Description

The dissolution of Qing power in Khalkha Mongolia in 1911, the advent of a brief independent theocracy under the 8th Jebsundamba, and the rise to political power of a native socialist movement in 1921 were part of much broader shifts in the socio-political geography of Eurasia. As institutional and political structures everywhere adjusted, many new types of intellectual transfers and encounters began to occur which ruptured the horizon of traditional Buddhist scholastic endeavors. This paper examines the travels and correspondences of one Khalkha Gobi Buddhist polymath during the twilight of the Qing and the dawn of Mongolian socialism. It will present ways in which new religious, intellectual, political and historical ideas were synthesized with Buddhist models through encounters with figures such as the 13th Dalai Lama, Agvan Dorjiev, Zhamtsarano, Gustaf John Ramstedt, and a Christian missionary named Powell. Further, it will show how radical new ideas stemming from sources as diverse as French museum holdings, German Orientalist scholarship, Russian socialism, Chinese travel literature and Buryat secular education were digested by one of the last heirs of conservative Mongolian Buddhism just prior to the purges of 1937.

Matthew King is a 4th year PhD candidate in the Department for the Study of Religion. He has worked on the revival of Mongolian Buddhism in the post-socialist era, the Tibet-Mongol religious and cultural interface, and the medical content of the Gesar of Ling epic in Tibet, North China and Mongolia. His dissertation analyzes the radical new historiography of late Qing Mongolian Buddhists.