2 buddhism in CONTEMPORARY MONGOLIA.pdf

TWO BUDDHISMS IN

CONTEMPORARY MONGOLIA

Johan Elverskog

In a recent overview of the ‘two Buddhisms’ thesis of Buddhism in the West, Paul

Numrich argued for the continued validity of this typology. In particular, through an

extensive overview of current scholarship, he convincingly showed that the oft-noted

dichotomy between immigrant Buddhism and western convert Buddhism remains a

valuable heuristic tool. At the same he also suggested various avenues for further

research. One such topic was the need to relate these developments of ethnic/convert

and traditionalist/modern dichotomies in the West with the broader realities in the

Buddhist communities of Asia (Numrich 2003, 70). To this end I would like to outline in

this study how the Buddhist revival in contemporary Mongolia relates not only to the

heuristic value of the two Buddhisms in Asia, but also to historiographical issues

concerning the study of the Dharma.

Continuity and conversion

We need to note in the beginning that the case of Mongolia slightly

problematizes the standard dichotomy between continuity and conversion

implied in the two Buddhisms model. Unlike many other Asian communities and

their emigrants in the West, the Mongols have not had a continuous tradition of

Buddhism as a lived tradition. Instead, as with groups in other postsocialist states,

the Mongols are returning to or reviving a religion that was disrupted and

fragmented by decades of socialist intervention, but is now simultaneously

deemed to be central to one’s ethnic and/or national identity and also something

one knows virtually nothing about. Like Bosnian Serbs scrambling about to ﬁnd

their ‘Saint’s Days’, 1 many Mongols are completely ignorant of the Buddhist

tradition. In essence, the majority of the population is not really engaged in a

continuing religious ‘tradition’; rather, they are ‘converting’, with ethnicity, or a

longing for a sort of ethnic or national unity, as their prime motivation.

As in the West, among many ‘ethnic Buddhists’, for many Mongols there is

no ontological need to ‘know the Dharma’; the ethno-national reason is reason

enough. As Bakula Rinpoche, who himself was from Ladakh and until recently was

a leading ﬁgure in the current revival, put it: ‘If you are not a Buddhist, then what

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 7, No. 1, May 2006

ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/06/010029-46

q 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14639940600877937

30 J. ELVERSKOG

are you? You lose your identity. How different are you then from Chinese or

Russians?’ (S.T. 1996). This view is also echoed in the comments of an ethnic

Buddhist, a Kalmyk Mongol in New Jersey: ‘A Kalmyk who is not a Buddhist is not a

Mongol’ (Sagaster 1999, 186 – 7). Based on such comments, it is easy to surmise

that for the Mongols being Buddhist is deeply rooted in the genealogical, ethnic,

and national imagination of the Mongols. Indeed, some contemporary Mongols

have even gone so far as to advocate that those who convert to other religions

should no longer be considered Mongol (Crossley 1999, 325). Some make this

claim not only in regards to contemporary Christian conversion, but also in the

case of families whose ancestors converted to Islam during the Yuan dynasty

(1272 – 1368). 2

Yet, although these examples seem to ﬁt an apparently common pattern of

return to religion within various ethno-national narratives throughout the

contemporary world, the reality in Mongolia is not as simple as these observations

would lead us to believe. In fact, many Mongols do not readily equate their ethnic

identity with Buddhism. Rather, they often hold quite the opposite view. Indeed

many Mongols understand the Dharma as the discourse of empire that was

employed by the Manchu court to keep the Mongols submissive. In this view, the

Qing dynasty (1644 – 1911) is seen as a blight or detour on the Mongol’s march

into modernity, the reason behind Mongolia’s inability to progress on from

Chinggis Khan and the formation of the world’s greatest land empire, the root

cause of contemporary Mongolia’s economic and technological backwardness

(Elverskog 2006b, 2 – 6). And, since it is a widely accepted fact that the Manchus

used Buddhism to maintain their control of the Mongols during the Qing dynasty,

the Dharma is blamed speciﬁcally for many of Mongolia’s woes.

The origin for this view can clearly be traced back to the late-nineteenth and

early-twentieth centuries when Mongol nationalists and Marxists both began to

argue that the main reason the Manchus had colonized the Mongols was the Qing

state’s promotion of the Dharma. Thus, in both Marxist and nationalist rhetoric,

the Dharma was the most powerful tool in keeping the Mongols submissive to

Manchu power. 3 This theoretical move ﬁt well not only with the teleologies of

Mongol nationalism and Marxism, both of which required the Qing to be equated

with backwardness and cultural stagnation (indeed, why else have a revolution?),

but also with narratives of modernity and its attendant secularization, wherein the

most common culprit for both the Qing imperial project and Mongol turpitude

was none other than religion. This sentiment is well captured in a pamphlet

published in July 1929 in Dolonnuur, which warns the Mongols of the danger

posed by the Panchen Lama.

From the latter period of our Mongolia’s great Yuan dynasty, Buddhism began to

penetrate. About ﬁve hundred years ago, at the same time as Altan Khan of the

T ¨ meds had spread Buddhism widely among the Mongols, the Manchu Qing

dynasty arose. Seeing it as a ﬁne-tuned way to decrease the unparalleled brave

and heroic nature of the Mongols, they turned the Mongols towards affairs of

TWO BUDDHISMS IN CONTEMPORARY MONGOLIA 31

emptiness like mercy and merit, sin and future incarnations, and made them fall

completely behind in political knowledge and economic development. The

might and glory of the ancient Mongols was already covered over and we

preserved a gentleness like sheep, thus becoming food for the wolves. (Atwood

1994, 512)

This pamphlet captures the basic idea well: the Manchus used Buddhism to keep

the Mongols weak, and thus, to advance into the modern age, Buddhism with all

its superstitions and institutionalized political structures needed to be abandoned

(Elverskog 2004a, 140). Curiously, however, this was not only a modern

interpretation. Mongol authors, such as the famous late-nineteenth-century

scholar Injanashi, had long been warning of Buddhism’s ‘too metaphysical’ nature

(Hangin 1973, 34), which kept the Mongols from focusing on the really important

things, such as technology and progress.

Invariably this historiographical interpretation reached its apotheosis in

Marxist circles, in which the very idea of Mongol and Buddhist were not only

dismissed as epiphenomena distorting true class distinctions, but also as

ideological smokescreens foisted on the masses by the religio-political elite to

ensure their own power. As the Mongol scholar Natsagdorj explained:

The Mongol feudalists strove to cause the Yellow Sect [the Dalai Lama’s Gelukpa]

to expand into the conquered territory under them, beginning with the second

half of the sixteenth century. As for suddenly having a liking for the religion on

the part of the Mongol feudalists, that was not directed solely by religious belief,

but was motivated mainly from the goal they had of exploiting the inﬂuence of

the Yellow Sect. The propagation of the Yellow Sect was directly related to the

use of the religion by the feudalists to subdue the anger of the masses who had

become mindless with suffering in the uninterrupted wars of the feudalists.

(1963, 13)

Obviously, the feudalists, with their promotion of the Dharma, had led the people

astray.

While we may easily dismiss this interpretation as Marxist theory run amok,

it is also important to recognize its fundamental insight—that the Manchus

somehow used Buddhism to rule the Mongols—continues to be the dominant

interpretative paradigm within the western academy today. Indeed, to better

understand the ubiquity of this model, one need only look at three excerpts from

recent scholarship on the Qing dynasty:

Qianlong universalism was founded on a complex of religious and political ideals

that bound together Tibet and Mongolia. Since the time of Nurhaci it had been

clear that legitimate rule over the Mongols depended upon patronizing Tibetan

lamas, whom Altan Khan had established as the spiritual guides of the Mongols.

Indeed by the late seventeenth century reincarnations of the lamas could be

found among the Mongols themselves, consolidating the ideological

identiﬁcation of Tibet and Mongolia. (Crossley 1997, 113)

32 J. ELVERSKOG

The Manchu rulers had to compete with Mongol khans for regional hegemony

and they too turned to Tibetan Buddhism for legitimacy. The history of Tibetan

Buddhist patronage by the Qing court is thus closely intertwined with the

successful Manchu campaigns to extend their control over the Mongols, who

constituted their greatest potential threat. (Rawski 1998, 244)

Qing emperors were personally involved with Tibetan Buddhist beliefs,

practices, temples, and clerics and intent on deﬁning themselves as both

Chakravartian [sic ] rulers and incarnations of Manjusri. Playing the role of both

patron and student of the religion allowed them leverage over the highest lamas

and provided them with personal religious advisors. Moreover, active Qing

patronage enlarged the Tibetan Buddhist world and both created and expressed

a particularly Manchu solidarity with believers within and beyond their empire.

(Naquin 2000, 308 – 9; see also Zito 1997, 23; Hostetler 2001, 35)

These three quotes are from leading scholars in the ﬁeld of Qing history, and one

can ﬁnd similar passages in the work of Mongol historians and Tibetan historians

(for example, Moses 1977; Jagchid and Hyer 1979, 177; Bawden 1989, 86 – 8; Bira

2002). Indeed, virtually every work on the subject maintains this interpretation. It is

found even in the Oxford English Dictionary under the word Lamaism, which reads

‘It is with this view [of enfeebling the strength of the Mongol princes] that the

emperors patronise lamanism [sic ]’ (Lopez 1998, 41). Yet perhaps the most telling

piece of evidence conﬁrming the pervasiveness of the idea that the Manchus used

Buddhism to rule the Mongols is that the Japanese adopted it as their own

strategy when they attempted to rule the Mongols in the early twentieth century

(Li 1998, 2003).

On account of this uniform discursive framework it is perhaps hardly

surprising that the vast majority of Mongols today believe the same thing. It is

simply taken for granted that the Manchus used Buddhism in order to rule the

Mongols. This sentiment is found not only among western academics and Mongol

writers, but throughout the population. One of the better examples of how

ingrained and pervasive this idea has become among the Mongols is the case of a

Christian convert. He used precisely this argument and its embedded notion of

backwardness to justify his conversion. ‘If my father had not been forced out of the

monastery [during the 1930s], I would never have been born. If Mongolia had not

been a nation of celibate monks, following a religion forced on us by the Manchus

to keep us weak, we would be a strong nation of 40 million people today’

(O’Donnell 1999).

In contradiction to the notion promoted by both modern Buddhist

reformers and the Mongolian government itself, which asserts that Mongol

identity is intrinsically tied to the Dharma and some glorious Buddhist past, the

reality is that for many the common linkage is more often with backwardness and

colonialism. Furthermore, as a result, for many Mongols, Buddhism is not a religion

of liberation and enlightenment, but the handmaiden of imperialism. This fact, of

TWO BUDDHISMS IN CONTEMPORARY MONGOLIA 33

course, problematizes one of the central components of the ‘two Buddhism’

model. Namely, unlike other Asian communities who identify the Dharma as a

positive component of their history and ethnic identity, Mongol Buddhist history is

intrinsically tinged with loss and national humiliation, which leads to interesting

speculation on the future of the Dharma in Mongolia. When the state tries to co-

opt the mantle of Buddhist rule—as has recently happened, when President

N. Bagabandi decreed a state Buddhist ceremony be conducted on the holy

mountain north of the capital in order to ‘restore patriotism and national pride’

(n.a. 2004)—will this be seen as cynical political manipulation of religion, or will it

be taken as an inspiring invocation of the Dharma on behalf of the nation?

The question is one that many who are interested in the revival in Mongolia

often ignore. Indeed most outside observers see the ‘revival’ not only as a return

to the natural order, but also that the return of Buddhism is fundamentally a good

thing (Kollmar-Paulenz 2003). As far as I am aware, unlike the Mongols themselves,

no outside observer (aside from some Christian missionaries) has critically

questioned the contemporary rise of Mongolian Buddhism. Instead, everyone

seems to agree that it is a positive development. 4 But the question matters and

the answer remains unclear. On one level, the return of the Dharma to Mongolia

offers a positive and celebratory narrative progression. After the brutal communist

purges of the 1930s and 1940s, in addition to the general mayhem of seventy

years of communist rule, the Dharma has ﬁnally rightfully returned. But one can

legitimately wonder why this return to religion has not been greeted with the

angst surrounding similar revivals in places such as the Middle East, South Asia, or

among evangelicals in America, or why so little is made of the increased

persecution of Christians and Muslims in Mongolia, or why the return of the former

communist party running on a pro-Buddhist xenophobic platform was seen as a

return to the natural order of things (Elverskog 2001).

The reasons that observers of Mongolia seem to speak within such a limited,

positive framework are numerous, but one important factor is the general view of

Buddhism as a post-enlightenment good religion (Masuzawa 2005, 121 – 46).

Moreover, for many observers it is likely that Mongolia functions as a synecdoche

for Tibet. Until Tibet throws off the shackles of the People’s Republic of China, and

thereby becomes a glorious Buddhist beacon to the world, Mongolia will have to

do. Among writers and scholars of central Asia, Mongolia’s religious identiﬁcation

with Tibet is considered a given. This identiﬁcation is, when one considers it well,

somewhat extraordinary. We do not after all say that the Burmese are Thai

Buddhists, although they share some religious characteristics, so why are the

Mongols identiﬁed as Tibetan Buddhists? Conversely, it sounds odd, if not

incomprehensible, to say ‘my German friend is a Mongolian Buddhist’—although

we in the West apparently have no problem in imagining and saying that a

German is practicing Tibetan Buddhism. Why is this? How can the late Buddhist

tantra created in Tibet still be Tibetan outside of Tibet? Or, more to the point, why

do we instinctively assume that a speciﬁcally Mongolian Buddhism does not exist

(Elverskog, forthcoming )? The historiographical implications of these issues have

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