At the heart of Jangar lies an enduring question: Who am I as a human being? Though rarely asked directly, this question is staged at the beginning of each chapter through the figure of a new hero-to-be. Their narrative cycle is not merely about victory or conquest; it is about transformation. Through trials, individual quests for love and happiness, and heroic struggle for collective survival as a people, the epic figures undergo a process of becoming—reaching, by the end of each episode, a fuller realization of human potential.

As Hannah Arendt highlighted in The Human Condition, there is a distinction between poiesis—the activity of production or fabrication—and praxis—the activity of meaningful action, i.e., human life not as a process of laboring or making, but as one of acting and appearing meaningfully in the public realm. The epic Jangar functions as an epic of praxis, staging the possibility of being human through heroic action, communal engagement, and narrative becoming.

This conceptual shift—from poiesis to praxis, from labor to presence, from product to meaning—reframes how we read the actions within Jangar. What unfolds is not a linear, goal-driven progression, but a ritualized, communal space of becoming, where identity is performed and affirmed. Through trials and combat, as well as through speech and the decision to act, the figure of the hero is constituted before the community. Heroism here is not about the pursuit of individual glory but a deeply relational and public process. In this sense, each chapter of Jangar becomes a staging ground for existential appearance: a space where identity is not only forged but also made visible to others.

Jangar’s space of appearance is embodied in Bumba, the sacred realm and central setting of the epic world. While it may be tempting to read Bumba as a mythological homeland or seat of political power, it is more accurate to view it as a symbolic polis where collective life, heroic action, and communal consciousness unfold. Bumba is not merely a backdrop for heroic deeds; it is the condition of their possibility.

Bumba serves as the site in which the hero’s identity is tested, affirmed, and made visible to others. It is where speech circulates, reputations are forged, and actions resonate within a shared memory. Its boundaries are defined less by geography than by relationships. Wherever the epic community gathers—through ritual, storytelling, or battle—Bumba is actualized. In this way, it mirrors Arendt’s claim that the polis “arises out of acting and speaking together,” and thus can exist “anywhere and anytime” (198). It thus becomes, in Arendt’s terms, the arena in which the human condition is not only lived, but revealed.

In Jangar, to act heroically is to allow oneself to be seen, judged, and remembered in the collective field of meaning. This act is the epic’s highest value: not dominance, but response-ability—the willingness to appear and be known through one’s deeds. Identity is not fixed at birth; it is earned, tested, and redefined within the communal space where narrative and memory converge.

In Jangar, each hero carries two names. The first, given in childhood, is a private name tied to family, place, and early potential. The second, granted by the community, is a public name in recognition of deeds that resonate beyond the self. The second name is the true marker of heroic becoming: it arises not from lineage, but from meaningful presence in the world.

So it is with Khongor, Jangar’s best friend-anda, or oath-brother. As a child, he was known as Scarlet Khongor, a shy boy with a mane of unruly scarlet hair. But on the battlefield, he earns his public name: Lion. Most chapters of the epic are dedicated to his heroic campaigns—his strength in war, his strategic brilliance, his ability to face insurmountable odds and emerge victorious. His ribcage is said to house a sleeping lion, awakened only in moments of ultimate peril. He becomes the epic’s symbol of martial excellence, and his name—Lion—resounds across the epic world.

And yet, there is one chapter that tells a different kind of story: Khongor’s pursuit of love. In this episode, the hero risks everything not for land or glory, but for connection. He defies the expectations of an arranged marriage and seeks a bond of authenticity and affection. The path nearly kills him—not because of a physical threat, but because love, in the epic, is a profound form of vulnerability. His courage here is of a different nature: it is emotional, existential, exposed.

From that rare union, a child is born—a son marked not only by the father’s scarlet mane, but by the promise of a new kind of heroism. Unlike Jangar’s princeling son, born through match-made duty, Khongor’s son displays great leadership qualities—reminding us that the legitimacy of khans is rooted in heroic action, not inherited connections.

Mingian, too, is a figure who exemplifies response-ability through presence rather than force. Born near Mount Mingi—what in modern imagination is in the Caucasus—his childhood name anchors him in place. But his public name, Mingian the Most Beautiful Person in the World, is bestowed in recognition of his inner grace and cultivated talent. He is a master of speech, song, and söngche-ceremonial performance, and his skill is so compelling that nobody dares harm him. Every polis in the epic desires Mingian not as a warrior, but as a living embodiment of refined human potential.

And then there is Sanal. When Bumba—the symbolic polis of the epic—is threatened, Sanal, as many other heroes, steps forward. He drinks from the yellow porcelain bowl, heavy enough to require seventy men to lift. His heart burns with “twelve courages,” and he cries:

“If my dried body is lost,
Earth will benefit from a handful of ashes!
If my wounded body is lost,
Earth will benefit from a bowl of blood!”

Sanal’s public name, He Who Contemplates, highlights the profound significance of his power—rooted not just in physical might, but in his deep Buddhist trait of contemplation. This title reflects his unwavering internal focus, his capacity for self-awareness, and his disciplined readiness to act in harmony with a greater purpose.

The shaman Golden Heart recognizes him as the most complete nobleman, not for his strength or beauty, but because he embodies the full spectrum of virtue:

“As wise as I,
Masterful as Savar Heavy Arm,
Brave as the Lion,
Elegant as Mingian—
Sanal carries ninety-nine noble traits.”

In Jangar, the true mark of heroism is the act of becoming visible in the shared space of the polis. This is, in the Bakhtinian sense, response-ability: the courage to live one’s name into being, where identity is not a possession but a process.

The time-space dimensions of Jangar are likewise central to the epic’s construction of meaning. The text situates its heroes within a distinct temporal framework, as conveyed in the opening lines of the orshilg (prologue):

Ertniin ekn tsagt hargsin
En oln burkhdyn shajin delgirkh tsagt hargsin

In the beginning of an early age,
At a time when the teachings of many Buddhas were spreading.

These temporal markers do more than place the hero in a remote antiquity; they articulate what Bakhtin described as the epic chronotope—a structure in which time and space are fused into a unified field of cultural meaning. In Jangar, this structure reflects not only mythic time but also a sacred historical sensibility, in which the unfolding of events is shaped by Buddhist concepts of era and dharma transmission.

While the epic’s temporal axis is grounded in Buddhist thought, its spatial dimension is shaped by the geography of the Silk Road. The world of Jangar extends from the silver-laden Ganga waters (ganga meaning “silver”) and the gold-rich Altai Mountains (altai meaning “gold”), across the wide steppes of Inner Asia, and on to Mount Mingi (mingi meaning “thousands” or as great as thousands). What emerges is a narrative map—one shaped by movement, encounter, and ritualized connections.

In this sense, Jangar offers a cultural cartography of the Great Steppe Route. The hero’s journey echoes the physical infrastructure of Eurasian trade and communication. Mobility across this terrain was supported by the caravan governing system of drinking water sources (ulgen), tea-and-bed (chai-honna) resting places for travelers, roadside eateries (khotan), soup kitchens (sholun) for monks and the poor, horse-exchange and postal stations (yam), as well as watchtowers, storm shelters (bolzatin boro), and bridges made of gold and silver spanning rivers. Jade gates marked the thresholds of khanates, functioning as both territorial boundaries and ritual thresholds.

The epic’s time-spatial narration—animated by palace gatherings, aristocratic court debates, and Buddhist intellectual voices—subverts sedentary assumptions about the human side of nomadic being, inviting us to reconsider nomadic political life as intellectually sophisticated and structurally complex.

Yet, the question remains: how can we translate the time and existence of Jangar into our modern imagination—particularly in a context where nomads have remained both incompatible with and resistant to modern forms of control, especially the extreme manifestations of totalitarianism imposed on nomadic way of life?

In 1940, Stalin’s regime proclaimed the age of Jangar as 500, anchoring it to the era of the last nomadic empire of the Oirad nomads, the Zunghar, while overlooking earlier signs of a proto-Oirad aesthetic in literary and oral creation—such as the intellectual productions of the Yelü(t) intellectuals, reaching back as far as the Rouran Khanate, 330-550 CE (Bougdaeva, “The Yelu Language of War and Peace”). In 1943-1956, Soviet totalitarianism rendered nomadic aesthetic creation invisible by exiling the entire people to Siberia and erasing their names from the published world (Guchinova, “I am an exile”; Bougdaeva, “Nomads under Arrest”).

Such control placed the Jangar on the Procrustean bed of bare life—not fully denying its existence, yet refusing to let it truly live. Transposed into the modern era, the Jangar was locked in limbo—not here, not there, but nowhere. Totalitarianism found itself in a conundrum, however: while silencing the nomadic voice, it still expected the voice to sing.

Nevertheless, the survival of the Jangar epic—corroborated by archaeological discoveries and translation efforts—strongly supports the view that the Oirad nomads once fostered distinct Buddhist-nomadic schools of thought in varied forms: literary, multi-scriptural, etched in stone, written on paper, and carried in memory.

Jangar is still spoken and sung, accompanied by the dombra—a lightweight two-stringed instrument that travels easily with those on foot (see the Kalmyk Cultural Heritage website). To sing Jangar is to radiate the light of a beloved narration. The imagi-narration of Bumba dispels inner doubts about the heroic potential of nomadic being—resisting modern constraints on plurality and the freedom to exist in nomadic distinctiveness, while defying the alienation from the spontaneous rhythms of steppe life.

Today, the Metropolitan Museum displays the imperial seal of the Dörben Oirads, marking the final chapter of the last nomadic empire, the Zunghar (Perdue, China Marches West). The Oirad epic Jangar stands as a cultural repository of nomadic statehood, tracing a lineage from the flourishing of the Yelu Xianbei intellectuals to the downfall of the Yelu-t Oirad polities. The stamp features a mythical creature—a tiger-like dog. These guardian beasts have watched over Yelu Xianbei tombs since the rise of the Xianbei aristocracy in the fourth century (Dien, Six Dynasties Civilization, 212). According to Xianbei mythology, the spirit of the dog guides and protects the souls of the departed, accompanying them to the abode of the dead, until a new cycle of revival and flourishing begins.