Mongolia is Awesome: Names Edition

I’ve mentioned illegal gold mining briefly before, but I didn’t include the most important detail of the movement. In some areas, illegal miners are referred to as “ninjas,” which is pretty cool, I guess. But why they are called ninjas launches this into some of the sheerest Awesomeness yet encountered.

You see, they often mine at night, and have to climb out with their great green bowls strapped to their backs. (The bowls/buckets are for panning, maybe?) Because of their resemblance to giant turtles, and their midnight activities, they were nicknamed (if you know where this is going, I love you) “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and called “ninjas” for short.

That’s right, the TMNT are real and operating in the outskirts of Mongolia. Does this make the mining companies Shredder?

 Mongols or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Does it matter?

Mongolia is Relevant: Mongolia and Your Mobile

I finally managed to find a copy of the English-Language newspaper in Mongolia, and immediately a few things struck me. One was how much was about economics—there was a “Money” section AND a “Market” section, plus the front page had an money/market focus. But a lot of the economic issues are related to the big thing in Mongolia these days: Mining.

Companies are rushing to develop infrastructure to tap the rich resources of the (till now) untouched Mongolian countryside. Though Mongolia’s not currently a huge player on the international market, that’s partially because it just doesn’t have the equipment and railroads (and regular roads) to uncover all its natural resources.

And valuable resources they are… though cashmere is my personal favorite, Mongolia also has mines upon mines of coal, copper, gold, and (my second favorite) uranium. One article I read was about the development of a new railway to Tavan Tolgol, “one of the largest coal deposits in the world.” But much of Mongolia’s earnings come from the Erdenet open-face copper mine, one of the ten largest copper mines in the world; it produces around 25 million tons of ore yearly, and because most of that goes to China, you’ve undoubtedly come into contact with some Erdenet copper (in your electronics) without even knowing it. On a more adventurous note, there are several Gold Rushes taking place in Mongolia right now, with people flocking to certain areas to illegally mine gold there. And unlike our Gold Rushes, there’s actually enough gold to provide most miners with substantial income. (They’re not getting rich, exactly, but they’re getting fed.) Though right now this mining is unregulated and dangerous, the government is working to extract the gold systematically and safely (though likely at the expense of the beautiful surroundings).

And onto the uranium! As I discovered in an article about Mongolia’s attempts to shift to nuclear power, Mongolia has 63,000 tons of proven uranium reserves, and it is estimated to have up to 100,000 tons. Just the proven reserves account for 2% of the entire world’s reserves, so it could potentially have 3 or 4%.

So though Mongolia may seem remote now, bear in mind that its resources are already relevant to your life, and probably the relevance of Mongolia’s mines will be impossible to ignore in a few decades. Oh, and also the cashmere—try ignoring that.

Mongolian Connections: Prayer & Production

At Gandan Khiid last week, R explained to me the family/lama system that takes care of the practical needs of the monks. I knew that a lot of the Gandan monks lived in gers in the district around the monastery, but I expected that they lived in monastic communities, or that there would still be a lot of housing for them in the temple complex (it is a monastery, after all). But that’s not how these monasteries (the urban ones, at least) work. Basically, a family “sponsors” a monk, and provides his material needs. They feed him, house him,  and though I don’t know if they clothe him, they even do his laundry. In return, the monk is expected to keep them in his prayers, and to intervene with the divine powers for them in times of crisis. Taking care of a lama gives one very good karma, and the way the deal works is essentially: Material support in exchange for spiritual support.

Though the Christian system never worked quite the same way, the material/spiritual support exchange was crucial in medieval Europe. Wealthy merchants, nobles, and even royalty often donated a lot of money to particular monasteries, and in exchange, the monks were expected to pray for the donor and Gregorian-chant for him/her every so often. Oxford is a great place to see this in action—New College was founded by a bishop/chancellor (not a layperson, but it proves the point) so that, after his death, the choir there would sing masses for his soul. Even peasants without a lot to give utilized this system; because there were so many religious communities (and so much bureaucracy) in Oxford, there are still records that show the donations peasants made to this or that parish or monastery in their will. In return, the donor expected a grave near the church and maybe a psalm every Sunday or something.

The exchange was not always so specific. When we stopped by a convent in Greece, one student on my trip asked a nun what service the convent provided for the outside community. (I can’t remember the context of the question, but it did fit.) The nun, a little indignantly, explained, “We pray for them.” Being modern, enlightened high school students, this hardly seemed like a worthwhile endeavor.

But it is interesting that this exchange is crucial in these different religious traditions. There is a divide, in both cases, between the people who pray and the people who work. The lay/clergy or lay/monk distinction was generally clear in medieval Europe, as it is generally clear in Mongolian Buddhism.  There was/is not supposed to be too much crossover in the roles. Yet in the Christian case, the group of people specializing in prayer has become less significant. Christians are expected to pray mostly for themselves, and they don’t hear much about donating to people to pray for them. (The personal connection to God carries more weight now than it did in the hierarchical church system of 700 years ago.) That being said, most laypeople still don’t devote the bulk of their daily lives to prayer. So they are still, decidedly, laypeople, unlike the somewhat blurrier Beguines of the 13th/14th centuries, who worked for their subsistence but spent as much time as possible praying. Now prayer happens, but it usually comes after material needs (and usually also after material wants).

The Buddhist system in UB, on the other hand, still actively maintains (at least from what I heard) the idea of having a group of people dedicated to prayer, while others are dedicated to keeping them alive and praying.

So this Connection comes with a Meditation: What is it that, in different religions at different times, makes the need for separate groups so important? Why should some people pray and some people work? Is it like a spiritual mass production system, where more gets done if each person fits in one part? Are there political or economic reasons that people maintain it? And why did it change in Christianity? (A historian would be able to help with this question.) At what point did the system in which laypeople provided food/housing/clothing and a separate community was devoted to prayer become a system where most people did some of both? From a spiritual standpoint, does this mean people are losing out on prayer (or material goods, I guess, though that seems unlikely)? And lastly, do we still have any kind of system like this, in which some people are dedicated to ideology and some people are dedicated to material production?

A couple spring to mind. First I thought of academics; higher humanities education doesn’t produce a lot (except papers), but professors/ researchers are supported because, by teaching and researching, they are advancing knowledge (as opposed to prayer). To an extent, I think this makes sense—we value education in a similar way to how people used to value religion. My second idea was, of course, the world of “finance” or “consulting” or “banking.” (I will never understand what sort of a Venn diagram those three belong to.) No matter how many people try to explain it, it seems that this is just turning money (aka paper) into more money, and usually for the people who had money to begin with. In some ways it makes sense (providing mining equipment and railroads to mine Mongolia’s gold, for example), but a lot of it just looks like a whole lot of nothing. (And, as evidenced by certain financial situations, it becomes a whole lot of nothing sometimes, too.) These people who do not produce are supported because the world values money. (Did finance/banking as we know it originate in the US, where money was valued in a way, if not to an extent, that it hadn’t been before?) I’m not sure finance fits in as well, because people do not actively support financiers the way people actively support academics; it’s more that financiers know how to manipulate a system dependent on capitalism (and the fact that people do value capitalism) for their benefit. These examples bring up another possibility: Are the four systems (Christian monks, Buddhist monks, academics, and finance) just a way to perpetuate the rich being able to avoid manual work or physical production, the way academics and finance often seem to be to me? (Yes, a lot of people advance themselves from poverty through academics or finance, but this often seems to be the exception.)

If anyone has thoughts, I’d love to hear.