Bodeng Ningli

Bodeng Ningli, 勃登凝黎, is a mountain that the Zhou Shu names in its account of Göktürk custom.^[1] A high mountain towered up four or five hundred li from Dujin, the mountain on which the khan resided. Neither grass nor tree grew on it.^[1] The Göktürks called it Bodeng Ningli. The Zhou Shu renders the name in Chinese as the spirit of the earth, 地神.^[1] Modern accounts identify Dujin, 都斤, with Ötüken. An older identification placed it north of the Tüsiyetü district of Mongolia.^[2]

The passage

The mountain stands in the Zhou Shu’s passage on the khan’s rites, after the two sacrifices.^[1] Every year the khan led the nobles to sacrifice at the cave of the forebears.^[1] In the middle ten days of the fifth month, they gathered at the Taren river to worship the spirit of heaven.^[1] The sentence on the mountain follows directly. It gives the name, the Chinese rendering, the distance and the bare slopes. It records no rite at the mountain itself.^[1]

Distance and spelling

The histories differ by one character. The Zhou Shu has “four or five hundred li from Dujin”, without a direction.^[1] The Bei Shi and the Tongdian have “five hundred li west of Dujin”.^[3] The difference lies between 四, four, and 西, west.^[2] The two histories also spell the name differently. The Bei Shi writes it 勃登凝梨, the Tongdian 㝅登疑梨.^[3] The French translation of 1864 gives four hundred li. It renders the gloss as “spirit of heaven”.^[4] Later renderings give “God of the Earth”.^[5]

Earth and the inscriptions

The Kül Tegin inscription of the eighth century names a sacred Earth-and-Water, türk ıduk yeri subı, in the same sentence as the Tengri of the Göktürks.^[6] Modern accounts set the mountain of the Zhou Shu beside it. This equation is a modern inference. Neither text mentions the other’s earth-power.

The Zhou Shu preserves a named, bare mountain that was held to be the spirit of the earth. It recorded the mountain before any Göktürk inscription was cut.