A ro-langs (Tibetan: རོ་ལང) is a

zombie A zombie ( Haitian French: , ht, zonbi) is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. Zombies are most commonly found in horror and fantasy genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, in wh ...

-like creature from

Tibet Tibet (; ''Böd''; ) is a region in East Asia, covering much of the Tibetan Plateau and spanning about . It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people. Also resident on the plateau are some other ethnic groups such as Monpa people, ...

folklore Folklore is shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes oral traditions such as Narrative, tales, legends, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, r ...

. Ro is the word for

corpse A cadaver or corpse is a dead human body that is used by medical students, physicians and other scientists to study anatomy, identify disease sites, determine causes of death, and provide tissue to repair a defect in a living human being. S ...

and Langs is the perfect tense of "to rise up", so Ro-Langs literally means "a risen corpse". A ro-langs is usually created by a gdon spirit, or a sorcerer. A ro-langs cannot speak or bend over, it signals its victims by wagging its tongue back and forth. They can not bend any joints, which makes them walk with a stiff-armed lurch. In regions of

there are low doorways to keep the ro-langs out.Wylie, ''JSTOR'', 1964,

', 12-3-11

Types

Tantric

The tantric types of ro-langs are raised from the dead through a ritual for personal reasons, such as to serve a necromancer and satisfy his lust for the power of the occult. A religious history written by Kun-dga'- snying-po contains one example. Na-ra-da gained mystical powers and set off to raise a ro-langs. He enlisted the help of a Buddhist Votary. When the tongue was cut off of the ro-langs, it turned into a sword of occult power, and the body turned into gold. The tantric type resembles the Zombie, voodoo zombie.

Demonic

Demonic ro-langs are created by an evil spirit with the goal of contaminating other humans; they are independent, and do not serve a master. They are created by either a gdon spirit that has broken its oath and become evil, or a bgegs spirit, which is already evil. Once the

consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...

has left the body, the evil spirit enters the body before it is buried. Demonic ro-langs have the power to infect other humans by touching them on the

head A head is the part of an organism which usually includes the ears, brain, forehead, cheeks, chin, eyes, nose, and mouth, each of which aid in various sensory functions such as sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Some very simple animals may no ...

. The idea of this type of ro-lang has helped shape the

in the film industry.

Storytelling

According to American scholar and Tibetologist

Turrell Wylie Turrell Verl "Terry" Wylie (August 20, 1927 – August 25, 1984) was an American scholar, Tibetologist, sinologist and professor known as one of the 20th century's leading scholars of Tibet. He taught as a professor of Tibetan Studies at the Un ...

, ro-langs can be described in one of three storytelling formats.

Legendary

A legendary story consists of an incident that occurred many years ago, and has been told of for centuries. The characters described in the stories are often labeled without names, instead with title such as "mother", "father", "prince", etc. This makes them difficult to trace back to the original event.

Epidemic

In an

epidemic An epidemic (from Greek ἐπί ''epi'' "upon or above" and δῆμος ''demos'' "people") is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of patients among a given population within an area in a short period of time. Epidemics of infectious d ...

story, a ro-langs rises and infects many people, often in one night. The ro-langs disease is transmitted by a ro-langs touching a person on the head. The story often ends with the ro-langs being defeated.

Comatose

coma A coma is a deep state of prolonged unconsciousness in which a person cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light, or sound, lacks a normal wake-sleep cycle and does not initiate voluntary actions. Coma patients exhi ...

tose story takes place at a definite location, a short time ago. The ro-langs in this story do not contaminate any people and they are quickly dispatched. Old Tibetan medical practices were not always sufficient for determining if a person is truly dead. Ro-langs in comatose stories have been described as having blue eyes instead of white. This is also a symptom of a person in a comatose state. It is believed that these people "rising from the dead" are actually just waking up from a comatose state.

Vulnerability

Ro-langs cannot be "killed" due to the fact that they have already died, but they can be made to "fall over" (brgyal-ba), a euphemism for killing the undead. The ro-langs can be classified by one of five vulnerabilities: 1. lpags-langs or skin-zombie;
2. khrag-langs or blood-zombie;
3. sha-langs or flesh-zombie;
4. rus-langs or bone-zombie;
5. rme-langs or mole-zombie. The prefix of the name describes the vulnerability. To make a skin-zombie fall over, one must break the skin. A blood-zombie must bleed, a flesh-zombie must be deeply cut or have flesh removed, a bone-zombie must have a fractured bone, and a mole-zombie is only vulnerable at a mole on the body. The types of ro-langs above are listed in order of difficulty to defeat. The skin-zombie is considered the easiest to defeat because the skin is easy to break, whereas the mole-zombie is considered to be the most difficult to defeat because of the small area of vulnerability, and the potential for the location of the mole to be unknown to the intended victim. Ro-langs are unable to bend at the waist; to exploit this weakness, many buildings in early Tibetan architecture were built with very low door frames. The belief was that the Ro-lang, unable to bend, would simply run into the low doorway, and be unable to enter the building.

References

{{Reflist

External links

The meaning of the Hollywood Zombie

Article by Turrell Wylie
Corporeal undead Tibetan legendary creatures