Dark woollen cloth is the standard material of dress, formed into a wide frock, trousers, and leggings, the last replaced in the wealthy by boots of Russia, or other costly leather. Over all is worn a capacious mantle of cloth, sometimes lined with fur. From a red girdle depend various purses, containing the wooden teacup inseparable from a Tibetan, flint and steel, and other odds and ends. Gay broad-brimmed hats are in vogue at Lhassa, but are rarer in the west. The women dress much like the men, and plait the hair in narrow tresses hanging on the shoulders. On the top of the head the Ladakh women wear a flat lappet of cloth or leather, descending in a peak behind, stuck over with beads of turquoise, amber, and cornelian; and the back hair is gathered in a queue, which is lengthened by tassels of coloured worsted intermixed with shells, bells, and coins, until it nearly touches the ground. Though not veiled, like the Moslem women, with muslin or calico, their charms are subjected to a much more efficacious disguise. Before leaving home, every respectable woman at Lhassa plasters her face with a black sticky varnish like raspberry jam, which gives her an aspect scarcely human. The practice is said at Lhassa to have been introduced some centuries ago, in order to check the immorality which was then rampant in the city. But it appears to be widely diffused, and is probably ancient. Rubruquis refers to something like it in the thirteenth century. Grueber and Dorville, who travelled through Tibet and Nepaul in 1661, say, "The women of these kingdoms are so hideous that they are liker demons than human creatures; for through some superstition, instead of water they always use a stinking oil to wash with; and with this they are so fetid and so bedaubed that they might be taken for hateful hobgoblins." But tastes differ, and the same unguent which the missionaries represent as intended to render the women hideously unattractive, or at least a modification of it in fashion at Ladakh, Moorcroft appears to think is adopted as a cosmetic. From all the fathers could learn, the black varnish has not altogether reformed Tibetan morals.
The strange, repulsive custom of polyandry, or the marriage of one woman to several brothers, is diffused over the greater part of Tibet, though it is not mentioned by Huc as existing at Lhassa. It is not confined to the lower ranks, but is frequent also in opulent families. Turner mentions one instance in the neighbourhood of Teshoo Loombo, where five brothers were living together very happily under the same connubial compact.
Moorcroft speaks of three meals a-day as the practise of Ladakh, but this extraordinary symptom of civilisation does not seem to be general. In Eastern Tibet, regular meals are not in vogue; the members of a family do not assemble to dine together, but "eat when they're hungry, drink when they're dry." We remember to have heard a graphic description of the Tibetan cuisine from a humourous shikaree, or native Nimrod, of our Himalayan provinces. "The Bhoteea folk," he said, "have a detestable way of eating. They take a large cooking-pot full of water, and put in it meat, bread, rice, what not, and set it on the fire, where it is always a-simmering. When hungry, they go and fish out a cupful of whatever comes uppermost, perhaps six or seven times a-day. Strangers are served in the same way. If a man gets hold of a bone, he picks it, wipes his hands on his dress, and chucks it back into the pot; so with all crumbs and scraps, back they go into the pot, and thus the never-ending, still beginning mess stews on."
Tea, however, is a staple article of diet, and is served on all occasions. A vast quantity is imported, artificially compressed into the form of solid bricks of about eight pounds weight, in which shape it requires little packing, and forms a most handy article for barter. Instead of infusing it after our fashion, they pulverise a piece of the brick and boil it in water, with a proportion of salt and soda; then churn it up with a quantity of butter, and serve the mess in a teapot. At Tassisudon, Turner admired the dexterity (comparable to that of a London waiter manipulating a bottle of soda-water) with which the raja's attendant, before serving the liquid, "giving a circular turn to the teapot, so as to agitate and mix its contents, poured a quantity into the palm of his hand, which he had contracted to form as deep a concave as possible, and hastily sipped it up." When taken as a meal, tsamba, or the flour of parched barley, is added, each man mixing his own cupful up into a sort of brose or gruel with his five natural spatulæ. Meat is abundant, but is taken as an extra or embellishment, rather than as a staple of diet. In cookery, the people appear to have none of the genius of their neighbours, either of India or of China. Hares, winged game, and fish, though abundant, are not eaten, so that they have scarcely any meat but mutton, (excepting occasionally yak beef,) and their mutton they have but three ways of serving—viz., absolutely raw, frozen, and boiled. The frozen meat having been prepared in winter may then be kept throughout the year, and carried to any part of Tibet. European travellers generally commend this meat, which undergoes no process of cookery.
The Tibetans, being no great water-drinkers, the liquid next in importance to tea is an acidulous beverage made from fermented barley, known through more than 20° of longitude as chong. Turner absurdly calls it whisky, but it is rather analogous to beer. It requires a large quantity to produce intoxication, but, nevertheless, that result is attained.
One of the peculiar customs which prominently mark the whole Tibetan race is the use of the khata, or scarf of ceremony. This is a fringed scarf of Chinese silk gauze, which is interchanged on all occasions of ceremonious intercourse, even the most trivial, and in every rank of society. They are to be had of qualities and prices suited to all pockets, and no Tibetan travels without a stock of them. In paying formal visits, in asking a favour, or returning thanks for one, in offering a present or delivering a message to a superior, the khata is presented. On the meeting of friends after long separation, the first care is to exchange the khata. In epistolary correspondence, also, it is customary to enclose the khata; without it, the finest words and most magnificent presents are of no account. Turner mentions that the Bhotan Raja once returned a letter of the Governor-General's, because it was unaccompanied by this bulky but polite incumbrance.
Of all the quaint modes of salutation among men, that in fashion at Lhassa is surely the quaintest and most elaborate; and we can fancy that it affords room for all the graces of a Tibetan Chesterfield. It consists in uncovering the head, sticking out the tongue, and scratching the right ear! and these three operations are performed simultaneously.
Tibet has always been a subject of curiosity, not more from its inaccessibility than from the singular nature of its government, resting, as is well known, in the hands of a sovereign, elective under a singular and superstitious system, who, by the name of Dalai (the ocean) Lama, is not only king and spiritual father, but also the embodied divinity of his people. The Buddhistic faith, numbering as its adherents a greater population than any other existing creed, when driven from its native soil, India, (in which it has long been totally extinct, though its gigantic footsteps still mark the surface in all parts of the peninsula,) spread over Nepaul, Ceylon, the kingdoms of the Transgangetic Peninsula, China, Corea, Japan, Tibet, and the whole Mongolian region to the confines of Siberia. The essential idea of Buddhism appears to be a peculiar development of the notion which runs through nearly all the Asiatic pagan philosophies, and which, interwoven with the fantasies of the innumerable Gnostic sects, once spread its influence to the centre of the Christian world—viz., that all the external world is but a transient manifestation of the Divine Being, and the souls of all living creatures are emanations from Him; that these souls, whilst included in material and perishable bodies, are in a state of imperfection, degradation, and suffering; and that the great object of intelligent creatures should be final release from the clog of the flesh, and abdication of all personal identity, to be absorbed in the universal soul. Considerable difference of opinion exists among the learned as to the true epoch of Sakya Muni or Gautama, the Indian deified saint, or Buddha, who was the propagator of the doctrine in the particular form which derives its appellation from him; but the latest of the various periods assigned for his death is 543 B.C. After a long life spent in preaching humility, self-denial, meditation on the divine perfections, and the celebration of solemn ritual services of praise and worship, he is believed himself to have been, at death, absorbed into the divine essence on account of his great attainments in sanctity. Sakya was followed by a succession of sacred personages, who are to be regarded either as mortals whose attainments in sanctity have reached, in repeated transmigrations, to a divine eminence, though not yet to the final absorption of a Buddha, or as voluntary incarnations of souls whose virtue had attained to freedom from the necessity of renewed terrestrial life, but who chose to dwell again on earth in order to aid men in the attainment of perfection, and facilitate their reunion with the universal soul. It is this part of the system which has assumed an exaggerated prominence in Tibet and Mongolia, where these regenerations have gradually, in the general faith, taken the form of continual and manifold incarnations of Buddha, or the Divine Being.
In combination with this doctrine, and the stress laid on meditation and ritual worship, a vast proportion of the inhabitants, both in Tibet and Mongolia, one at least out of every family where there are more than one son, devote themselves to a religious life, and many of these dwell together in monastic communities. The Shabrongs or Regenerate Buddhas are so numerous that many of the chief convents possess one. These personages, though all esteemed divine, appear somehow to vary in spiritual consideration as well as temporal grandeur, as one Marian idol in the Church of Rome has more sanctity and miraculous power ascribed to it than another has. The most eminent and most venerated of all is the Dalai Lama. The exercise of his authority is in theory unlimited; he is the centre of all government. But since, in the capacity of manifested divinity, he could not, without derogation of his sacred character, mix himself up with the numerous trivialities of human affairs, few questions are actually submitted to him; he is regarded only in the most amiable light, as absorbed in religious duty, or interfering only to exercise the most benign attributes. The general administration of the government is carried on by another personage, also a Shabrong, nominated by the supreme Lama, and known as the Nomé-Khan; by the Chinese and the Western Tibetans, he is generally called King of Tibet Proper. The Nomé-Khan is appointed for life, and can only be removed by a coup-d'état. He is assisted in administration by four lay ministers called Kalongs.
The provinces are governed by ecclesiastical princes receiving their investiture from the Dalai Lama, and acknowledging his supremacy, but enjoying apparently a good deal of practical independence.