To understand what Communism does to independent Buddhist societies, we should remember what it did to Mongolian Buddhism in the 1930s.
by Massimo Introvigne
Part 1 of 2
A few days ago, I found something I believed I had lost, a portrait of the 8th Bogd Khan of Mongolia, who was born in 1869 and died in 1924. The Bogd Khan, or Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, is the chief of the Buddhist Gelug lineage in Mongolia. The Gelug lineage is the same of the Dalai Lama, and the Bogd Khan is the third ranking person in the hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism, after the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama.
The 8th Bogd Khan, like the Dalai Lama in Tibet, was at the same time the political ruler of Mongolia. It lost his power to Communism, and after his death no Bogd Khan was enthroned until the fall of the Soviet Empire. At that stage, the Dalai Lama announced that he had recognized in 1936 a four-year-old boy as the reincarnation of the Bogd Khan, but had kept his name secret for security reasons. The ninth Jebtsundamba Khutuktu was enthroned privately in Dharamsala in 1992 and publicly in Mongolia in 2011, one year before he died in 2012 at age 80. Bitter Winter has reported about the political pressures exerted by China to prevent a tenth Jebtsundamba Khutuktu to be officially recognized, although many believe that he has reincarnated, and the Dalai Lama knows his name.
I bought the portrait of the 8th Jebtsundamba Khutuktu in Mongolia in 2005, as an icon of deep sadness and a testament to an enchanted world that was no more. I am happy I found it, for one reason in particular. If we want to understand the deep hatred of Chinese Communists for the monastic Buddhist society of Tibet, and the nomadic or post-nomadic Buddhist society of Inner Mongolia, one good starting point is to study what Communism did to (Outer) Mongolia in Stalin’s times.
In Mongolia where the memory of these tragedies is still very much alive, I also visited in 2005, in the capital Ulaanbaatar, a Memorial Museums of the Victims of Political Repression. It was a private enterprise, which most unfortunately was shut down in 2016. Although there are some hopes it can be reopened in the future, the building that hosted him, former Prime Minister Genden’s home, was demolished in 2019, and others are pessimistic about the future of the collections.
In order to understand the terrible events of the 1930s in Mongolia some historical elements are necessary. Mongolia has a very ancient tradition of shamanic religiosity, which still survives today. When Kublai Khan (grandson of Genghis Khan, and the son of a Nestorian Christian mother) converted to Buddhism in 1242, the monks who came from Tibet suppressed some shamanic elements but largely incorporated shamanism into Buddhism, giving Mongolian Buddhism its unique flavor.
Despite Kublai Khan’s conversion, Buddhism did not become majority in Mongolia until the sixteenth century, when it was a Mongolian army that secured the victory of the Gelug “system,” one of several competing Buddhist “systems,” in Tibet and gave its leader the title and power of Dalai Lama.
Between the seventeenth and eighteenth century Zanabazar—philosopher, sculptor among the greatest in Buddhist history, politician, and descendant of Genghis Khan— and the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, reinforced the hegemony of Gelug Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia. A great figure in Mongolian history, Zanabazar remains controversial because he summoned for military help the Chinese army, which eventually made Mongolia a province of China, a status it kept until 1911.
Zanabazar gave great impetus to monastic life, especially in the great monastery of Erdene Zuu, founded by his grandfather in Karakorum. Between the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the male population of Mongolia came to be composed for more than a third of monks, which did not displease the Chinese too much because the monks did not fight, did not rebel, and did not ask for independence.
In December 1911, taking advantage of the situation in China, Mongolia declared itself independent. The eighth Bogd Khan became the king of Mongolia and settled in a royal palace in Urga, present-day Ulaanbaatar. But China, Russia, and Japan threatened the independence of the new state. In 1920, in an extremely confused situation, the anti-Communist Russian aristocrat Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg occupied Mongolia at the head of a personal army. Tolerated by the Bogd Khan, he proved to be a capricious and cruel dictator.
Two pre-existing groups of Mongolian independentists, one non-Communist and one led by the ex-lama turned Marxist Choibalsan fought against the Baron’s regime. In 1921, they proclaimed independence for a second time, with the Bogd Khan remaining on the throne. But this time they called in aid the Soviet troops, who will remain in Mongolia for seventy years. In 1924 the last Bogd Khan died; the Soviets declared that he had no reincarnation and proclaimed the Communist republic.
Few could have predicted the horrors of the subsequent decade, which will witness one of the bloodiest anti-religious genocides in human history. We will explore these developments in our next article in this series.