Remedies for Various Diseases of Five Kinds of Livestock: A Tibetan Manuscript from Mongolia and Its Study (MAiP 9182/23)

In the collection of Asian manuscripts and prints in the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw, in the Tibetan and Mongolian collection, there are some ten Tibetan ritual text collections which were most probably used by Buddhist monks in their daily practice in Mongolia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were described briefly by Agnieszka Helman-Ważny in her monograph on Tibetan monastic books.1 The ritual text collections were catalogued by Thupten Kunga Chashab and recently they were scanned and made available via the museum website.2 The collections of short prayers, sādhanās and dhāraṇīs, are interesting for scholars since they document the everyday problems of Mongols in the 19th and 20th centuries and the possible solutions to those problems found in Buddhist practices. Because so-called “folk-religion” or Buddhist practices have been the subject of numerous studies, we will not elaborate on that topic here.3 We would like to provide an example of such a religious text accompanying one of the offering rituals. The manuscript is kept in one of the above-mentioned text collections. This particular parcel (No. 9182) contains sādhanās of Green and White Tāra and Palden Lhamo (Dpal ldan lha mo) – prayers concerned with proper future rebirths and with practice during the forty-nine days in the bardo state, as well as fumigation rites against contamination and several other texts.