380 klaus sagaster
Nestorian Christianity, and Manichaeism.^5 In their writings they used
primarily a script that had been derived from the Sogdian script and
which is referred to as Uighur script. The Uighur Tatatonga assumed
of ce with inggis Khan and apparently taught the Mongols Uighur
script. This script began to be used also for representing the Mongolian
language.^6 To the present day, the Uighur-Mongolian script is widely
used by the Mongols. The religious literature of the Mongols was
recorded in this script.
It is most probable that inggis Khan discussed Buddhism with
Tatatonga. Already for centuries, Buddhism had played a very im-
portant role for the Uighurs who possessed a rich literature on it in
their language.^7 Above all, the sons and younger brothers of inggis
Khan, who were introduced to the Uighur script by Tatatonga, must
have received knowledge of Buddhism. We do not know when the
rst Buddhist texts were translated from Uighur into Mongolian. We
know that there were translators, but none of their works have been
preserved. Yet, the Uighur language must have had a strong in uence
on the Mongolian language from a very early time on. This is espe-
cially true for Buddhist terminology. It is remarkable that Mongolian
has a large number of Sanskrit loanwords that were transmitted from
Uighur. Although there are Mongol and Tibetan translations of these
Sanskrit-Uighur words, up to the present the Sanskrit-Uighur forms
are very often preferred. For the central Buddhist concept nirva the
Mongols use the word nirvan that was borrowed from Uighur. The
Mongolian interpretative translation asalang-aa nögigsen, “the [state
of ] having transgressed suffering”, is only seldom used, and is a word-
for-word interpretation of mya-ngan-las ’das-pa, the Tibetan rendering
of nirva. The many Sanskrit concepts in Mongolian can be explained
by the fact that Turkish/Uighur Central Asian Buddhism had already
rmly taken root among the Mongols before they became inclined to
the Tibetan form of Buddhism.
1.2. inggis Khan and Tangut Buddhisminggis Khan must have also become acquainted with Tibetan and
Tangut Buddhism at a very early date, more precisely between 1205
(^5) Klimkeit 1988, p. 63.
(^6) On the introduction of the Uighur script, see the section “The Rise of the Uygur-
Mongolian Script” in Kara 2005, pp. 25–32. 7
Klimkeit 1988, pp. 203–206; Elverskog 1997.