Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet/Volume 1/On the meaning of the word Daban
Volume I. Page 6.
Colonel Prejevalsky here, and I think elsewhere, gives Daban as the Mongol equivalent for 'mountain range.' In this I cannot but think he is mistaken. Dábán in oriental Turki (and presumably in Mongol, if it be a Mongol word also) means, not a range, but a pass, or what is in Savoy called a col. Thus, on one of the routes from India to Yarkand there is a pass called the Yanghi Dábán, 'the New Pass.' 'New Range' would be nonsense; but 'Yanghi-daban-Range,' as some maps have it, is lawful nomenclature.
The Pass is that feature in a mountain range which most interests travellers, and which they hear most frequently named; passes always have names; ranges, among people who have no books of geography, are apt to have none. Hence, with imperfect knowledge of the language, it gets assumed that the name of a Pass is the name of a Range.
This occurs in various languages. In maps of China we find mountain ranges called by such names as Pe-ling and Tsin-ling, as if ling were 'mountain range.' But ling is 'a pass.' Tsin-ling-shan, 'the mountain of the Tsin Pass,' would be right. Huc, again, in spite of all the monstrous Tibetan passes that he traversed, never discovered that La in Tibetan meant a Pass and not a mountain. And this leads him to his preposterous derivation of Potâla, or as he chooses to call it Bouddha-La, the Vatican of the Dalai-Lama, from Buddha-La, 'mountain of Buddha' (the words would really mean 'Buddha Pass'), with which it has as much to do as Ben Nevis with the hill-country of Benjamin, or cream of tartar with Crim Tartary.[1]
Somewhat in like manner we have come to call various chains of mountains in India the Western Ghats, Eastern Ghats, and so forth; and I have seen it stated in a geography-book that Ghat means mountain. But Ghât really means a Pass. The plateau above and the plain below those passes were respectively known to the Mahommedan rulers as Bâlâ-ghât and Pâyin-ghât, 'Above the passes' and 'Below the passes.' Hence the Portuguese, and after them the English, attached the idea of mountain range to the word Ghat.—[Y.]
- ↑ Buddhala is however older than Huc, for I see it is alluded to by I. J. Schmidt in his Forschungen, &c., 1824, p. 209.
The origin of the application of the name Potala, or Potaraka, to the palace of the Grand Lama seems a little obscure. The name is the same as that of the city in Sindh (Haidarabad), which the Greeks called Pattala. Koeppen says that, according to legend, the Sakya family, i.e. the family of Buddha, originally sprang thence. According to Buddhist stories there were two other sacred hills of this name. The first rose out of the Western Sea, and bore on its summit a celestial palace which served as a rest-house to the Bodhisatvas on their errands to earth. This is the true and heavenly Potala. Another lay in the China Sea opposite Chekiang, and is in fact the famous ecclesiastical island of Puto near Chusan.