The Internal Regulations of Gandan Monastery

The chapter provides a translation of the first nine folios of the “Internal Regulations of Gandan Monastery in Ulaanbaatar” written in Classical Mongolian in 1925. To date, this is the only monastic constitution jayig (Tib. bca’ yig) of Ikh Khüree (Cl. M. Yeke küriye), the main seat of the Jebtsundampa Khutugtus, known to us. As this text was written shortly upon the foundation of the People’s Republic of Mongolia (1924–1992), it testifies to the prompt reforms undertaken by the socialist government toward religion and its institutions. While the main content addresses the temples in both parts of former Ikh Khüree—Züün Khüree and Gandan—the title, by its clear reference to exclusively Gandan as the Monastery in Ulaanbaatar, indicates that the reforms began with the immediate separation of religion from politics. Even though the main content focuses on the details of rituals, monks’ duties, and daily routines of Ikh Khüree’s temples, which primarily follow Géluk scholastic models and curricula, the authors use explicit language to instruct subordination of religious constituents to the socialist government. One wonders whether this deliberate start was in anticipation of the upcoming measures that would gradually eradicate the Mongolian Buddhism and its culture.

Agwan Dorjiev’s Questions about the Past and Future of Mongolian Buddhism

This chapter translates a 1924 letter exchange between two luminaries of the final years of prepurge Buddhism in Mongol and Buryat lands: the Khalkha polymath Zava Damdin Luvsandamdin (1867–1937) and the diplomat, reformer, and abbot Agvan Dorjiev (1854–1938). Both figures were deeply engaged with revolutionary intellectual currents circulating between China, the British Raj, Russia, Siberia, Tibet, Japan, and Mongolia in the early decades of the twentieth century. Both sought an advantage for Buddhist monastic life in competing models of revolutionary development and emancipation being debated in the Soviet Union and Mongolian People’s Republic. In the exchange translated here, these two tragic figures debate topics as diverse as the prehistory of the Mongolian community, the whereabouts of the fabled “land of Li,” and how best to counter the threat of scientific empiricism.

Ritual Texts Dedicated to the White Old Man with Examples from the Classical Mongolian and Oirat (Clear Script) Textual Corpora

This chapter examines some examples from the ritual text corpora written in “Classical Mongolian” and in Oirat “Clear Script,” dedicated to the veneration of the Mongolian nature deity, the White Old Man. The deity’s mythology, iconography, and the variety of ritual genres connected to him have been extensively studied. However, the rich textual corpus, especially the newly discovered Oirat incense offering texts and the various aspects of the White Old Man’s contemporary popularity among all Mongolian ethnic groups, evokes the revision of the deity’s ethos. Being a primordial nature spirit of highest importance became integrated later into the Buddhist pantheon and returned as syncretic deity into the folk religious practice. The chapter examines the similarities and differences between the Classical Mongolian and Oirat offering text versions and provides a glimpse into the newly invented religious practices dedicated to the deity.

The Khalkha Zaya Paṇḍita’s Smoke Offering Rituals to the Khangai Mountain Range

This chapter introduces the life and activity of the Khalkha Zaya Paṇḍita, Luvsanprinlei (Tib. Blo bzang ‘phrin las, 1642–1719), briefly describes his sixteen smoke offering ritual texts, and provides a translation of selected five short texts dedicated to different geographical sites in the Khangai Mountain Range. The five texts reflect the Mongols’ belief in spirit landowners, or caretakers, who must be pacified and pleased with offerings and encouraged to ensure prosperity and well-being. The male deity of the Khangai Range, together with its female consort, has manifold retinues, including local gods and spirits who live in nearby valleys, lakes, and springs. The colophons of the five texts mention Zaya Paṇḍita as the author, and they name monks and laypeople who encouraged and supported him. The five texts illustrate how smoke offering practices spread at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Mongolia. Several geographical sites mentioned in the texts can be identified in the current area of Arkhangai, Zavkhan, and Bayankhongor provinces.

Contemporary Buddhist Poetry and Fiction

The literary response to Buddhism in the years since the democratic revolution of 1990 has reflected the revival of interest in spirituality that has accompanied the development of social freedom. Writers have begun to use Buddhist imagery and themes in order to describe not only their own spiritual lives and those of their readers, but also to understand and express the secular. Moreover, the interest in Mongolian traditions among those writers who have come of age since the late 1980s means that Buddhism is now a more common subject in the contemporary literature. Using contemporary language to explore metaphysics, and the human response to metaphysics, these works reflect the difficulties of reviving and healing the image of Buddhism, and of spiritual practice, in post-Soviet Mongolia.

Agvaannyam

This chapter translates a selection from a 1965 Tibetan-language work by the Buryat luminary Agvaannyam (Tib. Ngag dbang nyi ma, 1907–1990). As a youth, Agvaannyam was selected to study in the great Géluk monastic colleges of Central Tibet, leaving Buryatia for first Khalkha Mongolia and the Lhasa region just before successive waves of revolutionary upheaval. In time, Agvaannyam became a prominent figure in the Tibetan and Mongolian diaspora and refugee community based in India and Europe. His six-volume work contains an untranslated autobiography and the 285-folio Lamp of Scripture and Reasoning, written in c. 1965, from which the current selection is drawn. In this translated section we see the author’s vision of a continuity of Buddhist transmission that could offset the bloody ruptures to tradition in Buryatia, Mongolia, and Tibet during its author’s lifetime.

Ritual Texts of Mergen Gegeen

Mergen Gegeen’s popular ritual texts combine the traditional Mongolian folk literature with Buddhist liturgical patterns. In this way, Mergen Gegeen infused Buddhist ideas into popular practices. A Rosary of Wish-Granting Jewels for Offering to the Tngri and Nāgas Mergren Gegeen clearly states that anything can be absorbed by Buddhism as long as it is within the framework of Buddhist doctrine and on the right path to serve the living beings. In the two texts concerning Muna Qan, An Extensive Prayer to the Glorious Muna Qan: The Immediate Wish-Granting Jewel Herein and The Smoke Offering and Offering to Glorious Muna Qan and to the Masters of Water Called the Jewel Mighty King, Mergen Gegeen attempts to convert a local pre-Buddhist deity Muna Qan into a protector of the Dharma.

A Trilogy of Ngawang Palden and Shedrub Tendar

“A Trilogy of Ngawang Palden and Shedrub Tendar” consists of three works composed by two Khalkha Mongolian Buddhist scholars, Ngawang Palden (1797–1864) and Shedrub Tendar (1835–1915). The trilogy consists of versified eulogies to the three aspects of the mind: the mind of enlightenment, the correct view, and renunciation, while pointing to various Buddhist doctrinal views and tales mentioned in various Indian sources. The authors were trained in a Mongolian Buddhist institution and eventually became highly respected scholars in the Buddhist scholastic circle of the Géluk world. In this regard, their works rightfully represent the nineteenth-century Mongolian Buddhist literature composed by then educated monastics.

Zava Damdin’s Beautifying Ornament for the Mind of the Faithful: A Praise-Biography of My Root Lama Vajradhara, He Who Possesses the Three Types of Kindness, the Great Mahāpaṇḍita Endowed with Excellent Discipline and Learning Named “Sanjaa”

This chapter presents a unique devotional biography from Khalkha by Zava Damdin Luvsandamdin (1867–1937) about his beloved guru Sanjaa (1837–1906). Completed in the late summer of 1914, some three years after the collapse of the Qing and the formation of a perilous Mongolian autonomous theocracy in 1911, Beautifying Ornament provides rare details about the life of an otherwise little-known Mongolian luminary from the late imperial period. Written in Tibetan and employing literary genres shared by that time across the Tibeto-Mongolian cultural interface, Beautifying Ornament sets narrative details proper to an “outer biography” (Tib. phyi rnam) into devotional verse (Tib. bstod) joined with a concluding “seven-limb prayer” liturgy directed to the departed Sanjaa for regular recitation by his disciples. Beautifying Ornament also illuminates the understudied globalisms of nineteenth-century Mongolian Buddhist life that sustained zones of contact and exchange between Mongol, Chinese, Tibetan, Nepalese, Japanese, Russian, and Indian Buddhist communities, scholastic institutions, and pilgrimage sites.

The Autobiography of the First Khalkha Zaya Paṇḍita Lobsang Trinley

The First Zaya Paṇḍita Lobsang Trinley (Tib. Blo bzang ’phrin las, Mong. Luvsanphrinle, 1642–1715) was and remains known as one of the most prolific Mongolian Buddhist masters in history. Despite his desire to stay in Tibet to continue his study of Buddhism, he was sent back to Mongolia to spread the Dharma among the Mongols by the Fifth Dalai Lama, which sets his experience aside from many of his peers. His autobiography translated and presented here is the first known Tibetan language biographical work authored by a Mongolian and went on to have a huge influence on Buddhist biographical writing in Mongolian lands. Although following what the author saw to be the idealized model of Tibetan Buddhist biographical writing, this work also weaves in stylistically Mongolian characteristics. The author’s own experience contained within, as well as the way in which this life story is presented, created a piece of writing that is able to personify the amalgamated Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhist world of the seventeenth century.