These songs all begin with A, la, la, la; la, la, la, mo and end with la, la, mo, la; la, la, la, mo. Once when I met a Tibetan soldier of my acquaintance, I asked why they used robber-songs instead of having war-songs of their own. He was a talkative kind of man and proceeded to explain in an oratorical tone.
“As you well know, the meaning of the songs is very good and noble; it is the courage praised in songs like these that strengthens a country. But even good songs, when used for robbery, are indeed wicked weapons, and the singers thereof great sinners. They are the same songs, but how great is the difference in their results! In one case they promote, and in the other they destroy, humanity and righteousness.”
[CHAPTER LXXVII.]
Tibetan Finance.
I shall next briefly describe the finance of the Tibetan Government. It must be remembered, however, that this subject is extremely complicated and hardly admits of accurate explanation even by financial experts, for nobody except the Revenue Officials can form an approximate idea of the revenue and expenditure of the Government. All that I could get from the Minister of Finance was that a considerable margin of difference existed according to the year. This must partly come from the fact that taxes are paid in kind, and as the market is necessarily subject to fluctuation even in such an exclusive place as Tibet, the Government cannot always realise the same amount of money from the sale of grain and other commodities collected by the Revenue authorities. Of course anything like statistical returns are unknown in Tibet, and my task being hampered by such serious drawbacks, I can only give here a short account of how the taxes are collected, how they are paid and by what portion of the people, and how the revenue thus collected is disbursed, and such matters, which lie on the surface so that I could easily observe and investigate them.
The Treasury Department of the Papal Government is called Labrang Chenbo, which means the large Kitchen of the Lama. It is so-called, because various kinds of staples are carried in there as duty from the land under his direct jurisdiction, and from landlords holding under a sort of feudal tenure. As there are no such conveniences as drafts or money orders, these staples have to be transported directly from each district to the central treasury, whatever the distance. But the taxpayer has one solace: he can easily obtain, on his way to the treasury, the service of post-horses, such service on such occasions being compulsory. The articles thus collected consist of barley, wheat, beans, buck-wheat, meal and butter. But from districts in which custom-houses are established various other things, such as coral gems, cotton, woollen and silk goods, raisins and peaches are accepted. Other districts pay animal-skins, and thus the large Kitchen is an ‘omnium gatherum.’ Truly a strange method of collecting taxes!
One peculiarity in Tibet is the use of an abundant variety of weights and measures; there are twenty scales for weighing meal, and thirty-two boxes for measuring grain. Bo-chik is the name given to a box of the average size, and it measures about half a bushel. But tax-collectors use, when necessity arises, measures half as large or half as small as these, so that the largest measure holds three quarters of a bushel, while the smallest holds a quarter. The small ones are generally used to measure the staples from provinces such as the native place of the Dalai Lama, or such as have personal relations to some high officials of the Government. Thus, though a favored district is supposed to pay the same number of bushels as the others, it pays in reality only one-half of what the most unfortunate district has to pay. Nor is the measure used for one district a fixed one; it may change from year to year. Suppose one of the most favored districts has produced a great rascal, or rebel, or has done anything that displeases the Government. The whole people of that district are responsible for it; they are obliged to pay by the largest measure, that is, twice as much as they did in the preceding year. Thus the various kinds of offences make it necessary to have thirty-two varieties of measures and twenty of weight. It is to be noted however that when the Government has to dispose of those stuffs, it never uses the larger measures, though if too small ones are used, it certainly causes complaints on the part of the buyers; hence the middle-sized ones are mostly used. All expenses of Government, such as salaries for priests and officers and wages for mechanics and tradesmen in its service are paid with an average measure.
The chief expense of the Government is, as I have stated before, that for the service of the Buḍḍha Shākyamuni. The money used for the repairing of temples and towers, and for the purchase of stone lanterns and other furniture amounts to a large sum; but by far the greater proportion is spent for butter, which is used instead of oil for the myriads of lights which are kept burning day and night. The stands arranged in rows in the temple of the Buḍḍha in Lhasa alone number no less than two thousand five hundred and in some special cases ten thousand or even a hundred thousand lamps are lighted, all of them burning butter of a high price. In Tibet the substitution of vegetable oil for mal is considered, not exactly sin, but at least a pollution and desecration of Buḍḍha; not a few Lamas leave a clause in their wills that rapeseed oil should not be offered for their souls after death. In front of the image of the Buḍḍha in Lhasa are placed twenty-four large light-stands of pure gold. These and some others have big oil-holders, large enough to hold five gallons of mal. Almost all the mal used for the service of the Buḍḍha is furnished by the Treasury of the Government, though a small part of it is offered by religious people.
Costly mal used, in former times, to be offered by Mongolians, to the great relief of the Papal Treasury, but the offering has recently been stopped entirely. The burdens of the Tibetan people themselves have been proportionately increased, but as the fixed rate of the tax cannot be increased the bigger measures are used more frequently.