More than a thousand years ago, on the back of a long Buddhist scroll, a Tibetan scribe wrote out a book of dice fortunes. You throw a four-sided die three times. For almost every throw, a god or spirit of old Tibet speaks: the sky god Chölek in his armour, Yarlha Shampo of the sacred mountain, Mangpo the spirit of horses, the seven daughters of the gods. They talk of snow peaks and blue lakes, lost horses, cuckoos and thin spring sheep, and then the book says plainly: mo bzang, a good divination, or mo ngan, a bad one.
How to consult
Think of what you are asking about. The book was cast mostly for home and life: family, health, travel, trade, friends and enemies, lost things.
Type your question if you like; it stays on your device. If you choose, pick the kind of question: the answer often speaks to it directly.
Tap Throw the die: it is thrown three times. The scroll writes each throw as rows of little ringed “eyes”, and the app does the same.
Read what the god says, and the verdict. A few answers warn “if this throw falls twice…”: you may throw again for the same question and see.
Your question and answers stay on this device.
Your past answers
How do we know?
✔ The scroll. The text is on the back of a Chinese Buddhist scroll almost 8½ metres long, found in the sealed library cave at Dunhuang and now in the British Library (IOL Tib J 740). It was written in the 9th or 10th century, when Tibet ruled or had just lost the Silk Road oases.
✔ The dice. Each answer is headed by three rows of ringed eyes, one to four in each row: three throws of a four-sided die. The answers run from 4-4-4 down to 1-2-1.
✔ Gaps. Scholars call it the only complete Old Tibetan dice book, but the scribe skipped two throws, 4-1-2 and 4-3-2. If you throw one of those, the app tells you and you throw again. Of the 62 answers, 40 are good, 15 bad, 6 middling and one “steady”.
✔ The gods. Some of the speakers are known gods of old Tibet, older than Buddhism there: Yarlha Shampo, the mountain god of the Yarlung valley, and Ödé Gungyal. Bon priests appear in the answers, and the British scholar F. W. Thomas thought the book belonged to the Bon tradition.
✔ Dice and the law. The same scroll goes on with a second text, about using dice to settle legal cases in the Tibetan empire.
≈ Hard words. Old Tibetan is difficult, and some lines are obscure or damaged. Some answers begin with a word like Pyabun or Rurak that seems to be the name of the throw; we leave those as names. Where we were unsure, we chose the plainest sense.
≈ The die. The scroll does not describe it. Long four-sided dice of bone were used across India and Central Asia, so the app shows one.
✔ Our words. The English translation and the modern readings are written for this app.
Tibetan text: transliteration of IOL Tib J 740 by Old Tibetan Documents Online (OTDO), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, CC BY 4.0. Facts about the scroll from F. W. Thomas, Ancient Folk-Literature from North-Eastern Tibet (1957), and the studies of Brandon Dotson and Ai Nishida. English translation and readings: our own.