepping out of the highest peak.
Later, Mr. Liu Xiwu translated it into an ancient poem:
The bright moon is so exquisite, it just came out of Dongshan;
The girl’s face was full of thoughts.
In the 1980s, Mr. Wang Yinuan translated it as:
From the top of the eastern mountain, a bright moon rises.
The face of an unmarried girl always comes to my mind.
Mr. Yu Daoquan’s senior student Mr. Zhuang Jing translated it as:
On the top of the eastern mountain, a bright moon rises.
The face of Jiao Niang floated in my heart.
Obviously, this love song is not complicated and easy to understand. Although these translations quoted above have different styles, their content is basically the same. I personally think that Yu’s translation is the best and most faithful to the original text.
There is only one major difference among these translations, which is related to whose face emerges in the poet’s heart? Here, we see “unborn mother”, “loving mother”, “beautiful woman”, “girl”, “unmarried girl” and “Jiaoniang”, etc., and so on. Checking the original Tibetan text, it can be seen that all these different translations correspond to the same Tibetan word Ma skyes a ma, which can be transliterated as “Maji Ama” in today’s Lhasa dialect.
And the title “Maggie Mama” is so unusual, it not only baffles all the translators and commentators of Tsangyang Gyatso’s love songs so far, but also leaves a lot of ambiguity and room for imagination. “Maggie Amy” is a freak transformed from “Maggie Auntie”.
The literal meaning of “Grandma Maggie” is the “unborn mother” translated by Mr. Yu Daoquan, or more bluntly, “Aunt Maggie”, but how can we explain this “unborn” but also become a mother? What about “Aunt Maggie” who lost her “mother”? This rare expression has stumped a group of philologists who like to be more serious. So far they have given the following three explanations:
First, “Weishengniang” means “women who have not yet given birth”, so it is translated as “girl”, “beautiful woman”, “unmarried girl” and “Jiaoniang”, etc.; The fairy, because of her miraculous origin, is extraordinarily beautiful;
Second, “Wushen Grandmother” means “Although you didn’t give birth to me, your kindness is the same as Grandmother”, which is extended to mean a “loving mother” (stepmother) who is more affectionate than her own mother, although she is not her own mother;
Third, “Aunt Maggie” refers to the “Mother of the Buddha”. It is said in the Buddhist scriptures that “all dharmas are empty, neither born nor destroyed, neither dirty nor clean, nor increase nor decrease.” Therefore, “no life” refers to the Buddha nature. Therefore, “No Birth Mother” is the “Prajna Paramita Buddha Mother” who is “no birth and no death”.
Corresponding to the above three different interpretations of “Aunt Maggie”, we also have the following three different interpretations of this love song by Tsangyang Gyatso:
First, if “Grandma Maggie” refers to a “never born girl” or “fairy”, then we can indeed understand that this is a love song dedicated by the poet to his sweetheart;
Second, if “Grandma Maggie” refers to a “unborn mother” (stepmother) who is more affectionate than her own mother, then this is just a song about children missing their mother;
Third, if “Aunt Maggie” refers to the Buddha’s mother, then it is not a love song at all, but a tribute to the Buddha’s mother by monks.
A “philologist” like me takes restoring the context of the text and interpreting the text correctly as a profession, and this practice sometimes inevitably spoils the scenery and defeats the appetite of literature. The possible meaning of the term “Aunt Maggie” is clearly stated above, which may have reduced the literary interest of Tsangyang Gyatso’s love song a lot.
In fact, no matter whether “Aunt Maggie” is interpreted as “unborn mother”, “girl” or “Buddha’s mother”, they are all just a general concept, obviously related to the sixth Dalai Lama’s “lover”. “That particular role just didn’t fit.
Perhaps instead of trying to clarify its meaning, it is actually better to directly retain the title “Maggie’s Mama”, which will have a more literary flavor and leave room for readers to linger. However, “Grandma Maggie” no matter it is “not born” or “not born”, it sounds like she is still an “grandmother” after all, and it is impossible to say that she is the young Buddha who once caused us to be killed in the middle of the night. The lover who sneaked out from the Potala Palace for a private meeting.
I have to say that we are very smart today, and it is easy to arrange an old lover for Cangyang Gyatso, who has already become an ancient person. “Maggie Ama” sounds wrong, we might as well use its “preposition form” to replace her with “Maggie Ami”, regardless of whether it works in Tibetan or not, at least in the ears of our Han people” “Maggie Ami” sounds more like the name of a Tibetan beauty.
As a result, “Aunt Maggie” transformed into “Ami Maggie”, so that the “Love Saint” we love the most and admire the most is finally betrothed to a legitimate lover three hundred years after he left the world of mortals—— — “Maggie Ami”.
In recent years, “Maggie Ami” has become popular all over the world with Tsangyang Gyatso and his love songs, and restaurants and bands named after her have also become popular. She has become a cultural symbol in China. It is undoubtedly a very successful commercial hype to transform the originally ambiguous “Maggie Aunt” into the name of a specific beautiful girl, Tsangyang Gyatso’s lover. It has won the support of the vast number of warehouse fans.
This is a bit like changing Shambhala into Shangri-La, it is a genius creation. But once the utopia of “Shangri-La” is established, people will quickly forget about the pursuit of the Buddhist kingdom of Shambhala.
If “Aunt Maggie” in Cangyang Gyatso’s love song is a goddess and a spiritual idol, then her variant “Maggie Ami” is just a woman in the world of mortals who has stepped down. After entering the altar, she was vulgarized as a beautiful “danglong girl” in a wine seller’s house in Lhasa.
But what I have to say is that the rather exotic name of “Maggie Ami” does not sound pleasant at all to the ears of a philologist like me who knows a little bit of Tibetan, and it is even a bit harsh.
Not to mention how a person’s name can be referred to by its “prepositional form”. In fact, few Tibetan women take the name “Ami”, because it does not sound like the one we imagined in Tibetan. It’s as feminine as it is. I dare not speculate on the real motives of the person who coined the name “Maggie Ami”, but he/she may not know that “Ami”, or A mi, actually has nothing to do with beautiful women in the Tibetan language.
On the contrary, A mi may be another way of saying A mye, which means “grandpa” or “dad”. Therefore, we thought that “Maggie Ami”, which sounds like a beauty and a lover’s name, could mean “Unborn Grandpa”, or “Unborn Father”, which is better than “Maggie Aunt” and “Maggie Amy”. The identity of Tsangyang Gyatso’s lover is even further apart. It can be seen that it is not very clever to fabricate an old lover named “Maggie Ami” out of thin air for our beloved lover.
So far, I haven’t studied Tsangyang Gyatso very carefully, but I have done a deep study on his predecessor, the first Dalai Lama Gendundup a long time ago, and I still remember Gendundup once wrote a The first very famous “Song of Oriental Snow Mountain” (Shar gangs ri ma). Find it today and reread it, and see how it begins:
On the top of the white snow mountain in the east,
It seems that white clouds go straight into the sky.
Whenever I see this place, I miss my Lama,
The more I think about his kindness, the happier I become.
In the east where the white clouds return,
That blessed and triumphant wilderness,
My father Lobsang Drakpa and his disciples lived there,
A benefactor whose name is hard to say!
This “Song of the Eastern Snow Mountain” is a hymn dedicated by the first Dalai Lama to his master, Master Tsongkhapa, who is known as the second Buddha. So far, it is still widely read and popular in Xueyu. Every time I read this love song by Tsangyang Gyatso, I think of Gendhondup’s “Song of the Eastern Snow Mountain”.
Needless to say, this love song by Tsangyang Gyatso cannot be compared with the song “Song of the Eastern Snow Mountain” in his previous life in terms of artistic conception and text, but I am very willing to believe that this is the handed down of Tsangyang Gyatso’s ancestors A continuation of the famous article, it is a hymn dedicated to his grandmother, his “unborn mother” who loves his own mother, Buddha’s mother, or Tara.
In any case, it can never be a love song written by Tsangyang Gyatso for his supposed lover “Maggie Ami”.
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