Mongolská politická proroctví a transformace jejich čínských pramenů
Mongolian Political Prophecies and the Transformation of their Chinese Sources

Summary/Abstract: Political prophecies represented an important type of syncretic texts in Mongolia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The highly eschatological prophecies were narrowly related to the rich popular literature describing hells and had the common aim to exhort the listeners to a pious Buddhist life. The popularity of the political prophecies culminated during the last decades of Manchu rule and the period of Mongolian autonomy (1911–1919). The anti-religious persecution starting in the late 1930s put an end to the circulation of the prophecies by manuscripts and block prints. But the prophecies still remained well-known among rural lay intellectuals and underwent a temporary reappraisal since 1990. The Mongolian prophecies contain several texts that were translated from Chinese or written on the basis of Chinese sources. In this article I compare three Mongolian texts related by their structure to an original Chinese prophecy mentioning a text inscribed on a stone fallen from heaven (Fó yǔ zhēnyán dùjiéjīng 佛語真言度劫經). The main aim of the article is to demonstrate how the prophecy changed according to the political and religious situation in Central Mongolia and how it was turned into an instrument of Mongolian nationalism. At the end, the article will introduce a comparative look at the contemporary prophetic thinking of a Western-Mongolian herdsman.

• Details
• Contents