Snow Lion

Above the treeline, where the air thins and the rock goes blue with cold, something white moves across peaks that nothing should be able to cross. The body is the white of fresh snow. The mane, the tuft of the tail and the curls at the heels are turquoise, the same green-blue as glacier ice and as the stone Tibetans have set into jewellery and altar fittings for three thousand years. It does not climb. It leaps, ridge to ridge, and lands without slipping.

Tibet has no lions.

That is worth saying plainly at the start, because everything else follows from it. The lion arrived on the plateau as an idea, carried north along the same roads as Buddhism, and the Tibetan word for it, seng ge, comes straight from the Sanskrit siṃha. In India the lion was a real animal with a real throne: the Buddha teaches from a lion seat, and his teaching is called a lion’s roar because nothing that hears it can argue back. When that image crossed the Himalaya it met a country of ice and altitude and changed to suit. The tawny beast went white. Its hair turned the colour of the glaciers. It moved upstairs, above the snowline, and stayed there.

Look at almost any Tibetan painting of a buddha and the throne underneath will be held up by them, one on the left, one on the right, shoulders braced, faces turned outward. Sometimes there are eight, and then they stand for the eight great bodhisattva disciples of Shakyamuni. The lions are not decoration. They are load-bearing in both senses, and the convention is old enough that a Tibetan viewer reads the throne before reading the figure on it.

The snow lion also flies. On the square prayer flags strung across passes and rooftops, a wind horse gallops in the centre with a flaming jewel on its back, and the four corners are held by a tiger, a garuda, a dragon and a snow lion. Wind takes the printed prayers off the cloth and scatters them. The four beasts are the frame that keeps the world steady while it happens. Much of the tidy psychological gloss that circulates in English for this set, the language of the four dignities, of meekness and perkiness and outrageousness and inscrutability, of unconditional cheerfulness and a mind free of doubt, is not ancient. It comes from Chögyam Trungpa, who set it down for Shambhala Training between 1976 and 1980. The animals are traditional. The vocabulary attached to them in most English sources is fifty years old and has a named author.

What is genuinely old is the milk. Tibetan literature keeps returning to the snow lioness and to the idea that what she gives is too concentrated for ordinary handling. Milarepa, the eleventh-century yogi whose songs are among the most quoted texts in the language, sang of himself as the snow lioness of the solitudes whose milk is like essential nectar, and the image recurs with a warning attached: her milk has to be caught in a vessel of gold. A common ladle will not hold it. The wood splits, the metal fails, and the milk goes into the snow and is lost. The point is not hygiene. It is that some things cannot be received by whoever happens to be standing there, and the teaching is one of them. Folk medicine took the image at its word, and remedies have been described as carrying the essence of the snow lioness’s milk.

She is also loud. The roar is the whole animal compressed into one attribute, and in the courtyards of monasteries it becomes a dance. A snow lion is worn rather than seen: a carved wooden head, painted, with fur and ribbons trailing behind for the mane, moved by performers under one skin to the flat percussion of drums and long horns during Losar and the great prayer festivals. A nineteenth-century Tibetan example sits in the Weltmuseum Wien, and the museum’s own note on it says something that a picture of the mask alone would never tell you: when the mask is worn in the ritual dance, it is the historical Buddha Shakyamuni who appears to the crowd. The lion leaping between peaks in perfect freedom is a working image of a yogi doing the same thing.

Then it went political, which is what happens to a good emblem. The Tibetan government’s own account of its flag reaches back to the regiments of the seventh-century king Songtsen Gampo, whose banners included a pair of snow lions facing each other and a single lion springing upward into the sky. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama gathered those older military banners into one design and proclaimed it in 1912: a snow mountain, six red bands for the six ancestral tribes, a rising sun, and two snow lions on the slopes holding a three-coloured jewel between them, blazing, as the official explanation has it, with the manes of fearlessness. For the next half century the animal was everywhere the state was. Silver coins struck under the Ganden Phodrang government show it standing before a mountain ringed by auspicious signs, and one such coin sits in the British Museum’s collection. It was on stamps and banknotes too.

Its powers are all of a piece: the roar that ends argument, the leap that crosses impossible ground, the fearlessness that comes from a body and a mind moving together, and the milk that heals. Its limits are equally consistent. It holds up nothing that is not already sacred, so its authority is entirely borrowed from what it carries. It cannot be caught, kept or bred, having never been an animal in the first place. Its milk destroys the wrong container, which means the gift is useless to most people who want it. And an emblem can be outlawed in a way a creature cannot. Inside Tibet the snow lion flag is banned, and displaying it carries real consequences, while outside it is stitched, printed and carried by Tibetans in exile everywhere they have settled. The lion that was invented to stand for a country now mostly stands for its absence.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Tibetan snow lion?

The snow lion, gangs seng ge in Tibetan, is a celestial beast said to live on the snow peaks and glaciers of the Tibetan plateau. It is shown as a white lion with a turquoise or green mane, tail-tuft and leg curls, and it stands for fearlessness, joy and the sacred mountains themselves.

Why is the snow lion on the Tibetan flag?

The Thirteenth Dalai Lama drew the modern Tibetan flag from older military banners, some of which already carried snow lions, and proclaimed the new design in 1912. Two snow lions stand on the slopes of a snow mountain holding a three-coloured jewel, and the official Tibetan explanation says they represent the country’s unified spiritual and secular life. The flag is banned inside Tibet today and is flown by Tibetans in exile.

What is snow lion milk supposed to do?

In Tibetan tradition the milk of the snow lioness heals the body and carries the essence of the teachings, and some remedies have been described as containing it. The catch is that it must be received in a golden vessel, because an ordinary container will break and the milk will be lost, which is the whole point of the image.

Why do snow lions hold up thrones in Tibetan paintings?

The lion throne comes from Indian Buddhism, where the Buddha teaches from a lion seat and his teaching is called a lion’s roar. Tibetan art kept the convention and gave the lions snow and glacier colouring, so a buddha or a lama is usually shown supported by a pair of snow lions. Where eight appear on a single throne, they stand for the eight great bodhisattva disciples of Shakyamuni.

Are snow lions real animals?

No. There have never been lions on the Tibetan plateau, and the snow lion exists only in art, ritual, literature and heraldry. That is not a flaw in the tradition; the creature was built to carry meaning rather than to be found, and it is one of the very few mythological animals whose entire recorded life happens in made objects.

Related Entries

Wind Horse, Druk, Yeti, Palden Lhamo, Mahakala, Manjushri, Tara, Avalokiteśvara, Vajrapani, Buddha, Garuda, Chinthe, Komainu, Kirin