A tantric text of the old Uighur: Kāyacakra Sādhana

Kāyacakra Sādhana is the second of two texts in a manuscript preserved in the Turfan Collection of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences under the code U 557. The text is a ritual guide that provides information on making offerings to the gods and achieving enlightenment through Cakraśaṃvara-maṇḍala. The text was translated from Tibetan into Old Uyghur during the period when the Uyghurs were under the rule of the Yuan Dynasty. The Tibetan text from which the Old Uyghur translation was based is attributed to 'Phags-pa bLama', who died in 1280. Although the Old Uyghur text does not have a colophon because it is missing from the end, it can be said that it was translated by Puṇyaśri based on the colophon of the text named Śrīcakrasaṃvara-Maṇḍala-Abhisamaya in the same manuscript. The manuscript containing the text was found during the first German expedition to Central Asia. The person who made us aware of the text is F. W. K. Müller. In his work titled Ein uigurisch-lamaistisches Zauberritual aus den Turfanfunden (1928), Müller gave information about the physical properties of the manuscript and the content of the text. The second study on the text is the study titled Fragmente tantrischer Werke in uigurischer Übersetzung, Berliner Turfantexte VII (1976), prepared jointly by G. Kara and P. Zieme. In this study by Kara and Zieme, various tantric Uyghur texts were published and examined. Among the texts in this study is Kāyacakra Sādhana. In the study, Kāyacakra Sādhana was published as text A together with the text named Śrīcakrasaṃvara-Maṇḍala-Abhisamaya. After these two studies, there is no study done directly on the text. For this reason, the text in question was re- examined in this study prepared as a master's thesis. The study consists of eight chapters in total. In the introduction section, information about the Uyghur ethnic name, Uyghur history, and Uyghur literature is given. In the text section, the name and subject of the text, its translator, its dating, studies done on the text, the physical characteristics of the manuscript in which the text is found, the language and spelling features of the text, and the methods followed while examining the text are mentioned. In the Transliteration and Transcription section, the text was transcribed and transliterated. The translation of the work is given in the Translation into Turkey Turkish section. In the explanations section, various words, grammatical structures, Buddhist terms and expressions, etc. are explained. In the index section, a grammatical index of all words in the text has been made. In the bibliography section, the sources used in this study are shown. In the facsimile section, photographs of the text taken from Digitales Turfan-Archiv are given. Keywords: Old Uyghur, Kāyacakra Sādhana, ritual guide.