Of Dice and Divination

Glimpses of Tibetan Divination, Past and Present, ed. Donatella Rossi, Petra Maurer, and Rolf Scheuermann (Leiden: Brill), 11–48, 2019

Nearly two dozen excavated Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang, Turfan, and Mazār Tāgh bear witness to the prevalence of a specific tradition of dice divination in Tibet. Largely dating to the ninth century, these manuscripts constitute a crucial part of the material culture of dice divination; another important part is the dice that are characteristic of this tradition. Known in Sanskrit as pāśaka-s, they are rectangular four-sided dice, and they have been found at archeological sites ranging in time and space from Mohenjo-Daro to Khotan to Egypt. From the first studies of early Tibetan divination texts inaugurated by A.H. Francke, scholars have emphasized the comparative and cross-cultural analysis of this method of divination. Such comparisons initially drew on the Runic Turkic Irk Bitiq, the Sanskrit Pāśakakevalī and the Bower Manuscript, and in more recent times have explored possible connections with Islamic traditions preserved in books known in Arabic as Kitāb al-Fāl and in Persian as Fāl-namāh and with Chinese traditions preserved among the Dunhuang manuscripts. The present contribution approaches this method of dice divination not through the mutable elements of poetics, and ideas of fate, luck, and fortune, which are open to adaptation to the social, aesthetic, and religious norms of various divining communities. Rather, it approaches this method of divination through a series of numbers that constitute its “bones,” or defining elements. These include the four faces of a die; the symbols on each face; the number of omens one should receive (often three); the number of divination omens in a divination book (sixty-four); and the numerical probability of receiving a good, bad, or mixed divination. In the process of examining these numbers and comparing them across traditions, the analysis clarifies the relationship between certain traditions and offers some tentative remarks about transmission.

In World Archaeoastronomy

2021

What do dice and gods have in common? What is the relationship between dice divination and dice gambling? This interdisciplinary collaboration situates the tenth-century Chinese Buddhist "Divination of Maheśvara" within a deep Chinese backstory of divination with dice and numbers going back to at least the 4th century BCE. Simultaneously, the authors track this specific method of dice divination across the Silk Road and into ancient India through a detailed study of the material culture, poetics, and ritual processes of dice divination in Chinese, Tibetan, and Indian contexts. The result is an extended meditation on the unpredictable movements of gods, dice, divination books, and divination users across the various languages, cultures, and religions of the Silk Road. Link: https://brill.com/view/title/59960

The I Ching (or Book of Changes) is an ancient Chinese form of divination. A numbered hexagram (or six-line symbol) and its associated reading or forecast, is generated using the modern 'cointhrowing' method (three coins are thrown, six times). In the present study, the coin-throwing method was adopted for the sole purpose of establishing a consistent means of generating 'lucky' numbers to be used in a form of gambling known as 'Lotto'-a televised game in which eight ping-pong balls with winning numbers printed on them are drawn every Saturday night from a pool of 45 such balls. Participants in the present study took turns throwing coins to generate their own hexagram numbers. A total of eight numbers were entered for each Lotto game. Over a period of months, ten games were played. Half the games played (5 games) independently produced significant amounts of winning numbers (p < .05). Individual hit-rates for key players ranged from approximately 17% up to 36% over the ten games. It was concluded that such high success rates might bode well for the system, but a 'control' condition would be necessary in a replication study to confirm the viability of the procedure.

2007

Contributions to the Cultural History of Early Tibet, ed. Matthew T. Kapstein and Brandon Dotson (Leiden: Brill), 3–77.

The thesis of this paper is that many Native American cultures share a cluster of connected ideas around themes of randomness, and that many African cultures share a cluster of connected ideas around themes of deterministic chaos. The idea that African cultures are connected to deterministic chaos and its computational relatives in fractals and complexity theory are described in detail in Eglash (1999), but I will briefly review the essential concepts later in this essay. Let me begin however with Native American culture, since the idea of randomness is more familiar to most audiences.

Review of Biblical Literature, 2020

Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2006

Tibetan and Himalayan Healing: An Anthology for Anthony Aris, ed. Charles Ramble and Ulrike Roesler (Kathmandu: Vajra Publications), 147–60.