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.