Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  As for the Buryats, they made up the majority of this region long before the Russians first heard of them in the early 1600s. Their ancestors had come up from the south, absorbing Uighurs, Altaians, Dzungarians, and Evenki along the way. They considered themselves to be Mongols, and indeed the birthplace of Genghis Khan was not far to the south, as the crow flies, while the Buryat language has much in common with the Mongolian spoken by the Khalkha of Mongolia proper. Like the Mongols, the Buryats were fine horsemen. They organized communal hunts. The rights to pastures were communally held, as in Mongolia today. Clans were ruled by powerful chiefs who made up a hereditary aristocracy. (Later, Russian Marxists dismissed the obligations of mutual assistance within the clan as merely a pretext for exploitation of the oppressed.) Buryat blacksmiths were masters at forging iron axes, knives, and harnesses, enjoying a nearly supernatural status in the community. The Buryats were more numerous and powerful than the other native peoples of Siberia. They had their own written language, and firearms. They even had vassals of their own, the Ket and the Nenet peoples, from whom they demanded military service and tribute that could be traded with China.

  But in the first half of the seventeenth century the Russians were pressing in, fired by rumors of silver mines in Buryat country. In subjugating Siberian peoples, the Russians’ usual routine was to capture native chiefs and then demand tribute payments for their safe return. With the Buryats, that did not work. The Buryat clans slipped away from their homes and united to form guerrilla armies that attacked the Russians, only to melt away into the forests afterward. And so it took the Russians decades to subdue the Buryats, in a brutal series of campaigns and counterraids that are loosely known as the Buryat Wars. The Buryats’ equestrian tactics and their deadly aim with bow and arrow made them a formidable enemy.

  These borderlands seethed with ferment at a unique moment in the history of inner Asia. The Russians pressed in from the north just as, in the Mongolian heartlands to the south, the old order was about to be turned upside down by the swift rise of the Manchus, born out of the Jurchen tribes who had briefly ruled China some centuries before. This new people were about to conquer and rule China again, as the Qing dynasty. As they were seizing the Chinese throne, in 1644, the Manchus were extending their influence in the Khalkha heartlands of Mongolia, upsetting the old clan order through intrigue and then war. Scenting opportunity out of the chaos, as the Manchus pressed into Mongolia from the east, the Oirat, or Dzungarian, Mongols pressed in from the west, under a charismatic and ruthless ruler, Galdan Khan. The chaos pushed refugees, brigands, deposed chiefs, and opportunists into Buryat country. Many of these assimilated with the Buryats living there. But it is reasonable to guess that the Buryats would never have forged themselves into a nation had not their sense of themselves been defined in part by this turbulence coursing in from north, south, and west.

  A nation, perhaps, but the Buryat people had for some time drifted apart into two distinct groups. The Buryats held Baikal to be sacred. Standing on Baikal’s shores, Buryats called the lake dalai, an ocean; and then Buddhists applied that term to their most revered person, the Dalai Lama. No spot was more sacred than Oikhon, the shaman island off the eastern shore. By the time the Russians showed up, some tribes had moved into the valley of the Angara running westward out of Baikal, near where Irkutsk now sits. From the Angara, Buryats spread out into neighboring valleys on the upper Lena that offered pasture for horses and cattle. These people became known as Western Buryats, living among Tungus who would occasionally emerge from the forests only to melt away again. After the Buryat Wars, Russians settled down among them, and these Western Buryats were the first to be altered by the Russian presence. The former nomads put down roots. As they struck their felt tents ever more infrequently, in time the ger morphed: first into a wooden hut, eight-sided with a pyramidal roof and a smoke hole in the center; then into a rectangular Russian izba. The Western Buryats sowed millet and buckwheat, and planted potatoes. Conversion to Orthodoxy was the next step.

  In contrast, the Russians had contact with the Eastern Buryats only later, in 1647, when the Cossack Ivan Pokhabov crossed Lake Baikal and camped by the Selenge River. Tsetsen Khan was the Selenge Buryats’ leader, and when taken to him, Pokhabov made the suggestion that he submit to Czar Alexis. A sense of exactly what the khan and his people thought of that came the following year, when the next Russian band to reach the Selenge was set upon and slaughtered.

  The Eastern Buryats had kept the old ways. They stayed in closer contact with Mongolian tribes than did the Western Buryats, and had a written body of epics and poetry. They migrated between pastures with horses and cattle, transporting their gers and all their worldly belongings on the backs of camels, animals the Western Buryats no longer used. They lived in a liminal space, between northern forests and Central Asian steppe, and they played a profitable role as intermediaries between the peoples of the two zones. They sent their own ironware, grain, and cattle north in return for forest furs, and exchanged these with Chinese traders for cloth, silver, and jewels.

  The official Marxist histories later claimed, oxymoronically, both that the Transbaikalia that the early Russians entered and annexed was an empty virgin land and that the locals were notable for “not standing in the way” of Russians who brought enlightenment in the form of higher culture and the farming know-how for turning steppe into fruitful ground. Both claims were absurd. The Eastern Buryats were greatly concerned about losing their tribute-paying subjects to the north, and with them the wherewithal for trade with China. And so their resistance was dogged. Wars multiplied in the borderlands. The Russian presence exacerbated interclan fighting, as “free” Buryat and local Tungus tribes attacked those that had become “friendly” to the Russians, in the sense that they had submitted and were paying yasak tribute.

  • • •

  The agitation in Buryatia was part of the last great swirlings of itinerant peoples that Russian and Manchu aggrandizement had set in motion. They came to a definitive end in 1727, when Russia and China signed the Treaty of Kyakhta: two great powers fixing once nomadic peoples in place. But while they lasted, the swirlings had a profound religious consequence. Turmoil in these borderlands increased contacts between Buryat and Khalkha Mongols. Indeed Khalkha refugees were the transmission mechanism for the remarkable spread of lamaist Buddhism into Russia—a message of peace borne on a turbulent stream.

  Buddhism first came to Mongolia from Tibet in the late 1500s, but only a century later did it begin to appeal to the Buryats, as they were coming under the Russian yoke. Pastoralist refugees fleeing into the borderlands from Kalkha Mongolia brought with them Buddharupas, small images of the Buddha. Monks came, too, though early accounts relate how at first they struggled to best the spirits of local mountains and streams and the Buryat shamans who channeled such forces. An early lama working among the Buryat was Sanjaya, a Mongol who in 1701 put up a ger-temple on the River Temnik, a Selenge tributary. In 1710 this evolved into a monastery, for which the Buryats used the term datsan, after the Tibetan dratsang, meaning a college that forms part of a larger monastic establishment. One hundred and fifty lamas were there, a third of them renegade Tibetans kicked out for fomenting, in the words of one historian of Buddhism, John Snelling, “some kind of hocus-pocus” at the great monastic center of Drepung outside Lhasa.

  Before long, Buryats themselves were playing their part in spreading Buddhism into Transbaikalia. In 1724 Damba Darzha Zayayev trekked with two companions to Mongolia’s holy tent city of Urga (modern-day Ulan Bator), where the spiritual head of the Gelugpa, or Yellow Hat, school of Buddhism saw the fourteen-year-old’s arrival as an ill omen and hurried him away. Zayayev continued on to Lhasa, where he spent seven years studying at the great monastic centers. Later, the Panchen Lama bestowed on him the conical hat of a pandit, a wise one. In Lhasa, he begged the 7th Dalai Lama to bless his notion of founding a monastery back in Buryatia. The Dalai Lama gave him a thangka,
gold embroidery on a black silk background, and ordered Zayayev to model the monastery on Mount Sumeru, the world mountain in Buddhist cosmology that is a quarter of a million miles tall and surrounded by four continents and a square, moatlike ocean.

  And so, in the early 1740s, Zayayev returned to Transbaikalia weighed down with sacred texts, images of the Buddha, and the plans for a monastery. What started as a ger-temple grew into the Tsongol datsan, a magnificent, elaborate complex in the Tibeto-Mongolian style. Peter Simon Pallas, the great German naturalist working for the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences, visited Tsongol in 1772 and found Russian carpenters at work on the seven constituent wooden temples, following the instructions of the senior lamas. (It would be nice to think they were the very same carpenters who shaped the whimsical fretwork of Irkutsk, some hundreds of miles to the west.) Other monks traveling from outlying parts of Buryatia to attend holy rites had pitched their gers in one corner.

  Zayayev sensed a rival. Lubsan Zhimba Akhaldayev had also gone away to learn the dharma and returned all fired up to build his own monastery. Zayayev declined his offer to become his disciple. Zayayev was clearly not enthusiastic about helping Akhaldayev found a new temple at a gorgeous spot, on the western shore of Gusinoye Ozero (Goose Lake). But Akhaldayev was confident. He had consulted a Buryat astrologer who had learned his arts in Tibet. This astrologer, Batur-un, insisted he had found the auspicious site for a datsan. He forced the issue by thrusting an arrow into the ground. From that point, the rivalry for top place among the Buryat devout only grew between Tsongol and Gusinoye.

  During the reign of Czarina Elizabeth, Zayayev was ruled to be the preeminent lama, at Tsongol. To Czar Peter III he handed letters from the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama and passed on news from Tibetan lands. And in 1764 Catherine the Great bestowed on Zayayev the title of “Chief Bandido Khambo Lama of all Buddhists dwelling on the southern shore of Lake Baikal.” It was a title worth striving for (bandido was the local iteration of the Sanskrit pandit, while khambo derived from the Tibetan khenbo, or abbot). After Zayayev’s death, Akhaldayev applied for the title. In Irkutsk, government officials were duly bribed, and the title was passed on. From that point on, Gusinoye datsan was the seat of the Buddhist church in Buryatia. It was also, for nineteenth-century Western travelers, an exotic tourist attraction for its “Sino-Tibetan style of architecture, its noisy lama orchestra, its altars crowded with images and sacred vessels, its incense burners, and most picturesque of all, the curious carriage on which the image of the Maitreya Buddha was paraded around the lamasery once a year.” At Goose Lake a century later, soon after the collapse of Communism promised, to some, a Buddhist revival, the historian Anna Reid describes a rather bathetic scene. She ran the head monk to ground in a cabin in the temple grounds. Above his bed were 3-D posters of kittens in a basket and a table laid with Ben Nevis whisky and tomatoes carved in the shape of flowers. The abbot himself was “hiding from his mother, girlfriend and infant sons behind a newspaper.”

  Buddhism came to a land that had forever hewn to animist beliefs. Rocks, trees, rivers: all were inhabited by spirits, and communication with the spirit world was mediated by shamans. Early accounts of Buddhism in Buryatia tell of powerful contests of magic in which lamas bested the great shamans, whose impotence was laid bare before a local people who till then had held their priests in awe. To many Buryats, Buddhism came as a relief: shamanism had its stern demands, including the propitiatory sacrifice of animals, sometimes in great numbers. Yet in practice, Buddhism did not chase out the old religion so much as absorb it. Old gods, as Anna Reid puts it, “shouldered their way into the Buddhist pantheon.” The old ovoos, shamanist cairns on every mountain pass and by every lake, fluttered now with Buddhist khadag. As a matter of policy the czars tolerated—even favored—this hybrid religion carrying a strongly pacifist message; and indeed by the nineteenth century, the great Buryat revolts in Transbaikalia were a remote memory.

  The early part of that century saw a great bout of datsan building, most notably at Tsugol, founded beside the Onon River in 1826. There, the first tsenyi, a school of advanced Buddhist dialectics, was begun two decades later. By then Transbaikalia had nineteen monasteries and 4,500 lamas. On the eve of the Russian Revolution seventy years later, the numbers had grown, to thirty-seven datsan and 16,000 monks.

  • • •

  A striking aspect of the story of Buddhism in Russia is how it, or rather esoteric versions of it, spread to a Western audience hungry for meaning and receptive to notions of a spiritual source emanating from some pure, central heart of Asia. St. Petersburg’s was a faddish aristocracy and already by the late nineteenth century it was turning to the cures of a Buryat practitioner of Tibetan medicine, Piotr Aleksandrovich Badmaev, godson to none other than Czar Alexander III. Badmaev was also a friend of Rasputin’s, and among his patients was Sergey Witte, builder of the Trans-Siberian Railway and fast becoming the most powerful statesman in the land. Badmaev took part in many court intrigues, and apart from medicinal skills, he endeared himself to the establishment by promoting an expansive definition of Russia’s empire, to include China, Korea, Mongolia, and Tibet. (Decades later, his son treated the Soviet elite. He appealed to the scientific materialists among the Soviet Union’s spies and cryptographers by suggesting that mantras might be used to read other people’s thoughts.)

  It was via a Buryat Buddhist visionary that the notions of a Shambhala, a visionary pure land, entered the Western imagination. Agvan Lobsan Dorzhiev had traveled widely as a young man, including to Tibet, where he had proved a brilliant student of Buddhism and, once he had become a master of philosophy, was made tutor to the 13th Dalai Lama, then a boy. In Russia Dorzhiev also won the trust of Czar Nicholas II and became his special adviser on Tibetan affairs. The British claimed he was a Russian spy; at any rate, when a British expeditionary force thrust into Tibet in 1904, Dorzhiev was instrumental in persuading the Dalai Lama to flee to Urga. Five years later he proposed to the czar that a Kalachakra temple of tantric Buddhism be erected in St. Petersburg. Despite a level of Christian hysteria, a temple was duly built and a portrait of the czar placed in it during the opening ceremony—just before the February Revolution.

  While he was in Tibet, Dorzhiev received from the Panchen Lama, the second-highest lama of the Yellow Hat sect, a number of gifts that included golden figurines, secret teachings, and, above all, oral readings of the “Prayer of Shambhala.” Tibetan legend has it that somewhere far to the north lies a millennial kingdom protected by snow mountains as high as the heavens and as sharp as a tiger’s teeth. The kingdom is in the shape of a lotus, with eight regions like petals, each separated by internal mountain ranges radiating out. It is a land of lakes, groves, and meadows, and in the capital at its heart, Kalapa, the palaces are of gold, turquoise, and emeralds—a place so lustrous that night cannot be told from day. Instead of ceilings are crystal spheres through which you gaze at the gods, and on a lake in a pleasure grove south of Kalapa you may glimpse mortals and gods together gliding about in boats. Those lucky enough to live in this land lead charmed lives, certain of Buddhist enlightenment.

  Visions of Shambhala became central to Dorzhiev’s spiritual quest. They also appealed to an “out of Asia” Orientalism among Western romantics and early-day dharma bums. Among the first to pick up on the idea was Madame Helena Blavatsky, fabulist, paranormal trickster, and founder of the Theosophical Society, a proto–New Age movement that in its time drew a tremendous number of followers in the United States and Europe, among them Leo Tolstoy. She certainly never went to Tibet. Yet she claimed to have returned from there with the knowledge of a Great White Brotherhood inhabiting a high Himalayan kingdom. There, a superior wisdom was evolving (the social Darwinism then in vogue seems to have influenced her pronouncements). The brotherhood was guiding humanity away from materialism toward a higher plane. Eventually a new superior race would replace the world’s currently imperfect humans. In her day, Blavatsky was hig
hly influential. Later, her kind of nonsense also impressed some Nazis. Heinrich Himmler, for one, believed that a Nordic race existed in “mystic Tibet,” waiting for liberation by the Germans from Chinese and English oppression. With sponsors like Himmler, this aspect of the Buddhist spiritual quest fell out of favor among Western dharma bums after the Second World War.

  As it happens, bliss and cornucopia are only one part of the Shambhala myth. The other part is inseparable and altogether darker, yet it goes largely unremarked in modern Buddhist exegesis. At one point in the myth, the prediction is made that barbarian demons will amass from the west and play untold havoc with the Buddhist faithful. Known as mlecca in Sanskrit, or lolo in Tibetan, the demons will usher in suffering and chaos and a long Age of Disputes in which faith will die out. Only Shambhala will guard the true faith and eventually restore it, putting an end to this terrible age. Delivering the Buddhist faithful from evil will be Shambhala’s last king, Rigden Djapo, the Fierce Turner of the Wheel. In a trance, he will anticipate the impending apocalypse. Gathering a huge army, he will wage against the barbarians a war without mercy. Rigden Djapo will defeat the armies of the lolo, an early Panchen Lama foretold, with the aid of “four millions of mad elephants.”

  Moderns fans of the Shambhala myth ignore the apocalyptic, militarist half of Shambhala’s narrative diptych, or they downplay it as something metaphorical, part of an inner spiritual struggle to conquer ignorance. And perhaps that is not surprising, even if it is disingenuous. The legend grew up in the early Middle Ages, in eastern Afghanistan and northern India. It was a time when a long, peaceful coexistence among Buddhists, Hindus, and early Muslim settlers came to an end. The rise of the Abbasid Caliphate spread intolerance; embracing Sunni Islam, the Abbasids and their followers drove out the Buddhists. And so the apocalyptic part of the Shambhala legend appears to be wish fulfillment for revenge, a Third World War: as well as mad elephants, the legend envisages machines of mass destruction in the shape of huge wheels; a contraption firing multiple arrows like an early version of a machine gun; and a prototype bomber pouring napalm on the barbarians. On occasion the provenance of these mlecca is explicit: they are the “people of Mecca.” To embrace the apocalypse myth today would be to embrace the idea of religious war.