44 Buddhism in Mongolia

Bulcsu Siklos

It may come as a surprise to some to discover that the religion most prevalent in areas inhabited by Mongolians was, and to an extent still is, Buddhism. Other types of Mahayana Buddhism, the types practised in Tibet, China and Japan, are easily distinguishable both from each other and from the parent Indian form, while Mongolian Buddhism, even when its existence is acknowledged, is usually treated as identical to its Tibetan antecedent, and hence subsumable under it.

The Mongols were relative latecomers both to Buddhism and to the historical scene. It is true that Mongolian tribes, often in alliance with other Altaic peoples, had made numerous inroads into China itself from early in Chinese recorded history, but even so, the sense of historical continuity relating the Mongols to world events and enabling them to be treated independently of other (in Chinese terms) ‘barbarian’ groups in matters of religion dates only from the thirteenth century, after Cinggis (Jengiz, Gengis, etc.) Khan’s unification of the Mongol tribes into a cohesive whole. The religion of the Mongols of this time and earlier could be classed as Shamanism, although it is hardly possible to treat all the Mongolian tribes together, the distinction between the majority nomadic groups and the more northerly sedentary tribes being particularly important to bear in mind. It has been suggested that Central Asian nomadic nations in general came quite late to Shamanism, perhaps borrowing most of their shamanic concepts from the forested areas further north.

The Mongols also came into contact with various Iranian religious concepts during this early period, primarily through their association with the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people who had converted to Manichaeism in the eighth century. The number of religious terms and divine appellations taken over from Iranian languages and still in use is quite considerable—for example the chief of the traditional shamanist grouping of the 33 tngri or ‘gods’ is known as Khormusta in Mongol, and is equivalent to the problematic Zurvanite deity Ohrmazd, principle of light, and to the Mazdean Ahura Mazda.

During the thirteenth century, whilst Mongolian armies were busy laying most of Asia waste, the Mongol emperors were encouraging a great number of foreign administrators and religious prac­titioners to come to the Mongol court, with the delegation of various tasks to these non-Mongols being done fully on the grounds of suitability, and not on the grounds of supposed cultural superiority. It is probably on similar grounds that the Mongols decided to adopt the Uighur alphabetic script (derived ultimately from Syriac through Sogdian), rather than the more prestigious and unsuitable Chinese script, the adoption of which would have drawn the Mongols into the Chinese cultural sphere and led them down a totally different religious path from the one they eventually followed.

The numerous Tibetans at the Mongol court were in the main representatives of the most influential political and religious force in Tibet at that time—the Sakya (Sa-skya) sect of Tibetan Buddhism. Although in time the Sakya lamas came to be regarded as religious specialists at the court, much as Uighurs were regarded as administrative specialists, the initial contacts of the Mongols with Tibetan Buddhism were exclusively political, and stemmed from the extremely wise Tibetan decision to submit uncondi­tionally to the Mongols. Any other decision would surely have led to the near-total destruction of Tibetan civilisation and of that particular form of Buddhism which is now associated so strongly with Tibet. The loss would have been compounded by the fact that the North Indian antecedent of Tibetan Buddhism was at this time systematically being extinguished by the Muslims.

The Sakya monks at the Mongol court managed to arouse a considerable amount of interest in Buddhism, especially during the reign of Khubilai (Kublai) Khan (1260-94), who seems to have taken a personal interest in the new religion. This was in the main due to the practical instruction he received in Buddhist practice from the most important figure in the history of this, the ‘First Conversion’ of the Mongols, a certain ’Phags pa bio gros rgyal mtshan or, for short, ’Phags pa (1235-80). His adroitness in arousing Khubilai’s interest in Buddhism led to the initiation of Kubilai himself and his consort, Camui, into the tantric cycle of Hevajra, and to the conversion of the whole imperial court. Numerous honours were heaped upon ’Phags pa, who was also asked to create a new script in which, hopefully, all the main languages of the Mongol Empire could be written. Known as the ’phags pa or dorbeljin (‘square’) script, it was rather cumber­some and did not outlive the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty.

Just as during the Second Conversion of the Mon­gols to Buddhism, which dates from the time of the later Ming dynasty, the worship of Tantric deities in their wrathful aspects was much more promi­nent than any other aspect of Lamaism in Mongolian religious life. Apart from Hevajra, mentioned above, and other major meditational deities assigned Buddha rank, several of the protector deities (of Bodhisattva rank, considered responsible for safeguarding the Doctrine) were extremely popu­lar. Such wrathful deities, bedecked with ornaments of human bone, spat­tered with human blood and fat, and often portrayed in a state of sexual union with female partners, seemed to have appealed to the Mongol court and high-ranking military—certainly these deities were considerably more ter­rifying and licentious than the old shamanic gods. It should also be men­tioned that the practice of Tantra in many ways stands very close to that of Shamanism. There is not too much difference between the tantric assimila­tion of one’s ‘body, speech and mind’ to those of the deity, achieved through visualisation, and the shamanic assimilation of the deity into oneself, in other words, the attainment of possession.

The First Conversion of the Mongols to Buddhism did not go very deep, and was confined almost exclusively to the Mongol aristocracy and military. The average Mongol still worshipped the old gods, the gods of natural phenomena, the god Eternal Blue Heaven and many others, and had probably never seen a lama or even heard of Buddhism. So, although by the time of the last Mongol emperor, Toy an Temur (1333-68), part of the Kanjur (the first section of the Tibetan Canon) had been translated into Mongolian and several monasteries founded, Shamanism remained the characteristic religion of Mongolia at large.

The eclectic and analytical studies of that most learned of Tibetan mystics, Tsonkapa (Tsong-kha-pa, 1357-1419), provided the inspiration for the development and growth of the first indigenous Tibetan school of Buddhism, the Gelugpa (dGe-lugs-pa). Throughout north China in the early Ming period considerable interest was shown in this highly esoteric and ‘magical’ form of Buddhism, and the resultant presence of large numbers of Gelugpa lamas caused considerable resentment in orthodox Chinese and imperial circles. This resentment culminated in the anti­Buddhist persecutions of the late Ming, in the face of which lamas fled in large numbers to the more congenial environment of south and west Mongolia, initiating the Second Conversion of the Mongols to Lamaism, this time in its Gelugpa form. The fragmented political nature of Mongolia at this time ensured that certain Mongol groups, initially seeking political support from a mostly unified Tibet, managed to make Buddhism their own within a few decades, whilst other, more isolated groups remained shamanist and had to wait until the nineteenth century for their first proper contact with Lamaism.

During the early stages of the Second Conversion in the mid-sixteenth century, south-east Mongolia had a true cakravartin (universal—and pious—monarch) in the person of Altan Khan. His meeting with bSod nams rgya mtsho resulted in the rapid conversion of all south-east Mongolian tribes to Lamaism, the outlawing of certain shamanistic practices (notably sacrifice) in the area, the consolidation of Gelugpa authority in Tibet itself and the conferral of the title Dalai Lama on bSod nams himself. The title ‘Dalai Lama’ is an abbreviation of the Mongolian bilig-iin dalai lama, ‘Ocean- of-Wisdom-Teacher’. Since bSod nams conferred the title of‘Dalai Lama’ posthumously on two of his predecessors, he counts as the third in the lineage of rgy al-has (lit. ‘victors’ i.e. Dalai Lamas). After the death of the Third Dalai Lama, the Gelugpa returned these favours by accepting a newly-born relative of Altan Khan as the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama—a privilege indeed.

The process of conversion continued in similar ways until all Mongol territories were affected. One of the most common methods employed was straightforward bribery:

In order to begin the spread of the Buddha’s doctrine... the Tiisiyetii Khan of the Khorchin lets it be publicly known that he will give a horse to whoever learns by heart the summary of the Doctrine, and a cow to whoever can recite the Yamdntaka-dhdrani by heart.

(From a biography of Neyia Toyin (1557-1653); quoted from Heissig, pp. 36f.)

Gelugpa authorities frequently objected to this sort of activity, especially as it encouraged tantric practice without prior training or initiation, but in the long run it was probably to their own advantage that their warnings were scarcely heeded.

Merely teaching mantras and various invocations at a popular level would hardly have ensured Lamaism’s lasting success in Mon­golia. Institutions for the study of the doctrine, monastic training, transla­tion, printing and so forth were soon established in most Mongol territories.

Before we go on to discuss Ch’ing times, one indi­vidual of considerable interest should be mentioned, Ondiir gegen (1635-1723), the first in the reincarnation lineage of the rje btsun dam pa khutuytu, who was primarily responsible for the ground gained by the Gelugpa in Khalkha (‘Outer’) Mongolia at the expense of other Tibetan schools. It may indeed have been a gesture of reconciliation on the part of the Gelugpa that Ondiir gegen himself was recognised as an incarnation of the historian Taranatha who had belonged to the heterodox Jo nang school of Tibetan Buddhism. The Jo nang pas were considered aberrant by all other schools for holding the concept of a type of ‘emptiness’ which was non­relative. Their monasteries were taken over by the Gelugpa in the seven­teenth century.

The Manchu emperors of the Ch’ing dynasty saw in Lamaism a useful means by which to pacify the Mongols, arch­troublemakers that they were, and took on the role of chief patrons of Lamaism in all Mongol areas under their control (collectively known as Inner Mongolia). Lamaism flourished as never before, especially from the time of the K’ang Hsi Emperor (1654-1722) onwards. K’ang Hsi himself seems to have taken a personal interest in the alien religion, and was instrumental in summoning Ngag dbang bio bzang chos Idan (1642-1714, the first in the reincarnation series of the ICang skya khutuy tus) to Peking to take up perma­nent residence there as the chief incarnate lama of Inner Mongolia. This encouraged the growth of his capital as a Lamaist centre and prevented Mongols being drawn to the natural headquarters of the Doctrine, Lhasa. The Manchus were concerned about the possibility, real in their eyes, of the development of a lamaist ‘state’ directed from Lhasa with the Mongols supplying the military wing. They even went so far as to construct a smaller version of the Potala, the Dalai Lama’s Lhasa palace, at Jehol, the emperor’s summer residence.

The Yung Cheng Emperor (1723-36) was by all accounts an ardent Buddhist with an interest in Zen as well as Lamaism. He turned his childhood palace into the famous Yung-Ho-Kung, which soon became the major Lamaist temple in Peking where the ICang skya khutuytus would, with Imperial co-operation, pick the names of prospective reincarna­tions of high-ranking lamas from a huge golden urn.

More and more high-ranking incarnates were being drawn to Peking throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, out of the many who had been newly confirmed by the Manchu Court. This honour was freely given to any lama who had rendered some service to the court or to Lamaism in general, and so the number of incarnates grew to almost unmanageable proportions. By 1900 there were 14 incarnate lamas in Peking itself, about 160 in Inner Mongolia, some 120 in Outer Mongolia and 35 in the Kokonor region, a total of some 326—more than the total number of Gelugpa incarnates recognised by the Manchu court for Tibet itself.

Perhaps the most remarkable figure of eighteenth­century Lamaism in Mongolia was the mergen lama-yin gegen, bLo bzang bstan pa’i rgyal mtshan, who was single-handedly responsible for the com­pilation of what could be termed a Mongolian national liturgy incorporating elements both of Buddhism and of Shamanism. A scholar of considerable ability, he tried to amass as many authentic texts relating to Shamanism as he could, and produced vast numbers of liturgical texts treating the worship of shamanistic deities in Buddhist guise.

The end of the eighteenth century marked the begin­ning of the decline of Mongolian Lamaism. Literary and religious activity still continued, though in Inner Mongolia it was becoming increasingly difficult to finance large-scale projects because of the impoverishment and instability of the Ch’ing (brought about in part by increasing European intervention). The situation was better in Outer Mongolia; it was from here that Lamaism started spreading northwards to Buryat Mongolia which was still fully shamanist in the early nineteenth century—indeed, many parts of Buryat Mongolia remained exclusively shamanist until the establishment of Soviet rule.

With the formation of the Mongohan People’s Republic after the death of the eighth and last rje btsun dampa khutuytu in 1924, both Shamanism and Lamaism were constitutionally prohibited in what had been Outer Mongolia. In Inner Mongolia after the fall of the Ch’ing in 1911, Lamaism managed to hang on, even though it was officially unsupported and frowned upon. The political and economic situation in Inner Mongolia was utterly chaotic during the first half of this century—monasteries owed vast amounts of money and were Hable to be sacked or destroyed by any number of roving bands of marauders. Worries were compounded by reports of persecutions of Buddhists in both the Mongolian People’s Republic and in Buryat Mongolia, especially after the so-called ‘Lama Risings’ of the 1930s, and Inner Mongolia, just like Tibet, was unable to escape the inevitable destruction of all its cultural institutions during the Chinese Cultural Revolu­tion of the 1960s.

Further Reading

Heissig, W. The Religions of Mongolia (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980) Lessing, F.D. Yung-Ho-Kung—An Iconography of the Lamaist Cathedral in Peking, vol. 1 (Stockholm, 1942)

Miller, R.J. Monasteries and Cultural Change in Inner Mongolia, Asiatische For­schungen, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden, 1959)

Pozoneyev, A.Μ. Religion and Ritual in Society—Lamaist Buddhism in Late Nineteenth­Century Mongolia, ed. J.R. Krueger (Bloomington, Indiana, 1978)