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EKATERINA SOBKOVYAK
ago. Speaking about these trends, Van Mierlo noted that not so long ago "a desire for
origins motivated practically all textual work."? He, however, underlined that "by cur¬
rent consensus the emphasis is now rather on creation, production, process, collabora¬
tion; on material manifestation of a work; on multiple rather than single versions.’
Greetham also characterized the work of textual scholars as studying the “process
(the historical stages in the production, transmission, and reception of texts), not just
product (the text resulting from such production, transmission, and reception).”™
This shift of the focus of interest in scholars practising textual criticism requires
them to abandon the principle of treating variant readings discovered in textual wit¬
nesses as corruptions and contaminations appearing in the course of the original ver¬
sion’s transmission. As Grigely accurately remarked in this regard: “[w]e need not
expend unnecessary energy arguing that one text is better than another text, but might
instead look at what occurs in the transition between texts and how our critical locus
may not be on one text or another text, but at the point of transition between those
texts.”?> When adopting this point of view, one should also not accept the primacy of
intentional changes over unintentional ones, taking into consideration the fact that both
types of changes “overlap, and even unintentional changes like spelling “errors” have
latent semantic power”, and that “we cannot, either as editors or as readers, predict
what kind of significance they hold for a text."
The application of the textual critical method to the investigation of the transmission
history of the Mongolian Kanjur as well as a complex approach of textual scholarship
has failed, so far, to produce a stemma of all the collection’s available copies that is
commonly accepted by scholars. Nor are researchers’ opinions in accordance regard¬
ing the relationships between particular, fully or fragmentarily preserved versions of
the collection.*’ Textual scholarship allows, on the other hand, the shedding of light
on the nature of the Kanjur as a cultural phenomenon, the special place it occupies in
the Mongolian literary tradition, as well as the role it has played in the socio-political
processes that have taken place in Mongolian society.
In what follows, I discuss the example of the Mongolian translation of the Prati¬
moksasütra, and attempt to demonstrate what kind of historical information that com¬
parative analysis of different versions of the translation, juxtaposed with various Ti¬
betan redactions of the text can offer. Finally, I demonstrate how this type of analysis
may contribute to our knowledge about the processes of creation, transmission and
reception of the canonical collection in the Mongolian cultural milieu.
van Mierlo, W.: Introduction, p. 1.
van Mierlo, W.: Introduction, p. 1.
Greetham, David C.: Textual scholarship..., p. 2.
> Grigely, J.: Texualterity..., p. 49.
% Grigely, J.: Texualterity..., p. 28.
On the assessment of the relationships between various extant copies ofthe Mongolian Kanjur texts see
Alekseev, K.—Turanskaya, A.: An overview of the Altan Kanjur..., p. 777; Kollmar-Paulenz, K.: Kanon und
Kanonisierung..., pp. 393-394; Kollmar-Paulenz, K.: The transmission of the Mongolian Kanjur..., p. 173.
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