Mongolia | Life & Death of the False Lama #17

I last wrote about Dambijantsan’s 1891 Sojourn through Mongolia.

A year later, in 1892, the Russian ethnologer Pozdneev showed up at Amarbayasgalant Monastery in north-central Mongolia. Amarbayasgalant Monastery, located 137 miles northwest of Ulaan Baatar, the capital of Mongolia, had been built by order of the Qing Emperor Kangxi to house the remains of Zanabazar, the sixteenth incarnation of Javzandamba and the First Bogd Gegeen of Mongolia. Completed in 1736, during the reign of Kangxi’s grandson Qianlong, Amarbayasgalant eventually became one of the main pilgrimage destinations in Mongolia.

Amarbayasgalant Khiid

It had been damaged during the upheavals of the late 1930s, but unlike most monasteries in Mongolia it had not been totally destroyed. The outer wall of the complex and the shells of most of the temples inside the wall remained intact, and starting in 1990 an extensive restoration project was initiated by Tibetan lama Lobsang Tenzin Gyatso Pal Sangpo. The monastery was officially reopened in 1993, and in 1996 the complex was nominated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Currently about sixty novices and ordained monks are in residence. The monastery now hosts a fair amount of pilgrims and sightseers from other parts of Mongolia and has became a standard stop for tourist groups headed farther west to the popular destination of Lake Khövsgöl. Still, after the sightseers and tourists have left for the day and monks have retired to their quarters the monastery grounds are often completely deserted, the silent broken only by the cooing of pigeons and the soughing of the wind through the empty courtyards.

Visitors to Amarbayasgalant in the late nineteenth century would have encountered a much different scene. Over 2000 monks were attached to the monastery, and it ranked second only to Örgöö (now Ulaan Baatar) among the most important pilgrimage sites in Mongolia, with thousands of pilgrims streaming here each year from all the aimags (provinces) of Mongolia. The so-called Imperial Temples, constructed during the reign of the Qing Dynasty emperors and enclosed by a wall measuring 680 feet by 575 feet, were flanked on either side by numerous temples built with donations from Mongolian pilgrims and well-wishers, including one temple which housed an immense statue of Maitreya, the coming Buddha, described as “sixty arm-spans” in height. All of these temples outside the Imperial Wall and the Maitreya statue were destroyed during the 1930s repressions.

Among the main attractions at Amarbayasgalant were the temples containing the sharils, or mummified remains, of Zanabazar, the First Bogd Gegeen of Mongolia, and the Fourth Bogd Gegeen, Losang Tupten Wongchuk (1775–1813). In the 1890s services were held over the remains these two Bogd Gegeens each day at five in the morning and again between eight and nine in the evening. “To officiate at these services,” noted one visitor, “five distinguished and most honored lamas are appointed in turn, whereas all the other more humble inhabitants of the monastery do not even have the right to approach these holy objects and must confine themselves to worshipping before the door of the temple in which they are.” The remains of Zanabazar and the Fourth Bogd Gegeen were removed from the temples in 1937 by communist iconoclasts and reportedly burned. The two temples which contained the sharils survived and were renovated in the 1990s.

I traveled first to Amarbayasgalant because of my interest in Zanabazar, the first of the eight Bogd Gegeens who from 1639 to 1924 performed a role in Mongolia similar to that of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas in Tibet. A distant descendant of Chingis Khan, he was the great-grandson of the Tüsheet Khan Avtai (1554–1587), ruler of the Tüsheet Khanate centered around what is now Övörkhangai Aimag in Mongolia. It was Avtai Who Met with the Third Dalai Lama in the 1580s, converted to Buddhism, and then reintroduced Buddhism into Mongolia after the long hiatus the religion had experienced after the fall of the Mongol Yüan Dynasty in 1368. Zanabazar, who at the age of four was recognized as the first Bogd Gegeen by a convocation of Mongolian nobles at Shireet Tsagaan Nuur, in modern-day Övörkhangai Aimag, traveled twice to Tibet and received teachings from both the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama. Back in Mongolia he embarked on an ambitious monastery-building campaign, introduced new rituals, including the famous Maitreya Ceremony, now once again practiced in Mongolia (at Amarbayasgalant, among other places), and even designed new robes and hats for monks of the Gelug sect to which he belonged. A renowned polymath, Zanabazar composed hymns, studied the medicinal qualities of hot springs, and invented two new alphabets, the Quadratic Script and the Soyombo Script. The so-called head symbol of the Soyombo script is now portrayed on the Mongolian flag, Mongolian currency, and literally thousands of other places.

Among his many accomplishments, however, Zanabazar is probably best remembered for his Incomparable Bronze Statues. “During his lifetime," notes a modern-day art historian, he was the greatest Buddhist sculptor in Asia.” His bronze statues of White Tara, Green Tara, Sitasamvara, the Five Transcendent Buddhas—Akshobhya, Vairocana, Amitabha, Amogghasiddhi, and Ratnasambhava—and others are now the centerpieces of several museums in Ulaan Baatar. Although few if any privately owned Zanabazar statues have come up for sale recently, so-called School of Zanabazar statues—made by artists emulating the style of Zanabazar—have recently been featured at high-profile art sales in New York City. Some of School of Zanabazar pieces at these sales sold for several hundred thousands of dollars. Zanabazar’s own works must be considered “priceless.”

As we have seen, however, it was Zanabazar who in 1691, after the invasion of Khalkh Mongolia by Galdan Boshigt, had capitulated to the Qing, resulting in the loss of Mongolian independence and making Mongolia a province of China. Resentment against the Qing Dynasty was running high when Podzneev visited Amarbayasgalant in 1892. Podzneev, the son of an archpriest in the Russian city of Orel, had studied at the School of Oriental Languages at the University of St. Petersburg and in 1876 had embarked to Mongolia with the famous Russian explorer G. N. Potanin on a three-year expedition sponsored by the Imperial Russian Geographic Society. After returning to Russia he continued to hone his fluency in Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian and was eventually appointed a professor at the University of St. Petersburg. In 1892 the Russian Foreign Ministry commissioned him to make what turned out to be a thirteen-month expedition in what is now the country of Mongolia and the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. On June 27, 1892, accompanied by his wife, a scholarly assistant, and various factotums, he crossed the Russian-Mongolian border at the trading post of Khyakta, and on June 2 he arrived at Amarbayasgalant Monastery.

An indefatigable researcher, he immediately began interviewing people and perusing written documents. He first met with the two head lamas of the monastery. He found them “very learned about Buddhism,” but “ignorant, not only of the history of their own country, but even of their own monastery.” Interviewing two elderly monks, Podzneev asked them how many temples were located within the original imperial wall. The monks had no idea, even though they had lived at the monastery for over forty years. “Just think how many years we have lived here but yet do not know; I guess we don’t have to!” one of the monks ingenuously explained. In talking to other monks Podzneev was struck by the level of animosity expressed against both the Qing government and the Mongolia noblemen who sided with the Qing. “The majority of them complained bitterly about the impoverished condition of the Khalkha,” he noted, “and did not attempt to hide it, expressing their dissatisfaction with the Chinese government and its extortions.” During the winter of 1891–1892 the Mongolian countryside had experienced extreme cold and disastrous zuds, ice or snow storms which prevent animals from grazing, and large numbers of livestock had died. Many herders who kept livestock for the monastery were impoverished, but despite this the Qing government had levied some 14,400 horses to replenish the herds of the Emperor which had been decimated by an epidemic. Resentment against this requisition was still running rampant when Podzneev visited Amarbayasgalant.

One evening Podzneev was visited in his quarters by the secretary of the monastery administration, a man named Yondon, who turned out to be “an elegant or rather cultivated, or at least experienced lama,” in Podzneev’s words, who had earlier served in the administration of a monastery in Örgöö (Ulaan Baatar) and who had been at Amarbayasgalant for the last seven years. The conversation soon turned to Dambijantsan. He had heard about Dambijantsan’s claim that he would soon return with army to overthrow the Qing. Pozdneev:

Yondon bicheechi [bicheech = writer or scribe) . . . earnestly begged me not to conceal anything from him but to tell him even in confidence where or not I had seen any such troops on the march or at least where or not I had heard that they were getting ready for a campaign. I answered the bicheechi that I had heard nothing of the sort . . . from a further chat it became quite clear to me that he and all other Mongols believe implicitedly to this day in the real existence of this son of Amursana and in the veracity of all that he said, and, as an irrefutable argument to the truth of both of these things, they point out that this lama possessed a cap to which a golden ochir was affixed instead of a button.

The wearing of badges of rank like a “golden ochir’ were regulated by the strict protocol of the Qing Dynasty and there were severe penalties for their unauthorized use. The implication was that if Dambijantsan possessed such a badge he must have been an important person, and that whatever he claimed must be true. “I, of course,” Podzneev wrote, “could not throw doubt on such an argument . . .” He continued:

From certain details of this story I guessed that the Mongol was talking about a certain charlatan, a Russian Kalmyk from the Little Dörbet ulus of the Astrakhan gouvernment, who, upon his arrival in Urga had been arrested by the Urga consulate and after interrrogation had been sent under guard back across the Russian border.

This was probably the first written account of Dambijantsan—but it was intended for a mainly scholarly audience of ethnologists, historians, and linguists—it makes for pretty heavy going when read just as a travel account—and thus unlike Beasts, Men and Gods never reached a wide audience (it was not translated and published in an English-language edition until 1971). It was perhaps fitting that the first account of him was made by Podzneev at Amarbayasgant, the burial place of Zanabazar, because Dambijantsan would devote the better part of his life to undoing what Zanabazar had done. It is also of interest that by 1892 Dambijantsan was already reputed to be a “charlatan,” as Podzneev calls him, a impostor and con-man who was not in fact a lama or a legitimate freedom-fighter, and did not possess the powers, either spiritual or political, which he laid claim to. It was this reputation which would earn him the moniker “False Lama.”

Podzneev concludes his remarks about Dambijantsan:

. . . one question still puzzled me, namely, to what did Dambi Jantsan owe his success, and, by turning the conversation gradually to this subject, I soon convinced myself that the basic cause for this was the tacit discontent and at times even hatred of the people for their government and an eager, if only passive, desire to rid themselves of the oppression with which the Chinese have surrounded the lives of the Mongols. To my surprise, I learned in this connection that the people are even discontented with their own Mongol princes, many of whom, I was told, become infected with the Chinese way of thinking during their trips to court, gravitate toward China, plunder their people, and, a most terrible thing to a Mongol, even offer offense to the faith.

It was this anger and hatred against the Chinese and Manchus that Dambijantsan hoped to mobilize in his struggle for Mongolian independence. His ultimate political goal, it was said, was to turn back the clock to the time of Galdan Bolshigt, before Zanabazar had ceded control of Mongolia to the Qing, and recreate a new Mongolian khanate. Only when this became impossible did he turn to a life of banditry and establish around himself not a khanate but a cult in which he could give free rein to his sadistic impulses. Inside of Dambijantsan were two entities struggling for control of his existence: the Ja Lama—Buddhist practitioner and freedom fighter—and the False Lama: con-man, bandit, torturer, and murderer. In the end the False Lama would win.