Clear Script, Cyrillic, and a Liturgy in Another Language

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.