holding a jar with jewels and gold in her hands, her upper body is of human shape
and the lower part of her body is the shape of a snake. "We got accustomed to saying
Sutää King, but according to the teaching this mountain is not Sutää King, is Sutää
Queen.” — said Jigmedjame.
Mankhan also has another local spirit namely the Khaanbaatar (Khal. Xänbätar),
a snowy, sacred mountain. But Jigmedjamc had no idea how this spirit looks like.
The famous Caves of Gurwan Senker (Khal. Gurwan Senxer/Cenxer), where the
famous rock inscriptions were found, have got a female owner spirit, an old woman,
who protects the surroundings ofthe caves and the nearby rivers.
The local spirit of the waters of Tögrögiin Khar (Khal. Tögrögin Xar) is a small,
mottled fish,’ a kind of /üs, that is — according to the Lama — hard to see.
Further he told us that his homeland has no owner-spirit of trees, because there are
no forests in Mankhan and the only plant that grows is the thorny Caragana. Besides
the spirits mentioned by name there are a lot of genii loci of the earth, waters, rocks
in the human world; as he told us it was impossible to mention all of them by heart.
Jigemdjamc’s narration presents a Buddhist cosmological understanding of the
world which is the background of the spirits-conception of Buddhicised folk religion,
too. But there are differences between the narration of a monk who is trained in Bud¬
dhist cosmology and the understanding of a shepherd (cf. below). Jigmedjame men¬
tioned that the spirits inhabit the middle world layer i. e. the world of human beings,
and although he said that some of the spirits lived under the ground he regarded them
as belonging to the middle world layer and not to the underworld (i. e. the Buddhist
hell). The cosmological pattern described by Jigmedjame is horizontal, and although
he did not mention it by name, I would state that the starting point of his enumera¬
tion of the important mountains and “layers” must be Mount Meru (Mong. Siimber,
Sümerü) and continuing from the Siimerii to the 26" — as he said the “predominating”
(axaljuya) — mountain is the mountain Sutéa. The predominating mountains of the
Oirats including the Dsakhchins, which play an important role in their world concept,
are the followings: Sutää King/Queen, Tsambagaraw (Khal. Cambagaraw), and the
Five sacred Mountains of the Altai (Khal. Tawan Bogd). According to Jigmedjamc’s
narration thereafter ends the Southern Continent, Jambudvipa and starts the Dund Tiw
the “Middle Continent” — as the Lama called it (cf. above).