Kalmyk Oirat

The Jangar is the epic cycle of the Oirat Mongols, sung by specialists called jangarchi, and it is built as a set of independent chapters rather than as one continuous story, so a performance takes up a chapter and finishes it. Its setting is Bumba, a country without death, old age or want, ruled by the orphan hero Jangar with a body of companions each defined by a distinguishing gift, and the cycle turns on the defence of that country against invaders. The material is heroic rather than doctrinal, but it sits inside a Buddhist world: the singers were often attached to monasteries or to noble households that endowed them, the chapters open with formulas of blessing, and the cycle absorbed Buddhist cosmological vocabulary without becoming a religious text.

Kalmyk itself is the vernacular of a people who migrated west from Dzungaria in the seventeenth century and settled on the lower Volga, which made Kalmykia the only Buddhist majority territory in Europe. The whole population was deported to Siberia and Central Asia in 1943 and permitted to return in 1957, and the loss of speakers and of monastic institutions in those years is the reason the language is now classified as endangered and the epic is carried by a small number of performers.

In 1648 the monk Zaya Pandita, an Oirat trained in Tibet, devised what is called the Clear Script, todo bichig, by reworking the vertical Mongolian alphabet so that vowels and several consonants that the older script left ambiguous were written unambiguously for Oirat. It was made for a translation programme: Zaya Pandita and his circle rendered a large body of Tibetan Buddhist literature into Oirat in it, and the script carried that literature for three centuries.

Kalmykia adopted Cyrillic in the twentieth century, with a brief Latin interval, so the Clear Script survives today mainly among Oirats in Xinjiang and as an object of revival. What is worth noticing is the division of labour. The liturgy of Kalmyk Buddhism is in Classical Tibetan and is not translated for ritual use, so a Kalmyk Buddhist hears the service in a language they do not speak, in the same way a Latin rite Catholic once did, while Kalmyk itself carries the epic, the blessings, the household ritual and the explanatory literature. A language can be religiously central without ever being liturgical, and this is a clear case of it. There is a second point about the Clear Script worth recording. Zaya Pandita made it for translation rather than for administration, and the surviving Oirat corpus is accordingly religious first: sutras, commentaries, biographies of teachers and ritual manuals, with secular material a minority. A script invented for a translation programme carries the shape of that programme in what survives in it, and the Oirat case is one of the clearest examples anywhere of a writing system whose entire early literature is religious.