The Religions of Mongolia

In this study Walther Heissig focuses on the existence in Mongolia of religious forms which have more ancient roots even than Buddhism. The forms of Northern Buddhism in Mongolia correspond in the main to those Tibetan forms from which they originated. Professor Heissig is mainly concerned in the present book with those beliefs and concepts which belong to the non-Buddhist folk religion of the Mongols. Scholars have in recent years discovered original Mongol texts and documents unknown till now, and professor Heissig's own researches in European libraries have revealed more than seventy-eight manuscripts, containing prayers and invocations from the folk religion, all of which provide essential material on the non-Buddhist religious conceptions of the Mongols.His philological work on these Mongol texts is the basis for this account of the ancient religious ideas of the Mongols. He begins by describing the shamanism of the Mongols, then gives an account of the spread of Lamaism and the subsequent Lamaist suppression of Shamanism. The main part of the book is devoted to a study of the Mongolian folk religion and its pantheon, which includes heavenly beings, the ancestor god, the deity of fire, and equestrian deities.