Classical Mongolian

Classical Mongolian is the literary language of the Mongols written in the vertical script, which tradition says was adopted from the Uyghurs at Genghis Khan's command in the early thirteenth century, when the scribe Tatatunga was captured and set to teaching the script to the imperial family. Written top to bottom in columns running left to right, the script served chancellery, chronicle and epic, including the transmission of the Secret History of the Mongols. The classical literary standard matured in the seventeenth century, when Mongolia turned decisively to Tibetan Buddhism and translation became the engine of literature.

Under Ligdan Khan a commission completed the Mongolian Kangyur, the canon of the Buddha's word, in 1629, and in the eighteenth century the Qing court sponsored the printing of the Kangyur and the enormous Tengyur of commentaries, projects that standardized terminology through dictionaries compiled for the purpose. Monastery printeries across Mongolia and Inner Mongolia produced sutras, prayer books, ritual manuals and popular didactic verse in Classical Mongolian, and lamas moved fluently between Mongolian and Tibetan, often composing scholastic works in Tibetan while preaching and translating in Mongolian.

The devotional literature of Classical Mongolian runs from canonical translation to popular religion. Beside the Kangyur and Tengyur stand the widely copied sutras of protection and merit, among them the Altan Gerel, the Golden Light Sutra, kept in homes as a sacred object, verse biographies of saints such as Milarepa in Mongolian dress, pilgrimage guides, incense offering texts, and the sang and serjim offering liturgies in which Buddhist and older Mongolian sky and mountain veneration blend. Didactic poetry, the surgaal genre, carried Buddhist ethics into lay life.

The twentieth century broke the tradition violently. Mongolia's socialist government destroyed most monasteries in the late 1930s and replaced the vertical script with Cyrillic in the 1940s, while Inner Mongolia, within China, kept the traditional script in daily use. Since 1990 Mongolia has revived monastic life and reintroduced the traditional script into schools, with official policy promoting its restored use alongside Cyrillic, and monasteries again print prayer books in the old orthography. Buddhist services in Mongolia today are chanted partly in Tibetan and partly in Mongolian, and new translations of liturgy into modern Mongolian draw directly on the classical versions, keeping the old register audible in the living religion.