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PÉTER, ALEXA
with an island-world (continent) " in the middle of each ocean. These oceans consti¬
tute the eighth sea. Beyond each continent lie two smaller isles (subcontinents), with
the entire configuration surrounded by an outer eighth ring of black iron mountains.'*
All four vocabularies follow this cosmological model, so we can analyse the
changing of terminology through the names of this system. From five chapters of
the Explanation of the Knowable two cover the Buddhist cosmology in 35 folios. In
the two versions of The Mongolian Mahavyutpatti around 30 chapters of 277 deal
with terms of cosmology. The 300 pages of the third chapter of The Source of Lexical
Wisdom contains most of cosmological key-terms. Cebel Vang£ug Dorje’s bilingual
description presents an overview of the various Buddhist hells in 350 folios.
Arranging in table the Mongolian cosmological terms of names of the Seven
Golden Mountains (Table 1), the four Continents (Table 2) and the eight Great Hot
Hells (Table 3) can reveal that the Mongols tried to create a uniform system of ter¬
minology in every historical era but they never had a universally accepted basis for
it. The main reason is that the spreading of Buddhism among the various Mongolian
tribes took a long time and the need for co-ordinating translations never came up.
Despite the fact that the Mongolian historical sources traditionally consider only two
or three conversions, in the course of time Mongolian tribes developed relations with
different Tibetan orders on divers occasions.
The Explanation of the Knowable was written during the first conversion, in the
days of the Yuan dynasty and it was one of the first among Mongolian cosmologi¬
cal résumés. In that era the Mongols who were translating Buddhist texts almost
entirely from Tibetan, usually reconstructed the original Sanskrit names and terms.
They followed the tradition used in the Uighur Buddhist texts because when the
Uighurs translated from Chinese, they always reconstructed the Sanskrit forms. This
method was adopted when the first Buddhist texts were translated into Mongolian. In
some cases these reconstructed Sanskrit equivalents are obscure and differ from the
generally-recognised ones. However, in the Tibetan version of this work almost all
the Indian names and Buddhist terms were translated into Tibetan in accordance with
the Tibetan traditon of translating elaborated in the 8-9" centuries. It seems that the
Explanation of the Knowable was not widely circulated during the 13%-14% centu¬
ries nevertheless, it left significant legacies to later Mongolian historiographies that
played significant roles in making of the cosmology of early-modern Mongolians.
The two versions of The Mongolian Mahdavyutpatti (manuscript and Tanjur), The
Source of Lexical Wisdom and Cebel Vangéug Dorje’s hell description were com¬
posed after the second conversion as a result of the renaissance of Buddhism in
Mongolia in the 17" and early 18" centuries when the demand to translate and adapt
canonic works flourished. Old religious si#tras were dug out and rewritten. In the
course of re-edition, the works did not remain unchanged, because the translators and
editors consciously made an effort to refashion the texts. In case of Mongolian words
it is easy to follow the changes in translation method. In the tables below we can
17 The hells are located mainly below the surface of the earth. Kongtrul Lodré Tayé: Myriad Worlds, 114.
15 Berzin, Alexander: Taking the Kalachakra Initiation. Snow Lion Press, Ithaca, New York 1997, 59-61.
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