“The Mirror of Universe” (Oir. Yertünčüyin Toli) as a Source on the Buddhist Cosmology of Kalmyks in the Mateials of P.S. Pallas and I.I. Lepekhin. Part 1

The paper examines one Old Kalmyk text in Oirat ‘Clear Script’ named as “The Mirror of Universe” (Oir. Yertünčüyin toli) which was one of the key sources for descriptions of Buddhist cosmology recorded in the materials of academicians P.S. Pallas and I.I. Lepekhin, who headed the academic expeditions of 1768–1774. The relevance of this research stems from the need to identify the primary sources upon which 18th-century scholars relied when documenting the religious beliefs of the Kalmyk people, as well as the importance of textual analysis for the correct interpretation of Buddhist terms and proper names distorted during transcription. Based on analysis of catalogues (from the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the RAS and the Oriental Department of the M. Gorky Scientific Library of St. Petersburg State University), seven manuscript copies of the text have been identified, five of which presumably have Kalmyk origin. It has been established that “Yertünčüyin toli” has survived exclusively in the Oirat “Clear Script”. The paper details the structure and content of this text, which follows the classical Buddhist schema of the “vessel-world” (the universe) and the “content-world” (the inhabitants). A textual analysis of the four lists of the work “Yertünčüyin toli” (“Mirror of the World”), planned in the second part of the study. It will allow us to verify the transcriptions made by P.S. Pallas and I.I. Lepekhin (according to A. Chubovsky) and give a correct interpretation of the key concepts of Buddhist cosmology.