The Mongolian Tanǰur Version of the Bodhicaryāvatāra-Review by Kara
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- A Comparative of Sanskrit, Tibetan and Mongolian on Prajñāpāramitā Chapter of Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra (2) (The Commemoration Number Published on the Occasion of the Seventieth Birthday of Professor Ryojun Fuyo)
- A Fragment of the Bodhicaryāvatāra from Olon Süme
- A Mongolian Printed Fragment of Bodhicaryavatara from Dunhuang
- Another Chinese Source for a Biography of Čhos-kyi 'Od-zer
- Characteristics of the Buddhist Mongolian Texts: The Lineage of the Bodhicaryāvatāra
- Nachlese zum Mongolischen Turfanfragment des Bodhicaryāvatāra
- On the Duplicated Chapter of the Mongolian Bodhicaryāvatāra
- Regional Characteristics of Mongolian Buddhism: A Study on the Basis of the Bodhicaryāvatāra
- The Bodistw-a Čari-a Awatar-un Tayilbur of 1312 by Čosgi Odsir
- The Mongolian Tanǰur Version of the Bodhicaryāvatāra
- The Mongolian Tanǰur Version of the Bodhicaryāvatāra-Review by Kara
- The Third Chapter of Chos-kyi 'od-zer's Translation of the Bodhicaryāvatāra: A Tentative Reconstruction
- The Transmission of the Bodhicaryāvatāra: The History, Diffusion, and Influence of a Mahāyāna Buddhist Text
- Zum Blockdruckfragmente des mongolischen Bodhicaryāvatāra der Berliner Turfansammlung
- Über den Quellenbezug eines mongolischen Tanjurtextes
Description
In a snake year, 1305-6, the Sa-skya monk Chos-kyi 'od-zer translated the seventh-century Indian Śāntideva's long poem, the Bodhicaryāvatāra (A Guide to the Path to Enlightenment), from its Tibetan translation into Mongolian prose, and this was one of the very first Buddhist works the Mongols could read in their tongue. The same monk wrote a commentary to the poem, an "appraisal of the way to enlightenment"; and his translation with the commentary was printed in Daidu, the Yuan capital, in 1312. A large fragment of one of the one thousand block-printed copies of this early edition was found in the Turfan basin (it is kept in the Berlin Turfan Collection). Numerous sixteenth-century manuscript fragments were discovered in Olon Süme (Inner Mongolia; they are now in the possession of the Tōyō Bunko, Tōkyō); the 1305 translation is known from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century manuscript copies (the oldest is now in New Delhi, another in St. Petersburg). It was such an old manuscript from which the learned monk, Urad güüsi Biligün dalai prepared his revised text, a modernized version of Chos-kyi 'od-zer's Middle Mongolian Bodhicaryāvatāra for the
Manchu imperial edition of the Printed Mongol Tanjur (Danjuur; 1748). Boris Vladimirtsov, Erich Haenisch, Francis Woodman Cleaves, Nicholas Poppe, Walther Heissig, Louis Ligeti, and other Mongolists and a non-Mongolist worked on this early
monument of Mongolian Buddhist literature. In his Comparative Grammar, Vladimirtsov stated that the Kanjur and the Tanjur preserved several Middle Mongolian texts revised by the late editors. He published the typeset text of the Kowalewski MS (1929) which proved to be useful for the study of the earlier fragments and the edition of the Tanjur-text. Ligeti gave a preliminary reading of this latter in his Mongol Nyelvemléktdr (1966); according to him, the Tanjur-text, despite its classical orthography and some modernization of its vocabulary, better represents the version of 1305 than the older Kowalewski MS. He accepted Heissig's evaluation of the New Delhi MS (that was presented to Lokesh Chandra in Ulaanbaatar in 1957), but then he had no access to that text. (Lokesh Chandra edited its facsimile with Heissig's short but essential foreword in 1976). Ligeti could only consult Heissig's first Olon Süme monograph published in 1966. He was working on a revised edition of the text in his last years: once in his home I saw his copy of the transcription, which was full of corrections and notes.
Now we have a new transcription of the Tanjur-version with a word-index and a white-on-black facsimile. Like the originally darker, now pale-ochre, print of the Mongol Tanjur, the photo-copy is not always easy to read, and so is the poorly printed facsimile of the precious New Delhi MS. Nevertheless with Vladimirtsov's edition and Ligeti's edition, or now with this new transcription, these "dark" copies can be "deciphered" more easily. Igor de Rachewiltz gives a reliable romanization of the Mongol text written in prose but arranged here in quatrains of the Tibetan version in isosyllabic verses; the quatrains are numbered by chapters (the same way as in Vladimirtsov's text and in Ligeti's transcription). The editor restituted the interpunction of the 1013 quatrains (often distorted in the Tanjur print and in the Delhi MS as well). Though in prose, the Mongol version has some rhythmic passages—maybe due to the strong beat of the original, or to its parallelism—in the texts of the early translation. Several word-order inversions (e.g., X:30b: boltuyai tede ere böged in the print of 1312) affirm that here and there Chos-kyi 'od-zer, to whom we owe those beautiful stave-rhyme strophes of the postscript, tried to render his prose more rhythmic (cf. my notes on "Mongolian verses without Alliteration," in Annales universitatis de Rolando Eötvös nominatae, sectio linguistica, vol. VII, Budapest [1972]: 161-68). (Kara, "Review," 704–5) Read more here
