dongba

dongba noun: a priest of the Nakhi people.

Noun

dongba (plural dongba or dongbas)

A priest of the Nakhi people.
- By 1949 there were dongba practising only in the rural areas of Lijiang. We have no figure on the exact number, but according to interviews many Naxi villages had a dongba at that time, or would invite one from a neighbouring village. After the Communist take-over the dongba's activities were...1998, Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard, David Strand, Reconstructing Twentieth-century China, →ISBN
- Dongba of the Baisha schoolwere skilled and prolific in the script, and they could read and write geba script as well. In an analysis of the title pages of seven thousand dongba books in Western libraries, Pan and Jackson found 1,233 written by some forty-five authors from the Baisha school.2011, Erik Mueggler, The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West, →ISBN

By 1949 there were dongba practising only in the rural areas of Lijiang.1998, Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard, David Strand, Reconstructing Twentieth-century China, →ISBN:
When the Buddhist monks and the dongbas went to the west to seek the sacred scriptures, the dongbas won the race and got the pants.2014, Marie-Rose Phan-Le, Talking Story: One Woman's Quest to Preserve Ancient Spiritual and Healing Traditions, →ISBN:

plural	dongba
plural	dongbas

From Mandarin 东巴 (dōngbā).

What does dongba mean?: Dongba means a priest of the Nakhi people.
How do you use dongba in a sentence?: By 1949 there were dongba practising only in the rural areas of Lijiang.
What part of speech is dongba?: Dongba is a noun.
What is the plural of dongba?: The plural of dongba is dongba.

Adapted from Wiktionary: dongba (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

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