The Mongolian Tanjur Version of the Bodhicaryavatara.

• Author: Kara, G.

In a snake year, 1305-6, the Sa-skya monk Chos-kyi 'od-zer translated the seventh-century Indian Santideva's long poem, the Bodhicaryavatara (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 Same (Inner Mongolia; they are now in the possession of the Toyo Bunko, Tokyo); 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 guusi Biligun dalai prepared his revised text, a modernized version of Chos-kyi 'od-zer's Middle Mongolian Bodhicaryavatara 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 Nyelvemlektar (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 Sume 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...