Thursday, November 25th, 2010 Temporalities in the Contemporary Revivalism of Mongolian Buddhism

Description

This paper explores the strategies of a Mongolian Buddhist monastery to revive their community within the contentious ideological landscape of post-socialist Mongolia. Delgeruunchoira khiid was once a thriving monastic complex in the central region of the Gobi Desert (Dungov aimag). In 1937 as part of the socialist persecution of Buddhism, the entire complex was destroyed and the 800 monks killed, imprisoned or disrobed. The eclectic and famous abbot Zawa Damdin Lam (1867-1937) also died that same year. Nearly seventy years later, a newly identified incarnation (khubilgan) of Zawa Damdin Lam re-founded the Gobi monastery of his predecessor, quickly attracting young monks, lay disciples and funding. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted intermittently over the past seven years, this paper surveys the successful re-founding of this community by highlighting two interwoven instances of co-option and re-deployment. The first concerns the construction of a temporal framework articulating traditional Mongol-Tibetan historiographic tropes of pre-prophesized Buddhist expansionism and the inextricable link of Mongol ethnicity and the Buddhist faith. This appeal to the legitimizing force of Buddhist time and chronology is offset by the de-temporalization of the symbolic figure of Zawa Damdin Lam himself. As an allegory of pre-socialist Mongolian culture, he is now localized and available in the person of the contemporary incarnation, who performs a continuum of Mongolian Buddhism resilient to, and literally prior to, the socialist purges and the upheavals of the new market economy. I reflect upon how this notion of time challenges a straightforward qualitative analysis of the appropriation by this community of the tripartite development rhetoric of free market economics, Christian missionizing and secularization; all pervasive foreign discourses aimed at ‘developing’ the Mongols. I argue that it is largely through the construction of a dynamic and convincing Buddhist time, representative of exchanges of Buddhist bodies, cultural knowledge and religiosity, that this one community has flourished where others have floundered in post-socialist Mongolia.

Matthew King is a third year doctoral student in Religious Studies. His research focuses on the form and content of early-modern Mongolian Buddhist historiography, and the Tibet-Mongol cultural interface more broadly. He has been on several research trips to Mongolian and Tibetan cultural areas, and while his dissertation project is primarily a historical project, he continues to conduct a long term study on the post-socialist revivalist project of one Mongolian monastic community, which will form the basis of this presentation.