The Buddhist Vocation of the Mongol Letters

From the sixteenth century the Mongolian script became above all a Buddhist instrument. After Altan Khan's meeting with the third Dalai Lama in 1578 sealed the Mongol embrace of Tibetan Buddhism, translation became a national religious project: teams of scholars rendered the Kangyur into Mongolian in the seventeenth century, and the Tengyur followed in the eighteenth under Qing patronage, hundreds of volumes cut to woodblocks in the vertical letters. Monastic printeries produced sutras, prayer books, and the popular literature of Buddhist edification, and the script absorbed a layer of galik letters devised to write Sanskrit and Tibetan mantras exactly, so that the seed syllables of tantric practice could stand correctly on a Mongolian page. Prayer flags, temple inscriptions and amulets used the script alongside Tibetan.

In the twentieth century the Mongolian People's Republic replaced it with Cyrillic and suppressed the monasteries, but Inner Mongolia kept the vertical script in daily use, and since the 1990s Mongolia has restored its teaching and plans its renewed official use, a revival in which reprinted sutras and newly carved temple inscriptions play a visible part. For Mongolian Buddhists the old letters carry the memory of the canon their ancestors translated, and writing them well remains a respected devotional craft.