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Figure 2.2. A shrine devoted to Maitreya, the Buddha of the new era, Mongolia, 1913.
won back his kingdom through a horse race, defeated demons in Tibet, and crushed barbarians who preyed on Mongolia, even chasing them down in faraway Persia. Indigenous bards who recounted his glorious deeds added their own details to the plot. Some storytellers merged the character of Geser with the image of the Shambhala king who was 26
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expected to resurface from the north and deliver people from the demonic forces. 8
h e most ancient prophecy, predating Shambhala and Geser, was about Maitreya (called Maidari by Mongols), the Buddha of compassion and of a new age, who was commemorated in numerous statues and temples. Maitreya is the most worshipped Buddha besides Gautama, the Buddha proper and founder of the faith. 9 Maitreya, who would be the i t h and the last Buddha, was expected to come in thirty thousand years at er the faith deteriorated and the world underwent a terrible war, natural calamities, and epidemics. Buddhists believed that at er this era of darkness Maitreya would descend upon the earth and bring about the golden age of prosperity and spiritual bliss.
Many minor individual prophecies were issued by the Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama, the Bogdo-gegen, and monastery oracles. At the turn of the 1900s, these public messages were increasingly i lled with anti-Chinese sentiments. Addressing his fellow Mongols, the Bogdo-gegen predicted, “h ere will be an unimaginable amount of suf ering.
Black-headed Chinese become many; they do not love the religion of Buddha and they have reached the extremes of disorder, so that it is impossible to accept the well-established law of predecessors as an example and to follow the order of Heaven.” He also instructed the faithful not to socialize with the Chinese ini dels or use their products and clothing, and even openly called the Mongols to revolt. 10
Oirot/Amursana Prophecy in the Altai and Western Mongolia Simultaneously, spiritual resistance was brewing in the Altai and western Mongolia where nomads shared the popular Oirot/Amursana prophecy, no less powerful and no less explosive than Shambhala. Around the 1890s, people began to spread word from camp to camp about the miraculous resurrection of a glorious prince who had i nally come to redeem them from oppression. h e Mongols and some Altaians called him Amursana. At the same time, many nomads in the Altai argued 27
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that his real name was Oirot and that Amursana was his chief lieutenant. Whatever his name, this redeemer was said to have returned at er hiding in a northern country for 120 years, and now, in charge of a mighty army, he would take revenge on enemies and bring together his Oirot people. Who were the enemies? In the Altai, they were the l oods of Russian settlers who squeezed native shepherds from their alpine pastures; in western Mongolia, they were the Chinese merchants and bureaucrats who came to control the lives of nomads.
Both Oirot and Amursana were personii cations of the glorious Oirot confederation (named at er the ruling Oirot clan), which in the 1600s united Turkic- and Mongol-speaking nomads of western China, western Mongolia and the Altai. Assertive Oirot princes embraced Tibetan Buddhism and frequently acted as patrons of Dalai Lamas; they also constantly challenged the Chinese Empire. Eventually the Manchu Dynasty became fed up with these warlike nomads and unleashed genocidal warfare against them, slaughtering all Oirot men, women, and children.
h e few who survived scattered, hiding in the mountains, deserts and taiga forests, and later giving rise to the Altaians, Kalmyk, Tuvans, and western Mongols. h e nomadic empire was gone, but its glory became imprinted in folk memory in the form of legends about Amursana and Oirot, who were expected to resurrect and save the nomads from alien domination. In fact, these legends became so popular that one of the refugee groups that escaped to the Altai Mountains, in literature usually called the Altaians, began to refer to themselves as the people of Oirot or simply the Oirot.
h e real Prince Amursana (1722–57) was the last Oirot prince and in fact was very arrogant and opportunistic. At one point, he served the Chinese, but then fell out of favor and turned against them. Folk memory chose this second “noble” part of his life for celebration and glorii cation. Fighting a losing battle against his former masters, Amursana escaped to Russia, where he soon caught a plague and died in Siberia. h is sudden disappearance of the prince in the faraway northern country later sparked legends about his subsequent return to his former 28
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subjects to deliver them from the Chinese and the Russians. Eventually, lamas declared the popular hero a manifestation of the menacing Mahakala, protector of the Buddhist faith. h e lingering prophecy agitated nomads to such an extent that in the 1890s they asked a Russian geographer-explorer visiting in western Mongolia if he was a vanguard of the Amursana army they expected to ascend from a northern country to liberate them from the Chinese. 11
h ere were many versions of the Oirot/Amursana legend. One of them was recorded by the musicologist Andrei Anokhin in 1919: Many years ago, Prince Oirot ruled the Altai. Oirot defended everybody, and there were neither poor nor discontented people in his domain. h en the Oirot people became surrounded by enemies who destroyed this idyllic life (a clear reference to the genocide of the Oirot confederation by the Chinese). Unable to protect his own people, Oirot retreated to Russia and married a maiden princess—an allusion to the Russian empress Elizabeth who accepted several runaway Oirot clans under her wing as her subjects. Before his departure, Oirot did two things: he cut his horse’s tail to the root, and he also cut a larch tree down to the level of his stirrups. h en the prince declared that he would come back to the Altai only when his horse’s tail grew again and the larch tree grew so big that it would cover a whole army with its leaves. Another important element of this tale was Oirot’s statement that the news about his return would be announced by a twelve-year-old girl and marked by the shit -
ing of a glacier on the highest Altai mountain. Similar legends, only about Amursana, circulated in western Mongolia.
In the Altai, the news that Oirot was i nally coming was revealed in 1904 by Chet Chelpan, a humble shepherd who frequented Mongolia, and Chugul Sorokova, his twelve-year-old adopted daughter. Both claimed to have seen the messenger of the legendary prince, who coni ded to them that Oirot would soon drive all Russians from the Altai and restore the old way of life. Chet Chelpan also prophesied that Oirot would be sent by Burkhan (the image of Buddha), which Chet considered the Spirit of Altai and the Oirot nation. In the meantime, as the 29
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good shepherd instructed his l ock, the Oirot people were to reject all contacts with the Russians, destroy Russian money, and stop using Russian tools. h is was the birth of the Ak-Jang (white or pure faith), an Altaian version of Tibetan Buddhism that drew on bits and pieces of Buddha’s teaching, indigenous shamanism, epic tales, and memories of the Oirot confederation. Behind Chet and his daughter stood a group of indigenous activists headed by Tery Akemchi (White Healer), who had apprenticed in Buddhist monasteries in Mongolia where they picked up elements of Buddhism and brought them to the Altai.
h e Oirot/Amursana prophecy was further bolstered in 1911 when Ja-Lama (1860–1923), a Russian Kalmyk immortalized in Ferdinand Ossendowski’s esoteric bestseller Beasts, Men and Gods, 12 showed up in western Mongolia, declared himself the reincarnation of Amursana, and led a local liberation movement against the Chinese. When news about the reincarnated Amursana reached the Altai, the prophecy was already adjusted to local needs and acquired an anti-Russian spin. h e Altai nomads expected Amursana to arrive accompanied by seventeen reincarnated lamas, seven hundred dogs, and seven thousand mighty warriors who would crush the Russians.
h e legends about Oirot/Amursana, which were familiar to all people of the Altai and western Mongolia, helped override clan and territorial dif erences and merge the nomads into nationalities. h e good shepherd Chet Chelpan asked his l ock to forget all quarrels and live
“like children of one father” and “like the herd headed by one stallion.”
Ja-Lama was even more explicit, telling his nomadic warriors that they were i ghting and dying for Mongolia. Later, in eastern Mongolia, the Shambhala prophecy served the same purpose: to unite the Mongols against the Chinese. In their song about northern Shambhala, Red Mongol soldiers sang that they would be happy to die i ghting against the Chinese ini dels and to be reborn in the Shambhala kingdom.
Tibet was a more complicated case. By the early twentieth century, the Forbidden Kingdom was already a united country ruled by the thirteenth Dalai Lama (1875–1933), who was working hard to make his 30
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Figure 2.3. h e thirteenth Dalai Lama, supreme leader of Tibet, 1920s.
domain into a sovereign nation. So here, instead of bringing the Tibetans together, the Shambhala prophecy and the Panchen Lama, who stood in its shadow and challenged Lhasa, disrupted nation building.
When Empires Collapse:
Mongolia, Altai, Tibet, and the Panchen Lama In 1911, the Chinese Empire collapsed. Six years later, the same fate befell the Russian Empire. h e chaos, civil wars, violence, and banditry that followed the demise of these two giants activated Mongol-Tibetan 31
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prophecies that helped people get through tough times. Common shepherds, princes, lamas, warlords, and even several European adventurers were all eager to tap into such redeeming legends as Shambhala, Maitreya, Amursana, and Oirot. Much of this prophetic baggage served the goals of nationalism. Amid the anarchy and chaos that reigned over northern Eurasia in the 1920s, the Kalmyk, Buryat, Oirot, Mongols, Tuvans, and Tibetans began to take power in their own hands and shape themselves into nationalities and nations. Moreover, driven by nationalist dreams, a few assertive leaders promoted grand political schemes that went beyond the existing cultural and geographical boundaries. Brought into the spotlight by a whirlwind of revolutionary changes, some of these “redeemers” peddled projects that would bring all Turkic-speaking nomads together into one large state. Others toyed with the idea of reviving the seventeenth-century Oirot confederation.
Some dreamers wanted to build up a pan-Mongol state that would unite people of the “Mongol stock” in Siberia, Mongolia, and Manchuria. Finally, several prophets worked to gather all Tibetan Buddhist people into a large pan-Buddhist theocracy.
In 1912, a year at er the Chinese revolution put an end to the Manchu Empire, the people of northern (Outer) Mongolia, backed up by Russia, drove the Chinese out of the country and made the Bogdo-gegen (head of Mongol Buddhists) the supreme ruler of their new independent theocracy. In 1918, when the Russian Empire was gone and amid the rag-ing Civil War, the Cossack platoon leader Grigory Semenov, the Buryat intellectual Elbek-Dorji Rinchino, and a dozen of his friends educated at Russian universities, gathered in the Siberian town of Chita and announced they had created a great pan-Mongol nation. To the dismay of Mongol leaders who did not want to be part of this, the adventurous gang of dreamers was all set to travel to the Paris peace conference to seek recognition from the great powers as an independent nation. h e whole scheme suddenly collapsed when Japan, which originally backed the project, abruptly changed its mind. With no support from below, the rascals who peddled the “great Mongol nation” scattered; half of 32
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them were murdered by a Chinese warlord in Manchuria who lured them to an “oi cial banquet” and then executed them for separatism.
h e same year in the Altai, the indigenous landscape painter and folklore collector Grigory Gurkin, along with his friend Russian anthropologist Vasilii Anuchin, launched the Karakorum state (a reference to the legendary capital of the Genghis Khan’s empire). Riding the popular Oirot prophecy, they declared an autonomy of the Mountain Altai and began to contemplate a “Republic of the Oirot,” which was to revive the seventeenth-century Oirot confederation by uniting Turkic-and Mongol-speaking nomads of the Altai, Tuva and western Mongolia.
Anuchin, who suf ered from delusions of grandeur, pushed his indigenous comrades to charge ahead “fearing nothing” and to “shape history in a revolutionary manner.” Speaking in front of the “children of Oirot,”
