After
Dambijantsan was
Deported from Mongolia in 1891, we hear nothing more about him, apart from a couple of unsubstantiated rumors, for the next twenty years. How does a man like Dambijantsan, who had electrified the populace of Mongolia during his sojourns there in 1890 and 1891, almost immediately becoming the stuff of legend, and whose charisma, will power, and apparent magical abilities had left an indelible impression on almost everyone who met him, simply disappear for twenty years? This is just one of the many mysteries of Dambijantsan’s life. I might note parenthetically that arguably the greatest magus of the nineteenth-century,
Helena Blavatsky, also disappeared completely for twenty years, a lacuna which even her most assidious biographers have been unable to fill in, and that the likewise arguably greatest magus of the twentieth century,
George Gurdjieff, also disappeared for twenty years, another lacuna which has left biographers scratching their heads in puzzlement and dismay. And need I add that
Jesus of Nazareth also disappeared for twenty years, a period about which the Bible has absolutely nothing to say? It is intriguing that legend, if not historical documentation, places Blavatsky, Gurdieff, Dambijantsan, and Jesus in India and Tibet during at least part of their missing years, but this is a topic which I must put aside for the moment while I deal with Dambijantsan’s reappearance in 1910, when he suddenly materialized in the town of Karashahr, in what is now
Xinjiang Province, China.
Here he sought out the Brothers Kryajev, Russian merchants who were operating in the area at the time. One of the brothers may have been P. I. Kryajev, who back in 1891 had been living in Uliastai and had been instrumental in gaining Dambijantsan’s release from the Qing authorities. Dambijantsan was traveling under an alias and had “somewhat changed exterior; his face was shaven now whereas formerly he wore a beard.” Karashahr, now known as Yanqi, just west of Bosten Lake, on the south side of the Tian Shan Range, was in an area inhabited by Torgut Mongols, many of them descendants of the Torguts who took part in the
Great Migration of Kalmyk Mongols from the Caspian Steppes in Russia back to China in 1772. Today the area is in the Bayangol Mongol Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang and is still home to many Torgut Mongols.
As noted earlier, Dambijantsan probably visited this area during his
1890 Sojourn through Xinjiang. Dambijantsan, himself a Dörböt, like the Torguts one of the tribes which made up the Kalmyks, would have found himself at home here among the descendants of the migrants from the Caspian Steppes along the Volga River where he was born, and he ended up staying in the Karashahr area for over a year. He must have had his ear to the ground and his political senses no doubt told him that the decrepit Qing Dynasty, tottering on its last legs, was about to come to an ignominious end. Perhaps he was just biding his time among the Torgut Mongols near Karashahr, waiting for the proper moment to make a dramatic return to western Mongolia.
According to Diluv Khutagt he arrived back in the Khovd area in late 1911 in the company of “man got up like a lama, and they had two riding camels.” The man’s man was Jimbe, and at this point he was apparently Dambijantsan’s sole disciple. At first Dambijantsan did not give out his name, but he soon became known as
Khoër Temeed Badarchin, the Wandering Monk with Two Camels, the same nickname he had gotten during his earlier stay in Mongolia Soon the rumor spread that he was either
Amarsanaa himself, in accordance with the legend that Amarsanaa had in fact never died, but had learned the secret of immortality, or that he was a descendant or perhaps reincarnation of Amarsanaa, returning to avenge Amarsanaa and continue his quest to free the Mongols from the hated Manchus. The legend of Amarsanaa’s return to Mongolia in one form or another dated from the late eighteenth century, and people might well have remembered the Dambijantsan’s earlier appearance in 1890-91 when he was claiming to be Amarsanaa’s descendant or incarnation. The Russian trader Burdukov noted that upon returning to Mongolia each spring from Russia, people would “naively ask when Amarsanaa will come and save us.” Now it appeared their prayers were about to be answered.
The mysterious
badarchin, according to the Diluv, “was a very powerful man and the saddlebags which his men couldn’t lift he could lift onto a camel . . . He was armed with a long old-style Mongol flintlock. Although he came from the Volga, he spoke the Khalkh dialect very well. He called himself a lama, but nobody knew if he really was one. Nobody knew his real age. Nobody knew the real truth about him.” Soon people did become aware of his real, or alleged, name, Dambijantsan, and as they repeated this name it got shortened to Dambija (the name by which many in Mongolia recognize him to this day), then finally to just Ja. Apparently from this time he first became known as Ja Lama. He also became known as Ja Bogd (
bodg = holy) and Ja Bagsh (
bagsh = teacher).
According to the Diluv Khutagt, Dambijantsan, ”visited the Torguud (Torgut) and Ööld banners one after another and everywhere caused everyone, great and small, to have faith in him, and spent several months in Zakhchin Da’s region.” At the time there were two Zakhchin Banners southeast of Khovd City, the Da Khoshuu and the Gün Khoshuu. Dambijantsan finally decided to set up headquarters among the Zakhchin Da Khoshuu. The word
zakhchin itself means “borderer,” and the Zakhchin people were one of many ethnic groups who fell under the general rubric of Western, or Oirat Mongols. They inhabit the area to this day, centered around the now neat and tidy little sum center of Mankhan. In Dambijantsan’s day, the town was well-known as the site of a monastery known as Tögrögiin Khüree. The famous lama Namkhaijantsan (1599–1662), who became better known as the Oirat Zaya Pandita, once lived here. At the at the age of nineteen Namkhaijantsan had gone to Tibet where he was ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama himself. He staying in Tibet for eighteen years before coming back to western Mongolia. In 1649 he returned to Tibet as the chaperone and tutor of the five-year old Oirat prince Galdan (later
Galdan Bolshigt) who himself entered the monkhood. (Dambijantsan, as we shall see, adopted Galdan Boshigt as one of his role models.)
Galdan Bolshigt (1644–1697)
A formidable polymathic scholar, the Zaya Pandita is famous for inventing the so-called “Clear Script” (
Tod Bichig), a modification on the Uighuro-Mongolian vertical script already in use by the Mongols. It was while studying the various dialects of the Western Mongols that Namkhaijantsan stayed at the monastery in Mankhan. Over 2,000 manuscripts on religious subjects written in Clear Script still exist in the libraries of Ulaan Baatar, including forty-seven composed between 1652 and 1662 by Zaya Pandita himself. The script is still used by Torguts in Xinjiang.
Namkhaijantsan (1599–1662), The Oirat Zaya Pandita
In 1911, when Dambijantsan arrived in the area, the Zakhchin were ruled by the 12th Zakhchin Noyon (
noyon = prince). The Noyon, whose given name was Sambuu, was born in 1864, the Year of the Mouse, at a place called Khuural Tsenkher, in what is now Mankhan Sum. He was the second son of a herdsman who, although very poor, was well known as a doctor practicing traditional Mongolian medicine. Sambuu’s talents were recognized early, and when he was ten years old the 10th Noyon of the Zakhchin, Dalantai, took him on as a disciple and student. Dalantai was a very learned man and highly respected as a
Dalai, a man whose knowledge was as vast as on ocean (
dalai = ocean, oceanic, etc.). Under the tutorage of the 10th Noyon, Sambuu learned old Mongolia Vertical Script, the Tod Script of the Oirat Zaya Pandita, the Manchu and Tibetan languages, and also studied medicine sutras and other Tibetan medical texts. He eventually became a
maaramba, a practitioner of traditional medicine, and was much respected by the Zakhchin people as a doctor and a knowledgeable and talented person in general.
Sambuu, the 12th Zakhchin Noyon
Meanwhile the 10th Noyon died and was replaced by a man named Nyamdeleg, who became the 11th Noyon. Nyamdeleg soon fell ill and his health became so bad that he was unable to fulfill his duties and had to stand down. The office of Noyon was not hereditary; it could be awarded to anyone the populace, led by the lesser noblemen, felt could best perform the job. Sambuu, well known for his knowledge and pure mindedness, was soon proclaimed the 12th Zakhchin Noyon. Ever energetic, he embarked on a campaign to upgrade the Tögrögiin Khüree and other monasteries and temples and imported skilled craftsmen from China to do the work. His goal was to make these monasteries the center of Buddhism in western Mongolia.
He also had a more militant turn of mind and with the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in the Fall of 1911 he declared himself ready to fight for Mongolian independence. Therefore he apparently had no objections when Dambijantsan, voraciously expounding on the need to eject the Manchus from western Mongolia and unite the Mongolia people, suddenly showed up in his territory and announced his intention to establish a winter camp about 20 miles south of Mankhan, on the Tsenkher Gol, where the river emerges from a canyon through the Mongol-Altai Mountain. On his peregrinations around western Mongolia Dambijantsan had already attracted a small flock of disciples and followers and these people too moved to the Tsenkher Gol camp.
Apparently it was here at his winter camp on Tsenkher Gol that on December 29, 1911, Dambijantsan did what the Diluv Khutagt called a “strange, magical thing." According to the Diluv Khutagt:
The Bogd was declared Khan of Mongolia at the time of the Mongol Revolution in 1911. Long before the news of this event reached Western Mongolia, Ja Lama called the people around him, and said, “The time for rejoicing has arrived.’ He then touched the barrel of his gun to the top of each man’s head, in the way a lama gives a blessing with his prayer beads, and said, ‘Go to the east and pray.’ Later is was discovered that this was the exact day on which the Bogd had been declared Khaan.
