When they moved eastward and were translated into Iranian languages, the names of the Manichaean deities (or angels) were often transformed into the names of Zoroastrian
yazatas. Thus
Abbā dəRabbūṯā ("The Father of Greatness", the highest Manichaean deity of Light), in
Middle Persian texts might either be translated literally as
pīd ī wuzurgīh, or substituted with the name of the deity
Zurwān. Similarly, the Manichaean primal figure
Nāšā Qaḏmāyā "The Original Man" was rendered
Ohrmazd Bay, after the Zoroastrian god
Ohrmazd. This process continued in Manichaeism's meeting with
Chinese Buddhism, where, for example, the original Aramaic (the "call" from the World of Light to those seeking rescue from the World of Darkness), becomes identified in the Chinese scriptures with
Guanyin ( or
Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit, literally, "watching/perceiving sounds [of the world]", the
bodhisattva of Compassion). The original six Syriac writings are not preserved, although their Syriac names have been. There are also fragments and quotations from them. A long quotation, preserved by the eighth-century
Nestorian Christian author
Theodore Bar Konai, shows that in the original Syriac Aramaic writings of Mani there was no influence of Iranian or
Zoroastrian terms. The terms for the Manichaean deities in the original Syriac writings are in Aramaic. The adaptation of Manichaeism to the Zoroastrian religion appears to have begun in Mani's lifetime however, with his writing of the Middle Persian
Shabuhragan, his book dedicated to the
Sasanian emperor,
Shapur I. In it, there are mentions of Zoroastrian divinities such as
Ahura Mazda,
Angra Mainyu, and Āz. Manichaeism is often presented as a Persian religion, mostly due to the vast number of Middle Persian, Parthian, and
Sogdian (as well as Turkish) texts discovered by German researchers near
Turpan in what is now
Xinjiang, China, during the early 1900s. However, from the vantage point of its original Syriac descriptions (as quoted by Theodore Bar Khonai and outlined above), Manichaeism may be better described as a unique phenomenon of Aramaic Babylonia, occurring in proximity to two other new Aramaic religious phenomena,
Talmudic Judaism and
Mandaeism, which also appeared in Babylonia in roughly the third century. == References ==