Tibetan legends about Lake Kokonor
The article considers the legends about the origin of Lake Kokonor, which exist among the Mongol and Tibetan tribes living around it. The relevance of this study is determined by the extremely low level of knowledge of these legends. The aim of this article is to study the central plot elements of the legends about the origin of Kokonor using descriptive and comparative methods. The material of the study was the "History of Kokonor" ( Mtsho sngon gyi lo rgyus ) by Sumpa-kenpo Yeshe Peljor (1704-1788). The texts of legends published in specialized literature were also involved. It has been established that the legends according to the main plot are conditionally divided into two groups. The first of them contains information that the waters that formed Lake Kokonor came here from Central Tibet, the other - about a spring that spilled over the entire plain and formed a lake. The first group of legends is called the Mongolian version of the origin of the lake, and the second is the Tibetan one. A specific feature of the Mongolian version is its connection with the construction of the Jokhang temple in Lhasa, and the main actors are a Tibetan king, a Tibetan lama, a blind Mongol old man and his son. At the heart of the legends that belong to the second group, there is a spring that they forgot to close, and as a result, the plain was flooded and Kokonor was formed. The main persons mentioned here with some variations are the Tibetan minister Gar and his son, the Tibetan king Sontseng Gampo, the Chinese princess Wencheng. Sumpa-kenpo cites a plot typical for the legends of the second group in his essay “The History of Kokonor”. It was revealed that, except Sumpa-kenpo's legend, in all other versions of the legends of the second group about the origin of Lake Kokonor, instead of a “wooden door” ( shing gi sgo chung ), a “stone” is found. It is concluded that the main difference between the legends of the first and the second groups is that the Mongolian version considers a bird as a “savior” from a flood, and Padmasambhava (sometimes in the form of a siddha or a monk, sometimes in the form of an eagle) in the Tibetan version, which, possibly speaks of a later Buddhist adaptation of these legends.