| Stories Told by the Corpses is a world famous story, it has been collected and rewritten by scholars while it was widely spread among the people through the ages, and it has become an indispensable shining pearl in treasure house of literature. Scholars in home and abroad, have collected and rewritten, translated and done many studies on the story from very early time. But the researchers mainly did studies on its different texts and origins. In this paper, I will talk about Stories Told by the Corpses which spread among Mongols, and do some multi-angle study on its different variants.Stories Told by the Corpses, is deeply loved by Mongolians and Tibetans, in Mongolian calls Siditu Khegur-un Uliger, means Magic Story of the Corpse, in Tibetan calls Ro-sgrung. Although, Stories Told by the Corpses is widely spread in Mongol areas, few people did study on the Stories Told by the Corpses systematically and from multiple perspectives. I have collected 39 versions of the Stories Told by the Corpses, including the results of previous studies, with methods of bibliography, colophon, compilation, Medio-translatology, communication, story types, and others, did a study on them and sorted out its origin and different variants. And then, author analyzed and discussed about the relationships and characters of Chapter 13, Chapter 26, and Chapter 34 of Mongolian editions. A comparative research did on two different versions of Chapter 21, evolutions and variants of Stories Told by the Corpses among Uirad and Kalmuk Mongols. By analyzing Introduction Stories, the thirteenth chapter, Son of a Brahman from Stories Told by the Corpses, talked about its spread and development in Mongol Areas.This paper consists of eight parts, such as introduction, text, conclusion, bibliography and appendix.The introduction introduces the background, purpose, research status, research methods, significance and the text material. The introduction mainly arranges the stories in home and abroad, and points out the shortcomings existed in advance, then, clarify the perspective, purposes and significance of the thesis.The chapter 1 discusses the version and synopsis of the story. The chapter is the fundamental part of the paper. Mongolian edition of the Stories Told by the Corpses which formed later, but it has many versions and spread widely. Therefore, it is necessary to study and sort out the situation at home and abroad to provide useful information for the academic community. The chapter discusses the collections of the Stories Told by the Corpses at home and abroad and given many related academic information. I have done a statistics, found that there are more than 40 traditional versions, including the 12 kinds of domestic ones and more than 30 foreign different versions. There are 20 more home and foreign published editions. Secondly, I talked about the outline of the Stories Told by the Corpses. There are different versions of chapterl3, Chapter 21, Chapter 26 and Chapter 34. It can be classified into three systems.The Chapter 2 consists of three parts, is the main part of the paper, studies its versions. In Part One studies the first 13 chapters. In order to identify the problems and relationship of translations and versions, did proofread on selected 9 kinds of manuscripts from the collected 20 more versions of the Stories Told by the Corpses. And we approached the first step research on the relationship between the Mongolian translation of 13 versions and Tibetan ones.13 stories from the 26 versions of Chidgur have characteristics of Mongolian stories, the stories come from the rewritten or resetting of the structures of the Stories Told by the Corpses, by Mongols. And we found that there only existed one kind of original version and narrators or writers did give some changes or deletes to the story.Part three, did a comparative study on additional stories of the Stories Told by the Corpses. The author made a comparison on the versions of the Stories Told by the Corpses which collected by Inner Mongolia University Library, one was published in 1964 in Mongolia, by scholar Burina, in Cyrillic Mongolian; Stories Told by the Corpses-21 Manchu Buddhist Stories, published in 2001, by Ji Yongmei.The Chapter 3 did a comparison on Mongolian and Tibetan editions of the Stories Told by the Corpses, the later one has two different systems, as the version of 13 chapters and the version of 21 chapters. This chapter focuses on the version of 21 chapters, it contains three parts. The first part talks on the collections and publications of Tibetan the Stories Told by the Corpses. The second part compares the translation texts of Tibetan and Mongolian stories and founds that they has the same system. In the third part did a comparison on the Stories Told by the Corpses and other stories, for finding their origins and developments.The Chapter 4, talked about the heritage of the Stories Told by the Corpses, which inherited among Kalmuk and the Oirat Mongols. The chapter consists of four parts. The first part describes the spread of the Stories Told by the Corpses and introduces about four versions of the Stories Told by the Corpses in Kalmuk area. The second part discusses the Kalmuk version of the Soul of Corpse, which was published in Kalmuk in 1962. According to the comparison on the Chidgur and the Soul of Corpes, found that the version of Chapter 26 of Shiditu Kegur was from the Kalmuc folk versions. The third section discusses the Soul of the heart incense, which was published in 1960 by in Kalmuk, has 12 the Kalmuk stories. The most Kalmuk scholars think that the Soul of the heart incense is same to the Stories Told by the Corpses, I found the difference between them by comparison.The chapter 5, the spread and evolution of the Mongolian editions of the Stories Told by the Corpses were analyzed. However, the oral stories have been spread very widely and colorful. A comparison made on the spread of Mongolian version of the Stories Told by the Corpses with the other versions, and found out their oral heritance types and tradition. And then, the paper talked about the story among Mongol areas and approached further study.In the Conclusion, summarizes the importance of doing studies and investigations on the Mongolian versions of the Stories Told by the Corpses and its spread and evolutions of the oral tradition. And the paper approaches the academic results of its origin and different variants’whole outline and significances of the textual comparison studies on them, with methods of bibliography, colophon, compilation, Medio-translatology, communication, story types and etc. |
