A New Light to Mongolian Translations of Bhadrakalpika

Koichi Higuchi

A New Light to Mongolian Translations of Bhadrakalpika

(62nd Meeting Friedensau, 2019)

Bhadrakalpikasūtra (bskal pa bzang po’i mdo in Tibetan) is among well-known Mahāyāna sūtras; the Sanskrit original is now lost and we have the Chinese translation from the Sanskrit original as well as the Tibetan translation, the Mongolian translations, the Manchu translation, the Khotanese and so on.

Owing to the brilliant achievement, F. Weller’s Tausend Buddhanamen des Bhadrakalpa (Leibzig, 1928), this is one of the well-known Buddhist works translated into Mongolian. Regrettably, his study, based on a publication of the Qing era, a pentaglottal (Sanskrit by Tibetan characters, Tibetan, Manchu, Mongolian and Chinese) list of Buddha’s names or epithets extracted from the Manchu version of this work, did not aim at philological and linguistic survey of the Mongolian text as a whole. This paper aims to discuss the whole Mongolian text and shows that this famous but little investigated work is worth fully investigating from not only the philological but also the linguistic point of view.