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ÁGNES BIRTALAN 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 Buddhist cosmology and the understanding of a shepherd (cf. below). Jigmedjame mentioned 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 enumeration 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). The Emic Classification of the Spirit Lords Although the Mongolian chronicles of 17-18 centuries give detailed description of the Buddhist cosmogony of the universe, the detailed oral narratives about the ° Cf. céxor ctirxé “a salmon-like fish with dark-spotted scales” Gombojab, Hangin: A Modern MongolianEnglish Dictionary. Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington 1986, p. 754. 382
