%D 2017 %T The Fear of Being Reborn in the Hells: Death and the Afterlife in Early Twentieth-Century Mongolia %! The Fear of Being Reborn in the Hells: Death and the Afterlife in Early Twentieth-Century Mongolia %X The collection of Tibetan and Mongolian manuscripts and xylographs of Prof. Dr. Richard Ernst (Winterthur/Switzerland) that currently is catalogued at the Institute for Religious Studies of Bern University holds a couple of Mongolian picture-books (Mo. jiruɣ-tu nom). These books have been very popular in nineteenth century Mongolia. Often they showed in drastic images the different Buddhist hells and the suffering beings in them. In this way, they evoked the transitoriness of human existence and the omnipresence of death. Moreover, they threatened the lay populace with terrible punishments that awaited those who had not lived according to the ten virtuous precepts (Tib. dge ba bcu). The books in which image often prevailed over text were used by itinerant monks to illustrate and enforce their moral injunctions. This paper analyses one picture-book of the Ernst collection. “The picture-book of Molom toyin” (Mo. Molom toyin-u jiruɣ-tu taɣuji orosibai) reflects in its images the fears and anxieties about death and the afterlife that influenced the social life of the Mongolians in the early twentieth century. The study of this picture-book opens new ways to explore the every-day religious concepts that determined the Mongolian socio-religious practices in regard to death and the afterlife. %U https://doi.org/10.13173/zeitdeutmorggese.167.1.0167 %0 Journal Article %R 10.13173/zeitdeutmorggese.167.1.0167 %J Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft %V 167 %N 1