Ganjuur Sutra registered in UNESCO Memory of World

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/ One of the unique pieces of Mongolian cultural and historical heritage, the Ganjuur Sutra which is made of nine precious stones has been registered in the UNESCO Memory of the World. A decision on it was made at the 11th meeting of the International Advisory Committee of the UNESCO held on June 18-21 in Gwangju city, South Korea. This meeting also registered 53 new entries after considering pieces nominated from countries. Implemented from 1992, the UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme is an international initiative launched to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against collective amnesia, neglect, the ravages of time and climatic conditions, and willful and deliberate destruction. It calls for the preservation of valuable archival holdings, library collections and private individual compendia all over the world for posterity, the reconstitution of dispersed or displaced documentary heritage, and the increased accessibility to and dissemination of these items. Ganjuur is a sutra written on 16.5x70.8 sized processed black paper with nine jewelries such as gold, silver, coral, pearl, turquoise, lapis, lazuli and steel. It is large collection of some 1,600 works on ten great and small sciences of traditional Buddhism (philosophy, technology, logic, medicine, philology, astrology, model dance, poetics, Abhidarma, composition) created by ancient Indian and Tibetan scientists and panditas. Ganjuur Sutra written with nine precious stones, the world’s only copy, is an important part of intellectual heritage of human kind which demonstrates remarkable traditional methods of Mongolians to create books by using jewelries. Moreover, the sutra is considered as a static artistic model of oriental and Buddhist works through combining religious and traditional folk arts enriched by the traditional Mongolian concept of beauty and mercy. Apart of Ganjuur, Mongolia has registered other sutras such as “Altantovch” and “Mongol Shunkhan Danjuur” by Luvsandanzan in the Memory of the World.