Eski Uygur Türkçesi Dönemine Ait Tantrik Bir Metin: Sitātapatrādhāraṇī

Abstract

This study deals with the Old Uyghur text Sitātapatrādhāraṇī, which is called Ārya-sarva-tathāgata-uṣṇīṣa-sitātapatrā-aparājitā-nāma-dhāraṇī in Sanskrit and known to be a Tantric text belonging to Tibet Buddhism, namely Vajrayāna Buddhism. Sitātapatrā, referred to as “Goddess with the White Parasol” is believed to protect against all kind of disasters, black magic and devil through her dhāraṇī read or worn by believers. The text is believed to be translated during the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in the 13th or 14th century and has copies in the Old Uyghur language, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Khotan Saka, and Mongolian. This study fundamentally based on the Berlin collection attempted to create new and almost complete text by combining multiple fragments and manuscripts stored in various collections such as St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IOM RAS), St. Petersburg State Hermitage Museum, Paris Bibliothèque Nationale de France (The National Library of France), Nakamura Fusetsu, Ōtani and Tachibana. The study consists of six chapters including Introduction, Text, Translation, Notes, Index, and Facsimile. The Introduction chapter provides general information about the context to which the text belongs and explains subjects addressed in the text. The chapter also explores versions of the text in different languages, work on the text, and the translation of the text. The fragments from various collections are also listed in a table in the Introduction chapter. Additionally, the chapter presents an explanation of the methods used to design the Text, Translation, Notes, Index, and Facsimile chapters. The Text chapter involves the transliterations and transcriptions of the fragments of different copies and collections included in the study. The chapter also introduces the fragments belonging to different versions parallelly named in the footnotes to ensure the integrity of the text and to demonstrate the spelling differences in the fragments. The footnotes also include reading suggestions for words in the damaged fragments and different interpretations drawn in previous work on the text. Additionally, the Text chapter presents work on the Chinese and Tibetan versions of the text and on the relevant fragment of the text under the catalog number of the fragment. The Translation chapter involves the translation of the text into Turkey Turkish made using other historical text publications, other versions of the text, and terminology glossaries. In the Notes chapter, expressions and terms corresponding or equivalent to foreign words from Buddhist terminology are offered and defined in comparison with versions of the text in other languages and relevant comments are also discussed. The Index chapter provides a grammatical index of all words in the text, demonstrates the language from which words are borrowed, if any, and presents corresponding words in Turkey Turkish. Finally, the Facsimile chapter includes the photographs of the fragments of the text covered in this study in the order by which they form the text.