iVillage

The heart of Tibetan astrology is the annual almanac or Tibetan calendar. Every lama and monk has one. Here we will go over what you might expect to find in the average almanac, but don’t.This is not the place (and I am not the expert) on all the subtleties of the Tibetan calendar system. I refer readers to the very excellent book by Edward Henning ‘Kalachakra And the Tibetan Calendar’. Here it will have to suffice to lay out the general characteristics, point out some of the problems involved, and mention how some students of the subject are dealing with them.

I don’t know how many lamas and rinpoches I have approached with questions I have about the Tibetan calendar system, but it seems that most of them are not concerned with this kind of detail. They tend to use the Tibetan astrological calendar as it is handed to them, with no questions asked.
The problem is that these small practice calendars (and there are quite a few of them) for the most part don’t even state what time zone the calendar refers to and, as any astrologer here in the West knows, you can’t list the time of the New Moon, without declaring the time zone it refers to. Is it India or New York? You need to know.

Before getting too much deeper into this, it is crucial that you understand why this type of astrological calendar is produced in the first place, and that has to do with group dharma practice, for these are primarily practice calendars.

If one is coordinating the practice schedule at a large monastery with perhaps several hundred monks, everyone has to agree on what calendar day and time any group practice should convene. The various astrological indicators like the moment of the New Moon, the moment when the Moon changes lunar mansions, and so on are not so considerate. The natural astronomical phenomena change when they change and that’s that. That’s a given.