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    <pre style="white-space:pre-line"><code>Bökhsuuri lives in  an administrative unit composed exclusively of members  of the Zakhchin
               ethnic subgroup but surrounded by a neighbourhood with a high percentage of Kazakh population.
               Bökhsuuri was thus in a position to perceive elements of Kazakh Muslim mythology and to reflect on
               selected Muslim religious ideas. According to oral communication, Bökhsuuri applies fragments of
               Arabic prayers in his ritual addresses to the heaven.
                     Bökhsuuri considers himself envoy of heavens (tengriin elch), which authorizes him to summon
               rain. However, he does not consider himself to possess the ability of summoning rain – for example he
               cannot  summon  rain  on  any  day,  for  example,  to  prove  his  abilities  on  request.  He  summons  rain
               through a ritual petition to the heaven (or to the tngri-gods, who can be quite easily interchanged with
               the lus-spirits in the popular understanding) on the carefully selected suitable day. Another condition
               is the single-minded devotion and confidence of all participants of the ritual, otherwise the heaven will
               not consider the performer of the ritual as justified or legitimate (tenger erkhsheekhgüi).
                     The need to obtain the “legitimation” or “empowerment” from nature to gain success in ritual
               actions and the everyday life of the community was situated within the more complex idea formulated
               by  Bökhsuuri  about  the “four  types  of the  power  of  nature”:  the  external air power  (gadaad  khiin
               khüchin, khii “air” as the vital principal of the traditional medicine and cosmology), the empowerment
               of nature (baigaliin erkhshee), the inner power of nature (baigaliin dotood khüchin), and the power of
               the  supreme  unity  (deed  negdliin  khüchin).  From  these  four  categories,  only  the  first  two  can  be
               observed in the contemporary world, the last two were apparent only in antiquity. The first type, the
               external air power, manifests mostly through shamans, in the dynamic of temporal cosmology (tsagiin
               erkh “the power of time” signifying the inevitable alternating of social orders and a general  moral
               decline), or in the natural rotations of seasons or regular meteorological phenomena. The second type,
               the empowerment of the nature is conditioned by the human responsible coexistence with the nature
               refraining  from  any  activities  that  would  change  or  harm  nature,  particularly  the  way  of  life  of
               Mongolian pastoralists. Under this condition, people can ask for the blessings of heaven, which will be
               given to them. They will also be protected from calamities, conflicts, and wars. However, according to
               Bökhsuuri, even in present-day Mongolia the devastating interventions in the landscape have already
               caused a reduction in the heavenly empowerment.


               1.10. Collections of Mongolian Manuscripts and Blockprints in the Czech
               Republic


               In  the  Czech  Republic  there  are  three  previously  catalogued  collections  of  premodern  Mongolian
               books (manuscripts and blockprints) kept  by public institutions and a few of old Mongolian books
               kept in private collections. All of the collections were described in detail in a form of a descriptive
               catalogue by Marta Kiripolská (Kiripolská 1996).
                     The largest of the Prague Mongolian collections is the collection of the Faculty of Arts, Charles
               University, consisting of 24 (some of them multivolume) items. The whole collection (together with a
               few manjurica and tibetica) was bought in 1991 via an antiquarian bookshop from the hereditaments
               of Czech Mongolist Pavel Poucha. Poucha collected the books and manuscripts mainly during his trips
               to Mongolia (1955) and China (1957–1958), some of them he received as presents from Mongolian
               scholars including B. Rinchen. In his published travelogues (Thirteen Thousand Kilometres Through
               Mongolia 1957, To the Heart of Asia 1962), Poucha made several mentions about his acquisitions of
               old  books:  “...Tibetan  and  Mongolian  manuscripts  or  blockprints  have  always  been  kept  in  high
               esteem and placed on a place of honour in the northern part of a ger or on the local altar next to the
               burkhans.  I  saw  it  in  Mongolia  myself  and  in  the  countryside,  I  was  given  several  such  books  as
               presents.” (Poucha 1957: 54); “[In Zag, Bayankhongor aimag] ... we stayed overnight in a ger of arat
               Adiya, a 73 years old man, who gave me two Buddhist sutras, carefully wrapped in old cloth wrappers,
               penetrated by hearth smoke. He said that nobody reads them anymore and people have any more taste
               for them, while at our place in Prague they still can be read.” (Poucha 1957: 208). In the same book
               Poucha included images of some of his collected old books (Poucha 1957: illustration behind p. 256).
               The xylograph sutra The Ocean of Parables (Eldeb üliger-ün dalai, 1728, j-313/91) is preserved in a
               pretty purpose-made box with a dedication from the Khentii Aimag Library to P. Poucha. On the first
               inner page of the print of the vocabulary The Book Gathering Mongolian Letters (Mongγol-un üsüg-ün

                                                           56</code></pre>
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