Mongolia is Relevant: Why Natalie Portman Thinks You Should Learn About Mongolia

Images of traditionally dressed upper-class Mongolian women are scattered through UB City in ads or postcards. Check out these pictures of the traditional costumes of Mongolian women:

Look familiar? That’s because George Lucas used the outfits of Mongolian queens as the source for one of Queen Amidala’s costumes. Although it pains me that this now means that a pic of Amidala shows up as the first GoogleImage result for “Mongolian traditional dress,” using historical Mongolian dress as inspiration is still pretty cool.

Who knew there was such a direct link between Mongolia and Natalie Portman?

Mongolia is Awesome: Ogedei's Secret

At the National History Museum of Mongolia yesterday, I came across quite a few interesting things (hopefully to be posted about later), but one was especially Awesome.

There are tons of reasons why the Mongol Horde had such success in battle, but one thing that kept them in tip-top shape was a bit more… inconspicuous. Apparently, underneath their chain mail (some of which was shown in the exhibit), they wore undergarments made of Chinese silk. Because silk is so tightly woven, an arrow losing speed is less likely to penetrate the fabric, so the silk works as a luxurious, soft, bulletproof vest. (Archers out there might be familiar with this idea, seen when a weak shot bounces off the cloth of a target rather than sticking in it.) This isn’t the point, though, as much as its medical advantage. Even when the point of an arrow still gets through the chain mail and silk, the silk decreases the chance that the barbs will enter the would (sources differ as to how--either by slowing its trajectory, entering the wound with the arrow, or, most likely, not ripping widely enough to allow the barbs to enter). During removal of the arrow, barbs cause a lot of damage (just picture it), so silk mitigates that damage and wounds are less likely to get infected. A medic treating a Mongol in silk would grip the fabric to pull the arrow out, leaving a cleaner wound.

So, yeah, even a Mongol’s drawers were ready for a fight.

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.

Mongolia is Awesome: Names Edition

Before I came, I read in my guidebook that there are souvenir shops just about anywhere you look, selling t-shirts, tacky (probably Made-in-China) novelty items, and postcards. Of course, most people who know me know that I was on the lookout for postcards from just about when I touched down. But my first couple days, I was dismayed to see not a single postcard or souvenir shop in sight. It occurred to me that this was probably because I don’t exactly live in a touristy district. And having explored the centre of the city, I was confused as to where exactly the tourist district was.

 Then I noticed a particular street on the map: “Tourist St.” Oh. That’s right, the Mongolians have unabashedly named one of their streets “Juulchin Gudamj,” literally translated as “Tourist Street.” Well, they know how to tell it like it is…

Meditations: Khölbömbög!

Okay, I admit it: this has very little to do with Mongolia. But it is related to traveling (marginally)…

Part of the privilege of being abroad in even-yeared summers is the World Cup. I know, I know, you can see it in the States on TV, and I’m sure there’s bars that get really into it, but it’s not the same as all the bars setting up screens and crowding with people for a few hours every evening, and hearing collective citywide cheers from my window, and having a go-to conversation topic with just about anyone in the city. Although I should admit, as much as I like the idea of the World Cup, the first real (start-to-finish) match I saw and paid attention to was the Japan-Paraguay match last night. And it got me thinking…

 

In the first few minutes, a Japan player ran into a Paraguay player and the latter fell down for a minute. It was pretty clearly an accident, and when the Paraguay player got up, the Japan player seemed very apologetic and even helped him up a bit. Immediately, my loyalties shifted to Japan. (They were less enthused about their anthem than Paraguay, but this made up for it.) It was so nice to see an athlete actually be polite and helpful in the game.

Alas, though, this was not to be the norm. The rest of the game, I was shocked by how the players seemed so unconcerned for their opponents. As professional football players, they all have something important in common; they all know what it’s like to fall and/or be hurt and also tired and stressed. So why couldn’t they extend a little compassion, share a joke, anything? Prove that people basically good, or something. But instead, (and this is really what got to me), they were 100% only out for themselves and their own team. Of course, I understand wanting to do your best and win, but what about when they protest perfectly fair calls? What about a specific moment when the ball went out of bounds, and both the Japan player and Paraguay player who’d been with it raised their hands to claim their own possession? In the replay, it was pretty clear that Japan had kicked it out, so why did he even try to claim it? Isn’t it just as bad to win because of an unfair call (where’s the merit in that?) as to lose?

I want to see a team (or player) who tries to correct the ref when ref makes un unfair call in their favor; I want to see someone who, if an opponent goes down and the ball goes out, stops to help up the opponent and brush off the grass; I want to see a winning team who shakes hands with the losers before they all get together and shout and celebrate and do whatever it is winning football teams do (I shudder to think). One of the things that I love about tennis is that the players (Federer excepted, of course) tend at least to appear to be good guys. I know there were players in the past who were famous for their tempers and foul language and general jerkishness, but what I remember (and love best) about tennis was watching Blake and Nadal (or whomever) be polite to each other, and express their admiration for the player who just beat them or lost to them or whatever. I think I may have cried because there was just something so beautiful about athletes saying, “We’re opponents, but we’re not enemies, and competition is not as important as being a compassionate and courteous human being.” I miss that. And I think football could use that.

But perhaps I’m being too idealistic—maybe it is too much to expect players to strive to be the best and compete, and then risk a loss over courtesy. And I don’t think that the players protest fair calls knowing they’re fair; I think probably they convince themselves that the call is unfair, or that the other guy really did kick the ball out. But that is a problem. Something in the sport is wrong if people actually actively convince themselves that they are always in the right.

So what is this? What about football breeds such behavior? Is it that good playing requires aggression, and aggression and courtesy are too hard to reconcile? Is it because these athletes are treated like they’re the tops, so they get that idea into their brain and can’t discard it, even when they’re playing someone who is playing better than they are? Or is it that the guys who are jerks and push and trip and yell are the ones who tend to succeed? Like in politics, does all the scum float to the top, leaving clearer water at the bottom where no one sees it?

That’s Meditation #1. The second thing I was thinking about was loyalties, and from where they come. If your nation’s playing, it’s pretty easy, obviously. But what about those games (most of them, especially if you’re USA) where your team isn’t playing. Brazil or Portugal? England or Germany? Japan or Paraguay? A game isn’t fun unless you’re cheering for someone, so how does one decide for whom to cheer? In some cases it’s obvious. Sports history might influence you (e.g. I will never root for Ghana), and in some cases maybe real history or politics influences you (I was glad to see N Korea lose to anyone), but it’s not always that clear.

For example, in the Paraguay-Japan game, for whom was I to root? I didn’t have language or geography favoring either, I’d never been to either, and I didn’t really know who was a better team. So the passionate anthem got me for Paraguay, but the courteous player and efficient playing in the first few minutes switched me wholeheartedly (and tragically, in the end) to Japan. But, fresh off my readings of the Crusades and Holy Wars, etc., etc., watching the Paraguay players cross themselves or pray, I thought, “Oh wait, should I be rooting for them?” …No… Religious affiliation, which was a pretty strong binding factor 5-10 centuries ago, is no longer taken into account much; “Christendom” as an entity no longer exists like it used to. So that’s out. East vs. West? But, no, not that either. Apart from the fact that it was always a pretty fuzzy categorization anyway, it doesn’t really apply at all now. Korea and Japan are considered by some to be more “Western” than “Eastern” in culture, values, and whatever else people use to classify. (I’m aware of the absurdity of categorizing “culture and values” at all, much less into such arbitrary categories as “east” and “west.”) So that doesn’t work… Geographical proximity? No… The English I’ve talked to cheer for Brazil over Portugal and Argentina over Germany. Some people choose based on whether they want an underdog or a winner, I guess. But for those of us who are football-clueless, that’s about as helpful as “East” vs. “West.”

In a flattening world, where do our loyalties lie? When we have so much in common with everyone, and still so much that is different, whom do we consider close to us?

The Mongolians were all rooting for Japan, and one guy we talked to said it best when we asked him why: “Japan has good team.” I think that works perfectly—Choose the “good” team, however you want to define “good,” and cheer away.

 (Who even produces knockoff flags?)

Mongolian Connections: Religion is Religion

At the end of my first week here, I finally got a taste of Ulaanbaatar’s religious life. Though they are never particularly conspicuous and don’t seem to impact everyday life much (if at all), there are a few temples scattered around the city.

A quick updated rundown on Mongolia’s religious life: Under Stalin’s regime, the temples were (almost) all destroyed and the monks “purged.” The purges of priests in Russia were small compared to the purges of monks here. Although statistics in Mongolia generally seem pretty dubious, it is estimated that 30,000 lamas were executed during religious purges. All temples were razed, except for four (that I know of) that were preserved for cultural reasons. Two were converted into museums, and one (Gandan Khiid) was mostly destroyed, though Russian officials used some buildings to stable their horses and store things, until the prime minister of Mongolia had to whip up an active temple pretty quickly when a dignitary wanted to see one. Gandan Khiid was then kept in controlled “working condition” for diplomatic purposes. (Read: So that the government could pretend it hadn’t killed all the monks.) Unlike in the USSR, where religion was discouraged and at times persecuted, everything I’ve read describes it as pretty much forbidden in Mongolia.  

Since the fall of communism, however, it’s had a relatively tremendous resurgence. About 50% of Mongolians now identify as Buddhists, though 40% still consider themselves “not religious at all.” I’d be interested to see how that applies in Ulaanbaatar versus the countryside, and I’m not sure exactly how people were polled. (I tried looking up statistics for different areas of the US to compare, but the polls tend to be adherent-based, and I can’t really equate the two.) So although atheism/agnosticism is alive and well, religious devotion is on the rise. Christian denominations are apparently succeeding in various missionary efforts, and their influence has been significant as well, according to R and Prof. O. One result of this new rise in religion is the re-opening or founding of a few Buddhist temples. The largest of these is Gandan Khiid, the one that was allowed to operate under the communist government. It is one of the city’s main tourist attractions, so Friday R and I headed over to check it out and see a ritual. 

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting, but I think there were two things influencing my preconceptions… First, my idealized vision of a population coming back to religion after years of oppression. In my imagination, I guess, though devotion still wasn’t the norm, (as evidenced by my post on the city’s lack of religious atmosphere), when people did embrace religion, they did it out of faith and enthusiasm for their beliefs. Second was a somewhat Orientalist idea of Eastern religion as more spiritual and even “pure.” Rightly or wrongly, Buddhism does tend to be considered more spiritual, closer to true belief and philosophy and separated from ritual, and a lot of people who identify as non-religious but “spiritual” identify more with Eastern religious doctrines. (If you disagree, let me know. I could be way off-base here, and trying to find people’s general opinions on forums, etc., yielded little of interest and made me lose a little faith in humanity.)

So I guess those things were swirling in my subconscious when I attended my first Buddhist ceremony. R and I arrived at Gandan too early, wandered around the monastery grounds and the streets outside, and then, when we heard a gong, (the first I heard in Ulaanbaatar, though I live across the street from a temple), we came back to try to watch the morning ceremony a bit. We walked past a huge incense burner on the way in, and the incense was thick in the air of the small main room of the temple, along with another smell I couldn't identify. There was a row of lamas on each side of the temple, and behind that a row of smaller lamas-in-training, young boys with shaved heads and dressed in the monastic red-and-yellow. The adult lamas were chanting (in Tibetan, we think), some from memory and some from books, and every once in a while the kids would join in for a line or two. (Though the kids’ participation was pretty sporadic and definitely seemed based on their whims rather than liturgical mandate.) 

A few laypeople did seem to be worshiping somewhat, walking to the back to revere the Buddhist statue there, and I vaguely recall someone touching one of the young lamas for a blessing. It was sometimes hard to tell the worshipers from tourists or onlookers, so I'm not sure exactly how many I saw. One older couple was especially interesting—very weatherworn, and the man was dressed in a traditional Mongolian herder’s outfit. R and I sat for a while to watch, and as I was observing all the lamas and their mini-lamas, something became obvious: They were bored. Not necessarily painfully fidgety-bored, but more bored than an average student would be in class, or a teenager in church. 

I noticed this first with the mini-lamas. They weren’t really paying attention (and the adult sitting next to them didn’t seem to care), and instead kept pinching each other or guffawing or chattering under the chants about whatever it is schoolboys chat about. (Having never been a schoolboy, I can only imagine what that is, and I suppose I will never know.) They looked exactly like boys their age (10-13?) might look like in the back row of a very boring assembly. Except this wasn’t the back row of a very boring assembly—it was the second row of a religious ritual. The kids were wedged right between the laypeople and the adult monks, and they seemed to care very little about the opinions of either, and even less about the ceremony.  

The adult monks weren’t chattering, but they were pretty clearly not putting in much effort to attain spiritual enlightenment, either. One kept yawning, occasionally through his recitations, but mostly in his pauses, and another chanted monotonously away, looking every bit like a kid who is made to apologize recites, “I’m sorry I called you a poo-head and broke your doll, and I promise not to do it again.” He looked about as much like like he was rolling his eyes as he could without actually doing it. It seemed to be just chant-chant-chant, another day at the monastery for these guys. I’m aware that I’m making a few assumptions, and reading into these guys’ expressions maybe more than I should. After all, these were a few monks at a morning ceremony at one temple. But I do want to say that these specific monks just did not seem that into it. They didn’t look spiritual, and they didn’t look like they cared one bit about what they were doing; they were just trying to get it done. I was confused as to why one would become a lama in a still relatively non-religious society unless one really felt called to it, but R explained that it is already very prestigious, and kids are sometimes put into training at a young age because of the honor of having a lama in the family. 
 

So that was my first impression of Buddhism in Mongolia. The next night, I found out more about it. While talking (or listening, more) to a group of expats, I heard that it is well-known that monks in Ulaanbaatar are corrupt. That was most of what I heard, confirmed later by R, and I wasn’t sure exactly what “corrupt” means, but one guy (X) did tell this story:  He had been talking with a monk the day before, and the monk said that he was worried about going back to the monastery because he was in trouble. When X asked why he was in trouble, the monk said that earlier that week, he had taken his wife’s car for a drive, gotten too drunk, and crashed it into a bus. (I can’t remember if it’s a bus, a car, or a truck, but I remember it being a relatively big vehicle, so I’m going with bus.)

Fun facts: Monks here are not supposed to marry, they are not supposed to drink to excess, and they are definitely not supposed to drink to such excess that they crash their wife’s car into another vehicle. Twenty years in, and already Lamaism in Ulaanbaatar is going the way of the medieval papacy. This is not a new phenomenon, however. The giant Buddhist sculpture at Gandan Khiid was originally commissioned in 1911 by the Bogd Khan, the spiritual leader of Mongolia, in the hopes that such devotion might restore his eyesight. His eyesight was due to a “severe illness” according to the plaque in the temple, and further research reveals the nature of the “severe illness”: Syphilis. Earlier, in the nineteenth century, the monk and poet Danzan Ravjaa spoke out against the corruption and hypocrisy of his contemporary lamas. (It should be noted, however, that Danzan Ravjaa was a member of a monastic tradition that allowed drinking and marriage, and his criticisms were more against the lack of compassion and devotion he saw in other monks.) His most famous poem “Shame, Shame” has a line that certainly might apply to the lamas I saw at Gandan Khiid:

“And the monks who call meditation a hindrance, shame!”

The whole thing reminded me of medieval monasticism and priesthood in Europe, and how, though there were devout monks, there was also a lot of corruption and a lot of simply not being true to the philosophy they were meant to be following. I can imagine monks at Cluny reciting their psalms with exactly the expression of the bored lama, and little nobles dropped off at Monte Cassino gossiping with the same subdued zeal as these mini-lamas. Across cultures, though monasticism has high ideals and attempts to root itself (initially) in its belief system, as it becomes popular or prestigious, it descends into just another way to be, at best, an ordinary human being, mistakes and all, (eg drunk-driving and crashing), and at worst, corrupt and sinful and power-hungry (*coughcough BORGIA coughcough*).  

I don’t have a conclusion in particular here; I just want to point out that religion is religion, and religious institutions don’t seem to be any better or any worse depending on the societies (or faiths) from which they spring.

Mongolia is Relevant: The Dalai Lama

Perhaps you have heard of the Dalai Lama. He’s kind of a big deal. The word “lama” is the word for a high-ranking Buddhist monk; it’s Tibetan in origin, but it is used here (though technically incorrectly) interchangeably with "monk." So when you go to a monastery, you can refer to the men there (all in red, with orange sashes) as either monks or lamas. (In one amusing typo on a museum plaque, a great “llama” had bestowed a gift on the temple. I immediately thought of The Emperor’s New Groove.) 

So that’s what the “Lama” in Dalai Lama means—but what about “Dalai”? It’s not Tibetan, but is the Mongolian word for “Ocean.” In the sixteenth century, Altan Khan, a ruler in Mongolia, bestowed the title of “Dalai Lama” on Sonyam Gyatso, the first person to receive it. (Two other Dalai Lamas were retroactively declared, making Sonyam Gyatso the third official Dalai Lama.) Thus, the most powerful living man in Tibetan Buddhism owes his title to a Mongol Khan, centuries after Genghis’s reign.

The Tibetans tend to refute this legend, saying that “Dalai Lama” was a Mongolian translation of a term already in use in Tibet, and that “Gyatso” (Tibetan for “ocean”) was used in titles before the Mongols applied “Dalai” to “Lama.” However, Mongolia legendarily thinks of itself as an ocean, (because of its vastness), and Genghis Khan means “Ocean King.” Genghis took this title after he had united all the Mongol people and had finally become ruler of the whole “ocean,” that is, Mongolia. 

(Definitely Ocean.)

Tibet and Mongolia are both landlocked, but one has a literary tradition of using the “ocean” as a symbol of significance, and historical precedence in using “ocean” as a person’s title. So, whatever the direct linguistic lineage of “Dalai Lama” is, I’m thinking the influence was very much Mongol. So you’ve been mentioning a Mongolian tradition for years and haven’t known it.

 Rajat and the Dalai Lama are tight.