Sizova Alla (St. Petersburg, Russia)

A Comparative Analysis of Special Terminology Used in the Mongolian Version of “Lam rim chen mo” Based on Existing Sources

(57th Annual Meeting of the PIAC Vladivostok, 2014)

“The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment” (or “Lam rim chen mo”) written by Tsong kha pa is the most prominent example of literary works describing the stages of the Buddhist path. There exists a number of Mongolian translations of the particular text from Tibetan language. Two of them belong to the classical Mongolian literature: the first one is known from the xylographic editions made in Beijing during the Qianlong Emperor’s reign (1736–1796), the second one is represented in two Buryat xylographic editions, that differ slightly from each other. Recently there were published two translations of “Lam rim chen mo” to the modern Mongolian. A number of sources for the study of special terminology used in the Mongolian version of “Lam rim chen mo” can be complemented with the Tibeto-Mongolian bilingual explanatory dictionary containing Mongolian equivalents and explanations of Tibetan words and thus aimed at helping with the understanding of the original Tibetan text.

The vocabulary of The Great Treatise abounds with special terminology and includes many dialect words which would not have been understandable even to native-speakers. An adequate transference of special terminology of that kind to Mongolian language required the use of different translation techniques, that varied due to current tradition.

A comparative analysis of special terminology used in the Mongolian version of “Lam rim chen mo” based on different sources allows us to trace the history of the particular work in Mongolian literature process, and at the same time provides us with additional knowledge concerning the Mongolian translation tradition as a whole.