Calendar

Several calendars are in use in Tibet. In this chapter we discuss the official Phuglugs (or Phug-pa or Phukluk) version of the Kālacakra (“Wheel of Time”) calendar, derived from the Kālacakra Tantra, translated into Tibetan from the Sanskrit in the eleventh century, used by the majority of Tibetans today, and sanctioned by the Dalai Lama. (The other widely used version is the Tsurphu.) The calendar is similar to the Hindu lunisolar calendars, somewhere between the arithmetic simplicity of the old Hindu version, and the astronomical complexity of the modern Hindu. There are also regional variants, because the calculated astronomical events are in terms of local time. The Bhutan, Mongolian, and Sherpa calendars are very similar.

Months are lunar; their length is based on an approximation to the varying length of the true synodic month, and can be 29 or 30 civil days long. Months are numbered consecutively, except for leap months, which precede their ordinary counterparts, as on the Hindu lunisolar calendar, and are named and numbered the same. The month names in Tibetan are:

Weekdays are named in Tibetan as follows:

There are several conventions for naming years. The most common is to use a 60-year cycle, naming them either like the Hindu Jovian years (Section 10.1), or using simultaneous 12-totem and 5-element cycles, in the fashion of the Chinese calendar (Section 19.4).