On the prayer flags at Kailash, in a word that may once have had a river in it, and in a small silver shrine that opens.
Every year, on the full moon of the fourth Tibetan month, a great flagpole is lowered at the foot of Mount Kailash.
It stands at Tarboche, near the start of the pilgrim path around the mountain, and for most of the year you can barely see the pole for its flags. Thousands of them run from the top of the mast down to the ground in every direction, bleached pale by a year of high-altitude sun. On Saga Dawa, the day Tibetans keep for the Buddha's enlightenment, the old flags come off, new ones are tied on, and the pole is hauled upright again while the crowd watches. They watch closely. How it stands is read as a sign for the year ahead. Straight is good. A lean is not.
Look at almost any one of those flags and you will find the same figure printed at its centre: a horse with no rider, carrying fire on its back.
That horse is lungta.
What lungta means
Rlung-ta, usually written lungta, is two words. Rlung is wind: breath, moving air, current. Rta is horse, the thing that carries. So the usual translation is "wind horse", which is accurate and a little misleading, because lungta is not really an animal. It is the name of a force.
When Tibetans say someone's lungta is high, they mean the current is running their way. Doors open before they reach them. The timing lands. When lungta is low, the same effort goes into everything and nothing moves.
That sounds like luck, and it overlaps with luck, but there is a difference that matters. Luck comes from outside and leaves when it pleases. Lungta is treated more like a condition, something that rises and falls, something you can spend, and something you can raise on purpose.
Raising it is what the flags are for.
The horse on the prayer flag
A traditional lungta flag is printed from a carved woodblock. At the centre, the horse carries three flaming jewels on its back, for the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. Sometimes they are drawn as a single wish-fulfilling jewel. Prayers and mantras fill the cloth around it.
Four animals sit in the corners, often called the four dignities. The garuda and the dragon take the upper corners; the tiger and the snow lion hold the lower two. The horse runs among them at the centre. (The garuda, the great bird that eats serpents, has a story of its own, which we tell in Garuda in Tibet: The Bird That Eats Poison.)
The flags come in five colours, always in the same order: blue, white, red, green, yellow. Sky, wind, fire, water, earth. A proper string is hung in that sequence, and it is hung high, on passes and rooftops and bridges, wherever the wind has room to work. The idea behind it is simple. The wind reads the prayers as it passes and carries them on.
Nobody expects the flags to last. As the print fades, the prayers are understood to have gone out into the world, and at Losar, the Tibetan New Year, fresh flags go up over the old.
On the high passes you will also see people throw handfuls of small paper squares printed with the horse, shouting as the wind takes them: Lha gyal lo! The gods are victorious. It is one of the happiest sounds in Tibet.
A word that may once have had a river in it
There is a scholarly footnote to lungta that we are fond of. The Tibetan scholar Samten Karmay has argued that the older form of the word may have been klung rta, "river horse", and that it goes back to the Chinese longma: the dragon-horse, said to have risen from the Yellow River carrying the first diagram of the world on its back. Over the centuries, the argument goes, the river became wind.
The question is still open. But Chinese does keep an everyday phrase built on that same creature. Longma jingshen, "dragon-horse spirit", is what you wish someone at New Year when you want them full of life.
Our workshop is in China, and our founder is a lay Buddhist of Samye Monastery in Tibet. A horse that belongs to both, and runs somewhere between river, wind and dragon, felt like our subject from the start.
2026, a Fire Horse year
Lungta also has a place in Tibetan astrology. It is one of the qualities read from a person's birth year, and almanacs mark the days when it is thought to run strong, which is when many families choose to hang their flags.
This year the horse is in the calendar itself. 2026 is a Fire Horse year in both the Chinese and Tibetan reckonings, a combination that comes round once in sixty years. The last was 1966. The next will be 2086. If you were born in a horse year (1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1990, 2002, 2014 or 2026, counting from the Lunar New Year rather than 1 January), there is an old custom for your own zodiac year: wear something protective, and wear it on red.
Carrying the horse: the gau
The flags stay on the mountain. For something to carry home, Tibetans had the gau, a small metal shrine worn against the body. Inside was something that had been blessed: a scrap of a teacher's robe, a few grains of rice that had sat before the Buddha, a prayer folded small. The box was never the point. What was sealed inside was the point, and almost nobody ever saw it.
Our Wind Horse Locket Pendant is a gau in the shape of the horse. The base plate is hinged on one side and latched on the other, stamped S925 on the inside where only its owner will read it. Behind it is a chamber seven millimetres deep, which is a lot for a pendant this size. All of that depth is there to hold something.
On the flags, the horse carries its jewel on its back. We moved the fire. On the locket, flames of fire-gilded 24K gold rise from the horse's brow and lift back over the mane, so the fire comes out of the animal instead of riding on it. A natural garnet sits where the straps of the gold bridle cross. Lower down, two Swiss blue topaz are set into a band across the body. Red at the head, where the horse thinks; cold blue at the body, where it carries.
Most of the time went into the mane. Each strand is cut on its own and lifted clear of the one beneath, streaming back from the crest and curling under at the ends, so the head reads as something caught mid-gallop. The recesses are oxidised almost to black and the high points brought back by hand, which is what lets the light run along the mane when you turn it. The gold is fused into the silver by fire rather than laid over it; we explain how in Traditional Fire-Gilding.
It measures 49 × 29 × 7 mm (1.9 × 1.1 × 0.28 in) and weighs 28 g (1.0 oz), enough that you feel it against the breastbone. That is the whole idea of a gau: you are meant to know it is there. It hangs on a red cord braided by hand in Tibet, about 60 cm (24 in) long, with a carved silver bead.
Filled, or left empty
If you ask us before it ships, we will have the chamber consecrated at the monastery we work with. Blessed contents, including a fragment of a lama's robe, are placed inside and the chamber is sealed. There is no charge, and it adds no time to the order. Because it is sealed for you, a consecrated locket is final sale.
Or leave it empty and fill it yourself. People put in a folded note, a lock of hair, a pinch of earth from a place they will not go back to. That is the older use of the form, and in many ways the better one. More on both choices in Consecration.
The same horse, on the wrist
There is a bronze in the Gansu Provincial Museum that almost anyone in China could draw from memory: a horse at full gallop, three hooves in the air, the fourth landing on the back of a flying swallow. It was cast in the Eastern Han dynasty, nearly two thousand years ago, and found in a tomb in Gansu in 1969. Its maker understood something useful. You cannot carve speed. You can only carve the thing speed has overtaken.
Our Wind Horse Cuff Bangle borrows that idea without copying the bronze. Look at the cuff straight on and you see a horse's head, bridled in gold, with a garnet where the straps cross. Catch it from the side and the gold streaming ahead of the muzzle turns into a swallow in flight. Whether it is the bird or the horse's own mane torn loose by the wind, we left unresolved on purpose. A second garnet is set into the swallow, on the far side of the wrist, where only the wearer knows it is there.
The band is 10 mm (0.4 in) wide at the back and swells to 18 mm (0.7 in) where the horse sits, with cloud scrollwork running its whole length. It weighs 40 g (1.4 oz) and comes in two sizes: Medium for wrists up to 19 cm (7.5 in), Large for wrists above that. Worn together with the locket, the cuff runs and the pendant carries.
What silver can and cannot do
We should be plain about one thing. In Tibet, lungta is raised by hanging flags, by making offerings, by practice, by generosity. Nobody we know would tell you it can be bought in silver, and we will not either. What a piece like this can do is keep the idea close: a reminder, against the skin, that the current you travel in is something you can tend.
That is how we think of everything we make. We did not invent the wind horse. We only carve it, and send it on.
May your wind rise.
May the road open before you ask it to.
May what carries you never tire.
Wind Horse Locket Pendant · Wind Horse Cuff Bangle · Tibetan Buddhist Jewelry