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PÉTER, ALEXA with an island-world (continent) " in the middle of each ocean. These oceans constitute 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 terminology 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 cosmological 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% centuries 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 composed 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. 322
