Relation between the Mongolian and Uyghur Versions of the Big Dipper Sūtra

The Mongolian version of the Big Dipper Sūtra was translated and printed in 1328 CE and is known as one of the earliest Mongolian translations of the Buddhist scriptures. However, the language of the direct origin of the Mongolian version is an open question. Against the Chinese and Tibetan hypotheses, Central Asian scholars have raised the Old Uighur version as a more likely candidate. Through minute textual comparisons and analysis of lexical and syntactic features across multilingual sources, this paper corroborates the Old Uighur hypothesis