(Tōyō Bunko)
Buddhist sutras translated from Tibetan to Oyirad by Zaya Pandita
68th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Bangkok 2026
The Biography of Zaya Pandita, titled Tale called Moonlight, was composed in the 1690’s or somewhat later in present-day Dzungaria. Its author, Gelong gsol-dpon Radnabhadra, was a disciple of the first Zaya Pandita Nam-mkha’-rgya-mtsho. Its story starts with the birth of the first Zaya Pandita in 1599, and in 1615 he received commandments of a bande when the Oyirad tribal chiefs became first Tibetan Buddhists. He studied twenty-two years in Tibet and became the highest monk ever produced by the Oyirads. It was he himself who created in 1648 the Oyirad alphabet, or todorkhoi uzuq (clear alphabet), by improving the traditional Mongolian alphabet. His biography itself, except sutras translated from Tibetan, was the earliest source written in the Oyirad script.
The presenter read her paper on the historical significance of this biography at the 28th PIAC meeting in 1985, which she attended for the first time. However, it remained impossible to publish a full translation in Japanese. Since the fall of 2022, she has been working on the Japanese translation and annotations with Professor Futaki, a Mongolian scholar, through monthly online research meetings, and it is almost complete. This time, she will list the titles of over 200 Buddhist sutras which were translated from Tibetan to Oyirad by Zaya Pandita and his disciples, and she would like to receive opinions and advice from Buddhist scholars participating in this PIAC meeting. Because the titles are often too abridged, making it difficult to identify the original sutras, and only a portion of the translated sutras remain.