Desi Sangye Gyatso's White Beryl (1685 to 1687)

Desi Sangye Gyatso (1653 to 1705), regent of Tibet, wrote the White Beryl in 1685 to 1687 as a treatise on Tibetan astrology and calendrical calculation. It combines Kalachakra-based and Chinese-derived elemental systems and includes a history of the calendar traditions. It is not a history or travel account. The card values it for defining the calendar and 60 year cycles used to date the chronicles in this inventory. It lists a 1972 New Delhi reproduction of the Lhasa blocks in two volumes, scanned at BDRC. The atlas does not hold the text of this edition: no copy was harvested into the corpus, so nothing from it was read for this guide.

How they knew

Compiled from others

Who “Tartar” means here

Not recorded, and the word is not expected in a calendrical treatise. The card notes only that Mongols were among the users of the calendar.

Why read it

It is the tool for turning Tibetan sixty-year cycle dates into years, and so for checking chronological claims in Tibetan and Mongolian chronicles.

Watch out

It is technical, and nothing about the Tartars is listed on the card. The copy is a reproduction of a Lhasa print, and modern editions exist.