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Ancient Tibetan astronomy keeps shining in modern times
By:Xinhua
update:October 04,2016
Oct. 4, 2016 -- Tibetan Buddhism conjures up images of prayer wheels, mandalas and prostration, but there is one little-known, indispensable item: a calendar.
 
Aside from some textbooks, the Tibetan Annual Almanac is the most widely circulated book in Tibet. The information it carries is critical in everyday life, especially for farmers, herders, doctors and Buddhists.
 
The Astronomy Calendar Research Institute of the Tibetan Hospital in Lhasa leads routine astronomy based on the tantric Kalachakra: the wheel of time.
 
Dating back more than 2,000 years, the Kalachakra describes eclipses as an alignment of the sun, moon and appropriate Lunar nodes, exactly the same as modern astronomy.
 
On these calendars, one can find the specific dates and times of eclipses, auspicious days for farming and other activities, as well as the timing of Buddhist festivals.
 
MANUAL CALCULATION VS DIGITALIZATION
 
For thousands of years, these calculations have been done manually, according to Yinba, director of the institute.
 
All the calendarists in Yinba's teams have gone through strict training in either monasteries or research institutes. They must memorize sophisticated formulas and be adept at mental arithmetic, as no scratch paper is ever available.
 
Instead, they calculate with a stick on specialized sand-boards, about one-meter long and less than 20-cm wide, and results must be quickly memorized as numbers are ceaselessly erased from the sand for the next calculation.
 
To make the figures easier to handle, ancient astronomy masters devised a set of "calculation verses." Calendar makers always chant while calculating.
 
In an attempt to speed up the time-consuming work, the institute brought in calculators in 1990s, but the astronomical data was too much for ordinary calculators.
 
When computers entered China, Yinba and his team began to use them and have since developed a set of algorithms on astronomical changes and changes of days.
 
Key in a few numbers into the system, and with a click of the mouse, all astronomical data for the year of the fire monkey (2016) will pop up onto the screen in two or three seconds, all fifty-two pages of it.
 
With the algorithms, the institute has published the first Tibetan calendar book covering the years 1 to 2100 A.D.
 
In the past, it took an astronomical master and his apprentices over 30 years to produce a new calendar, combining the four schools of traditional Tibetan calendar making, and working with both Gregorian calendar and Chinese lunar calendars.
 
Yinba said manual calculation was still used as a double check, but with computers as an alternative, more time is spent on training students and on research.
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