Tib., lha rgyal lo
Himalaya. Just outside Jomson, Nepal
In literature, I first came across this Tibetan phrase in the three fascinating novels about Tibet by Eliot Pattison. He describes it more or less as a phrase used by Tibetans - resistance fighters and others who detest the Chinese occupation of their land - as a greeting and sign of recognition.
I can't remember just how Pattison rendered these words into English, but when I - much later - searched for the phrase on the World Wild Web, the usual translation to be found was Victory to the Gods, or sometimes The Gods are Victorious.
Without thinking about it in detail, Victory to the Gods sounds not bad or wrong, especially in a setting in which these victorious gods are seen as the ultimate opposition to the Chinese who occupy the country and suppress its ancient culture; not only in the form of the Red Army, but also manifesting as an equally dangerous army of bureaucrats, spies, secret police and plain poor workers - you name it, the Chinese got it all.
Now I'm not pretending to read or speak Tibetan, but I do know that Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhism) does not simply have gods, it does also have goddesses - and plenty of them. And from previous studies, I knew as well that the Tibetan language hardly ever forgets to qualify gender, since the interplay between female and male is just too important an issue in this Tantric religion.
Bridge over ice-cold Water
And then there was also Lhamo in my mind (the protective goddess of both the Dalai Lama and the capital Lhasa), a name that means Goddess, or even more precise: Female (Tib. mo) Deity (Tib. lha)".
Turning for help and clarification to the incredibly detailed and wonderful Online Dictionary of Tibetan Buddhist Terminology (see links), my suspicions were immediately validated. Here one finds clearly evidence that lha is used to indicate the divine, the supernatural, someone or something celestial and sacred. Lha, without the qualification dang (male) should thus only be translated as deity (of any gender), not as god or gods. See for yourself in these Tibetan examples:
lha = celestial beings
lha bsang = offering of smoke (incense)
lha khang = temple, shrine
lha sa = divine abode
lha sku = sacred images (of deities); divine form
lha dang = god, gods (deity, male)
lha mo = goddess, goddesses (deity, female)
So to translate it simply as gods, a male term, is actually a (Western) translator's fantasy - even when one can find the expression Victory to the Gods on some Tibetan-run websites as well. Also other sloppy or biased translations of lha gyal lo can be found on various sites, ranging from an overly optimistic Gods won, demons defeated (lha gyalo, dam tshig pam) - as if the struggle is over already - to a well meant but equally erroneous The Goddess is Victorious.
So what about the other two syllables, rgyal and lo?
With rgyal its all quite easy, as one of its meanings is akin to our battle related terms such as victorious, winning, triumph. However, it also carries meanings such as success, to overcome, to prevail. So one can actually take one's pick of these words and come up with various translations that suit one's character or vision, or that fit the specific situation. May the Divine Prevail is thus equally good as Victory to the Deities or Success to the Divine.
Concerning lo, I've been advised that it does NOT mean - in this context - 'year', 'time' 'calendar' or 'age' as I'd previously thought. It is - in this case - merely a grammatical particle indicating the end of a statement.
But back to the problem of gender biased translations. The above example, perhaps not truly important, is just one of many occurrences where neutral terms are turned into gendered ones, or where even truly female terms are turned into male ones. In a paper that was published in the anthology Is the Goddess a Feminist?, well known author Miranda Shaw shows how often translators make such mistakes (based on their own mindset), thus changing - knowingly or not - the original meaning of the Tibetan idea.
Note
For anyone who wants to verify the above, here some hints as to the various spellings that occur on the net:
lha gyalo, lha rgyal lo, la gyalo, lha gyelo, lha-gyalo ...
