Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century Matthew W. King Subject: Buddhism, Histories and Regions Online Publication Date: Jun 2018 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.620 Summary and Keywords Mongol lands were bastions of Mahāyāna (Mon. yeke kölgen) and Vajrayāna (Mon. vačir kölgen) Buddhist life from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, vast territories of the Buddhadharma deeply twinned with Tibetan traditions but always of local variation and distinct cultural content and purpose. Mongol contact with the Dharma reached its apex in the early decades of the 20th century, a flourishing of Buddhist knowledge, craft, and institutionalism that would soon face the blunt tool of brutal state violence. As the great Eurasian Empires came undone with tectonic force and consequence, Mongol lands along the frontiers of the Qing and Tsarist formations had the highest per capita rate of monastic ordination in the history of Buddhism (up to one in three adult men holding some monastic affiliation). Decades into the revolutionary aftermath of imperial collapse, at the interface of Republican China and Soviet Russia, Mongolian monastic complexes were hubs of cultural, economic, and intellectual life that continued to circulate and shape anew classical Indian and Tibetan fields of knowledge like medicine and astrology, esoteric and exoteric exegesis, material culture, and performance traditions between the Western Himalaya; the northern foothills of the British Raj; the Tibetan plateau; North China; Beijing; all Mongol regions; and Siberia, right to St. Petersburg. In addition to being dynamic centers of production, Mongolian Buddhist communities in the early 20th century provided zones of contact and routes of circulation for persons, ideas, objects, and patronage. Pilgrims, pupils, merchants, diplomats and patrons (and those that were all of these) moved from Mongol hubs such as Urga, Alashan, or Kökeqota to monastic colleges, markets, holy sites (and at this time, universities, parliaments, and People’s Congresses) in Lhasa, Beijing, Wutaishan, France, and St. Petersburg. Page 1 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century In the ruins of the Qing and Tsarist empires, to whatever uneven degree these had been felt in local administrative units, Buddhist frames of references, institutions, and technologies of self- and community formation were central in the reimagination of Mongol and Siberian communities. In the decades this article considers, such imperialera communal and religious references were foundational to new rubrics associated first with the national subject and then the first experiments with state socialism in Asia. In many Mongol regions, Buddhism was at first considered “the very spirit” of revolutionary developments, as the Buryat progressive and pan-Mongolist Ts. Jamsrano once put it. By the late 1930s, however, the economic, social, and political capital of monks (especially monastic officials and khutuγtu “living buddhas”) and their monastic estates were at odds with new waves of socialist development rhetoric. Buddhist clerics and their networks (though not “Buddhism” as such) were tried en masse as counterrevolutionary elements. Able only to speak their crimes under interrogation and in court, monks fell to firing squads by the tens of thousands. All monastic institutions save three were razed to the steppe grasses and desert sands. Any continuity of public religiosity, other than minimal displays of state-sponsored propaganda, was discontinued until the democratic revolution of 1990. Mongol lands and its Buddhism was thus an early exemplar of a pattern that would repeat itself across socialist Asia in the 20th century. From China to Cambodia, Tibet to Vietnam and Korea, counter-imperial and colonial nationalist and socialist movements who were at first aligned with Buddhist institutions would later enact profound state violence against monastics and their sympathizers. Understanding Buddhism in early 20th century Mongolia is thus a key case study to thinking about the broad processes of nationalization, reform, violence, Europeanization, state violence, and globalization that has shaped Buddhism and Buddhists in much of Asia in the recent past. Keywords: Buddhism, Mongolia, nationalism, socialism, state violence, 20th century What Is “Mongolian Buddhism”? Where is Mongolia and who were the Mongols in the early 20th century?1 Answers to those questions are in the plural, since the form and content of Mongol communities, territories, histories, and sovereignties were subject to sustained reimagination at that time. Such imagination, in turn, was always profoundly local, even if expressed in broad abstractions such as Qing subjecthood, Russian citizenship, Tibeto-Mongolian monastic membership, or pan-Mongolism. In the first twenty or so years of the 20th century alone, Mongolian peoples were variously administered by Qing and Tsarist imperial formations, three new nation-states, and a series of breakaway autonomous units quickly (and often brutally) absorbed into Russian or Chinese political dominion. Buddhism—a set of disciplines for self- and community formation; a technique for making place, time, community, and authority—was redefined continually as part of these broad processes. For some, a Buddhism fit for the imperial-socialist transition promised to Page 2 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century reproduce Yuan-era political relations from the 13th-century Mongol Empire. For others, the best way forward was to simply continue imperial-era structures and narratives. These often mediated well-worn models of community conceptualization, such as of an eternal pan-Asian Buddhist kingdom in the rubric of “Our great Qing” (Mon. manu yeke cing), or else drew together some constellation of received concepts like törö (state), ulus (community), qaγan (such as a Chinggisid ruler), cakravartin (a Dharmic world emperor), qutuγtu (an incarnate lama), shabi (serf), lam (monk), arad (commoner), and the “Two Systems” (qoyar yosu) of “shared religio-political authority” (šasin törü yin erke). During the imperial-socialist transition of the early 20th century, these were set into innovative combination with Enlightenment-derived concepts of place, community, and history such as “citizen,” “development,” “proletariat,” “democracy,” “nation,” and “socialism.” Not only European political theory, but also nascent Orientalist academic disciplines such as ethnology, folk studies, archaeology, and philology, was instrumental in these processes. For many radical progressives and reformers, a disjointed group that very much included prominent monastic leaders early on, Buddhism in a post-imperial age ought to be legible as a tradition in line with a globally circulating moderne: on the one hand, by reviving the ethical purity and orientations of the “original Buddhism” fetishized by early EuroRussian Buddhologists in the rubric of world religions; on the other, by “rationalizing,” a process that meant embracing scientific education, scientific materialism, and scientific institutions favored in many quarters by both nationalist and then socialist leaders and intelligentsia. If Buddhism could not be made legible in these ways, such reformers often ominously concluded, it ought to be erased. As the 19th century turned into the 20th, Mongols under the Qing were organized into four ayimaγ made up of eighty-six banners (Mon. qoshun) in Outer Mongolia, the “great estate” (Mon. yeke yin shabi) of the Jebtsundamba Khutuγtus, and six leagues (Mon. chiγulγan) made from forty-nine banners in Inner Mongolia. Many other Mongolian ethnic groups lived in Tibetan regions along the Sino-Tibetan-Mongol frontiers, including in what is today Qinghai Province but also as far away as Shanxi and Zhili provinces in the People’s Republic of China. Furthermore, Kalmyks and Buryats, also Mongol peoples, lived under the sovereignty of the Tsarist Empire along either side of Lake Baikal. When the Qing and Tsarist Empires collapsed in the second decade of the 20th century, bloody contests ensued all along the Mongol frontiers of Russia and China between White Russians, Bolshevik forces, Qing loyalists, Muslim warlords, and regional factions with various affiliations. Emergent social and political desires and possibilities inspired Mongols to imagine their histories, associations, and territorial centers anew. The results were competing ethnic narratives of Mongolness (that included, in some cases, Tibetans and Manchus into their fold), competing temporalities that sought to “recover” (i.e., strategically invent) pre-Qing and Tsarist histories, and competing models of postimperial sovereignty aligned with centers as diverse as Beijing and Irkustk, Tokyo and Lhasa, Paris and Urga. Page 3 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century The Buddhadharma—imagined in late imperial-era frameworks by revivalists, Mongol Empire frameworks by puritans like Baron Ungern von Sternberg, in sectarian affiliation with Tibetan co-religionists, or in nativist terms by nationalist ideologues in Urga—was central to all such imagining of place, time, and sovereignty in Asia’s heartland at the start of the 20th century. One particularly telling example comes from the east of Lake Baikal, in Qori Ayimaγ. There, in reaction to the revolutionary events of 1905 and 1917, a consortium of nobles and clergy elevated the monk Samdan Tsydenov to the position of “Dharmarājan of the Three Worlds and a Holder of the Religious and Civil Spheres of Authority.” Though soon crushed by Soviet authorities, this anti-Bolshevik theocratic polity initiated its own Buddhist reform initiatives that elaborately fetishized the Tsarist Russian state and its deposed political leaders.2 Over the course of the 1910s, ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, Mongol peoples came to be administered in various provinces and autonomous zones of first Republican China and then the People’s Republic, various units of the Soviet Union, and in the socialist Mongolian People’s Republic that formed in 1921. “Buddhisms” in the plural were thus both a product of and a generative condition for each of the major sociopolitical movements that shaped the Mongol heartland of Asia in the early 20th century. For example, Buddhist ideas, institutions, networks, practices, and persons helped define and direct the transition from imperial subject to citizen, from monk or noble to proletariat and bourgeoisie, and from bannermen and slave to “Mongol.” To understand this history one must first understand the transregional affiliations and imperial forms of Buddhism that were remobilized, shorn off, or dispatched in the early 20th century. Because of constraints of space, the focus in what follows will be Buddhism in the Qalq-a majority “Outer Mongolia” (aru mongγul) and its re-formation as an autonomous Mongol nation, with many referents to associated developments in “Inner Mongolia” (öbür mongγul) and to Mongol regions in Russian Siberia. The “Yellow Religion” By the turn of the 20th century, the Buddhist tradition of all Mongol territories, whether under Qing or Tsarist dominion, was overwhelmingly that of the reformed Ganden tradition or, as it came to be known later, the Géluk (Tib. dga’ ldan; dge lugs).3 Known in Mongolian sources as the so-called “Yellow Hat School” (Tib. zhwa ser chos lugs) or, most commonly, simply as the “Yellow Religion” (Mon. sir-a yin šasin; Tib. ser gyi chos lugs), the Ganden tradition was founded in Central Tibet by the polymath Jé Tsongkhapa Lozang Drakpa (Tib. Rje tshong kha pa blo bzang grags pa, 1357–1419), his immediate disciples, and their powerful patrons from the Phakmodru family (Tib. phag mo gru). While all postYuan Tibetan traditions have histories twinned with Mongol-driven geo-politics in Inner Asia, by the early 20th century the Yellow Religion was the dominant force (and soon enough, the dominant victim). Page 4 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century In the early rhetoric of the school itself and in the memorialization of later followers, such as in the mammoth biographies written about Tsongkhapa by Mongol Buddhist scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Géluk intervention into the already rich religious landscape of Inner Asia was aimed at reform: to re-prioritize monastic ethics as the foundation of Mahāyāna and Tantric self-cultivation, to center rigorous training in dialectics and scholasticism as the necessary intellectual foundation for meditative accomplishment, and to reinterpret the “definitive and interpretative” teachings of Nāgārjuna, Candrakīrti, Dharmakīrti, Dignāga, and other Indian paṇḍitas. This latter endeavor was pursued in Mongol lands by the 20th century through the looking glass of monastic textbooks (Tib. yig cha) received from the colleges of the great monastic seats of Central Tibet (whose positions were regularly at odds with one another, even between colleges in a single monastery).4 Indeed, beginning in the 17th century, the major Géluk monasteries of Central Tibet along with a few major Tibetan Géluk institutions founded along the Sino-Tibetan-Mongol frontier in Shigatsé and Amdo were counted as the “mother monasteries” (Tib. ma dgon) of hundreds of dispersed “son monasteries” (Tib. bu dgon) spread by the early 20th century across North China, Siberia, and all Mongol territories. Shared values and organizational structures in those three seats concerning mass ordination—a tradition it now seems solidified not as a condition for, but by means of, expansion into Eastern Tibet and Mongolia—became paradigmatic in Mongol lands, much to the chagrin of many early nationalist and socialist leaders in the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party in the revolutionary period being considered here. The many colleges of the three main Tibetan monasteries in Central Tibet provided the major curricular models, ritual traditions, and philosophical interpretations of affiliates across Mongol lands until the crack of executioners’ rifles silenced the raucous sounds of debate courtyards, oral recitation, and large-scale ritual in the 1930s. Those three main seats of the Géluk school, all in the vicinity of Lhasa city in Central Tibet, became major sites of Mongol education, pilgrimage, military intervention, and trade beginning in the 16th century but entering maturation during the Qing formation (1644–1912). Of those three major Géluk monastic seats, Drépung (Tib. ‘Bras spungs) may have exerted the most influence on later Mongolian Buddhist life (though individual Mongolian monastic colleges maintained collegial affiliations with all other major Tibetan Géluk monasteries). Drépung Monastery was not only the home of the incarnation lines that would become the Dalai Lamas, the most important religious figures in later Mongol imagination, but also well as Paṇchen Sonam Drakpa (Tib. Pan chen bsod nams grags pa, 1478–1554), a luminary whose philosophical interpretations became dominant in many Mongolian monastic manuals and philosophical textbooks. More specifically, Drépung’s Gomang College (Tib. Sgo mang grwa tshang) was home to the regional houses (Tib. khams tshan) that most regularly housed Mongolian and Siberian pupils who had made the long journey to study in Lhasa and who, in many cases, would never return to their distant homelands. Page 5 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century Those Mongols who did return from their studies and those Tibetan lamas and incarnates who regularly toured through Mongol lands beginning in the 16th century often enforced a Géluk orthodoxy opposed, for example, against shamanism and “unreformed” Nyingma Buddhist influence. These Géluk orthodox figures further sought to standardize clerical Mongolian Buddhist life through emphasizing Tibetan language learning and writing to the exclusion of regional movements to adopt Mongol liturgies or native exegesis, such as the famous examples of the Third Mergen Gegegen (1717–1766).5 So ubiquitous was this sect in Mongolia that the “Yellow Religion” become a standard by which to define spheres of ulterior religiosity, like the “Black Religion” of shamanism (Mon. qara yin šašin)6 and unreformed “Red” sects of Tibetan Buddhism (Mon. ulaγan šašin) that had been influential even in the recent past, such as those in the Qalq-a Gobi Desert inaugurated by the 19th century luminary Danzan Ravjaa (Tib. Bstan ‘dzin rab rgyas, 1803–1857.7 As such, while Mongolian groups maintained relations with all major Tibetan Buddhist sects, as well as with various Chinese, Uighur, Tangut, and other Central Asian Buddhist institutions and lineages, it was the Géluk school that won the day in Mongol lands. This development was inextricable from the consolidation of the Inner Asian frontiers of the Qing Empire beginning in the 17th century. In time, this consolidated into a dominant (but never hegemonic) model of religion, community identity, history, territory, and sovereignty that Johan Elverskog usefully calls the “Qing-Géluk subject.”8 The Qing-Géluk subject and its associated institutional, historical, and political forms was a hegemonic referent in most Mongol lands outside of Russian Siberia at the dawn of the 20th century. During the 17th-century consolidation of Géluk temporal and religious authority in Central Tibet under the Fifth Dalai Lama and Gushi Khan, such legends of enlightened kingship (especially centered on Avalokiteśvara, with whom the Dalai Lamas were associated, Mañjuśrī, who was identified with the Manchu emperors, and Vajrapāṇi, the enlightened source of the Jebtsundamba Qutuγtu in Qalq-a Mongolia) gained new currency and were central to the political ideology of the Géluk school’s Ganden Potrang government and its affiliation with the Qing formation.9 An entire lexicon for such religiopolitical authority developed in post-16th-century Inner Asian Buddhist historiography and remained important well into the 20th, such as the “Two Laws” or “Two Systems” (Tib. chos srid lugs gnyis; Mon. qoyar yosu), as well as compound nouns that collapse the two into one (Tib. bstan srid, chos srid, bstan gzhung; Mon. törü šašin). Some terminology subsumed these spheres of authority into one abstracted whole, such as “the unification of Dharma and politics” (ex. Tib. chos srid zung ’brel). Seventeenth and 18thcentury Mongolian Buddhist scholastics such as Zaya Paṇdita and the author of the Erdeni-yin tobci consolidated a particularly salient vision of the connections between religion and state among Mongols, Manchus, and Tibetans in the early Qing period that would hang in the background of the many varieties of sociopolitical and religious contests of the early 20th century.10 By the beginning of the 20th century, the Mongolian frontiers of the Qing were societies divided, administratively and conceptually, between “black” (qar-a) lay society and “yellow” (sir-a) monastic society. Each had their own regional relations to the Qing Page 6 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century Empire and to each other, as well as uneven opportunities for political representation, economic advancement, and physical movement. These extended from incarnate lamas and hereditary nobility down to common herdsfolk, uneducated monks, vassals, and slaves.11 As in Tibet by this time, at the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy were incarnate lamas (Tib. yang srid; sprul sku; Mon. qubilγan; qutuγtu). The highest-ranking line of qutuγtu in Mongol lands were undoubtedly of the Jebtsundamba line, known more honorifically as the Bogda Gegegen (“Holy Enlightened One”). In the predominant Géluk hierarchy in Qing Inner Asia, the Bogda Gegegen ranked just below the Dalai Lamas and the Panchen Lamas of Central Tibet. In Siberia, where Russian authorities carefully outlawed traditions of installing incarnate lamas as monastic leaders, the Bogda Gegegen and the chief Tibetan incarnates still pulled heavily on the Buryat and Kalmyk imagination. Monastic estates in Mongolia were by the early 20th century nearly the only sedentary buildings and dominated most spheres of cultural life, including printing, education, medicine (including veterinary knowledge), astrology, and of course, Buddhist philosophical and ritual training. At this time, monastic schools generally taught using Tibetan-language sources (even if oral commentaries would have remained in local dialects) and Mongolian Buddhist authors wrote nearly exclusively in Tibetan. Outside of bureaucratic record keeping and diplomatic missives, monastics and educated laity even used Tibetan for writing Mongolian phonetically. Monasteries were also dominant politically and, most egregiously for later socialist leaders, economically. According to nearly contemporaneous estimates, Buddhist monastic holdings in Outer Mongolia at the turn of the 20th century amounted to about 57 million rubles of the 257 million total national properties. In addition to donations, taxation, corvée, and so forth, Mongolian monasteries at this time bolstered their income from regular financial support from the Qing bureaucracy and from leasing land at high rates.12 Monasteries owned some 2.5 million head of livestock in Outer Mongolia and controlled a further 1.5 million.13 However, power in monastic infrastructure was decentered; there was no unified or inter-regional bureaucratic or administrative structure, and instead monastic estates were run by strong local corporate rule and secular affiliation. This decentered, locally embedded monastic infrastructure explains both the quick penetration of foreign ideas and progressive movements into revolutionary centers like Urga during the Qing collapse, as well as the slow, uneven, and ultimately violent overthrow of all vestiges of local monastic structure in the first three decades of the post-Qing period. It is in this broad geopolitical and socioeconomic context that the story of Buddhism in early 20th-century Mongolia opens with a rather ominous and profoundly disruptive event: the flight of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama to Mongolia in the face of a British invasion of Lhasa in 1904. Connected to escalations in the Great Game that saw Britain preemptively responding to fears that the Russian Empire was exerting covert influence in the Tibetan frontiers of the British Raj as it had done in Afghanistan, the British Viceroy ordered the invasion of Central Tibet under the leadership of Sir Francis Page 7 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century Younghusband. Under the advice of his Buryat tutor and confidant Agvan Dorjiev, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama Tubten Gyatso retreated nearly twenty-five hundred kilometers from Lhasa to Urga. In Urga he took refuge, taught, and engaged in a distressed diplomacy for two years before moving on to Mt. Wutai and then Eastern Tibet. A small body of scholarship on the Dalai Lama’s time in Urga details the enormous economic strain the Tibetan contingent hoisted upon the Mongol nobility. The at best tense relationship between the Dalai Lama and the Jebtsundamba Qutuγtu has also been well documented, while the flurry of religious activity (such as mass ordination, public tantric initiation, and dialectic contests in the monastic colleges) that occurred between local Mongols and their Tibetan visitors has as yet been less comprehensively studied.14 The Dalai Lama’s flight from the British and his long sojourn in Qalq-a, China, and Eastern Tibet symbolically opens three decades of profound transition in Mongol that is the subject of the remainder of this article. The Bogd Khaanate Period (1911–1919) According to many Cold War-era Mongolian, Euro-American, and Soviet historians, Manchu and Tsarist neglect and aristocratic indulgence were to blame for impoverishing Mongol populations and creating optimal conditions for a “people’s revolution” of one kind or another. The people’s duγuylan or “arat circle” movements that arose in protest were, prior to 1911, always regional, ultimately suppressed, and of varying character and political aspiration.15 In Outer Mongolia, the crushing debts owed by the nobility to Chinese traders and bankers caused the exaction of increasingly high taxes from the arat commoners. The result, by the turn of the 20th century, was the concentration of wealth in the hands of just a few aristocratic estates, foreigners, and especially the monasteries that resulted in “widespread and disparate poverty.”16 There was, in Charles Bawden’s estimation, the “breakdown of a traditional pattern of living under the impact of economic stagnation and the collapse of a feeling of responsibility for the public welfare on the part of the authority.”17 As the Qing Empire began to falter in 1911 and collapse back into China, religious and aristocratic elites in the city of Urga (known then as Yeke-yin Küriye, the previously mobile “Great Encampment” of the Jebtsundamba Qutuγtu) colluded to expel the Manchu ambans and found an independent Buddhist theocracy. An ethnic Tibetan and the highest incarnate lama in Outer Mongolia, the 8th Jebtsundamba Qutuγtu (1869–1924) was dully enthroned as the Bogda Qaγan (“Holy King”), a theocratic ruler of an independent Mongolian nation-state under the reign name “Elevated by the Many” (Olana ergügdegsen).18 “By adding temporal authority to [the Jebtsundamba’s] religious primacy,” during the Bogd Khaanate, “it was possible to create a personal sovereign, replacing the Manchu Emperor, for the time being, and out of reach of the quarrels over precedence among hereditary Mongol princes.”19 In commemoration, and representative Page 8 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century of the profound transitions in social imagination then underway, Urga was renamed Niyslel Küriye (“National Capital”). A nearly contemporaneous history of the Autonomous Period describes the centrality of Buddhist frames of reference in this early experiment in national autonomy in Asia: When Hsüan T’ung, the eleventh emperor of the Manchu, or Ta Ch’ing, was small, the dignitaries and aristocrats who held state power, high and low, metropolitan and provincial, civil and military, all having lost the principles and virtues of government, their despotism, cruelty, graft, greed and indiscipline exceeded all bounds, and the masses of the five races subject to the state, the Manchus, Mongols, Chinese, Tibetans and Moslems, were truly unable to bear it, and were hard put to it to find their living, so that in the southern provinces of Chinea there broke out the revolution of the revolutionary people’s party known as the Ge min dan, which directly attacked the government of the Manchu Dynasty. Moreover, in Northern, Outer Mongolia, the place known as Urga was a place of extreme importance as the center and forefront and the root and the base, in fact, of all the Mongol aimaks, where the Holy Jebtsundamba Lama, worshipped and venerated by all the Mongol aimaks, had dwelt for many years, where the doctrine of the Buddha Śākyamuni flourished properly, where further all sorts of trade and industry were progressing greatly, and the people of all the tribes and sticks of Inner and Outer Mongolia mingled and settled together.20 All this inspired nationalist designs among progressives elsewhere in China and Tsarist Russia, especially in Siberia and Inner Mongolia, who had begun to newly conceive of a pan-Mongolian sociopolitical identity (though hardly a static, mutual, or consensual one). So began a period of Mongolian history known as the Autonomous Period, or the “Bogd Khaanate” in the Qalq-a dialect (Bogd Khaant Mongol Ulus, 1911–1919). Although short lived, this was a fascinating, if fraught, project to construct a “modern” and ethnically “Mongolian” Buddhist nation-state out of the mosaic of imperial-era histories and affiliations. In general, the Bogda Gegegen’s administration tackled their task by combining Qing imperial administrative traditions and European parliamentary institutions (ex. ulsîn khural) with new pan-Mongolian objects of knowledge and frames of experience. Alongside influences from Russia, these also developed in dialogue with nationalist currents in post-imperial China, such as the Republican period rhetoric of “five races under one union” (Ch. wu zu gong he). However, the pacification and unification of Mongolia’s new nationalist space was not only a matter of political redefinition. This transition also required sustained monastic ritual assistance and the deployment of various Buddhist discourses of authority and legitimacy. Contemporary observers such as Wladyslaw Kotwicz and Gustaf John Ramstedt recorded large-scale public cham dances, Maitreya processions, group mantra recitation, and major blessing and offering ceremonies to mark the occasion; a flourishing of public ritualism also evidenced in the very few monastic sources remaining from that period.21 Further, using the idioms of wrathful tantric meditation and ceremony, the Page 9 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century nationalist government employed monastic ritualists from Urga to suppress the internal and external enemies of Mongolian national autonomy (ironically employing the same techniques of ritual expulsion that had been put to use in centuries past by Tibetans to defend against Mongol invasion).22 As just one illustrative example, “the amban Samadi Bagshi Nomu Khan Jalhantsa Qutuγtu Dambinbazar went up together with many lamas of the place to the top of a high mountain near the city of Khobdo, and recited prayers for the suppression of the enemy.”23 Those rituals, however, were ultimately ineffective in the face of early 20th century geopolitics. The beginning of the end of the autonomous Bogd Khaanate came during the protracted Sino-Mongol-Russian conference in Kyakhta in 1914–15. The tripartite agreement that was its outcome denied Mongolia full independence: the Mongol-Chinese border was to be de-militarized and Chinese Republican officials were to take up residence in Urga and most other major cities, such as Uliastai and Khovdo. Even so, the Mongolian government retained its power to self-govern, but soon thereafter began to lose the confidence of the newly invented Mongol citizenry because of corruption, incompetence, and disorganization. In the words of the nearly contemporaneous Anonymous History of the Autonomous Period: However, the dignitaries and aristocrats, nobles and lamas, who wielded authority in the government of Mongolia and in the various aimaks and banners, instead of uniting their minds and strength and making every effort to try and work out a policy, just struggled for advantage, trying to get for themselves more ranks, titles and salaries . . . At every move they enslaved and oppressed the ordinary people, and wasted and ruined the store of capital. In particular, such aristocratic lamas as the Erdene Shanzodba of the Great Clerical Adminstration, Ching Zorigt Chin Wang Lama Badmadorj, the Grand Lama Nyagt Bilegt Beile Lama Puntsagdorj occupied the posts of Prime Minister of the government, and chief and second minister of the Ministry of the Interior and further, they were in personal attendance upon the Holy King . . . On such pretexts as that the laymen were who were the primary princely officials were quite ignorant of the deep and intricate doctrine of the Buddhist Faith, its limitless capabilities and its marvelous and inexhaustible competence, and so would base their actions on scraps of false and empty bookish and wordly principles derived from their personal experience, with the result that their advice and proposals would all be wrong, erroneous and misleading, they deceived the high and by-passed the low.24 The People’s Revolution (1921–1937) In 1919, the perilous semi-autonomy of Mongolia was shattered. Urga was occupied by Chinese forces and then again by White Russians in 1921 under the leadership of Baron von Ungern Sternberg, who declared that he came to defend the Buddha’s religion and Page 10 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century the authority of the Bogda Gegegen against the “Reds and Atheists.”25 To great pomp and circumstance, the Bogda was brought from nearby Manzusiri Monastery where he had been held during the Chinese occupation and re-enthroned in Urga. This would be a short-lived revival, however. Mongolian socialists headed by Damdin Sükhbaatar and heavily backed (some would say led) by Soviet forces ousted the whites that same year. The Bogda Gegegen was demoted to a constitutional monarch and the Mongolian People’s Republic (Bügd Nairamdakh Mongol Ard Uls) was established. The notes of a contemporary observer named I. M. Mayskiy, while impressionistic and not entirely reliable, gives us a general sense of the social structure of Mongolia society on the eve of the socialist transition in 1921. In the four ayimaγ of Outer Mongolia (Qalq-a), there were 91 princely houses, which Mayskiy estimated to comprise 410 members (0.1 percent of the male population). According to a 1918 census, the lesser nobility comprised 5.6 percent, serfs 16.6 percent, albat 26.2 percent, and lamas 44.5 percent. (Some ten thousand lamas living in the Great Estate of the Jebtsundamba were not separately counted.)26 From the start, the Mongolian people’s government faced this complicated ideological baggage head-on but not often with consensus. Party members understood their responsibility to free the masses from “feudal-clerical ideology,” but understand the task on quite different terms from one another. Some identified as already communists, some as socialists, some as capitalist, and others still as radical-democrats bound only by necessity to the international proletariat movement. The Comintern itself had to make special accommodations to include Mongolia in its Marxist-Leninist historicization of world revolution. For example, some cadres decided that Mongolia could not be included as a member of the bourgeois countries since it was: “by nature a particular party of the poor and middle-income working arad in a primitive nomadic country, neighboring a great revolutionary state with a proletariat dictatorship.”27 The Jebtsundamba responded to the publication of the MPP declaration in March 1921 as follows: “This is in opposition to monarchist rule. Even in great countries this (promotion of the rights of the masses) is very difficult to pursue and it is simply impossible in such an uncultured small nation as our Mongolia. It is said in historical writings that as soon as an internal threat coincides with external disorder, the fall of the state begins. If now, at such a moment, a revolutionary party sets out it would be easy not only to destroy the state but also to put an end to religion and to the nation.”28 The Jebtsundamba diplomatically summarized his attitude to the MPP as follows: “My views differ from the views of the party members not because I’m right and they are wrong, or vice versa, but because every century has its views and beliefs. Let the people of the new century realize their new mission: it’s high time for the people of the old century to consider the matters of the next world.”29 An important development in November 1921 was the “oath-taking treaty,” which limited the powers of the Bogda Qaγan to a constitutional monarch. He would remain the Head of State until his death in 1924. All matters religious were left to the Bogda during those Page 11 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century three years, while all political authority passed into the hands of the people’s government. There was also a rapid reform of the Shabinar Department (the Department of Religious Affairs) to reflect the separation of religious and secular spheres of administration. These reforms made it difficult for lamas to consolidate their position in the new state.30 Even so, the educated and politically experienced lamas and aristocracy, both members of the “old society,” were necessary as administrative experts for inexperienced Comintern agents and their Mongolian counterparts. Several acting or former Buddhist lamas occupied several key positions in the early iterations of the Central Committee of the revolutionary government. For example, the first Prime Minster Dogsomyn Bodoo (1885–1922) had been a lama, the next Premier was Jalhanz Khutagt, one of the highest-ranking religious leaders in the country, and a prominent revolutionary leader named D. Losol was also trained as a lama prior to the revolutionary events of 1911. Charles Bawden once wrote that “The revolutionaries and their sympathizers were certainly not Bolsheviks; they represented a wide spectrum of origin and outlook, but the Bolshevik element ousted all others . . . there was never room in Mongolia’s revolutionary development for democratic compromise.”31 Early on the poets and ideologues of revolution in Mongolia were congealed around a group Robert Rupen labeled the “Buryat Intelligentsia.”32 If high clerical Buddhism during the late-imperium was tied inextricably to the dispersed Géluk-Qing subject, and if lived religious life was always implicated in local conditions of possibility, in the twilight of the Qing and Tsarist Empire and in the dawn of socialism in Mongol lands, a new “pan-Mongolia” social imaginary emerged. In the hands of Buryat progressives and their Outer Mongolian collaborators, panMongolism was tied at once to an emancipatory politics and an invented national subject, one that was anti-capitalist; reacted against the West for imposing a political, ideological, and moral dictatorship; recognized the “free creativeness” of all nationalities; recognized the special role of the general masses, and the necessity to agitate them; saw Buddhism as “refuge of national spirit.”33 To understand the determining effect of Buryat progressive thinkers on Buddhism in early 20th-century Mongolia, one must understand the unique historical position of Buryatia between Europe and the rest of the Mongol-Tibetan world. Buryatia was incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1689. The Buryats long suffered two projects of cultural and political assimilation: russifikatsiya (forced enculturation, specifically around modes of production, as the Buryats learned agriculture); and ohristianivanie (the forced adoption of Orthodox Christianity, and the marginalization of Buddhism and indigenous traditions). The Russian state also worked to annex and nationalize Buryat Buddhism in order to weaken ties with Tibet and Mongolia. This was most successful in terms of instituting a distinct authority structure outside of the Tibet-Mongol Géluk world. There, for example, were no officially recognized incarnate lamas in Tsarist Buryatia. Power lay instead with the appointed Bandito Khambo Lam, an institution that was the invention not of a Dalai or Panchen Lama, but of the Russian state. Page 12 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century Very directly related to the form and content of Buddhism in early 20th-century Mongolia, the Speranski Reforms of 1822 further incorporated Buryat territories into Russian administration without coming into conflict with local tribal structures. However, the cancellation of the Speranski reforms in 1901, combined with intensified russifikatsiya and ohristianivanie policies and forced migration of Slavic peoples to Buryat territories, provoked a sustained critical response from leaders and intellectuals to the new pressures imposed by Russification and the augmented attacks on Buddhists and Buddhist institutions by the Orthodox Church. Buryat Buddhism was thereby reimagined in opposition to Orthodox Christianity. Buryat intellectuals looked past pan-Buryatism (which would have tied them further into the Russian state) to pan-Mongolism, a “national” and “ethnic” imaginary distinct from the “West” (though, as in Bogdanov’s statements below, many considered Western expansion inevitable, or else found the conceptual fruits of European modernity necessary in modernizing projects). These intelligentsia also argued that Buryat and Mongol customary law was not only amenable to socialist principals of communal ownership, but had historically represented some of the first instantiations of socialist principles prior to Qing and Tsarist influence. The two most influential Buryat Intelligentsia were Ts. Jamsrano and Bogdanov. Both had very different perspectives on Buddhism, modernization, and progress politics in Inner Asia. Bogdanov was from Irkutsk and traveled widely in the west, such that he became known as a “Buryat zapadnik” (Rus. zapadnichestvo, a trend in Russian intellectual circles at this time, where “Zapadniki” marked a self-consciously “western” view on Russia, one that importantly assumed “progress” should follow routes to democracy and nationalism).34 He also believed that the extension and normalization of capitalist relations would circumvent any nationalist differentiation, and that the market economy would dissolve the Buryats and their “archaic Lamaism.”35 Jamsrano had been instrumental in developing non-monastic education and a secular press in Outer Mongolia even before the collapse of the Qing in 1911. By 1921 he was both a socialist and Buddhist reformer who played a decisive role in the early revolutionary history of the MPR, including writing the platform of the party and attempting to reform monastic education to include laity and scientific subjects.36 Despite Comintern resolutions against the “lama establishment,” the period of 1924–1928 has been called the “pan-Buddhist era” and was very much colored by the ideas of the Buryat Intelligentsia like Jamsrano.37 Buddhist reformers across Mongolia and Buryatia authored synthetic publications that, for example, combined the teachings of the Buddha and Lenin. The lack of a singular god-concept in Buddhism further prompted reformers to argue that Buddhism was the true source of the Theory of Relativity and the source of modern thought itself.38 Even if the official Comintern line condemned Buddhism as the “opium of the people,” in the first years of the MPP many of its agents seem to have held ambiguous views about the socialist futures of the Dharma. Some urged revolutionary workers to study its tenants, while others argued that the philosophy of Marxist-Leninism thoroughly rebuked “every false point in the quasi-scientific premises of Buddhism.”39 Page 13 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century However, such debates were not only confined to Comintern meetings or People’s Congresses. They were also occurring in Buddhist monastic settings. Two examples of prominent monk-proponents of socialist reforms were the (in)famous confident of Tsar Nikolai and the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, the Buryat Agvan Dorjiev (Mon. Agwangdorji; Tib. Ngag dbang rdo rje, 1854–1938) and Qalq-a’s Darwa Paṇḍita Agwangchoijurdondubbalsang (Tib. Ngag dbang chos ’byor don grub dpal bzang po, 1870–1927).40 Just as elsewhere in late-and post-imperial and colonial Asia, where vocal but minority groups of often Western-educated Buddhist reformers invented versions of their tradition legible to a Eurocentric modernist imagination, we ought here to also note strong counter-modern and anti-reform Buddhist movements in Qalq-a and elsewhere in Mongol lands. Traces of such religious innovations are largely absent in political records and have received little scholarly attention to date. An emblematic figure in this regard is Zava Damdin Lubsangdamdin (1867–1937), a prominent Qalq-a monastic scholar, abbot, and historian. A fierce critique of the Bogda Gegegen and an interlocutor of the emergent revolutionary intelligentsia and Euro-Russian Buddhologists, Zava Damdin nevertheless proposed a subaltern historicization of the imperial-socialist transition using very different rubrics than those of the People’s Party or of reformers discussed above.41 As the 1920s progressed, party leadership was also working to oppose the formation of an Indo-Tibetan-Mongolian religio-cultural community positioned against the socialist program. Buddhism was central to both sides of this development. Japan sought to exploit pan-Mongolism and pan-Buddhism for their own colonial and imperial ends between the 1910s and the 1930s. After 1927, the Comintern began calling pan-Mongolism a weapon of Japanese imperialism. Even in the 1930s, the Japanese were actively using panBuddhism and pan-Mongolism to work with Buddhist monasteries in order to expand into Mainland China, Inner and Outer Mongolia, Eastern Turkistan, and Tibet. For revolutionary agitators and Soviet historians, “the one hundred thousand lamas, however, included both exploiters and the exploited,”42 which was “comprised of incarnate lamas, clerical administrators, and church labourers.”43 To defend against foreign influence and to garner domestic loyalties, in the 1920s the USSR used the Comintern and sympathetic Mongolian lamas to gain a deeper foothold in the country. At the same time, revolutionary leaders acted to draft young cadres from among the educated classes (i.e., lamas), present lectures on the harmful role of religion, and sought to turn the general population against the widespread, imperial-era practice of sending young boys to train as monks.44 Despite such efforts, in the first three years of the MPR (1921–1924) the number of lamas actually increased and leading religious leaders seemed to have largely seen the USSR and its Comintern representatives as temporary allies against Chinese expansion back into Mongolia (despite ominous measures against Bodoo and the Ja Lama in 1922). Page 14 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century In 1921, the revolutionary government established the precursor to the Mongolian Academy of Science, the Institute of Scripts and Letters (Mongol Bichgiin Sudar Khureleen). This was a center of scholarly activity for the translation and preparation of popular literature, the collection of old books and manuscripts, the registration of monuments, and the organization of a museum. This chamber was transformed into a Learned Committee in 1930, which included departments of language and literature, history, geography, agriculture, Tibetology, and Buddhism.45 Prominent Buddhist scholastics from Urga, such as Zawa Damdin Lubsangdamdin (1867–1937) were not only early contributors to its scholarly publications but also used the opportunity to independently twine Euro-Russian arts and sciences with received Buddhist narratives.46 The Bogda Gegegen died on May 20, 1924, an event that lead slowly, if unevenly, to the erasure of Buddhism in Mongolia (in parallel with developments in Siberia). The Soviet government did not send its condolences in the wake of the Bogda’s death, but instead prepared a plenary (held July 3, 1924) in order to resolve to establish a republic and adopt a constitution. The first constitution ominously set the goals of “fundamentally liquidating the remnants of the old despotism and transferring political rule to a genuinely arat system.” At People’s Congresses soon after, the electoral rights of former monastic and secular “feudalists,” employers, and moneylenders were abrogated. All natural resources, very much including the expansive livestock holdings of monastic estates, were declared common property. Social equality—regardless of gender, religion, or ethnicity—was declared. All citizens (including, notably, women) over eighteen years of age who supported themselves by their own labor were given the right to vote and to be elected in the great, little, or local khurals.47 In another symbolic transition, Niyslel Küriye (“National Capital”) was renamed Ulaγanbaγatur (“Red Hero,” present day Ulaanbaatar). In light of these developments, party leaders, Comintern agents, and revolutionary intelligentsia dully engaged in the revisionisms required to fit a sparse society of nomadic pastoralists, hereditary nobility and decentered monastic institutions into the universalist models of historical materialism. A “dictatorship of the proletariat,” after all, required the invention of social classes in the Mongolian context whose newly imagined historical experience could convincingly map onto Marxist-Leninist models of historical change. “Mongolian proletariats” were found first in serfs (shabi) freed from monastic estates, then in women, and finally among the “lower classes” of monastics.48 In July 1929, Ulaγanbaγatur and Moscow signed a secret agreement that effectively incorporated the MPR into the USSR, while allowing Mongolia to keep its own state structure. As a result, Soviet policy in Mongolia shifted to the effect that fewer Comintern agents were dispatched to Mongolia in place of more technicians, educators, doctors, veterinarians, etc.49 An important feature of this campaign was based on medicine—to supply more cheap medicine than German competitors, publish medical literature in Mongolian, send doctors to the countryside—in order to develop a Soviet-style health care Page 15 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century system in Mongolia. The point of this was explicitly to displace the hold of Buddhist lamas over the population in the sphere of medicine. In the early 1930s there was a turn across the country against the utopianisms of the Buryat Intelligentsia that had colored so much of the early 1920s. For hardline factions in positions of political power at least, it was clear that the revolutionary state and the Buddhist establishment would never coexist. This came on the heels of a “Leftist Deviation” in the late 1920s that had rushed to crush Buddhist monastic influence too rashly and had ignited the people’s opposition to the socialist state. Some radical elements in the MPRP had proposed to put 13,000 high-ranking monks in a concentration camp. However, Buddhist-led revolts against the party were large enough to quite such extreme ideas, though they would resurface to terrible effect only a few years later. The Purges At the beginning of the 1930s, Outer Mongolia had some eight hundred monasteries with some 80,000 lamas, as well as over 7,700 jas monastic properties. “In view of the church’s enormous influence on the population, it was not possible to resort to the confiscation of the property of the monasteries, as happened with the property of the secular feudalists and certain big church feudalists. Such a step would have been considered by believers as forced closure of the monasteries and could have caused their dissatisfaction.”50 Instead, a program of gradual annexation and isolation of monastic assets sought to displace monastic privilege and power in Mongolia without causing widespread revolt (as did sometimes happen in some areas). For example, during the “jas campaign,” the total population of monastic residents in monasteries fell from 80,000 to just 20,000 by 1932. Their livestock were transferred to collectives (negdel) and to poor arats.51 As a result, lamas in several monastic estates led nomadic pastoralists in revolt during the summer of 1932. Such revolts would quickly occupy some 70 percent of the country, killing thousands of people, and leaving five ayimaγs in complete mutiny.52 As a result, even Comintern agents had to admit that the “lamas remained the cultural leaders of the Mongolian people: as teachers, the only doctors and craftsman.”53 However, the hearts and minds of the so-called exploited class of arat nomadic pastoralists were not so easily won with what was recognized as stolen monastic and aristocratic property. Furthermore, the masses bristled at state efforts to project the categories of Marxist-Leninism into Mongolia and slaughtered their livestock en masse in order to avoid high taxation and negative class association.54 The defeat of Left Deviationism under Comintern guidance in 1932 and the development of the “New Turn” policy briefly stopped the disrobing of monastics and the forced closure of monastic institutions. Between 1932–34, a staggering 20,000 men became Page 16 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century monks again. Still, monastic assets were taxed in order to prevent exploitation of the arats looking after monastic-owned livestock. In the wake of the turmoil from the “jas campaign,” MPRP officials worried that Japan would strengthen its influence among Outer Mongolian counterrevolutionaries within the Buddhist establishment. In fact, the number of lamas briefly increased after 1932. In the face of widespread revolts, it was hard for the state to counter illegal, pre-revolutionary activity that was resurfacing among the lamas: “Leading lamas went on building temples, collecting taxes from the nomads, putting corporal punishment into practice, and getting their titles back.”55 In the fall of 1934, following policies established at the Ninth People’s Congress held that year, a plan was put into place to displace the Buddhist establishment on a discursive level. This was a cultural “struggle” waged against Buddhism and its institutions on several fronts. Party leaders resolved that the traditional Tibetan and Mongolian writing systems were to be eliminated and that a modern, reformed Mongolian written language be developed instead: “as long as the people continued reading and writing in these media, which could not express modern concepts, they would remain deaf to the cultural achievements of socialism.”56 Additionally, a change in Mongolian sympathies away from the monasteries was sought at public cham monastic dance rituals and popular naadam sporting festivals focused on archery, wrestling, and horse racing. State interventions included promoting Russian football, chess, circus performance, and more centrally mass literacy and public health campaigns promoting Russian biomedicine against traditional Tibeto-Mongolian monastic medical knowledge and practice. Even so, the statistics obsessively collected by the socialist state painted a rather disheartening picture. After more than a decade of party support for defected lamas and the prohibitions against children and young lamas studying Buddhist philosophy, in 1934 there were some 115,000 lamas as against 200,000 yurt households. Four out of five schoolchildren in Mongolia were still receiving an education taught by lamas.57 There was one lama, either in a monastery or as a “Black” lama living outside the monastery, for every seven arat, while there was only one party member for every 1000 arat.58 There were, in other words, only 8000 party members versus 115,000 active lamas twelve years into the socialist revolutionary period. Between 1921 and 1937, the “lama question” (lam naryn asuudal in the Qalq-a dialect) became common shorthand in the Socialist Party archives for a cluster of political, economic, and social impasses. In an important study of Socialist Party responses to enduring Buddhist authority, Christopher Kaplonski sees the lama question as the very heart of “Asia’s first modern revolution.” He finds that it was the ambiguities, split loyalties, contingencies, and unexpected outcomes that eventually created a socialist world on the steppes of Asia’s heartland. By the ominous year of 1937, state cadres estimated that there were still some 87,774 lamas out of a total population of 705,054.59 In the 1930s, literacy circles were set up in the monasteries, but by 1937 still only five thousand out of fifty thousand poor lamas had learned to read.60 Page 17 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century As a result, a special session of the MPRP Central Committee’s was convened in March 1937 in order to focus on anti-Buddhist campaigns. Extant sources record that antireligious agitation and propaganda was made an obligation of every party member.61 At Stalin’s behest, General Choibalsan and state judicial, police, and military forces began a systematic purge of Buddhist monastics, monasteries, and other “counter-revolutionary elements.” The most conservative estimates are that some 30,000 people were executed from a population of only about 900,000 in just eighteen months spanning 1937–38.62 Tens of thousands more were imprisoned or forcibly returned to lay life. All continuity of public Buddhist life and monasticism were ended until the democratic revolution of 1990. Soviet-era historiography would remember this obliquely as the time of the “Struggles of the Mongolian Nation for a Non-Capitalistic Route to Development.” Owen Lattimore, with some dramatic flair, observed of Mongolian Buddhism in the early revolutionary period that, “institutionally this religion, like one of its many-headed, thousand-armed deities, had a head to dominate every human thought and a hand to control every human action.”63 Even if it is true that, “in the long history of Buddhism perhaps no country or people in the world were as affected by the faith as were the Mongols of Great Mongolia,” it took just years for it to be criminalized, and just months for the terror of state violence to erase its previous hegemony.64 Against the comforting but unsustainable anachronism that it was Russian foreigners and not Mongols who were responsible for the purges, Irina Morozova writes bluntly that: “this ‘bacchanalia’ was staged not by the Comintern agents, not by Russian communists, but by the Mongols themselves, who had previously been in the habit of appealing to the lamas for advice on the slightest pretext. Now they carried forward the slogan ‘iron struggle.’ The tsiriks (soldiers) who were now shooting the lamas, had no fear of Buddha: ‘their hands did not shake, but took aim with pleasure . . .’”65 Conclusion Over a decades-long process a “Soviet-type command economy” was implemented in Mongolia in the wake of the purges of Buddhist institutions and their monastic populations. Solidifying only in the 1950s, this command economy “imposed a structural unity, a principal of nesting domination, on individuals and groups that were otherwise different from one another (for example, in native region, education, or religious attitudes).”66 Connected with this consolidated system of domination was the growth of a mature and hegemonic state historiography, deeply influenced by Soviet models, which charted Mongolian national history back to the 13th century-Yuan dynasty in the historical materialist idiom of class conflict.67 After the purges, public Buddhism in any form was essentially discontinued until the democratic movement of 1990 (an exception being the reopening of Gandetegchenlin Khiid in the capital in the second half of the 20th century as a working museum of sorts). Page 18 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century To explore the complicated and ultimately tragic story of Buddhism in early 20th-century Mongolia is to encounter invention; track global circulations of sociopolitical, historical, and religious representations; and peel away layers of cultural mediation and resistance. Any continuity of Buddhist tradition during the imperial-socialist transition must be looked over carefully for the ways that the idea of continuity itself was being deployed to navigate the contested landscape of sociopolitical possibility. Yet such scrutiny quickly runs past the end of pages penned by Buddhist hands outside of party cadres and preserved outside of party archives. Beyond trial proceedings and interrogation records were lamas could speak only their “crimes.” We have only a very few mostly Tibetanlanguage compositions by revolutionary era monks with which to more comprehensively plumb early 20th-century Buddhism in Mongol lands. The brutal silencing of the Mongolian saṁgha in the hands of the socialist state is mirrored in a silencing in the archives, and a clear picture of Buddhist life during Asia’s first experiment in state socialism remains elusive. Page 19 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century Review of the Literature Much like the sorry fate of Buddhists in Mongolia in the early 20th century, the organization of scholarly knowledge about this period has long been defined by prevailing geopolitical winds. Early scholarly accounts of Mongolia and its Buddhism around the turn of the 20th century come from a motley crew of explorers, missionaries, and imperial agents who traveled through Mongolia during the last years of the Qing, the Bogd Khaanate, and the early years of the Mongolian People’s Republic. Of note for historians of Buddhism, even if they must be used with some caution, are eyewitness accounts by explorer-scholars such as the Russians Aleksei Matveevich Pozdneev and Petr Kozlov, the Finnish Gustaf John Ramstedt, and the Polish Wladyslaw Kotwicz.68 As global geopolitics solidified into axes of capitalist and communist nations, a burgeoning of (often state-funded) area studies scholarship generated copious amounts of sociopolitical histories of the world’s second socialist state. In those pages are troves of valuable information about Buddhism in the early 20th century. This includes systematic pictures of what traces remained of living Buddhism during the imperial-socialist transition as well as details about the bloody purges that effectively ended the public life of the Dharma in Asia’s heartland.69 In terms of more recent scholarship, a very useful critique of the very terms deployed in the study of Buddhism in Mongolia is found in Christopher Atwood’s “Buddhism and Popular Ritual in Mongolia.”70 A key analysis of the sorry fate of Buddhists based on Socialist Party archives is Christopher Kaplonski’s The Lama Question, while Larry Moses’s The Political Role of Mongolian Buddhism, if dated, provides a close analysis of the institutional and sociopolitical structure of Mongolian Buddhism leading to the socialist period.71 Other dedicated studies of Mongolian Buddhist chronicles, traditions, institutions, and prominent figures associated with the early 20th century are too many to mention here. Readers are encouraged to mine several broad works and notable case studies to get a sense of that broad literature. These include, but are hardly limited to, works by Walter Heissig, György Kara, Vesna Wallace, Ishihama Yumiko, Emget Ookhnoi Batsaikhan, Johan Elverskog, Uranchimeg Tsultem, Isabelle Charleux, Caroline Humphrey, and Agata Bareja-Starzyńska.72 In a turn away from the dominant ethno-national categories of an older area studies, fresh multi-sited pictures of Buddhist life in Mongolia are emerging influenced by frameworks connected to Global History, New Qing History, inter-Asian themes, and even environmental history. Notable monographs here are Johan Elverskog’s Our Great Qing (2006); Caroline Humphrey and Ujeed Hürelbaatar’s A Monastery in Time: The Making of Mongolian Buddhism (2013); a 2015 volume edited by Vesna Wallace entitled Buddhism in Mongolian History, Culture, and Society; and Isabelle Charleux’s Nomads on Pilgrimage: Mongols on Wutaishan, 1800–1940 (2015).73 Page 20 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century Another important scholarly development has been the centering of Mongolians in the study of Buddhism and “cultural Tibet.” Whereas a previous generation of historians often considered Mongolia simply a static backwater to Tibetan tradition, recent work on the Tibet-Mongol interface has clearly shown the centrality of Mongolian persons, places, institutions, and ideas in the formation of Inner Asian Buddhist tradition in the late-and post-imperial period, even if the lingua franca was almost exclusively Tibetan and even if Tibetan monastic institutions in Central and Eastern Tibetan provided the dominant (but not exclusive) models for pedagogy, ritualism, monastic organization, and literary practice. A good starting place into that literature and the growing field of inquiry it represents are the many contribution published in the 2007 Proceedings of the International Association of Tibetan Studies edited by Uradyn Bulag and Hildegard Diemberger.74 Finally, recent work by small teams of dedicated Mongolian and European researchers have built on Rinchen’s 1979 documentation of purged monastic sites.75 On the basis of oral history, textual analysis, and archaeological exploration, several monograph-length studies and digital resources have emerged that begin to provide clearer pictures of not only the physical presence of Buddhist monasteries prior to the purges, but also of the form and content of Buddhist life in the early 20th century. Most notable here are Krisztina Teleki and Zsuzsa Majer’s ongoing work, exemplified in Monasteries and Temples of Bogdiin Khuree, Ikh Khuree or Urga, the Old Capital City of Mongolia in the First Part of the Twentieth Century (2006) and in an international digital research project called Documentation of Mongolian Monasteries.76 Links to Digital Resources Documentation of Mongolian Monasteries/Монголын Сүм Хийдийн Түүхэн Товчоо Төсөл Buddhist Digital Resource Centre Treasury of Lives Further Reading Chuluun, Sampildondov, and Uradyn E. Bulag. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama on the Run (1904–1906): Archival Documents from Mongolia. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2013. ’Dar pa paṇḍita. Khyab Bdag Rdo Rje’i ’Chang ’Dar Pa Paṇḍita Nga Dbang Chos “Byor Don Grub Dpal Bzang Po”i Skyes Rabs Rnam Thar Dang Gsung Thor. Mongol Bilig: Mongolchuudin Töwd Khelt Büteeliǐg Sudlakh Tsuwral. Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia: R. Byambaa, 2011. Page 21 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century Dorjiev, Agvan, Thubten Jigme Norbu, and Dan Martin. Dorjiev Memoirs of a Tibetan Diplomat. Tokyo: Hokke bunka kenkyū, 1991. Humphrey, Caroline. “Remembering an Enemy: The Bogd Khaan in Twentieth Century Mongolia.” In Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism. Edited by Rubie S. Watson, 21–44. Sante Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press; distributed by University of Washington Press, 1994. Humphrey, Caroline, and Ujeed Hürelbaatar. A Monastery in Time: The Making of Mongolian Buddhism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Hyer, Paul, and Sechin Jagchid. A Mongolian Living Buddha: Biography of the Kanjurwa Khutughtu. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. Jerryson, Michael K. Mongolian Buddhism: The Rise and Fall of the Sangha. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2007. Kaplonski, Christopher. Truth, History and Politics in Mongolia: The Memory of Heroes. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. Kaplonski, Christopher. The Lama Question: Violence, Sovereignty, and Exception in Early Socialist Mongolia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014. King, Matthew. “Giving Milk to Snakes: A Socialist “Dharma Minister” and a “Stubborn” Monk on How to Reject the Dharma in Revolutionary Buryatia and Khalkha.” Journal of Religion and Violence 4, no. 2 (2016): 205–227. King, Matthew. “Knowing King Gésar Between Buddhist Monastery and Socialist Academy, Or the Practices of Secularism in Inner Asia.” Himalaya: The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 36, no. 10 (2016): 44–55. King, Matthew. “Modernities, Sense-Making, and the Inscription of Mongolian Buddhist Place.” In Buddhism in Mongolian History, Culture and Society. Edited by Vesna Wallace, 53–69. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Majer, Zsuzsa, and Krisctina Teleki. “Monasteries and Temples of Bogdiin Khuree, Ikh Khuree or Urga, the Old Capital City of Mongolia in the First Part of the Twentieth Century.” Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 2006. Mayskiy, I. M. Mongoliya Nakanune Revolyutsii [Mongolia on the Eve of Revolution]. Mongolia: Oriental Literature Press, 1959. Moses, Larry William. The Political Role of Mongol Buddhism. Indiana University Uralic Altaic Series—Asian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977. Narangoa, Li. “Japanese Imperialism and Mongolian Buddhism, 1932–1945.” Critical Asian Studies 35, no. 4 (2003): 491–514. Page 22 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century Purevzhav, S. BNMAU-D sum khiid, lam naryn asuudlyg shiidverlesen ní : 1921–1940 on. Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia: Ulsyn khevleliin khereg erkhlekh khoroo, 1965. Rinchen, B. Mongol Ard Ulsin Ugsaatnǐ Sudlal Khel Shinjleliin Atlas. Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia: Shinjleh uhaanii akademi, 1979. Rupen, Robert A. “Cyben Zamcaranovic Zamcarano (1880-?1940).” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 19, no. 2 (1956): 126–145. Rupen, Robert A. Mongols of the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Publications, 1964. Rupen, Robert A. “The Buriat Intelligentsia.” The Far Eastern Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1956): 383–398. Krisztina Teleki. Monasteries and Temples of Bogdiin Khuree. Ulaanbaatar: Institute of History, Mongolian Academy of Sciences, 2011. Tsultem, Uranchimeg. “Cartographic Anxieties in Mongolia: The Bogd Khan’s PictureMap.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Cultural Review no. 21 (2016): 66–87. Tulisow, Jerzy, Osamu Inoue, Agata Bareja-Starzynska, and Ewa Dziurzyńska, eds. In the Heart of Mongolia: 100th Anniversary of W. Kotwicz’s Expedition to Mongolia in 1912: Studies and Selected Source Materials. Crakow, Poland: Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2012. Wallace, Vesna A., ed. Buddhism in Mongolian History, Culture, and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Zhambal, Boryn, Charles R. Bawden, T. S. Damdinsu̇rėn, and England Institute of Buddhist Studies. Tales of an Old Lama. Tring, UK: Institute of Buddhist Studies, 1997. Notes: (1.) One of the technical challenges of writing on Buddhism in early 20th-century Mongolia is that there is no scholarly consensus on either transcription or transliteration schema for vertical Uyghur script or the Cyrillic script (the latter was innovated in a language reform during the 1940s after the period this article considers). I have followed Christopher Atwood’s simplified Mongolian transliteration system in this introductory article, and follow the usual Wylie transliteration system for Tibetan. Transliterations of technical terms and personal names will be given in brackets on first use, and then the simplified transcription will be used thereafter. (2.) Nikolay Tsyrempilov, “Samdan Tsydenov and His Buddhist Theocratic Project,” in Biographies of Eminent Mongol Buddhists, ed. Johan Elverskog (Halle, Germany: IITBS, International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, 2008), 117–138. Page 23 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century (3.) Which is not to say that the so-called unreformed, older sects of Tibetan Buddhism did not maintain enduring connections with Mongolian peoples or exert influences on the form and content of Buddhism in Mongol lands. The controversial, often radically innovative and contrarian, Noyan Khutukthus of the Khalkha Gobi Desert regions is a paradigmatic case (and in particular the fifth incarnation Danzanravjaa (1803–1853) whose ecumenicalism, artistic pursuits, and charisma loom large even in the post-socialist cultural revivals happening today). See Hamid Sardar, “Danzan Ravjaa: The Fierce Drunen Lord of the Gobi,” in The Mongolia-Tibet Interface: Opening New Research Terrains in Inner Asia, ed. Uradyn E. Bulag and Hildegard G. M. Diemberger, Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the IATS, 2003 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007), 257–294. (4.) On the concerns and organization of the early Géluk school, see Elijah S. Ary, Authorized Lives: Biography and the Early Formation of Geluk Identity, Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism (Somerville MA: Wisdom Publications, 2015). For studies of scholasticism and institutional histories of Géluk monastic colleges, see Georges B. J. Dreyfus, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping the Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Michael Lempert, Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Martin A Mills, Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism: The Foundations of Authority in Gelukpa Monasticism (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); and José Ignacio Cabezón, Buddhism and Language : A Study of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism, SUNY Series, Toward a Comparative Philosophy of Religions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). (5.) See Caroline Humphrey and Ujeed Hürelbaatar, A Monastery in Time: The Making of Mongolian Buddhism, 2013. (6.) In many Mongolian cultural regions to this day there is also “yellow shamanism,” a mode of shamanic practice aligned explicitly with Buddhist cosmologies and ritual technologies, or else performed with some Buddhist affiliation or by a ritualist with training as a Buddhist lama. For examples and descriptions, see Katherine Swancutt, Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012). (7.) See, for example: Hamid Sardar, “Danzan Ravjaa: The Fierce Drunen Lord of the Gobi,” in The Mongolia-Tibet Interface: Opening New Research Terrains in Inner Asia, ed. Uradyn E. Bulag and Hildegard G. M. Diemberger, Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the IATS, 2003 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 257–94. (8.) Johan Elverskog, “Mongol Time Enters a Qing World,” in Time, Temporality, and Imperial Transition : East Asia from Ming to Qing, ed. Lynn A. Struve (Honolulu: Association for Asian Studies and University of Hawai’i Press, 2005). Page 24 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century (9.) dGa ldan pho brang. Originally the name of the Dalai Lama’s seat at Gaden monastery in Central Tibet, under the Dalai Lama V, his regent, Desi Sanggyeé Gyatso, and the Mongol forces of Gushi Khaan, the Ganden Potrang became the de facto political authority in Central Tibet as part of the Qing formation. See Robert E. Buswell and Donald S. Lopez, The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 237. For a fascinating discussion of the legal frameworks for the Gaden Potrang government, rooted firmly in the ideology of the Two Systems, see Rebecca R. French, “Tibetan Legal Literature: The Law Codes of the DGa’ Ldan Pho Brang,” in Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre, ed. Lhundup Sopa, Cabezón, and Roger R Jackson (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1996), 438–457. (10.) Ishihama Yumiko, “The Notion of ‘Buddhist Government’ (chos srid) Shared by Tibet, Mongol, and Manchu in the Early 17th Century,” in The relationship between religion and state (chos srid zung ’brel) in traditional Tibet: Proceedings of a seminar held in Lumbini, Nepal, March 2000, ed. Christoph Cüppers (Lumbini, Nepal: Lumbini International Research Institute, 2004), 16. (11.) Sechin Jagchid and Paul Hyer, Mongolia’s Culture and Society (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979), 381. (12.) I. M. Mayskiy, Mongoliya Nakanune Revolyutsii (Mongolia on the Eve of Revolution) (Mongolia: Oriental Literature Press, 1959), 248–249. Cited in Irina Y. Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia (Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press for the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, University of Cambridge, 2002), 91,ff. 6. (13.) Robert A. Rupen, Mongols of the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Publications, 1964), 82. (14.) Sampildondov Chuluun and Uradyn E. Bulag, The Thirteenth Dalai Lama on the Run (1904–1906): Archival Documents from Mongolia (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2013); and Boryn Zhambal et al., Tales of an Old Lama (Tring, UK: Institute of Buddhist Studies, 1997). (15.) Alan J. K. Sanders, Mongolia : Politics, Economics and Society (London; Boulder, CO: F. Pinter ; L. Rienner, 1987), 26. (16.) Charles R. Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia (New York: Praeger, 1968), 142. (17.) Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia, 147. (18.) The autonomous Mongolian state was first known as “The Mongolian State Elevated by Many” (Olnoo Örgögdcön Mongol Uls), a name resisted by Russian authorities and indicative of the new visibility of an expansive Mongol community that included commoners. Page 25 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century (19.) Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria; Their Tribal Divisions, Geographical Distribution, Historical Relations with Manchus and Chinese, and Present Political Problems (New York: H. Fertig, 1969), 122. (20.) Charles Roskelly Bawden, A Contemporary Mongolian Account of the Period of Autonomy, 1st ed., vol. 4 (Bloomington, IN: Mongolia Society, 1970), 7. (21.) Jerzy Tulisow et al., ed., In the Heart of Mongolia: 100th Anniversary of W. Kotwicz’s Expedition to Mongolia in 1912: Studies and Selected Source Materials (Crakow, Poland: Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2012); Harry Halén and Suomalais-ugrilainen Seura, Biliktu Bakshi, the Knowledgeable Teacher: G. J. Ramstedt’s Career as a Scholar (Helsinki: Finno-Ugrian Society, 1998); and G. J Ramstedt and John Richard Krueger, Seven Journeys Eastward, 1898–1912: Among the Cheremis, Kalmyks, Mongols, and in Turkestan, and to Afghanistan (Bloomington, IN: Mongolia Society, 1978). (22.) For example: James Gentry, “Representations of Efficacy: The Ritual Expulsion of Mongol Armies in the Consolidation and Expansion of the Tsang (Gtsang) Dynasty,” in Tibetan Ritual, ed. José Ignacio Cabezón (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 131– 164. (23.) Bawden, A Contemporary Mongolian Account of the Period of Autonomy, 4:16. (24.) Bawden, A Contemporary Mongolian Account of the Period of Autonomy, 4:21. (25.) Veronika Veit, “Some Marginal Notes on Geser Khan in Mongol Tradition,” in Tractata Tibetica et Mongolica, ed. Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz and Christian Peter (Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2002), 304. (26.) Mayskiy, Mongoliya Nakanune Revolyutsii (Mongolia on the Eve of Revolution), 37– 42. Summarized in Sanders, Mongolia : Politics, Economics and Society, 33. (27.) Russian State Archives of Social Political History, quoted in Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 76. (28.) From the Russian State Archives of Social Political History, quoted in Morozova, 26. (29.) From the Russian State Archives of Social Political History, quoted in Morozova, 27. (30.) From the Russian State Archives of Social Political History, quoted in Morozova, 28. (31.) Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia, 207. (32.) Robert A. Rupen, “The Buriat Intelligentsia,” The Far Eastern Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1956): 383–398. (33.) Summarized in Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 72. (34.) Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 71. Page 26 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century (35.) Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 71. (36.) Great summary of Zhamtsarano’s work (including his specific roles in PC 1, his pseudonyms, etc.) in Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 72. (37.) Larry William Moses, The Political Role of Mongol Buddhism, Indiana University Uralic Altaic Series—Asian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 175. (38.) Unknown source, cited in Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia. (39.) The Russian State Archives of Social Political History, quoted in Morozova, 32. (40.) Agvan Dorjiev, Thubten Jigme Norbu, and Dan Martin, Dorjiev Memoirs of a Tibetan Diplomat (Tokyo: Hokke bunka kenkyū, 1991); ’Dar pa paṇḍita, Khyab Bdag Rdo Rje’i ’Chang ’Dar Pa Paṇḍita Nga Dbang Chos “Byor Don Grub Dpal Bzang Po”i Skyes Rabs Rnam Thar Dang Gsung Thor, Mongol Bilig: Mongolchuudin Töwd Khelt Büteeliǐg Sudlakh Tsuwral (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia: R. Byambaa, 2011). (41.) Matthew W. King, Blood and Milk: Buddhism in the Ruins of the Qing, forthcoming; Matthew W. King, “Giving Milk to Snakes: A Socialist ‘Dharma Minister’ and a ‘Stubborn’ Monk on How to Reject the Dharma in Revolutionary Buryatia and Khalkha,” Journal of Religion and Violence 4, no. 2 (2016): 205–27; Matthew W. King, “Knowing King Gésar Between Buddhist Monastery and Socialist Academy, Or the Practices of Secularism in Inner Asia,” Himalaya : The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 36, no. 10 (2016): 44–55; Matthew W. King, “Modernities, Sense-Making, and the Inscription of Mongolian Buddhist Place,” in Buddhism in Mongolian History, Culture and Society, ed. Vesna Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 53–69. (42.) B. Shirendyb, By-Passing Capitalism (Ulaanbaatar: Mongolian People’s Republic State Press, 1968), 11. (43.) Sanders, Mongolia : Politics, Economics and Society, 32. (44.) Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 30. (45.) Sanders, Mongolia : Politics, Economics and Society, 134. (46.) Matthew King, “Modernities, Sense-Making, and the Inscription of Mongolian Buddhist Place,” in Buddhism in Mongolian History, Culture and Society, ed. Vesna Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 53–69. (47.) William A. Brown, Urgunge Onon, and B. Shirendev, History of the Mongolian People’s Republic (London: East Asian Research Center; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University , distributed by Harvard University Press, 1976), 6. Page 27 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century (48.) Caroline Humphrey, “Remembering an Enemy: The Bogd Khaan in Twentieth Century Mongolia,” in Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism, ed. Rubie S. Watson (Sante Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press ; distributed by University of Washington Press, 1994), 24. (49.) Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 11–12. (50.) A. P. Okladnikov et al., Istorija Mongolskoj Narodnoj Respubliki (Moskva, Russia: Nauka, 1983), 360. (51.) Sanders, Mongolia : Politics, Economics and Society, 34. (52.) Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 66. (53.) The Russian State Archives of Social Political History, quoted in Morozova, 37. (54.) Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia, 312. (55.) Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 38. (56.) Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 38. (57.) Sanders, Mongolia : Politics, Economics and Society. (58.) The Russian State Archives of Social Political History. Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 37. (59.) The Russian State Archives of Social Political History, quoted in Morozova, 38. (60.) Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia, 368. (61.) Sanders, Mongolia : Politics, Economics and Society, 125. (62.) Christopher Kaplonski, Truth, History and Politics in Mongolia : The Memory of Heroes (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). (63.) Owen Lattimore, Nationalism and Revolution in Mongolia: With a Translation from the Mongol of Sh. Nachukdorji’s Life of Sukebatur (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 81. (64.) Moses, The Political Role of Mongol Buddhism, 5. (65.) Morozova, The Comintern and Revolution in Mongolia, 37. (66.) Humphrey, “Remembering an Enemy: The Bogd Khaan in Twentieth Century Mongolia,” 24. (67.) For example, Owen Lattimore, Nationalism and Revolution in Mongolia: With a Translation from the Mongol of Sh. Nachukdorji’s Life of Sukebatur (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 81. Page 28 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century (68.) Alekseĭ Matveevich Pozdneev and John Richard Krueger, Religion and Ritual in Society: Lamaist Buddhism in Late 19th-Century Mongolia (Bloomington, IN: Mongolia Society, 1978); Lattimore, Nationalism and Revolution in Mongolia; Owen Lattimore et al., “Religion and Revolution in Mongolia,” Modern Asian Studies 1, no. 1 (1967): 81–94; Ramstedt and Krueger, Seven Journeys Eastward, 1898–1912; Tulisow et al., In the Heart of Mongolia: 100th Anniversary of W. Kotwicz’s Expedition to Mongolia in 1912: Studies and Selected Source Materials; Owen Lattimore, Fujiko Isono, and Diluv Khutagt, The Diluv Khutagt: Memoirs and Autobiography of a Mongol Buddhist Reincarnation in Religion and Revolution (Wiesbaden, Germany: O. Harrassowitz, 1982); Paul Hyer and Sechin Jagchid, A Mongolian Living Buddha: Biography of the Kanjurwa Khutughtu (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); and Petr K. Kozlov, Mongolija i Amdo i mertvyj gorod Chara-Choto: ėkspedicija russkogo geografičeskogo obščestva v nagornoj Azii, 1907–1909 P.K. Kozlova (Moskva, Petrograd: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel stvo, 1923). (69.) Li Narangoa, “Japanese Imperialism and Mongolian Buddhism, 1932–1945,” Critical Asian Studies 35, no. 4 (2003): 491–514; Alan J. K. Sanders, The People’s Republic of Mongolia: A General Reference Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); Sanders, Mongolia : Politics, Economics and Society; Bawden, A Contemporary Mongolian Account of the Period of Autonomy; Zhambal et al., Tales of an Old Lama; Uradyn Erden Bulag, Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1998); Jagchid and Hyer, Mongolia’s Culture and Society; Robert A. Rupen, “Cyben Zamcaranovic Zamcarano (1880–?1940),” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 19, no. 2 (1956): 126–145; Rupen, “The Buriat Intelligentsia”; Dindub and John G Hangin, A Brief History of Mongolia in the Autonomous Period (Bloomington, IN: Mongolia Society, 1977); Urgunge Onon and Derrick Pritchatt, Asia’s First Modern Revolution : Mongolia Proclaims Its Independence in 1911 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1989); Thomas E. Ewing, Between the Hammer and the Anvil? : Chinese and Russian Policies in Outer Mongolia, 1911–1921 (Bloomington: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University, 1980); and S. Purevzhav, BNMAU-D sum khiid, lam naryn asuudlyg shiidverlesen ní : 1921–1940 on (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia: Ulsyn khevleliin khereg erkhlekh khoroo, 1965). (70.) Christopher P. Atwood, “Buddhism and Popular Ritual in Mongolian Religion: A Reexamination of the Fire Cult,” History of Religions 36, no. 2 (1996): 112–139. (71.) Christopher Kaplonski, The Lama Question: Violence, Sovereignty, and Exception in Early Socialist Mongolia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014); and Moses, The Political Role of Mongol Buddhism. (72.) Gyorgy Kara and John Richard Krueger, Books of the Mongolian Nomads : More than Eight Centuries of Writing Mongolian (Bloomington: Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 2005); Johan Elverskog, ed., Biographies of Eminent Mongol Buddhists (Halle, Germany: IITBS, International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, 2008); Johan Elverskog, “Wutai Shan, Qing Cosmopolitanism, and the Mongols,” Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 6 (2011): 243– Page 29 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century 274; Walther Heissig, Die Familien- und Kirchengeschichtsschreibung der Mongolen (Wiesbaden, Germany: O. Harrassowitz, 1959); Walther Heissig, The Religions of Mongolia (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); Vesna Wallace, “Diverse Aspects of the Mongolian Buddhist Manuscript Culture and Realms of Its Influence,” in Buddhist Manuscript Culture: Knowledge, Ritual, and Art, ed. 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Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018 Mongolian Buddhism in the Early 20th Century (74.) Uradyn E. Bulag and Hildegard Diemberger, The Mongolia-Tibet Interface: Opening New Research Terrains in Inner Asia : PIATS 2003: Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Oxford 2003. Managing Editor: Charles Ramble (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007). (75.) B. Rinchen, Mongol Ard Ulsin Ugsaatnǐ Sudlal Khel Shinjleliin Atlas (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia: Shinjleh uhaanii akademi, 1979). (76.) Krisztina Teleki, Monasteries and Temples of Bogdiin Khuree (Ulaanbaatar: Institute of History, Mongolian Academy of Sciences, 2011). Matthew W. King University of California, Riverside Page 31 of 31 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, RELIGION (religion.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited. Please see applicable Privacy Policy and Legal Notice (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 July 2018