Abstract
Political prophecies represented an important type of eschatological texts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were narrowly related to the popular literature describing hells and had the common aim to exhort listeners to the pious Buddhist life.
Their popularity culminated during the last decades of Manchu rule and the period of Mongolian autonomy (1911-1919). The prophecies remained common among rural lay intellectuals even during the anti-religious persecution starting in the late 1930s and underwent a temporary reappraisal in 1990s.
The Mongolian prophecies contain several texts that were translated from Chinese or written on the basis of Chinese sources. In this article I compare three Mongolian texts related by their structure to an original Chinese prophecy mentioning a text inscribed on a stone fallen from heaven (Fo yu zhenyan dujiejing).
The main aim of the article is to demonstrate how the prophecy changed according to the political and religious situation in Central Mongolia and how it was turned into an instrument of Mongolian nationalism.