An Annotated Translation of the Dongba Script Jiaweiling Ritual Manuscript
This article presents a translation and interpretation of Dongba script certificates documenting the "jia weiling" (empowerment) ritual, a Naxi Dongba religious ceremony conducted at the Aming Ling Cave in Baidi, Shangri-La, to invoke spiritual power for practitioners. While earlier ethnographic fieldwork noted that Dongba priests received a handwritten certificate the day after undergoing this ritual, prior scholarship on practical Dongba manuscripts had not examined such certificate documents. The authors analyze two previously unstudied certificates—named after the recipients "Aming Dongqi" and "Yang Zhashi"—providing character-by-character transliteration, phonetic readings, and glosses. The study details the certificates' structure, including calendar notations (using the sexagenary cycle), personal and place names rendered through phonetic borrowing and compound graphs, and unusual orthographic phenomena such as canceled/crossed-out characters. This research expands understanding of both the genre of practical Dongba documents and specific graphic conventions within the Dongba writing system, offering new material for Naxi manuscript and script studies.
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