A Chapter from the liger-n Dalai

Abstract

The Buddhist Birth-Stories have spread widely among the Mongols chiefly in two collections: the liger-n Dalai (The Ocean of Parables) and the Altan Gerel (Golden Gleam). The former, according to Professor Berthold Laufer, is an adaptation of the mDzans-blun, the Tibetan translation contained in the Kandzur of the Chinese S M M, which has been edited and translated into German by I. J. Schmidt under the title Dzanglun oder Der Weise und der Tor. In the preface of his work Schmidt points out that while the two versions, Tibetan and Mongolian, agree in the main, the tales in the Mongolian text have been amplified and paraphrased, often with supplementary matter not found in the Tibetan version, although in the latter are found in places short passages which the Mongolian version has not.Professor J. Takakusu, on the other hand, is inclined to doubt the Tibetan origin of the Mongolian text on the ground that in the second chapter of the liger-n Dalai the phrase thousand princes is erroneously given as ten princes , and that such a mistake can only arise from a mis-reading of the Chinese character =f- as -J-.