A Newly Identified Incense-Offering Liturgy to Chinggis Khan and Related Mountain Cult Texts from Khentii

Abstract

This article introduces and examines a newly identified Tibetan-language incense-offering liturgy dedicated to Chinggis Khan, preserved within a private manuscript collection in Berkh, Khentii Province. Entitled Ezen Bogd-un San (“The Incense Offering to the Lord Sovereign”), the text constitutes an important new source for the study of the ritual veneration of Chinggis Khan within Mongolian Buddhist tradition. Through textual, liturgical, and historical analysis, the article demonstrates that the prayer invokes Chinggis Khan not merely as a remembered imperial ancestor, but as a sacralized sovereign figure integrated into a wider Buddhist cosmological and protector-deity framework. Particular attention is given to the repeated invocation of Ezen Bogd, the liturgy’s adaptation of Buddhist incense-offering structures, and its synthesis of Chinggisid sovereignty, territorial cult practice, and Tibetan ritual language.

The article further situates the Ezen Bogd-un San within a broader corpus of mountain and ovoo liturgies preserved alongside it in the Berkh collection. These include ritual texts dedicated to sacred mountains, territorial deities, and frontier cults associated with the former Setsen Khan Aimag and the wider Khentii region. Together, these manuscripts reveal an interconnected ritual landscape in which mountain worship, territorial cults, and the sacral veneration of Chinggis Khan formed part of a shared liturgical tradition. The study argues that these newly recovered materials provide important evidence for the ritual geography, sacred landscape traditions, and manuscript culture of eastern Mongolia, while also underscoring the urgent importance of documenting cultural heritage preserved in private collections.