Wind Horse

The road over the pass climbs until the air goes thin and hard to breathe, and at the top there is a cairn hung with rope and sun-bleached cloth. Travellers stop. Someone pulls a fistful of small paper squares from a bag, turns into the wind, and throws them, and for a few seconds the sky above the stones is full of white flutter. The cry goes up together: ki ki so so, lha gyal lo. May the gods be victorious. The papers come down across the scree and catch in the juniper scrub, and printed on every one of them is a small running horse.

The horse is saddled and in mid-stride. On its back it carries three jewels wrapped in flame, the wish-fulfilling gems that stand for the Buddha, his teaching, and the community that keeps it. At the four corners of the square stand four more animals, each holding its post: a tiger at the lower right, a snow lion at the lower left, a garuda above the lion, a dragon above the tiger. Between them run lines of printed mantra asking that obstacles be cleared. The whole design is cut into a woodblock, inked, and pressed onto cotton or thin paper, which is why the horse looks the same from Ladakh to Amdo and why nobody has ever needed to describe it in words.

Nobody tells a story about it, either. There is no myth in which the wind horse is born, is hunted, speaks, or dies. It exists as an image and as a force, and the force came first.

That force is *rlung rta*, and Tibetan medicine and astrology count it among five things that make up a person: *srog*, life; *lus*, body; *dbang thang*, the field of power or personal authority; *bla*, the soul; and *rlung rta*, fortune. Fortune here is not money. It is the quality that decides whether a day runs smooth or catches on every nail, and Tibetan has a whole vocabulary for its condition. A wind horse can be flourishing, expanding, running. It can also be fallen, diminished, brought low. When something has gone well people say *de ring rlung rta rgyug song*, today my wind horse ran. A proverb puts the matter more bluntly: whether I shoot is not in doubt, but whether the arrow hits depends on my lungta.

So the wind horse is kept fed. At Losar, the new year, families climb onto flat roofs in the cold before the light is good and lash a fresh line of five-coloured cotton to the corner poles, yellow for earth, green for water, red for fire, white for air, blue for space, the smell of burning juniper coming up thick from the hearth below while the new cloth cracks in the wind. When things are going badly the same remedies are reached for out of season, more smoke, more flags, more prayer.

Where the practice came from is a genuinely open question, and the most careful answer belongs to Samten Karmay, who devoted a study to it in *The Arrow and the Spindle*. The trouble starts with the spelling. The word can be written *klung rta*, river horse, or *rlung rta*, wind horse, and in Tibetan the first letter is silent in both, so speech cannot tell them apart. Karmay argued that river horse came first, entering Tibet through the *nag rtsis* astrological system borrowed from China, and that behind it stands the Chinese *longma*, the dragon horse that rises out of rivers. Wind horse would then be a later reinterpretation of a word that had lost its meaning. It stuck well enough that in the early twentieth century the scholar Ju Mipham still felt the need to state which spelling he preferred, which tells you the confusion was alive and not merely antique.

An older layer shows through in a manuscript Karmay edited, the *dBu nag mi’u ‘dra chag*, the Appearance of the Little Black-Headed Man, which is attributed to an eighth-century emperor but mentions Kublai Khan and so cannot predate the thirteenth century. In it a herdsman named Khritho loses his yaks to seven robbers from the demon land. He goes after them in a fury. His wife, frightened of what will happen to him, turns herself into a large frog and blocks the path, and he kills her without knowing who she is; her cry brings her father, who kills him with an arrow. Their sons demand compensation and are given six animals, among them a dragon, an eagle, a yak, and a tiger, and four of the brothers take those animals as their *dgra bla*, their warrior gods, before going out to finish the feud. Karmay suggests the yak was later swapped for a lion, around the period when lions became a Tibetan emblem of state. Those four animals are the four in the corners of the flag, and their presence there is older than any Buddhist reading of them.

Northward, the horse kept the name and shifted register. In Mongolian it is *khiimori*, and it means personal power, the strength that keeps a person upright between the sky above and the earth below; shamanic practice raises it with smoke and drumming much as Tibetan practice raises it with juniper and cloth. When Mongolia adopted a new state emblem in 1992 it put the wind horse at the centre, carrying the Soyombo mark instead of jewels, with the cintamani above and a khadag scarf beneath.

What it does is simple enough. It lifts prayers to where they can be heard, it turns bad fortune, and it pulls the other four personal forces up with it, since a person whose fortune runs well tends to find their health, authority, and soul in better order too. The limits are equally plain. A wind horse can fall, and it falls through pollution, broken oaths, and the ordinary grinding of a life gone wrong, and it does not stay raised on its own. The flags fray, the ink fades, the paper on the pass turns to pulp in the snow. The remedy has to be repeated, every year, by hand, in the cold.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Tibetan wind horse?

The wind horse, or lungta, is a mythical horse printed at the centre of Tibetan prayer flags, shown running with three flaming jewels on its back. It represents *rlung rta*, the personal fortune-force that Tibetan astrology and medicine count as one of the five energies making up a human being. The horse is believed to carry prayers upward on the wind and to lift a person’s luck along with them.

What do the four animals on a wind horse prayer flag mean?

The four corner animals are a tiger, a snow lion, a garuda, and a dragon, and each is linked to one of the five personal forces alongside the horse itself. The usual reading gives the tiger the body, the snow lion the soul, the garuda the life-force, and the dragon personal power, with the horse carrying fortune. In a manuscript edited by Samten Karmay the four are older than that scheme, appearing as warrior gods taken by four brothers avenging their father.

Does lungta mean “wind horse” or “river horse”?

Both spellings exist and sound identical in Tibetan, because the first letter is silent in each. Samten Karmay argued that *klung rta*, river horse, was the original, entering Tibet with an astrological system borrowed from China and deriving from the Chinese *longma*, or dragon horse. *rLung rta*, wind horse, appears to be a later reinterpretation, though it is now the standard form.

How do Tibetans raise their wind horse?

Wind horse is raised by hoisting new five-coloured prayer flags, especially at Losar, the Tibetan New Year, and by burning juniper in a smoke offering. Travellers also throw printed lungta papers into the air at mountain passes marked by stone cairns, shouting “ki ki so so, lha gyal lo”, may the gods be victorious. When someone’s affairs are going badly, these same practices are performed out of season to lift their fortune.

Why is there a wind horse on Mongolia’s state emblem?

Mongolia adopted its current state emblem in 1992, placing the wind horse, known in Mongolian as khiimori, at its centre. In Mongolian usage khiimori means a person’s inner strength and spiritual power rather than a specific creature, and shamanic practice raises it through smudging and drumming. On the emblem the horse carries the Soyombo symbol, with the cintamani jewel above it and a khadag scarf below.

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