A mongolian commentary on the “Sutra of eight luminous”: features of the genre

The article deals with a Mongolian manuscript entitled “Commentary on the [Sūtra] on the Eight Luminous” kept in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It represents the genre of parasutraic narratives. Usually such narratives are collections of stories about the benefits of reading sūtras. Most of such narratives preserved in Tibetan-Mongolian literary tradition till nowadays are devoted to the Diamond Sūtra, actually this text is a unique sample of such narrative dedicated to the Sūtra of Eight Luminous. Despite the fact that the original Chinese text of the sūtra belongs to apocryphal (non-canonical) literature, Tibetans and Mongolian peoples considered it as the authentic word of Buddha and actively used it in Buddhist rituals. An analysis of the structure and content of this narrative showed that it includes eight stories and compositionally is a “framed novel”, meaning that all the stories (except the 7th) are inserted into common “frame” of the story. Some compositional elements are borrowed from sutras. Unlike collections devoted to the Diamond Sūtra, this parasutraic narrative contains numerous references to Buddhist conceptions revealed in the sūtra. Besides, only three stories (from 4th to 6th) tell about benefits of the Sūtra of Eight Luminous, whereas other stories explaining various Buddhist conceptions don′t mention it. Comparison with parasutraic narratives devoted to the Diamond Sūtra shows the lack of genre unity, caused, in our opinion, by the fact that the genre didn't get further development in Tibetan and Mongolian literature.