Religious Bodies Politic

Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism

Anya Bernstein

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226072692
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Religious Bodies Politic examines the complex relationship between transnational religion and politics through the lens of one cosmopolitan community in Siberia: Buryats, who live in a semiautonomous republic within Russia with a large Buddhist population. Looking at religious transformation among Buryats across changing political economies, Anya Bernstein argues that under conditions of rapid social change—such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union—Buryats have used Buddhist "body politics" to articulate their relationship not only with the Russian state, but also with the larger Buddhist world. During these periods, Bernstein shows, certain people and their bodies became key sites through which Buryats conformed to and challenged Russian political rule. She presents particular cases of these emblematic bodies—dead bodies of famous monks, temporary bodies of reincarnated lamas, ascetic and celibate bodies of Buddhist monastics, and dismembered bodies of lay disciples given as imaginary gifts to spirits—to investigate the specific ways in which religion and politics have intersected. Contributing to the growing literature on postsocialism and studies of sovereignty that focus on the body, Religious Bodies Politic is a fascinating illustration of how this community employed Buddhism to adapt to key moments of political change.

ONE

Pilgrims, Fieldworkers, and Secret Agents: Buryat Buddhologists and a Eurasian Imaginary

Since the end of the Soviet Union, Buryats have been renewing their traditional Buddhist faith while rebuilding transnational, post-Soviet ties across northern and southern Asia. In contrast to many scholars, who have seen Buryats purely as “native,” “indigenous,” or even a “fourth world” people, many Buryats have long viewed themselves as cosmopolitans, regarding the long history of Buryat Buddhist pilgrimages to Mongolia and Tibet as a prominent marker of southern Siberia’s transnational history and identity. Today, Buryats make competing statements about a Eurasian future. Some view themselves as a truly cosmopolitan people spanning three major Eurasian states (Russia, Mongolia, and China) and extending their transnational religious practices into two more (Tibet and India); others express a more restricted understanding of their homeland within the Russian Federation.

From its early beginnings as the brainchild of Russian émigré intellectuals, to Lev Gumilev’s poetic theories of “passionarity” (Rus. passionarnost’), to its contemporary political incarnations in Russia and the post-Soviet states, “Eurasia” is a shape-shifting notion today. At first sight, the word “Eurasia” refers to a geographic location, encompassing Europe and Asia. However, the complex of ideas to which it refers has its roots in an early twentieth-century quest to find Russia’s unique character among the world’s peoples, a quest that often incorporated a preoccupation with Russia’s messianic role in world history. Politically speaking, in contemporary Russia “Eurasian” generally means “anti-Western,” in Kazakhstan and Tatarstan it means “Westernfriendly,” and in Turkey it can mean either (Kotkin 2007: 497).

However, beyond its narrow political meanings, “Eurasia” has also been employed as an intellectual paradigm to encourage historical research beyond the notion of nation-state. In this chapter, I join with Mark Von Hagen and others by using the term “Eurasia” not in the sense of twentieth-century philosophical and contemporary political movements, but as a tool to analyze powerful and emergent geoimaginary formations, such as those now being asserted in and beyond Buryatia (Grant and Yalçin-Heckmann 2007; Ram 2001; Von Hagen 2004). This kind of approach shares the broad interest in new “Eurasianist” paradigms across the former Soviet Union but locates this issue foremost in arenas of contemporary religious practice. The goal is not only to uncover how varied communities of Buryats have understood their place vis-à-vis the imperial center, but also to describe the profound efforts to recenter Eurasian spaces at the end of the Soviet era.

Buryats have visited Tibet not only as modern pilgrims but also as some of the earliest scholars, like G. Ts. Tsybikov and B. B. Baradiin, whose acclaimed early twentieth-century monographs firmly linked Buryatia to the Tibetan religious universe. In postsocialist Buryatia, however, debates regarding the place of Tibet in the national imaginary have taken a different turn. Should Buryat Buddhism be understood as adhering to a “Tibetan” model, one most recently advanced through pilgrimages by monks and well-funded laypeople to Tibetan monasteries in India? Or, as nationalists argue, should it downplay its international ties to assert itself as a truly independent “Buryat” religion? Over the last decade, the official head of Buryat Buddhists, Khambo Lama Damba Aiusheev, has repeatedly expressed his dislike for the proliferation of Tibetan and other Asian Buddhist “missionaries” in the republic, arguing that Buryat Buddhism is fully autocephalous. That is to say, it should be allowed to develop independently of the influence of other traditions (Corwin 1999; Filatov 2007).¹ This is also Moscow’s view on the matter, which has strongly discouraged Buryats’ international connections, with Putin’s 2000 National Security Policy calling for “counteracting the negative influence of foreign religious organizations and missions” (“O kontseptsii natsional’noi bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii” 2000).²

In contrast, other major Buddhist leaders have expressed incredulity toward the legitimacy of such notions as independent “Buryat Buddhism” or even “Mongolian Buddhism,” considering both traditions indivisible from larger transnational Tibetan Buddhism with the Dalai Lama as its only leader. Asked if the notion of “Buryat Buddhism” has a right to exist, a leader of the opposition to the current Buddhist leadership, the ex-Khambo Lama Choi-Dorzhi Budaev, expressed his opinion as follows:

Journalist: In your opinion, does the notion of “Buryat Buddhism” have the right to exist?

Ex-Khambo Lama Budaev: What are you talking about! This is not a very intelligent claim. . . . The global Buddhist community does not even grant Mongolian Buddhism such a status, and Mongols have an ancient Buddhist history. If we look into history, we will see that Tibetan lamas were always helping in the development of Buddhism here in Buryatia. Even the first Khambo Lama, Zaiaev, studied in Tibetan monasteries. But some of us have forgotten about this, and now we go as far as promoting some “Buryat Buddhism.” In older times, even the greatest of lamas could not take the liberty of making such claims. National pride is good, but not when unfounded, and by no means when it overlaps with religious issues. (Zhironkina 2006)³

In order to understand the new cultural and political orientations in a Eurasia present and future, marked by Buddhist transnationalism, one must explore the earlier pathways that lie beneath the surface of the current debates. This chapter examines the prerevolutionary history of Buryats’ engagement with greater Eurasia, drawing on the legacies of the long-underappreciated Russian Buddhological school and exploring the intellectual and political context of its emergence in the late nineteenth century. An exploration of the role of Russian Orientalists and political figures such as V. P. Vasil’ev and Prince E. E. Ukhtomskii, and a reading of the fieldwork of the first Russian-trained indigenous Buryat Buddhologists, G. Ts. Tsybikov and B. B. Baradiin, demonstrates that it was a tradition born out of conflicting sentiments toward Russia’s own cosmopolitanism, statehood, and imperial destiny in Asia, as well as from representations of indigenous peoples of southern Siberia. This chapter concludes with an outline of the emergent forms of what I call “Asian Eurasianism,” linking it to contemporary cultural debates in Buryatia, which are crucial for understanding the ways in which many non-Russians position themselves on the vast Eurasian continent.

Russian Orientalism and Ideologies of Empire

Edward Said’s foundational work once defined Orientalism as a particular set of cultural assumptions about the “Orient” adopted by the “West,” necessarily linked to an imperialist agenda (Said 1991). Scholars of other Orientalisms have produced extensive critiques of the universality of his thesis: it has been argued that German Indology was not linked to immediate imperialist interests while Japan was both a subject and an object of Orientalism without ever being colonized (Minear 1998; Pollock 1993).⁴

Scholars of Russia have often cited the case of Russian “Asianism”—an imperial ideology that privileged Russia’s Asiatic identity as opposed to its European one—as a peculiar kind of identification, whereby the “Orient” was both of the empire and foreign to it (Bassin 1999; Schimmelpenninck van der Oye 2001, 2010; Tolz 2011). Asianism, which exerted a significant influence on Russian intellectual, artistic, and political circles at the turn of the twentieth century, and its later offshoot, Eurasianism, proposed an alternative solution to the endless debates between Slavophiles and Westernizers by positing an inherent spiritual, geographic, racial, and political affinity of Russia with Asia.⁵

Buddhism, as an object of Western knowledge and scholarship, came into focus during the latter period of the so-called Oriental Renaissance, a European “discovery” and subsequent engagement and fascination with Oriental cultures and civilizations, comparable in its cultural impact to the rediscovery of ancient Greek texts in the fifteenth century (Schwab 1984). Buddhology or Buddhist studies originated as an offshoot of Indology, Sinology, philology, and archaeology in the early nineteenth century and, similarly to earlier forms of Orientalism, was inextricably linked to imperialist ideologies and the colonial context (Lopez 1995a). However, as Donald Lopez rightly notes, the “direct political role that Said describes for Orientalism . . . is not immediately evident in the case of Buddhist Studies,” since unlike the Islamic world, which inspired fear and fascination due to its very proximity to Europe, the Buddhist world was far away and presented no such threat. Instead, Buddhologists’ contribution to Orientalism was in the creation of the reified object called “Buddhism” (Lopez 1995c: 11–12). In certain strands of European Buddhology based on Indological scholarship, Buddhism—which had effectively disappeared from India by the time of the British rule—was safely considered a rational religion, often opposed to “idolatrous” Hinduism, with Buddha often portrayed as “an Indian version of Martin Luther,” a social and progressive reformer struggling to cleanse the corrupted religion of ritualism and superstition (King 1999: 145).⁶

Unlike Europe, the Russian empire did not view the Buddhist world as an abstraction. By the mid-nineteenth century, more than half of Russia was Asia, with China arguably being the most important Asian neighbor and half a million Mongol subjects inhabiting the empire’s borderlands. As early as between 1768 and 1774, Peter Simon Pallas, a German scholar invited to teach at the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg by Catherine the Great, conducted several expeditions in the Mongol regions of Russia. His remarkable observations of contemporary Buddhist practice were translated into English in a three-volume work entitled The Habitable World Described (Trusler 1788). Subsequently, when Buddhist studies appeared as an academic discipline in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century, it was not surprising that the first Russian Orientalists to engage in the study of Buddhism included Sinologist V. P. Vasil’ev and Mongolist O. M. Kovalevskii, as well as the German member of the Academy of Sciences Mongolist and Tibetologist Ia. I. Schmidt. The Academy of Sciences became a very important venue for the publication of early Buddhological scholarship.

Due to the significant presence of ethnic Buddhist subjects within the empire, Russia found itself in a unique position for the study of Buddhism. Stimulated by a growing rivalry with Great Britain for influence in Inner Asia, a powerful academic tradition of Orientalist Buddhist studies, represented by such scholars as F. I. Stcherbatsky, E. Obermiller, O. O. Rosenberg, I. P. Minaev, and S. F. Ol’denburg, had already emerged by the mid-nineteenth century. Like its European counterparts, early Russian Buddhology was mostly text oriented. As Russian scholars accumulated more knowledge about its subject populations, by the late nineteenth century the rumors that Buryats and Kalmyks were in regular contact with “mysterious” and “remote” Tibet generated enormous academic interest. Russian Buddhologists thus revolutionized the discipline in the sense that they turned their attention to the form of Buddhism known to them as “Lamaism,” practiced in several regions of the Russian empire, including those inhabited by Kalmyks and Buryats.⁷

Russian Tibetology, as a late nineteenth-century branch of Russian Orientalism, is especially interesting in this regard, as it privileged the training of native scholars and fieldwork along with the study of texts. Due to Russia’s own strong ethnographic situation, a certain line of Russian Buddhologists was among the first to use the classical methods of ethnographic field research, much earlier than more famous practitioners like Franz Boas or Bronisław Malinowski. By using native scholars as researchers of their own traditions, Russian Buddhology established its own kind of ethnographic authority, unprecedented in previous academic research.

Since Tibet was notoriously inaccessible, having sealed its borders to all foreigners with the exception of Asian Buddhist pilgrims in 1792, Russian Buddhologists turned their attention to Russia’s own Mongol adherents of Tibetan Buddhism and soon discovered that they had regular relations with Tibet. Although Buryat and Kalmyk Buddhists, as Russian subjects, were also banned from entering Tibet, some pilgrims managed to enter Tibet posing as Khalkha Mongols. The rumors about Buryats crossing the border into Tibet were all the more surprising since, shortly after the establishment of Buddhism in Buryatia in the early eighteenth century, Count Raguzinskii’s 1728 decree on border crossing had banned foreign lamas from crossing into the Buryat communities on the Russian side and restricted Buryats from excessive foreign travel. By declaring that Mongol lamas who came into Russia with Khalkha noblemen could stay, but that no new lamas from Mongolia or Tibet could enter the country, Raguzinskii made the first attempt to separate Buryats from the greater Tibetan Buddhist world, a trend that was subsequently pursued throughout the next two centuries.⁸ Despite these efforts, the borders remained extremely porous through the 1920s, with Tibetan and Mongolian lamas entering all areas with relative ease and numerous Buryat pilgrims undertaking trips to Tibet and Mongolia.

By the time Russian scholars became interested in studying Tibetan Buddhism, it was already well established among Transbaikal Buryats, providing these academics with unprecedented access to a living Buddhist tradition. In a little more than one hundred years, the number of monasteries grew from a few yurt-temples to thiry-four monasteries, and the number of lamas grew from 150 in 1712 to 4,509 in 1846 (and 15,000 in 1910) (Rupen 1964: 37). This expansion became a serious concern for the tsarist administration, especially in light of the new ideology that attempted to cement the role of the Russian Orthodoxy in the empire (see the introduction). Thus, the study of Buddhists within the empire began to acquire immediate political relevance.

“If we were more familiar with the religion of our alien (Rus. inorodnye) subjects, we could have avoided the many difficulties we have encountered,” wrote Russian Orientalist V. P. Vasil’ev on the subject of the rapid spread of Buddhism in Siberia (Vasil’ev 1873: 3). He also wrote the following in his review of the ground-breaking book on Buddhist monasteries by another famous Orientalist, A. M. Pozdneev, an expert on the Mongolian world, published in the Journal of the Ministry of Public Education in 1888:

Although we, in Russia, do not have special Buddhist provinces, given our confusion between cosmopolitanism and statehood, the Buddhist question becomes even more urgent. Influenced by cosmopolitanism and not knowing how to overcome even the mere shamanism of the Chuvash, Tungus, and other inorodtsy, we are even more defeated when it comes to Lamaism. . . . Before the very eyes of our administration, our Buryats, who were still shamanists when they became our subjects, came over, as if in silent protest against their masters, to the religion professed by their fellow tribesmen in a neighboring country, subject to a foreign authority. Before our eyes, Buryats started to influence our Kalmyks, who previously lived in isolation. . . . Now they send them huge bundles of sacred books. While we were convinced that with one more generation, the Kalmyks would turn into Russians, instead they (who, in the beginning of this century, finally dropped their braids and Mongolian costume) have turned even further away from us. (Vasil’ev 1888: 422–423)

For Vasil’ev, full citizenship is inextricably related to Russification, which involves both conversion of “aliens” (Rus. inorodtsy) and the denunciation of specific “alien” cultural customs (such as, in this case, braids and Mongolian dress). To stop being an inorodets (literally “person of a different kin,” a foreigner), one had to convert, which would enable one to start paying taxes instead of tribute (Rus. iasak) and thus acquire full rights of citizenship and participation in Russian society. The “defeat” refers to the failure to convert Siberian peoples, often bemoaned in the nineteenth century.

Buryats presented a special case, because, as Vasil’ev notes, Russians came to the Transbaikal at the same time that Buddhism was beginning to penetrate these lands. Instead of converting them, the Russian government concentrated on Irkutsk Buryats, being very careful with those of the Transbaikal due to the strategic border area. Until 1841, the affairs of Lamaist Buryats were under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; later they were transferred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. While the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was mostly concerned with the subordination of the Lamaist church to the tsarist government (to prevent separate relations with Mongolia), the Ministry of Internal Affairs concentrated on subordinating Buryat clergy to the local administration. Before the mid-nineteenth century, the government began to regret its policies, which included helping lamas fight shamanism with the help of local police. They issued a number of orders to protect shamanism, viewing it as an ideology that would not be able to oppose Russification as strongly as Lamaism (Gerasimova 1957: 31–32).

Thus, tsarist policies encouraged the flourishing of Buryat Buddhism until the mid-nineteenth century, when the government started to reverse its policies after repeated complaints from the synod and the Orthodox mission, which contended that missionary activity was being completely undermined by the tsarist encouragement of Buddhism. This resulted in the important 1853 “Statute on Lamaist Clergy in Eastern Siberia,” which directly subordinated all Buryat religious affairs, from the elections of the Khambo Lama to the administration of monasteries, to the state (Gerasimova 1957: 41).

In the passage above, Vasil’ev also exhibits the classical colonial view that ethnographic knowledge could be used to rule colonial subjects more efficiently. Writing about colonial ethnography in India, Nicholas Dirks noted that “by the late nineteenth century, ethnological knowledge became privileged more than any other form of imp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Transliteration
• Chronology of Events
• Introduction
• 1. Pilgrims, Fieldworkers, and Secret Agents: Buryat Buddhologists and a Eurasian Imaginary
• 2. Sovereign Bodies: Death, Reincarnation, and Border Crossings in the Transnational Terrain
• 3. The Post-Soviet Treasure Hunt: New Sacred Histories and Geographies
• 4. Disciplining the Monastic Body: Buryat Monks and Nuns
• 5. The Body as Gift: Gender, the Dead, and Exchange in the Chöd Ritual Economy
• 6. Buddhism after Socialism: Money and Morality in the World of Saṃsāra
• Epilogue: Bodies, Gifts, and Sovereignty
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index