The Tribe in the Tantra

Introduction

The Kalachakra Tantra calls the Muslims it fears the Tayin. John Newman’s study of the tantra ends with a short table of the Arabic words its authors borrowed, and one line of that table holds a long history. Under Arabic it gives Tayyi’, طيّئ. Under Pahlavi, Tazig. Under Sanskrit, tayin. Under Tibetan, stag gzig (Newman 1998, 333).

Tayyi’, or Tayy, is a single Arab tribe. The Tazig of Tibetan books carry its name.

This essay follows that name out of the mountains of northern Arabia, through Syriac chronicles, the Sasanian court, the Tang histories and an Indian copper plate, to Tibet. There it meets the real Arabs of the eighth and ninth centuries: allies and enemies in Central Asia, a Muslim teacher sent to the Tibetan court, Tibetan horsemen taken to Iraq, and a Tibetan king’s golden idol displayed between Safa and Marwa. It ends in two Tibetan religions that used the name in opposite ways. Buddhist translators of the Kalachakra wrote stag gzig for the barbarians Shambhala would destroy at the end of time. The Bonpo used the same word for the country their religion came from, and one of their texts calls that country Shambhala.

A tribe of the northern mountains

The Banu Tayy, بنو طيّئ, trace their descent to Julhumah ibn Udad, of the Kahlan branch of the southern Arabs. Their tradition remembers a migration out of Yemen in the late second century CE. They settled in two mountain ranges of northern Arabia, Aja and Salma, which took the tribe’s name as Jabal Tayy and are now Jabal Shammar, around the city of Ha’il.

From there they ranged across the Syrian desert. In the fifth century four hundred Tayy tribesmen raided villages on the Byzantine side of the frontier while Roman and Persian envoys were meeting at Nisibis. One of their chiefs, Iyas ibn Qabisa, governed al-Hira, the Arab capital on the Euphrates, for the Persian king from 602 to 611. Part of the tribe became Christian.

Two of its men are still remembered. Hatim al-Ta’i, حاتم الطائي, a pre-Islamic chief and poet, became the Arabs’ byword for generosity. His son ‘Adi ibn Hatim met Muhammad and became a Muslim with most of his kin. Around 630 a delegation of Tayy chiefs came to Medina under Zayd al-Khayl, “Zayd of the horses”, whom the Prophet renamed Zayd al-Khayr, “Zayd of the good”. Four years later, at the Battle of the Bridge in 634, Christian Tayy fighting on the Persian side crossed over to the Muslims as the Muslim army was about to break.

One tribe, many names

None of that explains why whole peoples came to be named after this tribe. Geography does. For the settled peoples of Syria and Mesopotamia, the Tayy were the Arabs they met most often, and the name spread east with the empires that learned it.

Language	Form	Written
Arabic	Tayyi’, the tribe	طيّئ
Syriac	Tayyaya, an Arab	ܛܝܝܐ
Middle Persian	Tazig, an Arab	Pahlavi script
New Persian	Tazi, an Arab	تازی
Chinese	Dashi, the Arabs	大食
Sanskrit	tajika, and the Kalachakra’s tayin	ताजिक, तायिन्
Tibetan	stag gzig, Tazig	སྟག་གཟིག

Syriac and Persian

Syriac writers called Arab nomads in general Tayyaye, the tribal name with a Syriac ending. When the Arabs came as conquerors, the name came with them. The chronicle finished around 640 by Thomas the Presbyter records a battle in 634 “between the Romans and the Tayyaye of Mhmt”, twelve miles east of Gaza (Palmer 1993). If Mhmt is Muhammad, as most readers take it, this is one of the earliest mentions of him outside Muslim sources.

The Sasanian Persians took the word from Syriac. Middle Persian Tazig became New Persian Tazi, “Arab”. The same word names the long-legged hunting hound of Iran and Central Asia.

East to China and India

The Tang histories call the Arabs Dashi, first written Duoshi. The usual explanation traces it to Persian Tazik or Tazi, though some have proposed Arabic tajir, “merchant”, instead (Theobald). It was the Dashi who defeated a Tang army on the Talas river in 751.

Sanskrit took the word as tajika. The Navsari copper plate of 739 records how the Chalukya prince Avanijanashraya Pulakeshin threw back a Tajika army that had already plundered the Saindhavas, Kutch, Saurashtra and the Gurjaras. Tajika stayed in Sanskrit for a thousand years. It is still the name of the Perso-Arabic system of annual horoscopes that Indian astrologers adopted in the medieval period.

Then the word drifted. Among Turkic speakers Tajik came to mean the Persian-speaking Muslims of Central Asia instead of Arabs, and that is the sense the modern nation of Tajikistan carries.

Tibet and the Arabs

Tibetans wrote the word stag gzig, also ta zig or rtag gzigs, and for two centuries they dealt with the people it named. In 715 Tibet switched sides to ally with the Umayyad general Qutayba, whom it had just been fighting, and in 717 it agreed to receive a Muslim teacher at the insistence of the caliph Umar II (Berzin, “Tibet at the Arrival of the First Muslim Teacher”). Trade ran alongside the wars. Arabic writers on perfume ranked Tibetan musk, المسك التبتي, above every other kind (King 2017).

Al-Ma’mun’s banners

The fullest Arabic record of Tibet in these years is in the Akhbar Makka of al-Azraqi, the ninth-century historian of Mecca. Al-Azraqi copied the text of a plaque that hung inside the Ka’ba. It records that al-Ma’mun, while he was still in Khurasan, sent his banners with his vizier al-Fadl ibn Sahl toward Kashmir and the country of Tibet. God gave him victory, it says, over the rulers of Bolor, the mountain country of Gilgit and Baltistan, “lord of the mountain of the khaqan and the mountain of Tibet”, and the defeated ruler was sent on to Iraq with horsemen of Tibet (al-Azraqi, ed. Malhas, 1:229).

The king of Tibet’s throne

In the same chapter, on the treasures hung in the Ka’ba, al-Azraqi tells a story he had from Sa’id ibn Yahya al-Balkhi.

A king of the kings of Tibet became a Muslim. He had an idol of gold in the form of a man, which he worshipped, and on the idol’s head was a crown of gold set with jewels, with rubies red and green, and chrysolite.

al-Azraqi, Akhbar Makka, ed. Malhas, 1:225

The idol stood on a square throne of silver, raised on legs and spread with brocade, with tassels of gold and silver hanging from its edges. When the king became a Muslim he gave throne and idol to the Ka’ba. They went first to al-Ma’mun at Merv, who sent them to al-Hasan ibn Sahl at Wasit, who sent them to Mecca in the care of Nusayr ibn Ibrahim al-A’jami, a commander from Balkh. They arrived in the year 201 of the Hijra, 817 CE.

When the pilgrims came back from Mina, Nusayr set the throne up with its idol in the middle of the courtyard of ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, between Safa and Marwa, and left it there for three days. Beside it stood a plaque of silver.

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. This is the throne of so-and-so son of so-and-so, king of Tibet. He became a Muslim and sent this throne as a gift to the Ka’ba. So praise God who guided him to Islam.

the silver plaque, as copied by al-Azraqi, 1:226

Nusayr’s nephew, Muhammad ibn Sa’id, stood at the throne and read the plaque aloud to the crowds morning and evening. Then the gift was handed to the keepers of the Ka’ba and stored in its treasury, in the house of Shayba ibn ‘Uthman.

It did not stay there long. In 202, 817 to 818, an ‘Alid rebel, Ibrahim ibn Musa, marched on Mecca from Yemen. The deputy governor, Yazid ibn Muhammad al-Makhzumi, dug a trench around the city, took the throne from the keepers to pay for the defence, and had it struck into dinars and dirhams, saying the caliph would replace it. The crown and the silver plaque stayed in the Ka’ba into al-Azraqi’s own time.

Two details stand out. The plaque opened with the divine name al-Rahman, the same name the Kalachakra would turn into a merciless god of death two centuries later. And both the man who told the story and the officer who carried the throne were from Balkh, the old Buddhist city of the Nava Vihara.

Who the king was, nobody knows. Al-Azraqi’s copy leaves his name blank, “so-and-so son of so-and-so”. No Tibetan source records an emperor’s conversion, and the emperors of those years, Tride Songtsen and his son Ralpachen, were among the greatest patrons Buddhism ever had in Tibet. The Arabic says “a king of the kings of Tibet”, one of several, and the plaque’s mention of Bolor and “the mountain of Tibet” points to a ruler on the empire’s western edge, in the borderlands al-Ma’mun’s armies had just reached, more than to the emperor in Lhasa.

Tayin in the Kalachakra

The Kalachakra was written in India between about 1025 and 1040, nearly three centuries after the Navsari plate. Its authors had tajika to hand. They wrote tayin.

Newman gives two reasons. Tayin was already a Buddhist Sanskrit word, a title of praise for buddhas and bodhisattvas meaning “protector”, and the Kalachakra’s authors enjoyed words that pointed two ways at once. They also liked to render Arabic names with Sanskrit words that meant something, usually something rude. Muhammad becomes madhupati, “wine-master”, and the Mahdi mathani, “the destroyer” (Newman 1998, 318 to 319, 333).

There may be a third. Tayin sits closer to the tribe than tajika does. The y of Tayyi’ and of Syriac Tayyaye survives in it, where Persian had turned the sound into z and Sanskrit into j. Whether the authors heard an older form from an informant or simply bent tajika toward a Buddhist word cannot be decided from the text. Either way, the tribe is audible in the name.

What the name referred to by then is a separate question. Newman thinks it very unlikely that tayin meant Arabs in particular, since the raids on India in the early eleventh century were led by Turks. It names the Muslims of the northwestern frontier as a whole, Turks, Persians and Arabs together. The Tayy themselves had long since dropped out of the picture. Only their name had travelled.

What the Arabs gave Bon

In Tibet the name took a second road, and this one leads back to Shambhala.

Bon, the religion that claims to predate Buddhism in Tibet, traces itself to a teacher called Shenrab Miwo. Its histories say he came from Olmo Lungring, a land on the eastern edge of Tazig, and brought his teaching to Zhang-zhung, the old kingdom around Mount Kailash in western Tibet (Berzin, “Tibet at the Arrival of the First Muslim Teacher”). David Snellgrove, introducing his translations from the gZi brjid, put the Bonpo view this way: their teachings came by way of Zhang-zhung, but “the ultimate source of their teachings is sTag-gzigs, a country situated rather vaguely still further to the west” (Snellgrove 1967).

The holy land of Bon, in other words, carries the name of an Arab tribe.

The name and its timing

The Bonpo do not say their Tazig was Arab. Their Tazig is older than Islam, a land of sages where Shenrab was born thousands of years ago. But the texts that describe it were written down in Tibet in the centuries when the word meant the Muslim west. The Bon scriptures surfaced as treasure texts from the discoveries of Shenchen Luga in 1017 onward, and the two great lives of Shenrab, the gZer mig and the gZi brjid, were set down between about the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries. In the same centuries Tibetan translators of the Kalachakra used stag gzig for the Tayin, and Tibetan musk travelled west to the markets of Baghdad. Whatever older memory of Iran lies under Bon’s Tazig, its name and its place as the far western source of wisdom were fixed when the far west was the world of the caliphs.

Bon history names scholars from that country. One of the six great translators who carried Bon into the languages of neighbouring lands was dMu tsha Tra he of sTag gzig (Karmay 1972, 16). Bonpo tradition also says the teachings were brought into Zhang-zhung by white-robed sages from Tazig, long before Buddhism reached central Tibet (Reynolds). The Kalachakra, for its part, noticed that the ascetics of the Tayin dressed in white, unlike Buddhist monks in their red (Newman 1998, 325). Two Tibetan traditions remembered the people of Tazig in white.

What Bon took from the Arabs, on the evidence, is a name and a direction more than a doctrine. No Islamic teaching appears in the Nine Ways of Bon or in the lives of Shenrab, which are described in The Nine Ways of Bon. But when the Bonpo looked for the source of their religion, they looked west to a country that, in their own language, bore the name of the Banu Tayy.

Olmo Lungring and Shambhala

The Bonpo sources go further. A Bon chronological table translated by Per Kvaerne says that Shenrab “was born in Sam bha la (sTag gzigs) in the west, in the town called Yans pa can”, in a palace called Bar po so brgyad. The same table says that Shenrab “explained the mighty Kalachakra Tantra” in a palace called dBan chen sa bdag (Kvaerne 1971, 220 to 221). And according to the gZi brjid, Olmo Lungring was known in Sanskrit as Shambhala (Okar Research).

So one Tibetan word did two opposite jobs. In Buddhist translations of the Kalachakra, stag gzig named the barbarians whose army Shambhala would destroy. In Bonpo texts, stag gzig was the country around Shambhala itself, where a teacher of the Kalachakra was born.

The Bon version has no final war. Neither the gZer mig nor the gZi brjid mentions a battle between Shambhala and the mlecchas. Their Olmo Lungring is a hidden land at the centre of the world. A nine-storeyed swastika mountain, Yungdrung Gutseg, rises at its heart, only realised beings can reach it, and when the world burns at the end of the age it is said to rise into the sky. Bonpo pilgrims kept setting out to find it until 1959, and none came back to tell of it (Okar Research).

Other traditions kept their own names for the place. Martin Brauen collected a few: the Indians call it Shambhala, the people of Oddiyana Sukhavati, the Kashmiris the Indestructible Vajra Continent, the Gesar epic the Land of the Turquoise-Winged Cuckoos, the Tibetans Olmo Lungring and the Chinese the Treasure Continent (Brauen 1997, 50).

The Persian theories

Modern scholars have mostly read Bon’s Tazig as Iran or Central Asia, where Avestan and later Sogdian were spoken. Soviet scholars pressed the identification hardest. The Leningrad Tibetologist B. I. Kuznetsov argued in 1970 that Bar po so brgyad, the palace of Shenrab’s birth, was Pasargadae, the capital and burial place of Cyrus the Great, and that Bon descended from the cult of Mithra. Samten Karmay noted that traditional maps of Olmo Lungring had been compared with Cyrus’s empire and some of their place names read as transcriptions of Persian words (Karmay 1975, 175). Berzin reports a related view that identifies Olmo Lungring with Elam in ancient western Iran and Tazig with Tajik, meaning Bactria, and imagines a Buddhist teacher from Bactria bringing the first impulse of Bon to Zhang-zhung early in the first millennium CE.

None of these theories has won general acceptance, and none of them explains the name. Persian or Bactrian, the country the Bonpo pointed to was called by the word the Persians had made from an Arab tribe.

Chögyam Trungpa, who taught a Shambhala path in the West from the 1970s and drew on Bon as well as Buddhism, was clear about who belonged in it. “The Shambhala vision does not distinguish a Buddhist from a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, a Moslem, a Hindu,” he said (Trungpa 1999, 133). The tantra that named the Tayin as Shambhala’s last enemy had, nine centuries later, a Shambhala teacher who would not tell them apart from anyone else.

Hatim’s name

The tribe’s name reached India twice. The first time it came as tajika and tayin, a name for invaders. The second time it came through Persian literature, attached to one man.

Sa’di’s Bustan, finished in 1257, tells stories of Hatim of Tayy as the measure of open-handed generosity. The Persian romance of Hatim’s seven quests went into Urdu at Fort William College in Calcutta in 1801, as Haidar Bakhsh Haidari’s Araish-i Mahfil. From there Hatim Tai moved into Indian film, beginning with Homi Wadia’s Hatimtai in 1956.

In the Kalachakra the name of the Tayy belonged to a merciless invader. In Urdu storytelling it belonged to the most generous man who ever lived.

Works consulted

• Azraqi, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah al-. Akhbar Makka wa-ma ja’a fiha min al-athar. Edited by Rushdi al-Salih Malhas. Vol. 1.
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• Haidari, Haidar Bakhsh. Araish-i Mahfil. Calcutta: Fort William College, 1801.
• Karmay, Samten G. The Treasury of Good Sayings: A Tibetan History of Bon. London: Oxford University Press, 1972. Cited through Okar Research.
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