Publication details
Mongolská politická proroctví a transformace jejich čínských pramenů
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica 1/2013, Orientalia Pragensia XIX |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | Mongolia, political prophecies, social situation, the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries |
| Description | Political prophecies represented an important type of syncretic texts in Mongolian 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 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 (Fo yu zhenyan dujiejing). 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 thinking of a Western-Mongolian herdsman. |