Introduction

Buddhism In Russia

THE STORY OF AGVAN DORZHIEV, LHASA’S EMISSARY TO THE TSAR

John Snelling, world-renowned Buddhist scholar, died in 1991. He was General Secretary of the Buddhist Society and Editor of The Middle Way, He is the author of The Sacred Mountain, The Buddhist Handbook and The Elements of Buddhism.

IN MEMORIAM
KHAMBO LAMA AGVAN DORZHIEV
AND FOR
THE BUDDHISTS OF RUSSIA,
BURYAT, KALMYK AND EUROPEAN,
ESPECIALLY
ALEKSANDER BRESLAVETZ
AND VEN TENZIN-KHETSUN SAMAYEV
OF KUNTSECHOINEI DATSAN, ST PETERSBURG

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data available ISBN 1-85230-332-8

Contents

ForewordVI
PrefaceVlll
AcknowledgementsXlll
Illustrations between pp. 1 76 and 177
1.The Buryats1
2.Early Life 1 854-187311
3.Tibet and Wu T’ai Shan 1 873-188822
4.The Thirteenth Dalai Lama 1888-1 89832
5.Ukhtomsky’s Summons 1 89843
6.Mission to Europe 1 898-1 89953
7.The Mfair of the Steel Bowls 1 899-190166
8.The Tibetan Mission of 1 90177
9.Among the Kalmyks and the Buryats 1 901-1 90390
1 0.The Young husband Mission to Lhasa 1 903-19041 02
11.The Dalai Lama in Exile 1 904-19081 15
12.A Heathen Temple in Christian Petersburg 1 908-1 910129
13.The Turning Point 1 909-1 913142
14.The Fall of the House of Romanov 1914-1917157
15.The World Turned on its Head 1917-19181 73
16.Fellow Traveller 1918-1 9201 87
1 7.Reform and Renaissance 1 920-1924202
18.Gathering Clouds 1 925-1929218
1 9.The Destruction of Buddhism in the USSR and the Death of Agvan Dorzhiev 1 930-1938236
20.After Dorzhiev 1 938-1991255
Appendix 1 Pre-1940 Datsans of Trans-Baikalia268
Appendix 2 Dorzhiev’s Inventory of Items Looted from the Petrograd Buddhist Temple in 1919269
Notes270
Glossary306
Bibliography311
Index318

It would be neither an understatement nor a cliche to say that John Snelling gave his life to this book. He was still tinkering with the final form of the text only days before he died on 28 February 1 992. John’s struggle to make sense of the life of Agvan Dorzhiev, enigmatic Buddhist monk from Buryatia, was poignandy mirrored in his own final battle to overcome leukaelllia. Periods of intense writing would be followed by bouts of intensive care in the Royal Free Hospital in London, where, in his last months, he would be found seated cross-legged on his bed working furiously on his newly acquired lap-top to complete one more chapter.

like many writers absorbed in the creation of a book, John was convinced that this would be his magnum opus. Perhaps this was just a necessary conceit for the completion of a project of this magnitude:
the distilling and ordering of a bewildering array of information that emerged in a stuttering flow from archives and long-forgotten texts.

The ‘Dorzhiev Book’, as he called it, was the most ambitious project he had ever undertaken. It demanded from his failing body the stamina required to bring to life the first ponrait of a man who had died in the obscurity of a Stalinist military prison seven years before John was born, written in languages John did not read.

The high point of John’s research was the two-week visit he and I
made to Leningrad in May 1 991. The thrill of exploring the Buddhist temple Dorzhiev had built there in 1 915, of tramping around the elegantly crumbling city in search of addresses where Dorzhiev and others had stayed, of visiting the gilded palaces where Dorzhiev had been received by the Tzar, of interviewing contemporary Russian Buddhists – all granted John the last joyous abundance of energy he would know.

While in Leningrad John was able to meet an ancient Buryat-Mongol lama who had attended an initiation Dorzhiev had given in 1 928.

Although this was the first person he had met who had known his subject in the flesh, the result of the interview – meticulously translated from Mongolian via Russian to English – was disappointing. The most John could extract from his informant was the unremarkable comment that Dorzhiev ‘was a great lama’.

This difficulty of gaining insight into Dorzhiev’s personality was a contant irritant and puzzle, which compelled John to burrow in increasingly obscure sources. At the end of the day he had to confess that he was still unsure of the kind of person Dorzhiev was. Yet, as an unexpected product of his research, the most extraordinary story was revealed.

Dorzhiev emerges as a vital thread that unites Tibet, Mongolia, Russia and British India at a tumultuous and critical period in their history.

He pops up everywhere: as a wily player of the Great Game; as tutor, confidant and emissary of the 1 3th Dalai Lama; as witness to the fall of the House of Romanov and an ambiguous conven to Bolshevism. More than anything else, though, he is the key to unlocking the fascinating but obscure account of Buddhism’s two hundred and fifty year history in Russia and its fate at the hands of Lenin and Stalin.

Perhaps because of its ever-enlarging canvas the Dorzhiev Book turned out to be almost twice as long as that for which John had been contracted, leaving his daughter Sarah and I with the unenviable prospect of having to cut large sections of John’S final work. Fortunately, however, Michael Mann of Element Books agreed to publish the text in its entirety and entrusted it to the sensitive editorial hands of John Baldock. Apart from the correction of some minor technical details and the rewording of a couple of ambiguous passages, Buddhism in Russia:
The Story of Agvan Dorz},iev – Lhasa’s Emissary to the Tsar is exactly as John Snelling left it. Stephen Batchelor Sharpham, 1 993

Preface

I first encountered Agvan Dorzhiev’s name when I was writing The Sacred Mountain (London, 1 983), a book about Mount Kailas in Western Tibet. It was at the point where I was dealing with the travels of the Japanese Buddhist monk Ekai Kawaguchi, who heard about Dorzhiev’s alleged machinations when he was in Lhasa around the tum of the.entury. At about the same time I was also editing The Middle W 0)’, the quarterly journal of the Buddhist Society, and often brief press releases would arrive on my desk from TASS giving details of Buddhist activities in the USSR. They were usually very propagandistic

Some years later, when working on The Buddhist Handbook (London, 1 986), I wanted to investigate these matters more fully and put them into some kind of coherent shape, for it was by then clear that there was – or at least had been – a lot more Buddhism in Russia and the USSR than most Western Buddhists supposed, yet for some obscure reason nothing very substantial had been written about it. Aher some research, I not only had more than enough material to write my piece for the Handbook but had also come to know a lot more about the less well publicized aspects of Dorzhiev’s life. This was a highly remarkable but untold story in its own right. I therefore drew up a proposal for a BBe radio feature, which was accepted, recorded and finally broadcast in 1989 under the title ‘The Lama of St Petersburg’.

Altogether, my researches to date had resulted in the accumulation of a great heap of books, articles and other materials, many in foreign languages. Most notably they included a copy of Dorzhiev’s own Tibetan-language autobiography. Of course the whole thing could have died at some point and all that research become the usual clutch of superfluous paper in an old box-file; but somehow it did not. The Dorzhiev Project had a power of its own and it maintained a quickening momentum. Unexpected but marvellous things would happen, like the arrival of strange packages from the USSR containing documents typed in Cyrillic, handwritten transcripts, archival photographs and other materials. Without contriving it, news of my interest had mysteriously filtered through to there.

As usual, these were sanguine projections. As I got down actually to write the book, I found I had embarked on a vastly more complex undertaking.

Though I am dealing here with the story of a great Buddhist lama, I must emphasize that I am not writing Buddhist hagiography. Conventionally, biographies of great lamas are inspirational rather than investigatory and consequently tend to extol the virtues of their subjects and overlook or deny their flaws and peccadillos. My approach follows the classic Western one of a concern for the truth – with what is or was the case. This means that I am very interested in what actually happened rather than what might have happened, and also in character and personality – that is, in psychology – which again are not concerns of the traditional hagiographers.

My task has been made more absorbing but less easy by the amount of folklore that has come to surround the Dorzhiev phenomenon. This ranges from absurd suggestions that he and the Armenian mystic G.

I. Gurdjieff were one and the same person, I to a whole gamut of writings that mix truth and untruth together, that exaggerate, mystify and at worst may have been intended to spread disinformation for politically mischievous reasons. I have chosen not to ignore these materials, but I have treated them with caution and made this clear in the text and notes.

I also gathered a great deal of oral information, much of it at first hand from Russian friends and contacts. The accuracy of such information is always hard to gauge, so I have again used it with caution and made it clear in my text or notes where I have done so.

This work is the first biography of Agvan Dorzhiev and no doubt more material will emerge concerning his remarkable life as archives in the former Soviet Union, and especially in Buryatia, are opened up.

Perhaps certain enigmas will then be clarified, such as whether he did in fact train at one of the great monasteries on Wu T’ai Shan after his first brief visit to Tibet, and what precisely caused him in 1918 to throw in his lot with the Bolsheviks and to begin working for Narkomindcl, the Peoples’ Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.

As regards linguistic matters, my task was made difficult by the fact that not only were my source materials in a variety of languages – English, French, German, Russian, Tibetan – but these often used Sanskrit, Tibetan, and/or Mongolian names and terms, as well as Kalmyk and Buryat variations of Mongolian ones. A variety of transcription methods had been adopted, so I was obliged to attempt to achieve some measure of consistency md coherence in my text. Accordingly:

I have generally sought expert guidance in these matters where possible, but any egregious inconsistencies or errors are due entirely to my own lack of linguistic expertise.

Furthermore, because this book is intended primarily for the general reader, accents and diacriticals have been kept to the minimum; and while many foreign language terms have been introduced into the text, the prim convention of italicization, which stigmatizes them as oddities, has been avoided. We now live in a global culture where English is fast becoming the lingua franca: a flexible and cosmopolitan new form of English that readily absorbs foreign words. Such words in any case have their own singularity, local colour and music – surely one of Gogol’s down-trodden clerks is better called a ‘chinovnik’ than a ‘bureaucrat’,
for example, and the great spiritual insights transmitted by the Buddha collectively constitute his ‘dharma’ rather than his ‘teachings’ or ‘Law’.

As regards dating, the Russians adhered to the old Julian Calendar until February 1918; this placed dates some ten days earlier than in the Gregorian Calendar long current in the West. Where my research material has been of Russian origin and predates February 1918, the dates are usually given in Old Style; New Style after February 1918.

Some writers have amended their dates, however, sometimes without saying so. In cases where ambiguity might arise, I have therefore insened
(OS) or (NS) after a panicular date .

Buddhism may well have something special to offer European Russians in the spiritual and ideological vacuum that has emerged since MarxismLeninism became discredited. It is, after all, attracting an ever increasing following in the contemporary West, but ironically the Onhodox Church may have prepared especially fenile ground for its spread in Russia because there are distinct similarities between the two religious traditions. Not only are Buddhism and Onhodoxy mystically inclined and endowed with strong monastic and eremetical traditions, but some of their practices are similar. For instance, the repetitious Jesus Prayer of the mystical Hesychasts could be said to be a kind of mantra;2 both the icon image and the Tibetan thanglca religious painting image are used as aids to visualization; and the Tibetan view of a graduated path to liberation has affinities with Ioann Lestnitsvich’s vision of the spiritual life as a kind of ladder or staircase.

Political and cultural links have also long existed between Russia and the great Buddhist heartland of Central Asia, an area where Dorzhiev himself discerned millennarian possibilities. If similar changes begin to take place there, particularly if the modem Chinese Communist Empire soon crumbles – and if the changes in Russia confirm anything with special force it is that the era of empires is now cenainly past – this could also liberate suppressed but equally powerful spiritual energies lying dormant in Tibet, Mongolia and parts of China as well. Who Icnows then but what I call Dorzhiev’s Shambhala Project for a great Buddhist confederation stretching from Tibet to Siberia, but now with connections across to Western Europe and even internationally, may well become a. very real possibility.

Looked at from these positive perspectives, the spirit of Agvan Dorzhiev is not at all dead. For the past fifty years or so it has merely been asleep.

John Snelling Sharpham, September 1991

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the generous help of friends and institutions in the USSR, who provided information, documents, translations, photographs, maps, advice, feedback and hospitality. My kind benefactors include: Aleksandr Breslavetz and Elena Kharkova of the Kunsechoinei Datsan, Leningrad; Aleksandr Andreyev of the Soviet Cultural Foundation, Leningrad; USSR Peoples’ Deputy Dr S. Shapkayev of Ulan-Ude; the Library of the Buryat Scientific Centre of the Siberian Depanment of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Ulan-Ude; Dr Bata Bayanuev, Scientific Collaborator of the Institute of Humanities, Buryat Scientific Centre, Siberian Division, USSR Academy of Sciences, Ulan-Ude; Dr Yaroslav Vasil’kov of the Oriental Institute of the USSR
Academy of Sciences, Leningrad; Gennady Leonov, Keeper of Tibetan and Mongolian Antiquities at the State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad; Elena Nikolaievna of Leningrad University; Oleg and Svetlana Borisov; Aleksandr Gavrilov; Bandido Khambo Lama Erdineyev; Doramba Lama Tenzin Gyatso; Aleksandr Pobents; Mikhail Momot and Dennis Dobrunin; Inessa Lomakina; Vladimir Montlevich; and Lama Samayev, Abbot of Kunsechoinei Datsan, Leningrad.

Otherwise, kind help was also provided by Alexander Piatigorsky of the School of African and Oriental Studies, London University; Caroline Humphrey of King’s College, Cambridge; Jeffrey Somers of Fine Books Oriental; Jeremy Russell of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Dharamsala; and Francis Macouin of the Musee Guimet, Paris. Also by Ian Heron (who gave invaluable advice on the life and career of Nikolai Roerich); also Thomas Nivinson Haining, Nicholas Rhodes, Angela Paynter, Nick Ribush, Anthony Aris, Alastair Lamb, Peter Lewis of Samye-Ling Tibetan Centre, and Amar Kaur Jasbir Singh of the India Office Records and Library.

Special thanks are due to those who translated Russian language materials, notably Ann Armitage, Richard Bancroft, Eva Hookway and John Aske, and to my Russian friends, Aleksandr Breslavetz and Aleksandr Andreyev, who not only located obscure Dorzhiev material in Russian archives but sent me translations of documents. Ann Armitage kindly checked Russian transcriptions and provided much indispensable help in other ways.

Eva Hookway also went to enormous trouble to translate German language materials, and throughout demonstrated enthusiasm and generous support for the project in innumerable ways. My debt to her kindness cannot be over-stated.

Stephen Batchelor translated Dorzhiev’s Tibetan autobiography as weU as providing invaluable advice on matters relating to Tibetan Buddhism and to the transcription of Tibetan words and names; he was also a sterling companion on a research visit to Leningrad.

Finally, my thanks to Revd Yoshiaki Toeda of the Japan Mission Conference, who took a serious and practical interest in this project, and arrangecla grant of US S500 to help defray the costs of research in the USSR.

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The Buryats

Anyone living at Kiachta may learn that the Russians of Siberia hold Lake Baikal in great veneration and ascribe to it something of a sacred character, speaking of it as the Holy Sea! 1 So wrote James Gilmour (died 1 891) of the London Missionary Society, who spent some twenty years working among the Mongols in the latter pan of the nineteenth century. His first winter view of the lake, which is about two hundred and fifty miles long by twenty to fony-five miles wide, was cenainly dramatic. The southern shore was ‘a confused mass of ice heaped up in ridges’, some of it looking ‘exactly like the tops of walls that are defended by having pieces of glass set in Iime’.2 Later he came to smooth, snow-covered ice, and then to transparent ice through which ran huge cracks by which it was possible to gauge the depth of the ice at ten to twelve feet. In the centre of the lake was a makeshift stall at which the good missionary paused for refreshment. Below the
‘vafer of suppon on which he stood as he drank his ‘hasty tea’ the water plummeted to prodigious depths – perhaps well over five and a half thousand feet, for Baikal is the deepest body of fresh water in the
�orld. In more clement seasons, however, its grandeur fully comes into Its own, and it is then truly the ‘Blue Miracle’, the ‘Pearl of Siberia’ .

Legend has it that three water babies once emerged from the waters of Lake Baikal to play on the shore. Their names were Ekhirit, Bulagat and Khoridai, and from them sprang the three eponymous Buryat tribes of Ekhirit, Bulagat and Khori.

One day Khoridai went to Ol’khon, the sacred shaman island in Baikal, where he spied three swans washing themselves. They were really heavenly princesses, Khoridai realized, so he took one of them to be his wife, hiding her wings so that she could not fly away. Years later, having borne him thineen children and lost her looks, the heavenly princess persuaded her husband to give her back her wings. She promptly depaned, leaving behind a prophecy that one of their sons would become a shaman and one of the daughters a witch . .. 3 More factual sources maintain that the various Buryat tribes probably originated in the Mongol lands to the south and, having gravitated to Trans-Baikalia by a circular route at some indefinite period, coalesced into a distinctive ethnic entity in the early eighteenth century, around the time that the border separating Siberia from Mongolia was defined.

They are classified as a Mongolian people on linguistic and cultural grounds; also on the basis of physical type, having ‘flat Mongolian features, high thin noses, yellow-brown skins, and big squat bodies’.4 A number of ethnic groups, including Uighurs, Altaians, Dzungarians and Tungus (or nenki, who spoke a language that had strong affinities with coun Manchu) also attached themselves to the main clans and called themselves Buryat. Moreover, those Buryats living to the west and nonh of Lake Baikal- that is the putative descendants of the mythical Bulagat and Ekhirit – possess more European characteristics, probably through interbreeding with T urkic peoples.

Some Buryats are still to be found living in the Mongolian People’s Republic and the Barga region of Manchuria, but nowadays most live in Buryatia, an autonomous region within the Russian Federation, though even here they have long been a minority. Besides other ethnic peoples, there was a great influx of Russian colonists from the seventeenth century onwardS. Political and criminal exiles from European Russia were also posted there; also Old Believers, those long-haired and bearded stalwans who clung defiantly to the old religious forms that Peter the Great, in his obsession to Westernize Russia, wished to sweep ruthlessly away. As most of the new arrivals were straight Onhodox believers, Onhodox proselytizing and other forms of Russian influence exened an increasing pressure upon the Buryats, but though the Cis-Baikalian ones succumbed to it to a considerable extent, those in Trans-Baikalia resisted and clung to their Mongolian traditions.

In Trans-Baikalia the principal Buryat tribes are the Khori and the Selenga. The former, the putative descendants of the eponymous Khoridai, gravitated to an area to the east of the regional capital, Verkhneudinsk, now Ulan-Ude, on a tributary of the River Uda, one of the numerous feeders of Lake Baikal. The Selenga Buryats, on the other hand, a more recent grouping, established themselves to the south in the environs of the River Selenga, another of the lake’s feeders. The minor tribes include the Kudarin Buryats, who found their way to the area around the mouth of the Selenga, and, to the north of them, the Barguzin Buryats.

The Buryats have a reputation of being more peaceable than many other Mongol nations – the Kalmyks, for instance, gained Cossack status on account of their martial talents – and they became loyal subjects of the Russian empire. Their traditional organization was based on individual households, a number of which constituted a basic grouping known as an ulus. Several ulus constituted a clan and several clans a tribe. At the apex of the tribal hierarchy stood the taisha or zaisan, the tribal boss, each of whom had his own kontora or official headquarters.

At first the Russians treated the Buryats remarkably well, for their grip on this far-flung outpost of their empire was tenuous and to antagonize or alienate the indigenous peoples might have touched off troublesome resistance. This enlightened policy was enshrined in the Speransky Statute of 1 822 which classed the Buryats as inorodsky (outsiders)
and established a policy of minimal interference in their internal affairs.

Though Russian governors were appointed, they were encouraged not to tamper with tribal organization or interfere in its workings. The Buryats were also granted certain special privileges, including exemption from taxation and military service. They were in addition left remarkably free to pursue their own non-Orthodox religious persuasions – far more so than the Old Believers, for instance.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, moves were made to scrap this policy. Assimilation into the Russian Empire then became the order of the day, privileges were rescinded and Orthodox missionary activity was stepped up. This displeased many Buryats and led to the development of nationalism.

Traditionally the Buryats pursued the classic Mongol lifestyle of nomadic pastoralism, keeping herds of canle, sheep and horses (and sometimes a camel or two). A century or more ago they were economically probably bener off than the general run of Russian peasants, for the meat they produced – and produced very efficiently, certainly more efficiently than after Soviet collectivization – fetched a good price. They were also to some extent involved in trade with Mongolia and China through Kyakhta, and with such pursuits as fishing and farming. Their nomadic pastoral way of life was seriously undermined by the Russian government policy changes at the end of the nineteenth century, however, especially when the authorities began to carve up Buryat lands and allot them to Russian and Ukrainian senlers.

Tribal solidarity was thereby threatened – but then that was among the government’s objectives.

Traditional to the Buryats too was the circular yurt or felt tent (locally known as ger), though lanerly the felt was exchanged for wood and finally there was a trend towards senled living in wooden buildings .

Inside the yurt would be found revered items such as ongon (spirit-dolls)
for, like the other Mongols, their original religious traditions included shamanism as well as folk beliefs and practices.

Buddhism did not begin to interest the Buryats until the laner part of the seventeenth century, about the time that they were being subjugated by the Russians, and then perhaps only moderately. It was first brought to them by refugees from Mongolia, who carried buddha-rupas (Buddhist images) in their baggage, and by a small number of monks, though these initially had difficulty in dealing with the local spirits of mountains and rivers and the various shamanistic cults.5 Among the first lamas to work among the Buryat was a Mongol named Sanjaya, who in 1 701 set up a yurt-temple on the banks of the river Khimni (or Temnik), which joins the Selenga just south of Gusinoye Ozero (Goose Lake). Then in 1720 a group of a hundred and fifty lamas arrived, about fifty of them renegade Tibetan lamas who had been thrown out for fomenting some kind of hocus-pocus at Gomang College at Drepung, the great monastic university just outside Lhasa; the rest were Mongols who had thrown in their lot with them. On hearing that their arrival had been of benefit to the local people, the government allowed them to stay; it also exempted them from taxation.

Two local characters who figure prominently in the early history of Buryat Buddhism are Damba Darzha Zayayev ( 1710/1 1-1777) and Lubsan Zhimba Akhaldayev (died 1 797), who were Tsongol and Selenga Buryats respectively. Both went abroad to study Buddhism but later returned and worked among their own people.6 Damba Darzha Zayayev was the son of a nobleman named Zaya Sakhulakov. In 1724, when he was hardly fourteen, he set off for Urga with two companions, but ill omens prompted the superstitious Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu to forbid them to stay, so they went their various ways. Zayayev eventually reached Lhasa and remained there for about seven years, studying at monastic centres like Gomang College and Rata monastery.7 He received his getsiil (novice) ordination from the Second Panchen Lama, and his gelong (full monk) ordination from the Seventh Dalai Lama. When he broached the subject of founding a monastery in Buryatia with these illustrious preceptors, the Panchen Lama gave him the conical cap of a pandit (teacher), and the Dalai Lama handed him a ‘black drawing’, saying: ‘If you have to construct a monastery, then it should have the form of Samye monastery, modelling Mount Sumeru and the four continents … ‘8 Returning to his homeland in the early t 740s laden with sacred texts and images, Zayayev found that during his absence a yurt-temple had been established in the domains of the Tsongol and Tabungut Buryat clans by a lama named Agvan Puntsog. One source maintains that, having bested Puntsog in religious debate, Zayayev was accorded the accolade of Master of the Dharma and ‘invited … to the high seat’;9 another suggests that he worked in partnership with Puntsog (who may actually have been his root guru) in establishing and running a yurt-temple in the Khilgantai region on the Chikoi river, to the south-east of Selenginsk and that after Puntsog’s death he ‘moved over to Khilgantai’. lo This simple foundation, which was later replaced by a grand set of buildings in the Tibeto-Mongolian style, would seem to be the beginnings of the Tsongol monastery, which Zayayev is certainly credited with founding. When Piotr Simon Pallas of the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences visited it in t 772, he found that the seven constituent temples of the Tsongol had been built of wood by Russian carpenters according to the specifications of the senior lamas; ordinary lamas coming from outlying regions to attend religious rites meanwhile pitched their yurts in a fenced area. II
The Buryats usually use the term ‘datsan’ to describe their monasteries.

This is a variant of the Tibetan ‘dratsang’, the term for a college that is a component part of a larger monastic foundation, such as Gomang at Drepung or Me at Sera. However, in Trans-Baikalia the word came to mean an actual monastery with accommodation for lamas and other facilities in addition to areas for philosophical study. We also sometimes come across the term ‘dugan’. This is the local variant of the Tibetan
‘dukhang’, signifying a hall in which monks assemble for meetings, to chant the sutras and so forth.

Lubsan Zhimba Akhaldayev went in t 72 t to study the dharma in Mongolia – some chronicles say at Da Khuree, the great monastery of the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu. On returning to his native Selenga region, he too had ambitions of setting up a monastery; he was also hoping to make Damba Darzha Zayayev his disciple. Though he favoured a beautiful location on the western shores of Gusinoye Ozero (Goose Lake)
as the site for his new monastery, he was for some reason reluctant to go ahead alone, so he visited Zayayev and Batur-un, an astrologer who had also studied in Tibet, with a view to having the site tested. No doubt sensing the seeds of future rivalry, Zayayev was reluctant to cooperate; Batur-un, however, having made his astrological calculations, was sure that he had found a perfect place, so he forced the issue by plunging an arrow into the ground.12 Rivalry between the T songol and Gusinoye Ozero datsans did develop just as Zayayev had foreseen, for the erection of the Gusinoye Ozero Datsan effectively terminated the Tsongol diocese at the Selenga river.

There was also competition as to who was the top man of Buryat Buddhism: the lord abbot of the Tsongol Datsan or that of Gusinoye Ozero. This was complicated by the fact that the government, recognizing that Buddhism was becoming a potent force in Trans-Baikalia, began attempting to assert some measure of control over the new church and to designate irs leader from the 1740s onwards – that is, during the reign of the Empress Elizabeth. In some early official edicts, Zayayev was declared to be preeminent, much to the chagrin of Akhaldayev’s followers. He also later went to Moscow with other Buddhist delegates, and prescnted the emperor with letters from the Panchen and Dalai Lamas, communicated news of Tibet, China and Amdo, and offered gifts from Tibet;ll in return he was ‘made Khambo’.14 Finally, in 1764, during the reign of Catherine the Great, the imposing title of ‘Chief Bandido Khambo Lama of all Buddhists dwelling on the southern shore of Lake Baikal’ was conferred upon him.1S The term ‘khambo’ is a Mongolization of the Tibetan ‘khenpo’, meaning a Buddhist abbot or one who has attained high scholastic honours. ‘Lama’, on the other hand, is the Tibetan equivalent of the Indian term ‘guru’, that is a teacher, who may be but is not necessarily a monk (Tib. gelong), as is often thought. Finally, ‘Bandido’ is a local form of the Sanskrit ‘pandit’:
a wise teacher.

Aher Zayayev’s death in 1771, his successor Sodnompil Kherurkheyev applied for confirmation of his title, which he held for three years.

However, Akhaldayev also applied to be confirmed as Bandido Khambo Lama of the five datsans falling within the purview of the Gusinoye Ozero Datsan. After government officials in Irkutsk had been bribed, the titles were duly confirmed, though technically there could only be one Bandido Khambo Lama. The contention between the two monastic factions continued for some time, but eventually Akhaldayev gained the title and passed it on at his death in 1796/7 to his successor, Danzan Demchik Ishizhamso (died 1808).

In this way the official seat of Khambo Lama was finally located at Gusinoye Ozero Datsan, though at first this was, in terms of splendour, a poor rival to the establishment on the Chikoi river. By the early nineteenth century, however, it had burgeoned into ‘an exotic tourist attraction, affording a unique opportunity to inspect a lamasery and attend irs services, and few of those who were privileged to see it failed to comment on its peculiarities, irs Sino-Tibetan style of architecture, its noisy lama orchestra, its altars crowded with images and sacred vessels, irs 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, as it was in lamaseries in Mongolia itself.’16 Once Buddhism had established itself on a solid footing in TransBaikalia, datsans increased in number. The Ana Datsan was established around 1775, the Aga, which in time became a leading centre of learning and book production, around 1811, and the Tsugol around 1 826.17 Figures for 1822 specify some nineteen monasteries and 2,500 lamas, and by 1 846 this had gone up to thirty-four monasteries and 4,509 lamas, about half of them in the districts of Khorinsk and Aga. Professor N. Poppe has reckoned on the basis of census statistics that this indicates a proportion of one lama to every founeen or fifteen persons.18 Clearly, the suppon of such a high proponion of ‘non-productive’ religious would bear heavily upon the lay population. This concerned the Russian authorities and in 1 853 a Law on the Lama Clergy of Siberia was approved which allowed for thirty-four datsans accommodating one Bandido Khambo Lama, two hundred and sixteen lamas and thirty-four bandi or novices. In practice, the law was not strictly enforced beyond placing a tax on unofficial and self-appointed lamas, and the numbers of lamas increased steadily in some thirty-seven datsans – three over the legal limit. By 1916, the official lama population of Buryatia had risen to around 16,000.

The Buryat datsans were once fine architectural monuments in their own right, as well as repositories of rare artistic and literary treasures.

In addition they were great centres of culture and education. The monks were usually COnversant with Mongolian and also Tibetan, the lingua franca of the Lamaist world, so had access to the wealth of learning of that sphere. At their disposal were good libraries of Tibetan and Mongolian texts on philosophy, medicine, religion, history and other subjects. Some datsans had tsenyi 19 schools – that is, schools of advanced Buddhist dialectics. The first tsenyi school was opened at the Tsugol Datsan in 1 845, and subsequently others at the Atsagat, Ana and Enghetu datsans, and at Khambaliin Kuriye, the residence of the Khambo Lama. The datsans were also lay educational centres, providing good general education to Buryat boys and to some extent to girls.

Manba, schools and clinics of Tibetan medicine, also existed in some Buryat datsans. There was a manba at the Tsugol Datsan, for instance, where courses lasted about four years and the title manramba, doctor of m
.

edicine, was conferred upon those who successfully completed them.20 T.

lhetan medicine is still practised today. It can provide very precise di�gnoses using a complex system of reading the pulses, examining unne and so fonh; for remedies, it extensively depends on herbal remedies, dietary therapy, special pills and often spiritual practices, for many physical ailments are thought to result directly from spiritual dysfunctions. Two Buryat practitioners of this kind of medicine, the brothers Badmayev, ran a thriving practice in St Petersburg at the tum of the century, and one of them, Piotr, attended Emperor Nicholas II
himself.

Such a deep concern for culture and education led to the emergence of a Buryat intelligentsia. The first Buryat scholars are reckoned to have been Dorzhi Banzarov ( 1 822-55) and Galsan Gomboyev ( 1822-63).

Banzarov was educated at the Russo-Mongolian Military School at T roitskosavsk and at the University of Kazan, where, besides Russian, he studied Latin, French, English and Turkish. For his doctorate he submitted a thesis on the shamanism of the Mongols, a pioneering work that waS’later published. Gomboyev, on the other hand, also lectured at Kazan and taught Mongolian at St Petersburg University.

In the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, however, there was a remarkable new wave of intellectuals, some of whom will feature in the forthcoming narrative. Besides Agvan Dorzhiev, they include B. B.

Baradin, G. Ts. Tsybikov, Ts. Zh. Zhamtsarano, M. Bogdanov, B.D.

Ochirov and E. o. Rinchino – men of an extremely high intellectual order who became both cultural and political leaders not only in Buryatia itself but in Kalmykia and Mongolia too. In spirit they were liberal rather than revolutionary nationalists, their primary concern being to protect the culture and traditions of their people. Roben Rupen has written:
Some facts are common to the lives of all these men: their early years were spent in a typical Mongolian setting; the folklore and superstitions of their people were known to them, and even shared by them; they had excellent educations, most of them at the University of St Petersburg, where they Cperated closely with Russian Orientalists; they wrote scholarly (historical and philological) works in the Russian language; they all spoke and wrote Russian fluently. They travelled widely in Siberia, Central Asia, and European Russia, and some of them even in Western Europe. They always remained Mongols, with close ties to their native land.21 The presence of ethnic Buddhists within the Russian Empire stimulated scholarly interest in Buddhism in European Russia – or rather it added stimulus to an interest that had already arisen when those valiant pioneers who spear-headed Russian expansion in central Asia first encountered Mongolians and Tibetans. It was recognized in official circles that it would be useful to know more about the languages, cultures and religious traditions of these peoples.

An interesting development took place in the eighteenth century as an indirect result of a gold-seeking expedition that Peter the Great dispatched under Ivan Mikhailovich Licharov in the direction of Yarkand. This discovered the remains of an abandoned yurt-monastery, Ablai Khid, in the Altai region near modem Ust-Kaminagorsk, that had once been occupied by Dzungarian Kalmyks; it had reputedly been consecrated in 1657 by Zaya Pandita, the leading Kalmyk lama of the day. Among Licharov’s finds at the site were a few pages of Tibetan manuscript, which he took back to St Petersburg, where they aroused considerable interest. Schumacher, Peter’s librarian, dispatched one page to Leipzig, where it was published and described by Menke in his Acta Editorum; further pages were dispatched to France, where a rough attempt at translation using Fano’s Latin-Tibetan dictionary was attempted by Michel and Etienne Fourmon. Peter the Great was shown this translation and expressed himself well pleased with it; he also ordered that more manuscripts be gathered in order to further understanding.

Subsequently, Russian investigators succeeded in obtaining from one Agvan Puntsok Dorzhi a Mongolian translation of the text and from this a Russian one was eventually prepared by Piotr Surivanov, who knew Mongolian. This showed that the pages were in fact fragments of the Maha Sudari Sutra (‘The Sutra for Recollecting the Great Sutra’), which purports to record discussions between the cosmic buddhas Vairocana, Samantabhadra and Maitreya on techniques for using mantras to gain bodhi or wisdom.22 From such somewhat bizarre origins, a powerful tradition of academic studies blossomed in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the auspices of the Oriental Institute of the Imperial Russian (later the USSR) Academy of Sciences. During that period, Russian scholars (or ‘scientists’ as they prefer to call them) like I. P.

Minayev (1 840-90), S. F. Ol’denburg (1 863-1 934), F. I. Stcherbatsky
(1 866-1942), O. O. Rosenburg (1 888 -1919), Y. Y. Obermiller (190135) and A.1. Vostrikov (1 904-37) became pioneers in the translation and s�dy of Mahayana Buddhist scriptures and commentaries from Sanskrit, T,
lbetan and Mongolian sources, much as their British counterparts were pioneers in those from Pali sources.

A more committed, less academic interest in Buddhist philosophy and practice also arose among European Russian intellectuals and sophisticates, particularly in St Petersburg, where a Buddhist community emerged around the turn of the century. This was a time of great ferment in Russian culture and many people, growing dissatisfied with the conventionalities of Orthodox Christianity, were casting around for new spiritual directions. Important new movements emerged at this time, two of which, the Theosophical movement of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91) and the mystical system of the Armenian mystic Giorgy Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1877-1949), were successfully transmitted to the West, where their influence has been wide-ranging and long-lasting.

Theosophy rests on the notion that there once existed a great wisdom religion which atrophied and fragmented into the various more or less superficial religious traditions that survive in the world today. Madame Blavatsky and her colleagues had a particular feeling for Buddhism because they believed that this contained more of the lost esoteric wisdom than the other religions. The formidable lady herself first encountered Buddhism among the Kalmyk Mongols of Astrakhan province where her grandfather had once been civil governor. In her writings she claims to have ‘lived in their kibitkas’l3 and partaken of the lavistL hospitality of the Prince Tumene, their late chief, and his princess’.l4 She also claims to have visited Tibet, where she stayed in Tibetan Buddhist convents, visited the great monastery of Tashilhunpo and generally ventured where no other European had been or could hope to gO.lS
Gurdjicff’s system also purports to be based on lost esoteric teachings, in his case rediscovered during a series of adventurous spiritual quests in remote parts of the Middle East and Central Asia. Although these are mostly Sufi in origin, some Buddhist elements are included, for, like Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff too claims to have ventured to Tibet around the tum of the century and to have studied under tantric lamas. Ironically, both Dorzhiev and his amanuensis Ovshe Norzunov have been wrongly identified with Gurdjieff, who quite possibly was a Russian secret agent.

The initial tolerance with which the Imperial Russian government treated Buddhism spawned a reciprocal attitude in the Buryat Buddhist church.l6 Harking back to Mongol precedents, the lamas fully and gratefully believed that in the Great White Emperor they had found a benign patron. What else was the Emperor but a Russian Khubilai Khan and the Bandido Khambo Lama a Buryat Sakya Pandita or Pagpa? Some even believed that Catherine the Great was an incarnation of White Tara, a Buddhist deity – and that the compassionate spirit of Tara reincarnated in each succeeding monarch, whether male or female.

It was into this Trans-Baikalian Buryat milieu that a child was born to a pious Buddhist couple named Dorzhi (or Yeshe) and Drolkarl7 in mid-January of what was reckoned locally as the Wood Tiger year of the fourteenth sixty-year cycle. This would be 1 853 in the Tibetan style of annuation, 1854 in the European, though some sources argue for 1853 or 1852 as the true date. Bearing afterwards his patronymic, he was known to the world as Dorzhiev.

Early Life 1 854 – 1 873

Agvan Dorzhiev’s parents, Dorzhi and Drolkar, were registered with the Galzut clan of the Khori Buryat. T heir ancestor, Ukhin Akhaldayev, how�ver, who was probably on Drolkar’s side of the family, had migrated to alaen territory west of Lake Baikal in the 1770s, ‘wishing to find faith and education’) He had settled for a time in the Verkholensk district

?f Irkutsk province, where the old shamanistic traditions persisted even In Dorzhiev’s maturity, a fact which prompted him to found datsans and to attempt to convert the local people to the Buddha-dharma.

Around 1810, however, Ukhin had returned to the Khori heartland, and resettled in the vicinity of the village of Kurba, which can be reached by fOllOWing the Uda river upstream from Ulan-Ude, then known as Verkhneudinsk. It was near there that his remarkable descendant was

�m in a small village of wooden houses called Khara-Shibir. T his was m

.

th� Zaigrayevsky rayon (district), and for administrative purposes fell wlthm the purview of the Khorinsk steppe duma. Today, a mill-stone marks the exact spot.

In his memoirs,2 written in T ibetan around 1924, Dorzhiev recalls that at Khara-Shibir a river flowed from the ‘left armpit’ of a mountain called Dha�kar-tsa-gen. The village is in fact situated in the broad valley of the Uda nver, which a little upstream, at the village of Kurba, receives the waters of the Kurba river. To the south there is open steppe. To the north there are the mountains of the Ulan-Burgasy range, which runs for about two hundred kilometres between the T urka and Kurba rivers, its peaks between fourteen and about twenty thousand feet high. Nearby, in its forested foothills, once nestled the Chulutai Datsan – a magical place)
As the Uda flows south-west towards Ulan-Ude, it passes near the remains of the old Atsagat Datsan, where a wooden dukhang or monastic assembly hall of two storeys was first erected in 1825. It was at this datsan that Dorzhiev, who records in his memoir that he started to learn to read at the age of seven, laid the foundations of what the sympathetic German Mongolist, W. A. Unkrig (1883-1956), calls ‘a quite unusual general education’. In panicular, he possessed a remarkable flair for languages, as indeed did many Asiatics of the period. In time he not only acquired ‘a solid knowledge of Asiatic languages but of French and Russian as well’. Unkrig goes on:
It might sound strange that we are emphasising this, because after all he was a Russian citizen, but in fact it was rare to come across a fluent R�ssian speaker or writer among the lamas of that country, despite their Iingyiliic talents: one has only to think of their mastery of the obligatory and mach more difficult Tibetan language.4 In fact Unkrig may be gilding the lily. Tibetan lamas who have examined Dorzhiev’s Tibetan writings, including his memoirs and autograph, have found their literary and calligraphic qualities somewhat homespun; his Russian may also initially have been somewhat rudimentary, for pre-1901 sources mention that he needed the assistance of an interpreter.

Other accounts speak of Dorzhiev as being proud, ambitious and ready to prosecute his aims to their conclusion; also extremely charming as well as genuinely good-heaned and compassionate .

By all accounts Dorzhiev’s p�rents were among the first Buryats in their locality to become partially settled. In winter they would have lived in fixed wooden dwellings, but when summer came around they would have followed their cattle, sheep and horses to their pastures, which before the communists began decimating the forests were well-watered.

They may also have grown crops of wheat, a ponion of which they would have been obliged to tum over as tithe to the government.

Measured against contemporary standards in provincial Russia and even more so in Mongol lands, such a life was relatively stable and materially well-provided. Some Buryats were even prosperous: a traveller in Urga some thirty-five years later records that those who went on pilgrimage there made their Khalkha cousins envious with their rifles, their talk of sewing machines, warm houses, stacks of hay and garnered harvests:
‘Rich, smooth Buryats! Great lords!’ the Mongols would shout. ‘Give candle, give sugar, give tobacco, give vodka.’5 memoirs A serious interest in religion arose in Dorzhicv at an early age. In his
(]K)gycl he simply records that at thimcn a ‘pandit and abbot’ named gave him an Amitayus long-life empowerment in the tradition of Machig Drubpa’i Gyclmo (Skt Siddharaini), a female siddha who had lived in ancient India and transmitted the practice to Rechungpa (1083-1161),
the great yogi Milarepa’s foremost disciple, who had thereby derived the blessing of long life.6 Dorzhiev afterwards recited the dharani connected with that practice, which would have been a verbal formula, longer than a mantra, thought to be imbued with magical potency. 7 On the scant evidence available, it is difficult to say precisely who this ChOgyel was, for the name could simply be a Buddhist honorific meaning ‘dharma raja’ or ‘king of the Buddhist doctrine’, indicating a man well-versed in both Buddhist scholarship and practice. In his memoirs Dorzhiev mentions two other teachers who were of important influence Upon him in his youth: Sonam and Chapel Pelzangpo. Again, these are just combinations of conventional Buddhist names and honorifics and so do not give much solid indication as to whom he is referring. Other sources, however, cite a Buryat lama, Namnanai-Gegen, as his root guru.8 According to the notes supplied to Dorzhiev’s memoirs by Khensur Ngawang Nyima, this lama was ‘a great Permission Master for the major preliminary retreats of Vajrabhairava for twenty-two years’,9 though where he does not say. As this is the first tantric initiation that Gelugpa monks receive and is basically a Protector practice, Namnanai-Gegen may actually have given the neophytes the necessary teachings. An oral report maintains that after he became his disciple, Dorzhiev spent time in retreat at a holy place in Alkhanai, about two hundred kilometres to the south of Chita. \0 As R.E. Pubayev maintains that it was Namnanai-Gegen who encouraged Dorzhiev to go to Tibet and who also ordained him as a monk 11 and Dorzhiev himself records that it was Chapel Pelzangpo who was responsible for these, we might venture to deduce that these names in fact refer to one and the same person. The only problem with this neat little piece of speculation, however, is that in his Tibetan memoir
�orzhiev does specifically refer to one ‘Namnang Pakshi’. ‘Namnang’12 IS the Tibetan name of the dhyani-buddha Vairocana, so it would seem quite probable that ‘Namnanai’ was its Mongolian variation.

Unfortunately, Dorzhiev makes only passing reference to this lama, which leaves us still in the dark as to whom Chagyel, Sonam and Chapel Pelzangpo were. Perhaps one of them was Iroltuev Lama, at the time just a monk (gelong) but later to win fame as an expert in Buddhist philosophy and dogmatics, to travel extensively in Asia and eventually be exalted to the rank of Bandido Khambo Lama – Dorzhiev would quite likely have come under his spiritual tutelage at the Atsagat Datsan. Hearsay evidence cites one other important early spiritual influence: Galschiyev Erdenyo Khyabsun, a Buryat who graduated from Drepung monastic university near Lhasa with a Doramba geshe degree.

When he was fourteen, Dorzhiev went to the holy city of Urga to continue his education. This may have been shortly after his father’s death. Urga lay in Outer Mongolia, then under Manchu Chinese suzerainty. To go there would not have been a long journey by Central Asian standards. Dorzhiev would probably have crossed the Russo-Mongolian frontier near Kyakhta, where the white tower of the Russian church could be seen for miles, a beacon of Orthodoxy on the edge of an ocean of Lamaism, and from there Urga itself was about a hundred and seventy miles due south across rolling grass-covered hills, many of which were crowned with pine forests.

Uega was in fact what the Russ��s called the place; it was their corruption of the Mongol word ‘Orgoo’ meaning the palace of an important penon. To the Mongols themselves. however, it was Yekhe Khiiree Of.. Da Khiiree, literally ‘Great Monastery’. Mention of i.! first appears Gegen, in Mongol records in 1649, where it is stated that OndOr the first Jebtsundamba Khutukhru, returned from Tibet to found seven dratsang or monastic colleges. Thereafter, this nomadic monastery moved from place to place until finally coming to more or less permanent settlement on the north bank of the Selbi river, a tributary of the T ula, in 1779. As by then it had become the permanent seat of the Khutulchtu
(locally known as Bogdo-Gegen or Bogdo-Khan) and of the Chinese and Mongol Ambans or Imperial Residents, it assumed the status of capital of Outer Mongolia. Subsequently it grew rapidly in importance as a religious, administrative and trading centre, but though permanent buildings were erected on the site, late nineteenth cent”.rry Uega still retained much of its traditional character as a tent city, for the local citizens were loath to forsake the cosy amenities of their felt yurts, especially in winter, and large numbers of these continued to be pitched in courtyards behind wooden palisades in and around the city. Nowadays the modem secular city of tnan Bator stands on the site: the prosaic concrete capital of the until recently Communist Mongolian Peoples’ Republic.

The vanished Buddhist city of Urga was not a single settlement but an agglomeration of separate enclaves spread over a wide area in the valley of the River Tula. The Russian ethnologist A. M. Pozdneyev,ll who first stayed there in 1 877, identified three principal enclaves: the original Khiiree or Monastery, where the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu had his residence; Gandan, a separate monastic enclave dedicated to higher Buddhist studies; and Mai-mai-ch’eng, the commercial centre.

By the time that Dorzhiev arrived in Urga in 1 868, the Khiiree itself incorporated twenty-eight dratsang, known locally as aimaks, to which were attached a total of around thirteen thousand monks. The temple facilities for each dratsang fell into two parts: a felt yurt in which monks foregathered for religious ceremonies, and a wooden sanctuary housing massive buddhas (locally called burkhans), votive objects and other Lamaist paraphernalia. These facilities, which Pozdneyev remarks were
‘extremely wretched and dirty’, were surrounded by wooden palisades, while the monks lived in adjacent yuns and hutments, also surrounded by palisades. Dominating the Khiiree, however, and lending it a touch of magnificence, were its great temples. T hese were situated at the centre of the enclave, in a wide square where two broad streets crossed, and were permanent wooden structures in fine Sino-Mongolian or T ibetoMongolian style, with gilded decorations known as ganjira and gyaltsen on their wide-gabled roofs. They included the Tsokchin, the assembly hall containing the throne of the Jebtsundamba Khurukhtu, where the monastic congregation gathered four times a year at major festivals. Yuri
(George) Roerich, who was in Urga in 192617 with his illustrious father’s Central Asian Expedition, witnessed one of these great assemblies:
First one sees purple and yellow-clad lamas in high hats and flowing monastic robes, ascending the bura-yi” shata or ‘platform of the trumpet’ and summoning the monks with the deep drawling sounds of their long trumpets or du”g-chen.

The narrow lanes and streets of the monastic city suddenly fill with purple-dad lamas; imposing gray-haired geshe and gab;u (Tib. bka-bcu) or fully-pledged priests who observe the ten commandments, move in procession to the assembly hall. Young getsul or novices and probationers throng the entrance to the hall.

The presiding lamas take up their seats to the left and right, in front of the throne of Bodgo Gegen, which is usually covered with the red mantle and the ceremonial hat of the Pontiff. The Tsok-chi” Gebko or the Provost Marshal of the assembly hall takes his seat at the entrance of the hall. The rest of the clergy sit down on the low mattresses spread in rows parallel to the northern wall. At the ends of the rows, close to the entrance of the hall, sit the lama musicians with long trumpets, hautboys, and tambours. The service starts, and the low voices intone a chant, occasionally interrupted by the deep sounds of the trumpets and the sharp ringing tones of the hautboys. Tambours, rhythmically SOunded, join in the service, and sometimes the harrowing sounds of the cymbals rise in the semidarkness of the hall. The deep low voices of the elder monks are accompanied by the shrill high voices of the boy novices, who rhythmically shake their heads and bodies while chanting their prayers. It is quite unlike the chants in Tibetan monasteries, but is similar to that of the Tsaidam Mongols.

This temple music, a remnant of the ancient past, going back to shamanistic antiquity, is not without a peculiar charm of its own, and never fails to make a deep impression on the visitor. 14 Other temples in the Khiiree were the Da-ching Galba-yin Siima (founded 1 739), beside which in Dorzhiev’s time the Khutukhtu’s residential YUn was pitched in an enclosure surrounded by a y”ellow fence; the Ernchi-yin-siima or Temple of Medicine; the Barun Orgo, which was consecrated to Abatai Khan; the Manla-yin-siima or Temple of the Medicine Buddha; the jude-yin-siima, which was dedicated to Tantra; and the Tsurkha-yin-siima or Temple of the Astrology, where students applied themselves to astrology and astronomy before going on to be initiated into the mysteries of Kalachakra. Finally, and considered by some to be the most striking, was the domed temple built to contain a colossal statue of Maidari (Maitreya, the Coming Buddha), the handiwork of the Chinese craftsmen of Dolo-Nor, which contained relics of T songkhapa.

Situated about a mile and a quarter from the Khiiree and built on a similar quadrangular central plan was Gandan, the monastic enclave dedicated to tsenyi or Buddhist dialectics.15 Here Dorzhiev would have found the most learned geshes (doctors of divinity) and lama students.

Founded in 1756, Gandan was originally part of the Khiiree until the laner’s rise.. an administrative and trading centre, whereupon its studious incumbents began to demand a separate location, which was granted them in 1809. In Dorzhiev’s time, it included the palace and tombs of some of the jebtsundamba Khutukhtus, four monastic colleges and two temples of tsenyi, including the janraisig Temple, founded in 1838 and dedicated to the Bodhisattva of Compassion (Tib., Chenrezig, Skt, Avalokiteshvara). In greatly diminished form Gandan survives today, separated from the main city of Ulan Bator by the River Suvag, which Rows from Green Lake into the Tula, now partly underground.

It is the seat of the Khambo Lama, the head of the Buddhists of Outer Mongolia and President of the Asian Buddhists’ Conference for Peace.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama visited it in 1982 and gave a Yamantaka Initiation to about a hundred and forty lamas while a crowd of twenty thousand reportedly gathered outside.

About six miles to the east of the Khiiree, in what is now the modem suburb of Amgalan, lay the trading centre of Mai-mai-ch’eng, which consisted of a Chinese centre surrounded by a ring of Mongolian suburbs. The best class of shops, which stocked such goods as cloth, haberdashery, toys, confectionery, sugar, toiletries and tobacco, were to be found in the former and were elaborate establishments built within mud-walled compounds. The more modest shops lay in the Mongolian peripheries, and they opened directly onto the streets and specialized in cord, saddles, bridles, harness and suchlike. There were also street traders and, to the south, many timber yards. Besides a substantial Mongol population, several thousand Han Chinese lived in Mai-mai-ch’eng in a state of voluntary exile under the Edicts of the Li Fan Yuan (Board of Dependencies), which was also responsible for the control of Tibet.

These edicts, which saved Mongols and Mongolian culture from being overwhelmed by the Han Chinese, forbade the Chinese from bringing their families to Urga, so some naturally sought the consolations of Mongol concubines.

In addition to these three pJ;’incipal enclaves, there were other satellite quarters, including various markets, a suburb that had grown up around the yamens of the Ambans and a ‘townhouse section’ in which the Mongol dzasaks or princes had built dwellings where they very occasionally resided. There was also a Russian consulate, known as the Green House, which still stands on elevated ground once known as Konsuliin Denzh (Consular Embankment), now Marshall Zhukov
�venue, overlooking the site where formerly the Chinese fortress was Situated. Unfortunately, its impressive view of the river is nowadays blocked by the Soviet trade delegation building, which once housed the Soviet embassy. The Green Huuse was built between 1863 and 1865, and replaced an older building on a separate site dating from
� 786. A fine view of Urga was to be had from the stony hill that rose Immediately behind it. Mai-mai-ch’eng lay some distance to the left or eas� and the temple city to the right or west. The whole prospect was enCircled by a tangle of mountains, out of which stood one dominant peak, Bogdo-Ula, which was heavily wooded. From the muulltains to the east appeared the Tula river, whose gleaming waters enlivened the sombre monotony of the valley as they flowed past the City and wound
�way into the broad plain that was partially visible through a wide gap an the hills to the west. 16 The British missionary James Gilmour was in Urga for a couple of days in the late nineteenth century. Unfortunately, though clearly a warm-hearted man with a lively curiosity, his Christian prejudices rath�
r jaundiced his responses to the city, which appeared to him as nothang less than a ‘stronghold of unblushing sin’. He was prepared to concede that from afar its temples looked ‘lofty and grand’, but close up they lost ‘much of their imposing effect’. Rather more impressive were the many prayer-wheels that he encountered at street corners and other busy places: ‘These praying-cylinders seem to be seldom left long at rest
. . :, he says. In front of the temples, meanwhile, he saw ‘long sloping Wooden platforms’, at which men and women were busy making rapid prostrations; and ‘all about the stony environs of this great stronghold o

.

f Buddhist faith’ he encountered other more ardent devotees making Circuits of the holy places by measuring the full length of their bodies on the ground over the whole route – an arduous and painful practice kno�n as ‘falling worship’. Arguably the deepest impression that he earned away, however, was of the pitiful legion of ragged beggars that thronged the market-place, which was also frequented by opportunistic eagles that swooped out of the sky to scavenge any titbit left accessible to their talons. 17 Other writers also mention Urga’s packs of wild dogs, which not only rapidly disposed of the dead bodies that were left exposed outside the city but were also known on occasion to attack and consume living ones.

Such was the remarkable monastic city to which the young Dorzhiev came as a bright-eyed young aspirant in 1868. From his later accomplishments in the field of tsenyi, one might have expected him to have gravitated to Gandan, but he seems in fact to have gone to the Khiiree, for according to his own account, Sonam, who gave him basic instruction, was the second abbot of the Great Monastery. From this lama, one
‘oceanically endowed with the virtues of scriptural knowledge and direct insight’, he also received the precepts of an upasaka or Buddhist layman, by which he undertook to restrain himself from killing, stealing, indulR in irresponsible sexuality, lying, and blunting his awareness with intoxicants. Sonam seems to have laid particular emphasis on the last: ‘Alcohol is the root of all evil,’ he declared unequivocally.

‘Never touch it!’
Dorzhiev took his preceptor’s injunction to heart and on his own admission curtailed his drinking. Later, when no doubt well established in temperance himself, he vigorously exhorted others to do likewise, and the evils of the demon drink became one of the principal themes of his Buddhist sermons, though it is unlikely that his worthy efforts bore any more success than those of his earnest Christian counterparts in Victorian England.

Two people who certainly did not exemplify the admirable virtue of sobriety were the last two incarnations of the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu.

Both were ‘oceanically endowed’, not with commendable Buddhist restraint, wisdom and meditative proficiency, but with colourful vices.

The seventh khubilgan in the line that stemmed from Ondiir Gegen, some of whom were regarded as incarnations of the spirit of Taranatha
(one of the leading pandits of the allegedly heretical Jonangpa school of Tibet,18 which was suppressed by the victorious Fifth Dalai Lama in the seventeenth century), died in 1868, the year in which Dorzhiev arrived in Urga. He had been born near Lhasa in Tibet in 1850, the son of a layman, and declared a khubilgan in 1851. He was brought to Urga in 1855 and his general education and Buddhist training began in his seventh year. Early on, he showed great talent as a sculptor, turning out commendable buddha-rupas. However, around the age of twelve or thirteen, he began to be systematically corrupted by Tsetsen Khan Artased, the Mongol Amban in Urga, who had designs on his treasuries.

The Khutukhtu seems, however, to have been fertile ground for corruption. He gave himself up with enthusiasm to drinking, tobaccosmoking, whoring and homosexuality. While standards in Mongolia at this time generally fell far below the pristine norms established by the Buddha, some senior lamas were seriously concerned and appealed to the Manchu Amban for help. As a result, an order was issued at
�e end of 1866 making it a criminal offence for religious to behave Improperly. However, the Khutukhtu merely removed himself to the Amurbayasalant monastery and continued his excesses there. He did display a little temporary restraint, at least in public, when he returned to his capital in 1867, but soon returned to his old ways when Tsetsen Khan’s sons presented him with their sister, with whom he is said to have ‘let himself down … to the life of an ordinary layman’. The ensuing scandal resulted in the banishment of some of the Khutukhtu’s profligate cronies, including a son of Tsetsen Khan. In 1868, he fell ill:
rumour had it that separation from his cronies had undermined his health and induced severe nose-bleeding. He died in December that year having been bed-ridden for the last two months. The grief-stricken old tutor who had schooled him in the art of making buddha-rupas promptly offered up prayers and took his own life.

.

As usual upon such an occasion, there followed an uncertain Interregnum during which the appearance of the next khubilgan wa� awaited. In the interim, possible causes for the late khubilgan’s untimely death were hotly debated and scapegoats sought by the grieving po�
ulation of Urga, for his rakish life had not impaired the reverence in which they held him. Naturally the blackest suspicions fell upon Tsetsen Kh�n and .there were hopes that a special inquest would be ordered by Peking which would bring him to book. Disappointingly, no coroner appeared, but two of the Khutukhtu’s personal attendants who were thought to have been in Tsetsen Khan’s pay were clapped in wooden cells ��d taken out of Urga to be punished. It was also rumoured that the SInister Amban had bribed a certain lama named Diba-samba to bring about the Khutukhtu’s death by sorcery. The fact that this lama was stricken with quinsy and conveniently died was deemed proof of his guilt.

At the same time, omens and portents bearing upon the nature and place of the new birth were also eagerly examined and interpreted.

The Mongolians were not the ultimate arbiters in these occult matters, however: that privilege was retained in Tibet. A special expedition was therefore dispatched to the Land of Snows in 1869, and it was there that the new khubilgan was found, having been born early in 1870 into the family of one of the Dalai Lama’s closest officials. He was brought to Urga along with his family in 1874, and although in his early years the positive influence of his strong-minded mother kept him in line, he too gradually began to grow restive with his cloistered life and the company of old lamas. At the age of fifteen he finally kicked over the traces and enthusiastically followed his predecessor into the realms of debauchery, both homosexual and heterosexual, particularly offending monastic proprieties by taking at least two consom. He lived on until 1 924, still held in high awe by his people, having enjoyed for a brief period the distinction of being the first and only ruler of an autonomous Outer Mongolia.

It must have been against the backdrop of the dramatic events following the death of the Seventh Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu, and the discovery and installation of the Eighth, that Dorzhiev’s first visit to Urga took place. However, it is unlikely that he was there continuously for any grftt length of time. For, though he does not mention it in his memoirs, which stress the religious aspects of his life, he was during this period briefly married to a girl named Kholintsog and held down a job as a minor official (some say a clerk) of the local stepped duma (council).19 One oral source has even reponed that he fathered a child, though what became of this offspring is not known.

Gradually, however, he describes himself as becoming convinced by his studies that ‘the household life, both in this and future binhs, is like sinking in a swamp of misery’ and increasingly to appreciate the
‘inconceivable benefits of ordination’.

Dorzhiev says that he was influenced in this direction by the spiritual biographies that his ‘kind and fatherly teacher’ encouraged’ him to study, along with edifying works like the Uliger-u1I Dalai or Ocean of Narratives, known in Tibet as the Do Zang Lun (‘Sutra of the Wise Man and the FooI’).2o This is a collection of about fifty-one jatakas or birth stories, the purpose each of which is to show how the karma created by actions in past lives ripens to condition present ones. Many of the stories in the Ocean of Narratives exist in early Buddhist sources, but the collection in its present form was apparently put together by Chinese monks, who heard the stories retold at the great oasis centre of Khotan on the Silk Route in Chinese Turkestan many centuries ago; it was subsequently translated from the Chinese into Mongolian, Oirat and Tibetan.

Young Dorzhiev must also have been mightily impressed by the lamas that he met in Urga, the best of whom must have provided a young man of his intellectual and spiritual qualities with more stimulating company than he had hitheno encountered. There must, however, have been an element of self-interest in his wish to join their number by seeking ordination, for, though he naturally does not say as much himself, the inconceivable benefits to be derived from it would certainly have included access to increased educational opportunities and the possibility of preferment.

But when his kindly teacher heard of his young devotee’s intention to ordain, he adopted a somewhat cautious stance. ‘First consider the respective virtues of the monastic and the lay lifesty-Ies; he suggested with a benign smile, perhaps thinking of Kholintsog. ‘If you fail to live up to the proper standards of monastic life, your lot will be an unhappy
�ne. You will undoubtedly be reborn as a poor lay person in your next hie. If, however, you remain a lay person but pay due respect to the Bu�dha’s teachings, then you will acquire merit and enjoy a fortunate reblnh.’21 But in spite of the warnings, Dorzhiev was not deterred.

Accordingly, in the presence of ‘the great abbot Chapel Pelzangpo’,
he received the vows of a celibate layman and, he adds wryly, ‘made a pretence of keeping them’.

But where should an able and ambitious young man with a religious vocation look next to deepen his Buddhist education? There was really only one place.

Tibet And Wu T’Ai Shan 1 873 – 1 888

In the winter of 1873, his nineteenth year, Dorzhiev left his homeland and travelled10 Tibet under the compassionate care of the great abbot Chapel Pelzangpo. It would have been a long and difficult journey, taking about four months if he travelled directly and suffered no undue delays.

We are not sure precisely which caravan route he took, but the most direct one ran south-wesrwards from Urga across the grasslands of northern Mongolia to the monastic settlement of Yum-beise khuree or Yungdrung-beise khiiree,l and from there south-south-west across the arid and stony expanses of the Gobi, plying from one nomadic encampment of black yurts to the next to the Chinese city of An-hsi
(Anxi) in Kansu province. The route then ran across the desolate Tsaidam region at the foot of the Tibetan plateau. Yuri Nikolaiveich Roerich, who passed that way in 1927 with his father’s expedition, wrote of Tsaidam:
This dreaded salt marsh stretches for more than 200 miles from west to east, with an average elevation of 8,000 feet, forsaken of animal life, a land of unapproachable salt lakes and bottomless salt pits, engirdled by quicksands and ridges of sand dunes … Towards the north and south barren and wind�odcd mountain ridges form its natural boundaries. To the north is a sucassion of mighty mountain ranges belonging to the Nan Shan system, to the south a mountain country gradually rising towards the great highlands of northern Tibet. Scanty vegetation exists in the river valleys . . . 2 Here lived various ‘banners’ or dans of Qoshot Mongols, a branch of Oirat or West Mongolians who, like their kinsmen the Kalmyks, had migrated from Dzungaria in the seventeenth century. Administratively, Tsaidam proper was divided into five principalities, notably Kurlukheise, so named because the dzasak or prince of the Kurluks had been Tibet and Wu rai Shan 1 873-1 888 23 invested with the Chinese rank of pei-rzu or beise. To the south lay the domains of the Teijiner Mongols.

Beyond Tsaidam, the route rose to the Tibetan plateau and crossed the Chang-Tang or great northern plain of Tibet, which Roerich describes as

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‘a country of climatic extremes’, of burning sun, bitter cold and great wind storms, all of whic;:h had together conspired to make it what it had tOpographically become: ‘a series of weathered mountain chains which have been considerably levelled, and broad intermontane plains, the home of herds of wild yaks’.3 Here, on either side of the Tangla range, lived the Horpas: the inhabitants of the Tibetan province of Hor. The first Tibetan settlement of any consequence on this route was Nagchukha (Nagqu), a customs and militia post and trading centre �hrough which many caravan routes passed. Dorzhiev would have been JU�
t one of a profusion of exotic Central Asian types rubbing shoulders WJt� each other in the squalid streets and bazaars of Nagchukha where, besides the obligatory monastery, Shabden Gompa, he would also have found a dzong in which lived lay officials. It is quite likely that his caravan changed their tired pack animals for fresh ones here.

Many travellers from Urga opted for a slightly less direct route that brought them to Nagchukha by way of the great monastic centre of Khum-Bum in the north-eastern Tibetan province of Amdo, near the turquoise lake of Koko-Nor. This was the country from which Tsongkhapa, the founder-father of the Gelug school, originally came. �e�
e the caravans from the north joined up with those plying the major SlnIng – Koko-Nor _ Nagchukha – Lhasa route. What the journey from Koko-Nor entailed is described by Sir Charles Bell, one-time British Political Officer in Sikkim and friend of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama:
�� caravan from Mongolia assembles at Kum-bum, ncar th� Koko Nor Lak�.

With it com� m�n from Am-do and th� Koko Nor, and �v�n Buriats from distant Sibttia. All march togctha, finding in th�ir larg� number their prot�on against bngands of the Go-Iok country. At Nag-chu-ka, som� tm days march from lhasa, th� danger from robbers being now past, th� larg� company b�aks up;
�nd the formal pennission of th� Dalai Lama having hem obtained, proceeds In driblns to Lhasa. Twice yearly the caravan, merchants and pilgrims together, crOSses the ‘Northern Plains’ of Tibet, once in the Roods of summer, and once wh�n this desolat� �xpanse, several hundr�ds of miles across, sev�ntttn thousand fccr above sea-I�vel, and sw�pt by hurricanes of wind, is in the grip of an Arctic Wlnt�r. Camels, yaks, and ponies are used both for riding and carrying loads.4 Lhasa lay about a hundred and fifty miles soum-south-west of Nagchukha, beyond the Nyenchen Tangla range, which was crossed by way of the Shang-shung Pass. In 1846 the French Lazarist padres, Huc and Gabet, made that journey:
“The road which leads from Na-Ptchu [Nagchukha) to Lha-Ssa [sic) is, in general, rocky and very laborious, and when it attains the chain of the Keeran mountains it becomes fatiguing in the highest degree. Yet, as you advance, your heart grows lighter and lighter, at finding yourself in a more and more populous country.

“The black tents that speckle the background of the landscape, the numerous parties of pilgrims repairing to lha-Ssa, the infinite inscriptions engraved on the stones erected on each side of the way, the small caravans of long-tailed oxen [yak) that you meet at intervals – all this serves to alleviate the fatigue of the journey.”‘
Within a few days’ march of Lhasa, Huc and Gabet found the black tents of the nomadic pastoralists giving way to the houses and fields of settled agricultural people_ Here, in a well-watered plain that Huc calls ‘Pam,.p<?u’ (he probably means the valley of the Pempo-Chu) and which he a�bes as ‘the vestibule of the holy city’, they rediscovered the amenities of civilized life. Before resuming their journey, they took advantage of this to tidy themselves up and to exchange their yak for robust donkeys. They had then to negotiate only one more mountain to reach Lhasa, but this was ‘the most rugged and toilsome that we had as yet encountered’ – so much so, in fact, that Tibetans and Mongols believed that all who reached its summit gained remission of all their sins. Finally –
“The sun
‘was nearly setting when, issuing from the last of the infinite sinuosities of the mountain [probably the Go-la pass), we found ourselves in a vast plain and saw on our right Lha-Ssa, the most famous metropolis of the Buddhic world.

“The multitude of aged trees which surround the city with a verdant wall; the tall white houses with their Rat roofs and their towers; the numerous temples with their gilt roofs, the Buddha-La [Potala), above which rises the palace of the Talc [Dalai) Lama – all these features communicate to lha-Ssa a majestic and imposing aspect.’
If the first glimpse of Lhasa impressed those Lazarist padres, how much more so would it have moved the young Dorzhiev, for whom it was not just another city but the most sacred site on eanh. At the Go-La, devotional joy would have overflowed from his hean and he would have fallen to his knees to offer thanks that, after so many weary and perilous months in the wastes of Central Asia, he had at last arrived at the spiritual centre of his universe. He would also have added a stone to the cairn on the pass before passing on .

Lhasa lies in the wide valley of the Kyi-Chu, surrounded by a cumin wall of bare mountains. It is dominated by the Potala (commenced c. 1645), a
‘majestic mountain of a building’ painted gleaming white and dark red, which seems an organic extension of the rocky outcrop known as the Red Hill on which it is built. Nearby is the crag known as Chakpori, literally Iron Hill, where the old traditional medical college has since been replaced by a high broadcasting aerial. The old city itself lies to the South-east, a warren of low Tibetan-style houses clustering around
�e Jokhang (established seventh century), the great temple inside which, an a legion of chapels, hundreds of butter-lamps fill the air with light and rancid fumes. Here pious pilgrims pay reverence to the ancient statue of Shakyamuni Buddha known as the Jowo Rinpoche. This, the most venerated image in the land, is said to have been brought from China as pan of the dowry of the Chinese wife of the seventh century king, Songrsen Gampo, who is credited with unifying the Tibetan state and es�b!ishing the Buddhist religion. Around the Jokhang and its ancillary buddangs runs the circumambulation route known as the Barkhor, where i� Dorzhiev’s day strange and colourful pilgrims from every region of TI�t and Central Asia would be seen twirling their prayer-wheels, tolling their beads or measuring the length of their bodies on the ground. Shaven-headed lamas in red and golden robes would be m�c� in evidence everywhere in the city, and those exalted in the rehgaous-political hierarchy would wear splendid silks and brocades.

More pilgrims might be seen circumambulating the Lingkhor, the outer rout� running around the old city, the Potala and Chakpori.

�.

ang a great religious centre, Lhasa was of course replete with rehgaous buildings of all kinds, including Gyu-to and Gyume, the Upper and Lower Tantric Colleges (the former housed in the Ramoche T�mple), and three of the so-called ‘Four Lings’, Tengye Ling, Tsomo Lang and Tsechob Ling. The three great monastic universities of Ganden, Drepung and Sera, which housed tens of thousands of Gelugpa monks, were, however, situated outside the city proper. Surrounding Lhasa’s te�ples were narrow, insanitary streets, along some of which traders phed their business, selling goods from the outlying provinces, from faraway China and Russia, and even cheap manufactured goods of European origin. There was also – it still survives – a Moslem area to the SOuth-east of the Barkhor, complete with its own mosque, where La�akhis and Kashmiris lived and plied their own traditional trades, which,
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as the killing of animals (though not the eating of meat) was proscrabed for practising Buddhists, included butchery. Unfonunately, when Dorzhiev first came to Lhasa in 1873 there was a grave impediment to his monastic ambitions. The Dalai Lama’s permission for him to live and study there had neither been obtained nor, if applied for, would have been fonhcoming – and for a substantial reason. The fierce 26 Buddhism in Russia xenophobia that had caused the Tibetans to debar Europeans from crossing their frontien applied equally to citizens of the Russian Empire

Moreover, such was Tibetan ignorance of the outside world and its inhabitants at this time that they are unlikely to have been able to distinguish Buryat Buddhists from other outsiders. Chopel Pelzangpo therefore beanne very anxious for his protCgc’s safety. Dorzhiev might perhaps have been able to stay illegally with some Mongol lamas had he possessed the funds for greasing the necessary palms, but he was not sufficiently affluent, so his teacher eventually decided that it would be best if he returned to Urga. Before going, however, he was enrolled at Gomang College at Drepung monastic university.

Founded in 1416 by Jamyang ChOjc, a disciple of Tsongkhapa, Drepung was at the time the largest monastic establishment in the world: a vast and crowded complex of whitewashed stone buildings, the most important graced with gilded roofs. It sprawled across the lower slopes of a stony defile so�e five miles west of the holy city of Lhasa. In its heyday, it housed upwards of seven thousand monks divided between four constituent dratsang or colleges: Loseling, Ngagpa, Deyang and Gomang. All had courtyards, sutra halls and chapels, which were connected by narrow cobbled alleyways. Dominating the whole was the Tsokchen, the great assembly hall, which still houses an image of Jhampa Tongdrol, the Lord of Drepung. Sadly, there are only about four hundred monks at Drepung today, though of all the great monasteries of the Lhasa region it suffered least at the hands of the Red Guards who, between 1 966 and 1976, conducted an enthusiastic orgy of destruction in Tibet with a view to inaugurating a brave new Marxist world.

Gomang College, which possesses impressive murals depicting scenes from the life of Shakyamuni Buddha in its main sutra hall, was the establishment in the Lhasa region to which Mongol lamas gravitated.

This tradition could be traced back to the Fifth Dalai Lama, Losang Gyatso ( 1617-82), who had been established in political dominance in Tibet by Gushri Khan and with whom the Mongols therefore felt a special connection. Charles Bell makes the point that it was the Mongo�s and the men from northern and eastern Tibet who enjoyed the reputation of ‘numbering in their ranks the keenest students and the most learned professors’, for only the most highly motivated would have been prepared to make the long and hazardous journey to Lhasa. Moreover, CUt off from all family ties, they were able to apply themselves to study and practice without distractions. That Dorzhiev would have been of this breed we can have no doubt.

Back in Urga and now twenty-one years of age, Dorzhiev was given full ordination as a bhikshu or Buddhist monk by Chapel Pelzangpo. He also continued his spiritual training under the direction of a number of notable lamas. From Jabtru Losang Jinpa, a lama attached to the temple known as Tagten Puntsok Ling who was entrusted with offering jabtru, a purification ritual, to the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu, he received the four initiations of the single form of the Higher Yoga Tantra yidam
(deity), Vajrabhairava, who is closely related to Maiijushri. This yidam
�n.

joys special importance in the Gelug school as Tsongkhapa himself was Initiated into Vajrabhairva’s sadhana by Oongrub Rinchen and it thereaher became his central lifelong practice. Meanwhile, from Ngari-pa,7 a lama born in the Tra-khang below the Potala in Lhasa, who eventually became tutor to the dissolute Eighth Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu, Dorzhiev received initiation into the thirteen deity form of Vajrabhairava.

These initiations empowered him to begin the preliminary practices of the sadhana or specialized yogas associated with each particular yidam.

These would have involved practices designed to develop devotion to the guru, who, as the specialist guide to the occult world of powerful deities
�nd dreadful forces, occupies a very special role in Tantra; also practices hke a hundred thousand mantra recitations and a hundred thousand prostrations, which develop mental calm, concentration and humility.

�ore precisely, Tantric practices would come into play later, like detailed visualizations of the yidam and either worship of these as external forms, Or actual personal identification with them with a view to actualizing the yidam’s enlightened qualities. Dorzhiev also continued to study the SUtras or Buddhist scriptures and their commentaries, the shastras.

But Dorzhiev was not exclusively in Urga. He records in his memoirs that he also studied at what he calls ‘the Five Peaked Mountain’. When Tibetan Buddhists use this term they invariably mean Wu rai Shan, the great Buddhist holy mountain situated south of the Great Wall in Shansi (Shanxi) province, not far from Peking. Here, from a great terraced plateau about eight thousand feet high, rise five cloud-girt
�aks replete with shrines, stu pas, batteries of prayer-wheels, auspicious Sites, rock-cut inscriptions and images, temples and monasteries. Many of the latter had walls of faded crimson or yellow-ochre surmounted by 28 Buddhism in Russia roofs of golden-yellow tiles. The mountain is dedicated to Maiijushri, the celestial bodhisattva who wields the Sword of Wisdom.8 Besides temples of modest proportions, there were at Wu T’ai Shan monasteries that were truly vast. P’usa Ting, for instance, housed hundreds of monks and was said to be larger than the famous Lama Temple in Peking. It was built on a ridge running from the surrounding mountains and was approached by a steep flight of over a hundred steps. When James Gilmour visited it with two missionary friends during this period, he found inside the walls a street lined on both sides with houses built in the Tibetan style. P’usa Ting was the seat of a grand Lama,’
lam� the Dzasak Lama, sometimes alternatively called the Kusho appointed from Lhasa to exercise authority over the thousands of Tibetans and Mongols of the area; for although situated in China, Wu T’ai Shan was a great centre of Lamaism, which of course would have been whY Dorzhiev went there.

‘As Jerusalem is to the Jews, Mecca to the Mohammedans, so is Wu T’ai Shan to the Mongols’, wrote James Gilmour. Mongol pilgrims of all types came here in large numbers all year round, travelling either alone or in groups, mounted or on foot, for to their thinking this was the Supreme Pure Land: a kind of heaven on earth that will be spared devastation when all else perishes iD the apocalyptic destruction that will come at the end of the present world-cycle. One pilgrimage would not only secure benefits for health but would ensure happiness in a future life; two visits would double the benefits, three triple them – and so on.10 On a more immediate, mundane level, however, they had to take care not be fleeced by the Chinese inn-keepers and other opportunists from whom they would have to buy goods and services. One inn along the pilgrim route to Wu T’ai Shan that Gilmour noticed bore an enticing advertisement to the effect that its management was honest, its prices low and its service prompt. Gilmour and his friends found to their chagrin that they ‘had to wait a long time for a poor dinner, and when it came it was not cheap’) 1 Though Dorzhiev does not tell us at which monastery he stayed during his sojourn here (if it in fact took place), P’usa Ting would be the most likely. As for his spiritual life, however, he is quite precise: as well as studying the sutras further, he received more initiations and doctrinal instrUCtion from learned lamas like Jangchub Tsultrim Pelzangpo, Yeshi Lhundrup Pelzangpo (who was a Lharampa Geshi – a Gelug Doctor of Divinity of the highest degree) and from a Buryat rulku whom Dorzhiev calls Dzasak Rinpochi. Could this be the Dzasak Lama, the Lord High Abbot of P’usa Ting?

The young Buryat must have shown great promise and generally pleased his teachers with his considerable charm, for steps were taken to fi.

nd a way for him to continue his studies in Tibet. The plan that was d�
vl�d was basically that his way should be smoothed by the liberal distnbution of offerings in pertinent places around Lhasa. While he was engaged in preliminary practises like the first of four sets of a hundred tho�sa�
d prostrations in order to become qualified to attend one of the p�
ehmmary retreats of Vajrabhairava, Dzasak Rinpoche provided him WIth a.

f.

und-raiser,12 Jadrel Rinpoche, and also gave animals and other necesslhes. Dorzhiev does not seem to have known precisely who urged Dzazak Rinpoche to favour him in this way: perhaps it was a lama named Drubwang Jangchub, or it may have been Namnang Bakshi, his own root guru.

Ja�es Gilmour was highly critical of such ‘collecting expeditions’ as he Witnessed. These usually consisted of several lamas, he records, who Set off from Wu T’ ai Shan each spring with carts and tents to spend the .

summer soliciting alms all over Mongolia and even up into Buryat terntory, where the people were richer and the pickings accordingly better. They would return before winter laden with food, tea, skins, mo�
ey, and driving herds of cattle and flocks of sheep – ‘all eagerly received’. In return, they would reward rheir benefactors by placing their na.

mes on a ‘subscription list’ that gave the good people the pleasure of thinking that they were patrons of the temple and therefore had special connections with Wu T’ai. lJ
Dorzhiev was therefore following a well-established tradition when he returned to his Buryat homeland with Jadrel Rinpoche and raised a very considerable collection. Not only did comparatively affluent Buryat Buddhists show generosity out of gratitude for the initiations, blessings and advice they had received from great lamas like Dzasak Rinpoche, to whom they were particularly devoted, but the less well-off gave generously too. When Dorzhiev and Jadrel Rinpoche returned to Wu T’ai Shan and offered their collections to Dzasak Rinpoche, he was understandably delighted. ‘Normally we only receive such kindness from Our parents’, the good lama declared; and then went on to lavish particular praise on Dorzhiev’s efforts.

Rinpoche now personally took over all the arrangements for Dorzhiev’s retum to Tibet. He obtained various necessities, including clothing, from Peking, arranged that Dorzhiev would again travel with Jadrel Rinpoche and even fixed the precise time when he would leave. Jadrel Rinpoche was impatient, however, for although an old man he had a strong spirit and was eager to be on the trail. So they set off on foot a little early, bearing the offerings which Dzasak Rinpoche had entrusted to them.

There was one important meeting en route: with a Tibetan zaisan who had been employed in the government · of the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu and was now on his way to Lhasa to become the Dalai lama’s Mongolian translator. Significantly, he and Dorzhiev talked high politics: ‘The British and the Russians are two different nations:
the Tibetans should understand this’, Dorzhiev explained, pointing out something that was not generally understood in Tibet. ‘Moreover, the British fear the Russians, who belong to the mightiest nation on earth.

Therdore if the Tibetans wish to avoid falling into the hands of the British they should make friends with the Russians. Moreover, the Manchu Emperor of China respects the Russian Tsar. He sends him gifts and in return has received rifles and cannon. Please convey chis to the Tibetans.’l” Dorzhiev was twenty-six when in 1880 he at last reached the holy city for the second time. He and Jadrel Rinpoche then made generous offerings at the three great Lhasa monasteries, Ganden, Sera and Drepung, as well as at Tashilhunpo ncar Shigarse in southern Tibet, where the Panchen lama, second only in the Tibetan hierarchy to the Dalai Lama, had his scat. Furthermore, during Monlam Chenmo, the Great Prayer Festival held straight after the Losar or New Year celebrations, when annually Lhasa used to be taken over by thousands of monks for three weeks of intense and exotic ceremonies designed to protect Tibet during the coming year, more lavish distributions of offerings were made.

Finally, offerings were made at Gomang College, and these must have been extremely munificent for they qualified Dorzhiev for the title of chomze: one who makes offerings to the entire assembly of monks in a monastic institution.

By this means, which may not exactly have been bribery but something very much like it, the earnest and energetic young Buryat was able to
‘create favourable conditions for my studies’. He apparently suffered no more problems.

At Gomang, Dorzhiev would undoubtedly have been attached to a Mongol tutor who would have superintended his continuing geshe studies -the term ‘geshe’ is roughly the Lamaist equivalent of a doctorate in divinity – which can be broken down into five constituent parts.

Firstly, he would have studied the Collected Topics of Valid Cognition
(i.e., logic); secondly, Buddhist dogmatics based on the Prajnaparamita or Perfection of Wisdom literature; thirdly, Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka or Central Way philosophy; fourthly, the Vinaya or Monastic Discipline; and lastly, Abhidharmakosha, Vasubandhu’s treasury of early Buddhist realism, which includes the exposition of the theory of dharmas
(elements). The overall aim of the course would have been to establish clearly in Dorzhiev’s mind, through reasoning, the nature and goal of the Buddhist path. In practice he would have studied and memorized texts. He would also have tested his knowledge and understanding in actu�
1 �ebate in the special debating courtyard at Gomang, perhaps connnumg until far into the night. But mere intellectual understanding does not transform a mere mortal into a buddha. That can only be brought about by special practices, notably meditation. By this system, therefore, theory plus practice equals realization.

During the following years, Dorzhiev was fortunate to receive dharma teachings and initiations from ‘the Great Protector and his sons, holy beings and actual buddhas.’1S These included among others Trichen Dorji Chang; also Purchok Ngawang Jampa, a distinguished lama of Me College at Sera monastic university, generally regarded as a manifestation of the Indian pandit Atisha. In order to penetrate deeply into the meaning of the teachings as well as to practise in accordance with the instructions he had received from ‘the famous Rabjam Peldrup’,
�e would also periodically go on retreat at Gonsar, a secluded hermitage In the mountains outside Lhasa, where he also received guidance from the ‘incomparably kind’ Geshe Khetsun Zangpo.

All did not go completely smoothly according to Dorzhiev’s own testimony, however. ‘My stupid mind was greatly distracted and so my studies did not progress very well’, he maintains; ‘I accordingly turned my efforts towards various lesser sciences’. 16 This must be a rhetorical piece of conventional self-deprecation, for when in 1888 he finally came to take his geshe examinations, which were traditionally held publicly in the presence of many distinguished scholars as part of the Monlam Chenmo cycle of events in Lhasa, Dorzhiev passed with the highest honours and was awarded the Lharampa degree. It is, however, a little puzzling that he managed to complete the course so quickly, for there is usually a waiting list and ample funds are necessary to pass the final hurdles. Everything points to Dorzhiev having an influential patron and sponsor. Perhaps
�oney was reaching him from Russia – and perhaps from high places In Russia. Naturally he is reticent about anything of this kind.

Dorzhiev was known in Tibet as Ngawang Losang, and among his fellow Buryats after graduating, as Tsenyi Khenpo: a learned instructor in Buddhist logic and debate – something broadly along the lines of professor of Buddhist dialectics. He did in fact instruct Mongol and Buryat students in tsenyi at Drepung. 17 It was a position commanding great respect, and meant he had become a recognized member of the monastic elite of Lhasa.

Then almost at once – and as if he had been prepared and groomed for it – an extremely auspicious door opened for him.

The Thirteenth Dalai Lama 1 888 – 1 898

Even towards the end of his life, T ubten Gyarso, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet (1876-1933), still possessed powerful presence. He was then old by contemporary Tibetan standards and two periods of exile as well as many stressful years of political struggle had taken their toll. Consequently, the jaunty gay hussar moustache that he had once sported was gone, the fiery, impetuous temperament of his youth had mellowed, his teeth were rotten, his enormous ears stuck out from his shaven head like those of a monstrous elf, and his skin was puffy.

His eyes were still compelling, though, and left the few Westerners that met him in no doubt that here was a very remarkable man, both spiritually and politically. 1 History has confirmed these impressions.

Tubten Gyatso is now generally recognized as one of the great Dalai Lamas, the line of whose incarnations stretches back through fourteen physical vehicles to Gendun Drup (1391-1474), the nephew of Jc T songkhapa.

It was Tubten Gyatso’s fate to grapple with the momentous changes that beset Tibet towards the end of the nineteenth century. Until then, the Land of Snows, her borders sealed against foreign intrusions, had successfully enjoyed seclusion for almost a century. Beyond the traditional priest-patron ties with China, no channels of communication existed with the outside world, and any outsider, especially any European who crossed her frontiers. was turned back. Virtually no outside influences, therefore, and no modem innovations had penetrated that hermetic world in which the ancient Mahayana and Tantric Buddhist traditions of ancient India were preserved by devoted guardian monks.

But the outside world could not be kept at bay forever, and if Tibet would not yield to friendly overtures then more vigorous, even violent methods would sooner or later be used to force her to open her doors.

During Tubten Gyarso’s reign there was constant pressure on Tibet from her powerful neighbours, British India and China, as well as from less powerful ones like Nepal. She was invaded several times and her precarious independence was in almost constant jeopardy. But in the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, Tibet was fortunate to have a leader capable of responding to the challenge of the times. At the height of his powers, his capacity for work was prodigious. He would rise at four a.m., earlier if necessary, and labour on through the day, alternating spiritual with worldly duties until past midnight.2 To compl�[e matters, his efforts
�ere often frustrated by reactionary political factions within the country Itself, notably the ultra-conservative caucuses in the great monasteries of the Lhasa area. Yet for over twenty years, between 1912 and 1933, he secured the de facto independence of Tibet while at the same time maintaining inviolate her ancient Buddhist traditions.

When in 1875 the Twelfth Dalai Lama died, a regent, Tatsak Rinpoche, was appointed to rule Tibet until the next Dalai Lama was found and brought to maturity. He was a monk of Kunde Ling,3 one of the four royal colleges of the Lhasa area from which, with three other monasteries, the Fifth Dalai Lama had decreed that regents should be drawn. At once efforts began to locate the new body in which the compassionate spirit of the Buddhist deity Chenrezi (Skt
�valokiteshvara), thought to inhabit each Dalai Lama, would reappear In the world. Tradition had set up elaborate occult methods for doing this. An official group would, for instance, visit the Oracle Lake, Lhamoi Latso, situated near the Chokhorgyal monastery some ninety miles east-south-east of Lhasa, in whose mystic waters mysterious signs and portents would appear. Afterwards search parties would be dispatched to follow them up.

The wily Chinese, always with a keen eye for their own political advantage, had attempted to gain some influence over proceedings by pressing upon the Tibetans a golden urn in which the names of candidates could be put and a ‘winner’ drawn as in a lottery. Fortunately, in this case the urn was not needed, for all the indications, including the pronouncements of the State Oracle who lived in a small temple at Nechung, were particularly powerful and clear that the new incarnation would be found in the village of Langdun in the Dakpo region of south-east Tibet. A likely child, born amidst marvellous portents to a worthy couple named Kunga Rinchen and Losang Drolma on 27 May 1876, was duly found and tested along with two other candidates.

When shown a selection of articles, he unerringly chose those items that had belonged to the previous incarnation. The Regent and other high officials were convinced, the appropriate declarations were made and the child was brought to his capital, Lhasa, and initially installed at the Gunthang monastery near the holy city in 1 878, then moved to Samtcnling, a monastery just to the north of Lhasa.

After his formal enthronement at the Potala in Lhasa in july 1 879, the infant Dalai Lama lived a cloistered life mainly in the company of adults. In anticipation of his future spiritual role and ‘in accordance with the procedures set by my predecessors’, he took various monastic vows, received major and minor Tantric initiations, and was given a thorough Buddhist education. He had numerous gurus drawn from different schools of Tibetan Buddhism, his Senior Tutor being the Regent, Tatsak Rinpoche, but the main brunt of his day-to-day teaching fell on the Junior Tutor, Purchok Ngawang Jampa of Sera Me College, with whom he forged a special bond of affection. It was Purchok who taught him how to read and write, who steered him through the complex Gelug programme of study and who gave him various Tantric initiations as well as a host of oral transmissions. He also presided over his full monastic ordination in 1 895 and guided him in meditation. After his tutor’s death, the Lama wrote:
[Purchok Rinpochcj never allowed my training to become one-sided, always watching to see that my practice of contemplation and meditation kept a proper balance with my efforts in study. He revealed the entire path of enlightenment to me, like teaching a child how to walk and talk. His kindness to me was inconceivable, and there is no way I could ever hope to repay it.4 The Dalai Lama was also instructed in logic and exercised in formal debate – he was dazzlingly good at it, according to Purchok Rinpoche

The connection between Dorzhiev and the Dalai Lama began about 1 888, the year in which Dorzhiev took his geshe examinations and the Dalai Lama was twelve or thirteen. As the two events followed so closely upon each other, the likelihood would be that Dorzhiev had been picked out already as a suitable tutor and hastened through the notoriously slow, cumbersome and expensive geshe examination process. His spiritual and scholarly qualities must have attracted attention, and he was also appreciated for his personal charm and practical acumen. But he was not without opponents. There were some Tibetans who muttered that it was insupportable that a Russian subject should hold so high a position, and they repeatedly called upon the Regent and his ministers to dismiss Dorzhiev and send him back to his homeland. At one point they nearly h�d their way, but the Dalai Lama and Purchok Rinpoche interceded on his behalf. 6 For the next ten years, Dorzhiev, by his own account, served as the young Dalai Lama’s ‘inseparable attendant’, and His Holiness came t� look upon him as his ‘true guardian and protector’. 7 During this time a close and lasting relationship was formed with the result that down to 1913 Dorzhiev was the Lama’s closest political advisor. It may well have been, furthennore, that it was Dorzhiev who, either alone or with political allies, encouraged his young protege to avoid the fate of his predecessors – the last four Dalai Lamas had all been bu�ped off before attaining maturity by power-hungry regents – by takang temporal power into his hands as soon as he was able to do so. ‘There was never previously a man who had risen so high in Tibet’,
Wrote the Kalmyk Baza Bakshi of Agvan Dorzhiev.8 Being an assistant tutor to the Dalai Lama also had distinct spiritual advantages for Dorzhiev. He was able to be present when Purchok Rinpoche gave His Holiness blessings, teachings and initiations into the sadhana of such yidam as Vajramala, Chakrasamvara, Guhyasamaja and Vajrabhairava; also Kalachakra, literally the ‘Wheel of Time’, thought by many to be the apogee of the Tantric path and especially relevant in the present Kali Yuga or spiritual dark age. To develop the spiritual skills required by these practices, the Lama would retire into short retreats’J
for periods of a week or two twice or three times each year, and at least once during his teens for three months. Dorzhiev was able to accompany him on some of these. Meanwhile, the special duties entrusted to him included the performance of occult rituals to ensure that the Dalai Lama e�joyed a long life, and either organizing or himself offering special
‘lafe substances’}O He moreover oversaw the carving and printing of the wood blocks whenever the Dalai Lama ordered new impressions of sacred texts.

As Dorzhiev’s relationship with his young protege developed, he gradually began to broach political matters. Always deeply devoted to the interests of his fellow Buryats – and to the Kalmyks as well

More imponantiy, as history was eventually to show, Dorzhiev now also began to urge upon the Dalai and Panchen Lamas the wisdom of looking to Russia for support against the British, since the Manchu Empire of China, then in a state of decay, lacked the necessary strength to be a viable patron-protector of Tibet and might even be prepared, for money, to give Tibet into the hands of some other foreign nation. The British sahibs, lording it away below the Himalayas in India, had for some time been exerting pressure on Tibet’s southern frontiers. On the face of it this did not amount to much more than a series of vexing border squabbles and unwanted overtures, but to the Tibetans it was sinister –
evidence that Britain wished to engulf Tibet as she had engulfed India and was engulfing various Himalayan enclaves, notably the kingdom of Sikkim, with which Tibet traditionally had very close ties. I I Engulfment, the Tibetans believed, would mean that their spiritual traditions, the jewel they valued over all others, would be destroyed.

‘Because she herself is an enemy of Great Britain, Russia will come to the assistance of the Land of Snows to prevent her being devoured by the British,’ Dorzhiev explained to the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, ‘Also the stainless teachings of the Buddha still flourish in Russian-controlled TOrgutl2 and in Buryat[ia).’
During the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s minority, two particular but unrelated events took place which gave the young prelate a foretaste of political things to come.

The first was the penetration of Tibet by the Bengali babu Sarat Chandra Das (1849 -1917) 1 3 who successfully combined scholarship

The other crucial event was the invasion of parts of Western Tibet in 1 888 by the Gurkhas of Nepal demanding compensation for the looting of Nepalese shops in Lhasa following a quarrel between two Tibetan women and a Nepalese shopkeeper .

In 1 886, after twelve years of service, Tatsak Rinpoche died and his office passed according to time-hallowed tradition to a senior lama of
.

of the other six special monasteries. Thus Demo T rinley Rapgay,
�e IDcarnate lama of Tengye Ling, became the new Regent. Tengye Ling was not large and populous but it was exclusive and very wellendowed. It was also very conservative and traditionally pro-Chinese, so Demo Khutukhtu would have been a partisan of the Manchus and in consequence, both anti-Russian and anti-British. On assuming power he ill-advisedly appointed his brothers as aides, and their corrupt and Oppressive behaviour won them many enemies; this was later to cause severe problems.

one The policy of exclusion maintained by the Tibetans was an open challenge to a certain adventurous type of European. Almost for the sport of it, a number of intrepid travellers and explorers were tempted to make a dash through the Forbidden Land to the holy city of Lhasa, which, veiled so long from Western eyes, had acquired an almost irresistible mystique. One of these was the Frenchman Gabriel Bonvalot, who decided to try to reach the holy city from the North, crossing the Altyn Tagh and traversing [he vast northern plain of Tibet.

Bonvalot relied not merely on courage and determination but on close secrecy: such secrecy in fact that his two European companions, the Belgian missionary Father Dedeken and the young French aristocrat and sportsman Prince Henri of Orleans, were kept in the dark about their true objC..”tive until the expedition was well advanced.

In February 1 890, after surviving the bitter Arctic conditions of the Chang-Tang in winter, Bonvalot and his party were eventually stopped by a large force of armed Tibetans just south of Tengri-Nor, a lake about ninety-five miles north of Lhasa. A number of Tibetan officials went out to meet them and several days of parleying and political discussion ensued. It is interesting to speculate whether Dorzhiev was present.

Certainly Bonvalot docs not mention him specifically in his published narrative, nor can he be picked out in Prince Henri’s photographs; but it is interesting to note that Bonvalot records that the negotiations were carried on through a Mongolian and that at least two other interpreters were sent out from lhasa, one of whom he describes as a native of Urga who had come to Tibet some time ago and been obliged to stay because he lacked the funds to return home.

The Tibetans initially believed that Bonvalot’s group were either British or Russians, enemies in either case, but Prince Henri advised them that they were neither; they were French – and he spoke of ways in which the French, working in conjunction with their allies the Russians might ‘prevent Tibet from being devoured by Britain’. Tibetan officials were adamant that Bonvalot and his companions shCluld not under any circumstances proceed to lhasa and eventually it was agreed that they should leave for China via Batang;t .. nevertheless, Prince Henri’s advice was noted in lhasa, where it served to confirm what Dorzhiev himself had been telling the Tibetans.

At about the same time, the Nechung Oracle went into ritual trance and afterwards made two pronouncements that could also be interpreted as supportive. Firstly, he announced that a great spirit, a manifestation of a supremely compassionate being, a bodhisattva no less, had appeared in the north and east, which might be construed as a reference to the Russian Emperor, who of course was regarded as an incarnation of White Tara by Russian Buddhists. He also talked in the cryptic way that oracles do of ‘treating an open wound with the fat of a dog’, which could be interpreted as meaning, if an improbable remedy works then don’t hesitate to use it, or more precisely: if Russia can help Tibet then she should be approached.

As inside Tibet a fear of external encroachment began to mount, secret high level political meetings were also now convened to discuss the possibility of seeking protection from an outside power. Dorzhiev, asked to attend one of these, argued his case that Russia could offer the best protection. Subsequently, the Tibetans began to keep a close watch on the activities of the Russians, and when the Heir Apparent, the future Emperor Nicholas II, visited Buryatia during his grand tour of the Far East in 1 890/1, they were favourably impressed:
Word of the reverent reception by the Suryat people of their deified monarch and of the favours loaded (upon them) after the passage of His Imperial Majesty penetrated deep into distant Tibet, and in the eyes of everyone, from the Dalai lama and high officials down to the most humble commoner, the prestige of Russia was increased considerably, and this naturally suggested the notion that such a bodhisanva of a Tsar could be of great bendit to Tibet as well.1S
The young and impressionable Dalai Lama was certainly among those persuaded by Dorzhiev’s arguments. He had virtually no knowledge of
�he ou�ide world and absolutely no knowledge of the workings of In.

temanonal politics – which was true of just about everyone else in Tibet at the time. His tsenzab, however, was very much a man of the world: comparatively well-educated, well-travelled in Central Asia, and m?reover a person of intelligence, acumen, charm and character. One Witness who personally met him testifies that his ‘science, energy and, above all, the vivaciry of his mind . . . predestined him to become a great statesman or a great adventurer.’16 He may also have lent a
�rtain urgency to his arguments by invoking a prophecy then current In Lhasa that some nemesis was about to overtake Tibet that would mean there would only be thirteen Dalai Lamas. But perhaps Charles Bell sums up the situation most succinctly: ‘The professor of theology was clever and pushful, and the god-king was cut off from contact with the outside world’. 17 Because of the air of mystery that has always surrounded him and the central part he played in Central Asian politics during this period, it has been suggested more than once that Dorzhiev was a sinister Russian agent. For instance, in Sturm Uber Asien, a ripping yam (Central Asian style) published in Berlin in 1926 by the German Oriental traveller and geo-physicist Wilhelm Filchner,18 it is alleged that Dorzhiev was recruited by the Russian Foreign Office and Intelligence Service in 1885, and that he was the master of many lama-agents, including a Mongolian named Zerempil (born 1870), whose memoirs form the basis of Filchner’s book. This would seem improbable since at the time Dorzhiev was immersed in the study of higher Buddhist dialectics; and moreover, it might be argued that no mere mole would have possessed the motivation to pursue these notoriously difficult intellectual disciplines for years on end and to the highest academic levels.

On the other hand, Dorzhiev was a highly political animal and there exists solid evidence that he was by no means hermetically cut off from COntact with the Russian empire while he was in Lhasa. Indeed, W.

A. Unkrig talks of him being liberally rewarded with medals and decorations by the highest authorities in St Petersburg for his promotion of Russia in Tibet. Also Russian records report that when in 1896 three Buryats were decorated by Nicholas II, a certain ‘Lama Agvan’ received a monogrammed watch, while one of the others, who both received gold medals, was a Buryat named Ocir Dzhigrnitov, whom Dorzhiev 40 Buddhism in Russia himself reports had got through to Lhasa with a message from Dr Piotr Badmayev, a Buryat healer influential in high policy circles in St Petersburg who at the time was in Peking, having obtained Russian government finance to the tune of five million rubles for a far-fetc�ed scheme to use Buryats to incite the Mongols and Tibetans to rebel agamst their Chinese suzerains. To conceal Ocir’s true purpose, Dorzhiev passed him off as an ordinary pilgrim, ‘and so he went back, after performing religious observances with some Mongols.’ 19 When the Dalai Lama assumed full temporal responsibilities in September 1 895 at the age of nineteen, Dorzhiev continued to be a member of his spiritual staff. He also attended His Holiness in a personal capacity. According to Charles Bell, he was appointed ‘Work Washing Abbot … part of his duties being to sprinkle water, scented with saffron flowers, a little on the person of the Dalai Lama, but more on the walls of his room, on the altar, and on the books, as a symbol of cleansing.’2o Bell also reports that for his various duties Dorzhiev received a combined salary amounting to no more that £ 140 per annum.

A Russian source, on the other hand, maintains that Dorzhiev held the exalted office of ‘Keeper of the Golden Teapot’.2 1 With the Dalai Lama’s political coming-of-age, the Regent, Demo Trinley Rapgay, resigned. He and his brothers did not, however, depart the spiritual arena with good grace for, like many of their predecessors, they had become attached to the delights of power. A power struggle –
and in all likelihood a sinister one – seems to have taken place, and one, moreover, because of the political loyalties of Demo Khutukhtu and his monastery, which would also at root have been about Chinese power in Tibet. The upshot was that Demo Khutukhtu and his brothers were accused of using black magic to secure reinstatement. Thus arose the notorious Case of the Cursed Pair of Boots, which began in suitably melodramatic fashion when, during the Monlam Chenmo or Great Prayer Festival of 1 899, the Nechung Oracle predicted danger to the life of the Dalai Lama and suggested the thorough investigation of a pair of Tibetan boots given to the Dalai Lama’s friend and tutor Terton SOgyal by Chojor, the steward of Tengye Ling. Whenever SOgyal wore these boots his nose started bleeding. The cause was soon rooted out: when tom apart, the soles of the boots were found to contain slips of paper on which were scrawled the Dalai Lama’s name and horrible curses invoking his sudden death. The ex-Regent, his brothers and their accomplices were arrested and put on trial. Found guilty, their lives would probably have been forfeit had not the Dalai Lama been compassionately opposed to capital punishment. Instead, Demo Trinley Rapgay was stripped of his estates and imprisoned for life along with his accomplices.21 Su�
h indeed was the murky political world in which the new ruler of Tibet had to try to assen his own political will. It recalls as much a� anything Italy under the Borgias – with sinister occult nuances. A
P�cture of what was going on politically in Lhasa towards the end of the nineteenth century was outlined in a pamphlet that Dr Badmayev passed on to the St Petersburg newspaper Novoye Vremya. It was presented as a repon by a ‘Buriate of Chorinskaia’ – obviously Dorzhiev. British officials sent home the following resume:
In this report, the customs of Lhasa and the intrigues surrounding the Dalai Lama are described. His Court consists of a number of Lamas divided into parties and quarrelling among each other. The party in power holds the seals and acts in the Dalai Lama’s name. The laner is indifferent to party strife, and is concerned only that his authority should not be diminished, so that the people should continue to revere him. As a diminution of his authority is contrary to the interests of the parties, he remains outside their disputes.2J
Dorzhiev could hardly have enjoyed his dose relationship with the Dalai Lama without becoming involved in these intrigues. Indeed, there was a moment when he debated whether it might be wise to retreat to his native Trans-Baikalia,24 but he maintains that he was concerned for the Dalai Lama, who was disturbed by the prevailing contention.

Communication betWeen the two of them seems to have been broken at some point. Perhaps the young god-king was in retreat; or perhaps –
�hich seems more likely – Dorzhiev’s political opponents managed to ISOlate him from His Holiness. The position had dearly become very tense and delicate.

The next news that Dorzhiev received was that it was His Holiness’s personal wish that he leave Tibet for three years and while away he should visit China, Russia and France in order to find out more about the ‘order of life’ in those countries and whether political suppon might be fonhcoming, as Prince Henri of Orleans had suggested.25 Dorzhiev therefore began to make arrangements for leaving. He dutifully visited Purchok Rinpoche, who offered him the fatherly advice that he should spread the Buddha Dharma by whatever means were open to him for the spiritual welfare of all sentient beings and also bestowed on him protective blessings in the sadhana of Mahakala and the ‘Poisonous Black Dharmaraja’, as well as giving him three symbolic gifts that would give him suppon of body, speech and mind. These were a statue of the goddess Tara (body), a copy of a liturgical rite containing guidance on the Pratimoksha or Code of Monastic Discipline (speech),
and a Kadampa stupa (mind). From the Ncchung Oracle, meanwhile, Dorzhiev received further advice on the wonhy Buddhist enterprises that he could undcnake as well as more auspicious presents, including a gold thumb-ring and a red knotted khada16 or offering scarf.

So in 1 899, Dorzhiev, then in his fony-fifth year, set off from Lhasa
‘bearing both worldly and spiritual riches’.27 It was a beginning of a great journey that was to take him far beyond his Central Asian stamping grounds, far beyond Asia … far beyond even his own most extravagant projections …

Ukhtomsky’S Summons 1 898

When Dorzhiev left Lhasa in 1898 – with who knows what simple or mixed feelings – he was not, as might have been expected, a member of a caravan heading for Koko-Nor. Ever a man of surprises, he headed in exactly the opposite direction: south towards British India – according to contemporary Tibetan perceptions the pit of all evil and menace.

Cenainly this would have given him access to modern means of transponation that could carry him to Trans-Baikalia far more quickly than if he had gone by the more direct but arduous overland routes.

But there is also this to bear in mind. The sinister British presence notwithstanding, India was – and still is – for Tibetans the supreme holy land. There, in the sultry heanland of the Gangetic plain, lie the sacred sites associated with Shakyamuni Buddha. To make a pilgrimage to one or more of these was the earnest aspiration of every pious Tibetan Buddhist, for the blessings and spiritual merit that would thereby accrue to him would be immeasurable and at least ensure a fortunate rebinh in his next life.

Having left Lhasa and been ferried across the River Tsangpo, Dorzhiev and his unnamed companions reached Nedong, near the modem administrative centre of Tsetang, one of the five gates on the road to India noted for bureaucratic complications and corruption, where they were stopped on the orders of the military commander. Dorzhiev’s fame must have preceded him, however, for when he realized who he was, the officer in charge prostrated himself three times, offered him a lot of money and ‘happily sent us on our way’.

The view a few days later of the crisply snowcapped Himalayan peaks rising from the barren Tibetan tableland to touch the ultramarine sky must have lifted Dorzhiev’s hean. It would have been lifted for a second time soon afterwards when, having crossed the high passes into the state of Sikkim, he caught his first glimpse of the plains of India. In the distance they looked like a vast and mysterious map spread out at his feet. He could descry great rivers. roads. jungles. towns. villages and cities. ‘Is this not like a deva loka’. he asked himself; ‘a land of the gods?’
Then the steep descent from the snowline to the treeline. and. like so many adapted to life at high altitude. he found the heat overpowering and began to experience difficulty in breathing. Just to walk a short distance was too enervating. and sleep when it came was fitful. He quickly acclimatized however. and afterwards experienced no more difficulties in that direction. though others were in store. At the Indian .

frontier he was stopped and interrogated by British officials. Coolly, he explained that he was a Chinese subject, a Mongolian; in fact, ‘I
am the first Mongolian who has decided to return to his homeland . by the easier sea route’, he announced, showing them a Mongolian passport he had purchased for twenty-five yuan from the Chinese representative in Lhasa. ‘Many more of my fellow countrymen will shortly follow.’l The commercially-minded British, no doubt pleased at the prospect of a fresh influx of travellers with cash to spend, allowed him to pass. They had in any case nothing really to be suspicious about. India, as Kipling noted, was a land of pilgrims, and it was not unusual to see Tibetans plying their way along the hot and dusty roads – Kim’s Lama was just such a one, though probably few others wandered as far as Lahore. Many Tibetan and a few Mongolian traders also came regularly to do business in Darjeeling and Calcutta: Alexander Ular talks of a thousand Tibetans a year at Calcutta at about this time.

In due course Dorzhiev reached Siliguri, the railhead that served the hill station of Darjeeling. where he caught a train for the bustling city of Calcuna, then capital of the Indian Empire. The architecture of the great buildings of the city fully reflected the arrogant self-esteem of the proud people that had built them. There were government offices. museums and libraries with Corinthian columns; a cathedral reminiscent of St Paul’s; triumphal monuments and Wren-style churches; imposing banks and houses of the great trading companies . . . Certain sections of the city might have been transported intact from the City of London itself, except that just a stone’s throw away there were overcrowded native quarters that were totally Oriental. Government House on the edge of the great open park known as the Maidan was the official residence of Her Majesty’s Viceroy. Next year, 1899, that ‘most superior person’, George Nathaniel Curzon, would be appointed to that plummy position. Had he already been installed and caught the slightest whiff of a suspicion that a Russian citizen high in the councils of the Dalai Lama was in his capital he would have been extremely dismayed. As it was, the British intelligence agencies allowed Dorzhiev to slip through their net without even noticing.

Though Calcutta was the first great modern city Dorzhiev had clapped e.

yes on, he did not linger there but instead caught another train, this time to the ‘greatest of Pure Lands’, Bodh-Gaya. In that Bihar town he duly made pious prostrations at the Bodhi Tree beneath which Shakyamuni Buddha had achieved full spiritual enlightenment, and paid his respects to various other ‘objects of reverence’. He also made offerings, including gold.

In those days Bodh-Gaya had been in the hands of Shaivite Hindus for about three hundred years. They regarded the Buddha as a manifestation of their god Vishnu, and had set up their own temple. Accordingly, they were somewhat contemptuous of Buddhist claims to the place, which had just begun to be advanced by Western sympathizers like Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (who with Madame H. P. Blavatsky (183 1-91) and others founded the Theosophical Society in New York City in 1 875) and Sir Edwin Arnold, author of The Light of Asia, a best-selling poetic life of the Buddha. Arnold wrote in the Daily Telegraph:

If you walked on that spot which [400,000,000) Buddhists love so well, you 
would observe with grief and shame ... ancient statues plastered to the walls of 
an irrigating well ... Stones carved with Buddha's images ... used as weights 
in levers for drawing water ... I have seen three feet high statues in an excellent 
state of preservation buried under rubbish ... and the Ashokan pillars, the most 
ancient relics on the site - indeed, 'the most antique memorials in all India' -
which graced the temple pavement, are now used as posts of the Mahant's [i.e., 
the Hindu priest's) kitchen.2

Returning to Calcutta, Dorzhiev took passage in a ship sailing for China.

During the voyage a mighty storm erupted, perhaps one of those terrible typhoons of the South China Sea whose furies Joseph Conrad has evoked so compellingly. Completely out of his element, the Buryat lama began to fear that he was about to be precipitated into his next rebirth. He was spared, however, and in due course reached Peking, from where he travelled on to Urga. There he was reunited with his old mentor, Chapel Pelzangpo, and received further blessings and initiations from him as well as from the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu.

News that Dorzhiev was in Urga quickly filtered through to TransBaikalia, and soon two representatives appeared who had been sent by the Buryat monks and laity to request him to return to his own people.

Naturally he agreed to do so. It was probably not the first time that he had been back in Buryaria since settling in Lhasa in 1 880. There are records that maintain that he had returned there in 1 889 on a 46 Buddhism in Russia fund-raising mission for his monastic college, and as late as 1 896, on the orders of the Dalai Lama, he is said to have spent a year at the Gusinoye Ozero Datsan near Selenginsk, seat of the Khambo Bandido Lama, ‘not as a political agent but as a scholar’.J There may have been other occa-sions too. This time he certainly visited the Atsagat Datsan near KharaShiber, where, with great pleasure, he collected the inscribed gold watch which the Emperor had presented to him for services rendered to Dr Badmayev’s agents in Lhasa. He also proposed to his fellow Buryats that a great religious meeting-place be established where monks of the main monasteries could foregather for great assemblies at which teachings might be given and ceremonies conducted. The suggestion was unanimously accepted, and Tehor Kangyur Lama was invited to take charge of the meeting-place; Dorzhiev himself was also given a responsible post.

Then events began to take a decidedly momentous turn. Some time before, when he had passed through the Chinese city of Tientsin en route for Peking. Dorzhiev had met the Russian consul, Aleksey Dimitrievich Startsev, a man of complex family background. His natural father was the Decembrist, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bestuzhev (1791-1855), who had been exiled to Siberia along with his brother for their part in the palace revo-lution attempted in December 1822 by some liberal officers of the Guard, the elite corps of the Russian army staffed by members of the new gentry.

economic 

During his 
        conditio

         exile, which he had put to good use investigating Buryat CUStoms,

ns and so forth,4 Bestuzbev had found consolation in the of a Buryat lady, who bore him two sons. Later this lady contracted a mous more permanent liaison �th a �ch�nt, D.O. Startsev, who magnani-ly accepted both boys IDto hiS family and gave them his name.S
Dorzhiev had told Startsev about his mission but the consul had refused to accept him on an offici�
1 �asis because he was travelling without retinue or formal substannataon of status. He did, however wire the news of D.orzhie�
‘s progress to a velj’ prominent figure i�
the highest court ardes an St Petersburg: Pnnce Esper Esperovich Ukhtomsky (1861-1921).

anns The old Impe�al Russi�
n .eagle fa�d in two directions and foreign policy was subJect.

to a Similar duahsm. �ere were those who urged a westward orienta non, notably con centra non on the Balkans, maritime access to the Mediterranean through the Black Sea and the Dardenelles, and Pan-Slavism in Eastern Europe. But there were also those who felt that Russian destiny lay in the East, even at the risk of conflict with Great Britain, China and the rising power of Japan. Reverses in the West caused Russia to tum increasingly to the East during the laner pan of the nineteenth century, which perfectly suited cenain other great powers, notably Germany. Within the Eastern lobby at least two factions were active. One was concerned with economic concessions in Korea:
the so-called Yalu Timber Concession. The other faction, of which Ukhtomsky was a leading member along with Count Sergey Yulevich Wine, the highly capable Finance Minister, and Dr Piotr Aleksandrovich Badmayev, had more grandiose notions of Russia’s role in Asia.

Scholar, collector, traveller, political thinker, poet, entrepreneur, publisher and editor, Prince Ukhtomsky was a remarkable man by any token

Princes were not rare in Imperial Russia; they were cenainly not scions of the Imperial House of Romanov but landowning aristocrats of a lesser kind, inferior to the likes of grand dukes and counts. Ukhtomsky could therefore only boast of relatively blue blood, though on his mother’s side his ancestors included Sir Samuel Greig (1735-88) and his son Aleksey Samuilovich (1775-1 845 ), who, though of Sconish origin, saw distinguished service as admirals in the Russian Navy during the wars against the Turks. Ukhtomsky’s father, Esper Alekseyevich, was a naval man too and founded a steamship company to link the Baltic with India and China via the Black Sea.6 While still a student of Philosophy and Slavonic Studies at St Petersburg University, Ukhtomsky developed a keen interest in Buddhism. It was therefore quite appropriate for him on graduating in 1 884 to enter the service of the Depanment of Foreign Creeds of the Ministry of the Interior, which put him at once in direct touch with the Buddhists of Russia and enabled him both to study their religion and culture closely and to stan assembling his great scholarly collection of Lamaist an. Upon this collection, the first of its kind in the world, the German orientalist Alben Griinwedel based a pioneering study to which the prince himself contributed a spirited and self-revealing preface.7 Ukhtomsky wrote that he loved the noble spiritual ideals of Buddhism, as he did all the high mystical endeavours of humanity. He loved too its humanitarian tolerance, and he admired the valour of the missionaries who had borne Shakyamuni Buddha’s teachings across lofty mountain ranges and inhospitable desens to the far-flung comers of Asia. But above all he believed that a revitalized Buddhism, perhaps based at a restored Bodh-Gaya and under the spiritual leadership of the Dalai Lama of Tibet, could reawaken and unify the disparate Buddhist groups of Asia and initiate a regeneration, the basic aim of which would be to ‘set again the great mass of people on the road of adoration of “the master ”’.8 Between 1 886 and 1 890 Ukhtomsky made several journeys to the East, visiting the Buddhist temples of Trans-Baikalia and Peking as well as travelling extensively in Mongolia and as far afield as Ceylon
(Sri Lanka).

This and his burgeoning reputation as an Orientalist secured him, at the very last minute, an invitation to be the chronicler of a grand tour of the East that Crown Prince Nicholas, the future Emperor Nicholas 11, was to make in 1 890 and 1 891. Designed to further Nicholas’s diplomatic education, this was also a cunning ploy to take the prince’s errant mind off the bright young things that were over occupying his attention in St Petersburg.

The tour started with a train journey to Trieste, where a Russian naval squadron including the frigate Pamyat Alova was waiting to sail the Imperial party via Grcccc, Egypt, the Suez Canal and Aden to India, where the obligatory tiger hunt took place as well as visits to Delhi, Jaipur and some of the Buddhist holy places. Late� when the frigate docked at Colombo, some of Nicholas’s entourage took the opportunity of inviting Colonel Henry Steel Olcott aboard. One of them, undoubtedly Ukhtomsky, had earlier tried to contact the American Theosophist at Adyar near Madras, where the Theosophical Society had established its international headquarters, but unfortunately he was away in Burma at the rime. This unidentified Russian visitor had expressed interest in Theosophy and bought some books. Olcott later recalled:
I went aboard the frigate and spent an hour in delightful convenation with Prince Hesptrc Oukhtomsky [sic), Chid of the DCpartcmmt des Cultes in the Ministrre de l’lnterieure, who was acting as the [Crown Prince’s] Private Secretary on this tour, and lieutenant N. Crown of the Navy Departmmt at St Petersburg., both charming mat. I found myself particularly drawn to Oukhtomsky because of his intenSe inmat in Buddhism. which for many yean he has made a Special study among the Mongolian lamaseries. He has also given much time to the study of other reIipons. He was good enough to invite me to make the tour of PropositiOns,9 the Buddhist monasteries of Siberia. He asked me for a copy of my Fourteen so that he might translate them and circulate them among the o.id Priests of Buddhism throughout the empire. This has since been done.1O
After Ceylon, the tour proceeded to Siam, Indo-China, Japan (where an attempt was made on Nicholas’ life) and China, then the Imperial partY
returned to St Petersburg via Vladivostok and Siberia. In Buryari� where, as we have noted, he was reverendy received by the local people, the Heir Apparent camped for a night or so in the vicinity of the Atsagat Datsan.

The lamas took advantage of this opportunity to obtain permission to b�ild a new dukhang of some two storeys on the very spot where Nicholas’ tent had been pitched. Aptly, it was dedicated to White T�ra and served as a choira (a school for the study of higher Buddhist dialectics).

. The book of the tour that Ukhtomsky subsequently wrote, published In six pans between 1893 and 1 897 by the Leipzig firm of Brockhaus, won him instant acclaim and fame. Lavishly produced with many fine engravings, it was the first popular ethnographic work in the Russian language, and soon afterwards English, French and German editions appeared. I I Such was the level to which it lifted Ukhtomsky’s standing that for several years he was consulted by the Emperor on Far Eastern policy as well as giving advice on the government of the eastern regions of Russia.

The prince naturally possessed very evolved political views of his own and he was not reticent about them. Through his newspaper, St Peterburgskiye Viedomosti (St Petersburg News), of which he was editor as well as publisher, he could, moreover, shape public opinion. l 2 He argued forcefully that Russia possessed deep spiritual affinities with the peoples of Asia and so was their natural leader: the one world POwer that could benevolently introduce science and progress into that �nawakened continent and guide it towards spiritual renaissa.

nce.

RUSSia should therefore pursue an expansionistic policy for ‘essennally there are not, and there cannot be, any frontiers for us in Asia’.IJ
.

What he had in mind, however, was not a crude, bludgeoning imperialism of th
� kind practised by the British, who had paltry understanding of the
�Pl ritual traditions of their subject peoples and were mainly inter�ted 111 .

commercial exploitation. Russia, Ukhtomsky felt, being on a hlgh�
r SPiritual plane altogether, would not need to use forceful ‘:’leans as It could depend mainly on benevolence to fulfil its manifest desnny. Ind�d, he at times talked as though the whole matter were so divinely ordamed
�at it must happen of its own accord: organically, as it were, by some p rOCess of natural fusion’. This might �
xplain why he also made .”:�� SCent on the surface to be very contradictory statements, such as.

one has any int -ntion of attacking England in Asia’,I” while he .

dear�y regarded India as a natural pan of the future Russian hegemony m Asia that he foresaw.

Despite his disparagement of Anglo-Saxon huckstering, Ukhtomsky built up considerable commercial interests cf h�s own. Besides.

his newspaper interes� he was Director of the Russo-Chme5e Bank, which was fonned in 1 895. The bank benefitted enormously from the defence treaty he helped negotiate the following year in St Petersburg with Li Hung-chang
( 1823-190 1), a statesman who at the time was virtual ruler of China.

In the treaty, China granted Russia pennission to build a railway across Manchuria with the bank’s finance; as the railway zone was leased to and policed by Russians, it became in effect a strip of Russian territory within Manchuria, and hence the major spearhead of Russian penetration in the area. Ukhtomsky was a member of the Board of the Manchurian Railway too, as well as being involved in Mongolor, a gold-mining concession in Mongolia operated by a Franco-Belgian company panly owned by the Russo-Chinese Bank. Mongolor was managed from Urga by a cenain Russian of Gennan origin named von Groth, who had previously worked for the Chinese Customs Service – he had reputedly been assistant to Sir Roben Hart – a connection he exploited when first staning out gold-mining on his own account in Mongolia before the tum of the century.

Setsen It was in fact his own concession to mine in the T ushetu and Khan aimaks that was later transferred to Mongolor, but it was never very profitable. I 5 Von Groth was also believed by the British – who imputed many sinister things to this shadowy figure – to be interested in extending Mongolor’s activities into Tibet, where there were known to be rich gold deposits, and in 1 902 it was reponed that he had applied to the Chinese for pennission to extend the Trans-Siberian railway into the Land of Snows. l6 Tibet itself had for a long time �n a focus of �ussian interest. During the late nineteenth century RUSSian explorers tned to force their way to Lhasa in much the same way as their British and French counterparts.

Some of the earliest attempts were those of Colonel (later Major-General)
N. M. przhevalsky (1849-85). His first expedition took him only as far as the northern parts of Tibet and �
he headwaters of the Yangtse, but that of 1 879-80 was a more detennmed affair personally backed by the Emperor. Accompanied by an escor:r of picked Cossacks, przhevalsky got within a hundred and fifty miles of Lhasa before being turned back by a large Tibetan force. Then in 1 899 the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, of which Ukhtomsky was a prominent member sent an expedition
.

to Central Asia and Tibet u�
der the leadership of Captain Pett Kuznuch Kozlov (1863-1 935). This too was financed by the Emperor and had an escort of soldiers. Kozlov got as far as the eastern Tibetan town of Chamdo but was also refused permission to proceed to Lhasa. Again, Tibetan soldiers were dispatched to prevent him from advancing, and his party skirmished with them. The first Russian explorer to reach the holy city did so in August 1 900 and was able to stay there until September 1 901. This was Gombozhav Tsebekovich Tsybikov ( 1 873-1930), who as a Buryat was able to pass himself off as a pilgrim in Tibet.

Ukhtomsky was a member both of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society and of the Russian Committee for the Study of Central and Eastern Asia, which was set up by Professors S.F. Ol’denburg and V. V.

Radlov. At these learned institutions and elsewhere he rubbed shoulders with the cream of Russian orientalists and explorers during what is often called the Golden Age of Russian Orientalism. He himself was throughout his life a keen advocate of what the Russians call scientific and we in the West call scholarly research, and when in a position to do so was also a staunch protector of ethnic minorities, notably the Buryats.

His championship of their cause in St Petersburg brought him many heart-felt letters of gratitude, often accompanied by presents. He called for better health care for them, for instance, and defended them against both forcible conversion to Christianity and the arbitrary excesses of local officials.

In religious matters Ukhtomsky was on the side of tolerance, for though a Christian himself, he was conscious of the spiritual authenticity of other religions, notably of course Buddhism, and may well have sympathized with the universalist view that in their highest forms all the religions of the world point to the same ultimate reality. This is not to say that he had reservations about Christian missionaries proselytizing in Asia, however. Far from it; he wanted to see the Gospel disseminated there:
[The study of the Buddhist cult) is, without mentioning its scientific imponance, the basis from whIch our missionaries, who� success is still so limited, can, if they want to lead our country towards a spiritual renaissance and if they propose making themselves pioneers for the Christian faith, obtain the wherewithal to make themselves educational workers and scouts in order to carry into unexplored descm of High Asia the light of a superior faithY
Ukhtomsky was also an advocate of reform and greater social freedom.

He used St Peterburgskiye Viedomosti as a medium through which to express his liberal views – but at a cost. The wrath of the reactionary authorities, who maintained a draconian censorship of the press, fell upon him and St Peterburgskiye Viedomosti was subjected to a series of warnings and punitive bans. Eventually Ukhtomsky was even forbidden

to sign his editorials. For this and other reasons, his political star 
gradually waned and by 1900 he could write 'I have not the influence 
which I formerly enjoyed'l S, and he had completely lost the Emperor's 
ear by the time Rasputin appeared on the scene, though he still retained 
his senior court rank as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Thereafter he 

turned more and more to his scientific interests.

It is clear, then, why in 1 898, when his star was still very much in the ascendant, Ukhtomsky should have shown a close interest in the movements of Agvan Dorzhiev. For a start, Buryat lamas like Dorzhiev, who regularly and freely commuted from Russia across the Lamaist heartland of Central Asia to Urga and Lhasa, were the natural harbingers of his grand vision of Russian leadership in Asia.

‘Trans-Baikalia is the key to the heart of Asia’, Ukhtomsky wrote;
‘the forward post of Russian civilization on the frontiers of the ” Yellow Orient. “’19 But more than that: with his entree to the Dalai Lama, Dorzhiev was in a unique position to be able to help Ukhtomsky and his associates further their plans and projects – if Dorzhiev was not already engaged in doing so.

So in 1 898 Dorzhiev received a letter from Ukhtomsky summoning him to St Petersburg. It took the good lama by surprise and threw him into something of a dilemma. He was an influential person in Trans-Baikalia, he reflected, but if he were to depart, would his plans for the advancement of his fellow Buryats be accomplished? But the call was not one to be lightly dismissed, so in company with Taizan Tseten, a high Buryat official, he � o.

ff for t�e Russian capital, travelling on the still uncompleted Trans-Slbenan Ratlway. Once across the Urals he was in country that was entirely new and foreign to him: Europe, the dynamic cradle of contemporary civilization and culture. Here secular values held sway as opposed to the ancient spiritual ones to which he was so deeply devoted. How would Ngawang Lobsang (Dorzhiev), the master Buddhist dialectician of the debating courtyards of Drepung monastic university, fare in such a Babylonian milieu? It was an interesting question.

Mission To Europe 1 898 – 1 899

In his vIsions of grandeur, Peter the Great conceived of building himself a palace to match the splendours of Versailles. The autocrat’s dreams became reality twenty-nine kilometres west of his capital, on an incline overlooking the steel waters of the Gulf of Finland. Here arose his summer residence of Peterhof (now Petrodvorets): a place of magnificent palaces and pavilions set in a manicured parkland of arbours, gilded statues, fountains and waterways. Somewhere in this magnificent complex, Prince Ukhtomsky presented Agvan Dorzhiev to Nicholas II, Emperor of all the Russias, early in 1 898.

History has heaped ignominy upon Nicholas II. Cenainly he had fine feelings, high ideals, perfect manners, a deep love of his family and a streak of genuine religious devotion – some even say a dash of mysticism – but he conspicuously lacked the robust qualities essential in anyone wishing to continue to play the Great Autocrat in the tradition of his domineering father, Alexander III. So this ‘frail, bearded figure with the strange, wistful eyes … whose feeble shoulders seemed incapable of supponing the mantle of authority which, like a shroud, hung over them’, I misjudged and vacillated when he should have been clear and decisive, and time and again during periods of crisis in his anguished reign he steered the ship of state onto the rocks of disaster.

Two very brief accounts survive of the meeting at Peterhof: that of Dorzhiev himself, and that of the Narkomindel official L.E. Berlin, which disagree quite fundamentally on which party took the initiative.

According to Dorzhiev, the Emperor, speaking through Ukhtomsky, mentioned ‘ways in which Russia could benefit Tibet’ while the ‘hand of the enemy [i.e. Britain] was not withdrawn’, and suggested that a Russian representative be sent to Tibet. To this Dorzhiev could only explain that both the Dalai Lama and his government, as well as lay and monastic opinion in Tibet, were all firmly resolved that no foreigner should enter their land, so for the time being the notion of a Russian representative in Lhasa or even of Russo-Tibetan rapprochement was not feasible.

With diplomatic handling, however, and two or three meetings of the present kind, there might be a possibility of disposing the Tibetans more favourably towards the Russians. The Emperor, Ukhtomsky and other Russians present were not pleased with this.

Berlin, however, suggests that Dorzhiev transmitted a verbal request from the Dalai Lama to the Emperor that Russia give assistance to Tibet.

To this the Emperor apparently replied that before any answer could be given the request would have to be submitted in proper written form.

Altogether, Dorzhiev’s reception in St Petersburg was ‘restrained and mistrustful’, except in Imperial ‘great power’ circles, where the idea of Russo-Tibetan rapprochement found favour. Here Dorzhiev was promised support.2 Putting both accounts together and weighing them against subsequent events, it would seem that Dorzhiev probably did ask the Emperor if Russia was prepared to help Tibet if she needed assistance. Nicholas was not prepared to commit himself, but he and Ukhtomsky did raise the question of Russian representation in Lhasa. Dorzhiev could in his turn give no positive response, so neither party derived much satisfaction from the meeting, but it was nevertheless important in opening communications be�� Lhasa and St Petersburg.

Dorzhiev also presented pennons from the Dalai Lama at the Russian Foreign Ministry. Among these was a request for the establishment of a Buddhist meeting place in St Petersburg: not necessarily a purpose-built temple but some kind of shrine, perhaps in one of the foreign embassies.

As the journal Stoitel announced:
In view of the great number of people professing the Buddhist faith living pcnnancndy in Petersburg it has been reponed to us that there has arisen a petition for the opening of a small Buddhist oratory for one hundred to twO hundred people. The oratory will be situated in one of the central pam of the capital)
Census figures certainly bear out that the numbers of St Petersburg Buddhists were rising at this time. That of 1 869 had recorded only one, an intellectual, but in 1 897 there were seventy-five and by 1910 a hundred and eighty-four. Most were Buryats and Kalmyks, some of them students and army personnel stationed in the capital; there were also some Buddhists attached to foreign embassies (Chinese, Japanese, Thai); and there was an elite coterie of European sophisticates and intellectuals, most of them from the upper echelons of society, who
‘saw in the mystic cults of India and Tibet a kind of universal religion of the future’. These people, if not exactly card-carrying Buddhists, were certainly highly sympathetic. Ukhtomsky is the best known of them.4 We can be sure that Ukhtomsky introduced Dorzhiev to all segments of this growing community, as well as to members of the thriving school of St Petersburg orientalism: men like P.K. Kozlov, D. A. Klements, S.F.

Ol’denburg and F.1. Stcherbatsky. We have no concrete record of it, but it must have been immensely stimulating for them, far removed as they were from the vital centres of the Buddhist world, to have a learned lama from the court of the Dalai Lama among them; and for his part, Dorzhiev may have begun to appreciate that European Russia could be relatively fertile ground for the dissemination of Buddhism .

Characteristically, Dorzhiev has left us no record of his impressions of St Petersburg, but it must have impressed him deeply, for it is a city in the grand style: intended by its founding genius, Peter the Great, to be a full expression of the glory of his Russian empire. Impressive classical and baroque palaces designed by architects from France and Italy, soaring churches with gilded domes, cupolas and spires, triumphal columns and statues, and elegant stucco apartment blocks flank its expansive boulevards and streets, while down its main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt, trams and carriages and even a few motor cars would have bowled along beside the fashionable theatres and shops and coffee houses frequented by the beau monde.

But St Petersburg always had its dark side too: those Dostoyevskian quarters where the poor lived the blighted and brutal lives that sometimes ended in madness or murder; and it was here too that Gogol’s downtrodden chinoviks were engulfed by mountains of superfluous paper. It is also a city of water: built on a swamp, sliced in two by the broad Neva and laced with glassy black canals. According to the writer, Vladimir Nabokov, who before his exile was one of the occupants of St Petersburg’s palaces, the shadow aspect of the city derived precisely from its watery origins.

What, for instance, was the periodic flooding of the Neva if not a ‘dim mythological vengeance’ (as Pushkin described it) of the primordial swamp gods, ‘trying to take back what belonged to them’?5 From St Petersburg Dorzhiev travelled south to visit the Kalmyks.6 These people were the remnant of a loose confederation of West Mongolian clans that had, from around 1 632, migrated in successive waves from Dzungaria in Central Asia to the lower Volga region, then a wild Cossack frontier zone. Subduing the local Tatars, they had pursued their traditional Mongolian nomadic lifestyle, augmented with a little occasional banditry, on the steppe between Astrakhan and Stavropol. However, as the expanding Russian empire began to assert its power over the region, particularly during the reign of Catherine II, friction arose for the Kalmyks feared that they might be forced to abandon their old ways for some kind of settled mode of life. As a result, on 5 January 1 771 – a propitious day selected by the Dalai Lama’s oracle – their leader, Ubashi Khan, inaugurated a grand migration back to their old Dzungarian homelands. However, those living on the far side of the Volga, including members of the Torgut, Lesser DOrbet and Greater Dorbet clans, were unable to cross the river because it did not freeze that year, so could not join the exodus and were therefore obliged to continue to live on European soil. Though many resisted it – some Kalmyks joined the revolt of Emelian Pugachev, the Peasants’ Tsar ( 1773-75) – the price of this was further russification; but even so, they stuck spiritedly to their nomadic ways.

Marvellous horsemen, they contributed crack Cossack cavalry to the Russian Army, some of whom distinguished themselves in the fight against Napoleon in 1 8 12. For this, Emperor Alexander I royally rewarded them with a vast tract of land, the income from which was to be used for the benefit of their people in perpetuity. With these funds a hospital and a number of dispensaries and schools were established. The schools further exposed the Kalmyks to Russian culture, but anempts were made to preserve their own culture too. First the Kalmyk nobility, and later the ordinary people, had been converted to Tibetan Buddhism before the migration from Asia. This was maintained in the lower Volga region, and during the early days connections with Lhasa were maintained. Young Kalmyks made the arduous journey to the holy city to pursue their higher religious studies. The outstanding Kalmyk lama of this period was Zaya Pandita (1599-1 662), who devised a Kalmyk alphabet (the so-called ‘clear writing,’ 1648) and translated many Tibetan texts.

from the accounts of people like Benjamin Bergmann, who travelled among the Kalmyks in the early nineteenth century, it is dear that Kalmyk spirituality very closely foll�wed its Mongol-Tibetan prototypes, even to the extent of retaining vesnges of pre-Buddhist ecstatic shamanism and folk religion. Their Buddhist pecking order included high lamas, bakshis or teachers, and ordinary monks (gelong); below these there were novices and lay followers (khuvarak 7). All religious people were held in high esteem. Their khurul or temples, meanwhile, like their homes, were tents of the classic Mongolian sort – lanice-work frames covered with thick felt – or else wooden structures that could be dismantled and carted from place to place. From about the eighteenth century onwards, brick and stone khurul were also constructed:
The monasteries contained temples, chapels, cells and workshops. The main temple usually had a high central space crowned by a tower; it was richly ornamented with carving, painting, bronze sculpture, and religious figures.s Obos or cairns, primitive sorts of Buddhist stu pas, were also erected for ritual purposes.

Dorzhiev’s decision to visit the Kalmyks may have been in part at least inspired by a Kalmyk lama named Baza Bakshi (Baza Menkedzhuyev)
whom he had met some years previously in Lhasa. Baza had set out for the holy city in the summer of 1 891 with the aspiration ‘to make known and renew a path that could be taken by the many spiritual beings in our country’. On the way he heard of a ‘Gegen Soibun, a Mongol, a Buryat, and according to the tales of his people there was no man more elevated in Tibet than he’. Certainly Dorzhiev gave great assistance to the Kalmyks in Lhasa – ‘He managed everything for us in every way’, Baza reported. While among the Kalmyks, Dorzhiev stayed at Baza Bakshi’s monastery, Dundul Khurul, in the Maloderbet ulus.9 As the link with Lhasa had been discontinued during the time of the Seventh Dalai Lama, Kelsang Gyatso (1708-1 757), and a hiatus of a hundred and fony years elapsed, the Kalmyks were honoured and delighted to greet Agvan Dorzhiev, a Tsenyi Khenpo at the right hand of the Dalai Lama, when he arrived among them in March 1 898. He performed religious rites in their nomadic encampments and, with good command of the Kalmyk dialect, gave wise discourses in which he spoke particularly of the evils of alcohol abuse, to which many of the less pious were prone. The Kalmyk faithful reciprocated by giving him gifts for the Dalai Lama.

This was the first of a number of visits Dorzhiev made to the Kalmyks, and for many years he took them under his wing:
… the welfare of the Kalmyks, both as co-religionists and fellow Mongolians, was close to Agvan Dorzhiev’s heart. As they were separated by hundreds of miles from the important centres of the ‘Yellow Faith’ – the word ‘lamaism’ was not known to them – and entirely left to their own devices spiritually, his main objective was the training of an indigenous clergy endowed with inward steadfastness. 10 He helped establish religious schools among them as well as higher educational establishments (choira). He also attempted to unify the Kalmyk and Buryat dialects, and to Latinize Kalmyk spelling. His efforts to draw the Kalmyks more closely into the Lamaist fold were not entirely successful, however: they were simply too far out on a limb ever to liaise closely with the other Mongolian and the Tibetan

peoples. h

  " "" d K I k" " " It would seem that Dorz lev VI site a my la twice In 1 898. On 

the first occasion he was approached by a young zaisan (nobleman)

of the Greater Deroo clan named Ovshe Norzunov (born 1874?),
who had faithfully attended his religious meetings. Though educated, Norzunov had elected to adhere to the traditional nomadic lifestyle rather than take up an official post. He was also seriously devoted to Buddhism, influenced in this direction after the death of his father by his pious mother. He now asked Dorzhiev how he could strengthen his religious practice. Dorzhiev urged him to make a pilgrimage to Lhasa.

A month or so later, in June 1 898, Joseph Deniker (1852-1 918) had an unusual visitor at his Paris home. The caller, a Buryat, presented letters of introduction from one of Deniker’s Russian friends, and asked whether he would like to make the acquaintance of a Tibetan priest attached to the coun of the Dalai Lama. Dcniker said he would. An hour later Agvan Dorzhiev was at his door.

Though of French origin, this worthy scholar had in fact been born losif Egorovich Deniker in Astrakhan, and had gone to school with Kalmyk and Cossack children. Aher studying Chemistry in Moscow and St Petersburg, he became interested in anthropology and moved to Paris, where he obtained his doctorate and in 1 888 was appointed Librarian of the National Museum of Natural History. Today he is best remembered for a classification system of human races based purely on physical characteristics, but he was also a keen student of Buddhism and , with a native command of Russian, served as a channel of communication between Russian orienta lists
“

and the �estem world, translating the learned articles that appeared In the RUSSian scholarly press into French.

He was in constant correspondence with V. V. Grigoriev, the Secretary General of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, and he cenainly knew Prince Ukhtomsky.l l Deniker wrote that on their first meeting Dorzhiev was in European dress. He was ‘shon and stocky’ and

His bronzed face was of the keen Mongolian type, and he appeared intelligent 
and kindly. In the course of conversation, I questioned him about Buddhism; 
and then, in his tum, he began to question me, wishing to know if there were 
many Buddhists in Paris. I told him that the number of his co-religionists in my 
country was very small, but that many French scholars were interested in the 
doctrine of the Buddha, and that in the Musee Guimet there was a collection 
of many objects of the Buddhist cult. A few days later I took him to see the 
museum. He was very pleased with his reception ... 1 2

On 27 June 1 898, Khambo Lama Agvan Dorzhiev celebrated a Buddhist ceremony at the Musee Guimet: an ‘Invocation at Shamyamuni Buddha and All the Buddhas to Inspire all Beings with Love and Compassion’.

Dorzhiev himself says that a very large audience of some four hundred people was present. According to the published programme, his translator was Buddha Rabdanov ( 1 853-1 923), an educated Buryat from the Aga steppe who in his time visited both Tibet and several Western European countries, including France, where he lectured on Mongolia and Tibet at the Musee Guimet, Italy and Belgium. \J Two other sources mention that Deniker acted as translator, so perhaps more than one person served in this capacity.

If he adhered faithfully to the official programme, Dorzhiev first prostrated himself before the altar, on which were disposed various sacred objects and offerings, then sat down in the seat prepared for him and went on to summarize, through his translators, the history of the propagation of Buddhism in Tibet. After that he recited a Tibetan prayer requesting all buddhas, bodhisanvas and enlightened beings to descend among the assembly.

He then recited Puntsok, a prayer of five shlokas (verses) ‘denoting love and respect for Shakyamuni Buddha, the Future Buddha Maitreya, Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, Asita [AtishaJ, and the other sages who have propagated Buddhism in Tibet’. Next followed a prayer of a single shloka asking the Buddhas to accept the offerings which had been prepared, after which his assistants repeated three times, ‘either out loud or mentally’, the Sanskrit formula Namo Buddhaya, Namo Dharmaya, Namo Sanghaya (‘Homage to the Buddha, his Teaching, and the Community of his Followers’). This done, Dorzhiev flung flowers on the altar, his assistants following suit. After another short prayer, he finished by reciting a prayer in three shlokas entitled Kyabne, asking the holy buddhas to protect all beings for all time and deliver them from evil, misfortune and unhappiness; also to spread happiness both in religious and secular society. I .. ‘Just through this it was possible that some aspirations [arose]
which left good karmic interests’, the good lama later wrote.

Seeing some of these proceedings recorded on old-fashioned wax 60 Buddhism in Russia cylinders, Dorzhiev was greatly impressed and, fired with enthusiasm, he bought a phonograph and some wax cylinders for his own use. He seems to have acquired a camera too. Obviously he had a propensity for modem Western gadgetry.

Dorzhiev was also impressed with Paris. ‘It is a very beautiful city to behold’, he wrote, ‘and has an extremely large population’. Nothing very much seems to have come out of his visit from the political point of view, however. He was unable to meet Prince Henri of Orleans as he had hoped because he was out of the country, but he was introduced to someone he calls ‘Khlemintso’ (Clemenceau?): an aristocrat who had great respect for Buddhism.

He also met a woman whom he simply calls ‘Alexandra’. This may have been the remarkable French traveller, mystic and writer Alexandra David-Ned ( 1868-1969), who was herself to go to the East in 1911 and spent some twenty years there studying Tibetan language and Buddhist philosophy. We know that Madame �avid-Neel frequented the Musee Guimet. for it was there when she was Just twenty-three years old that she first developed a liking for things oriental. She may well, then, have attended Dorzhiev’s ceremony, and if so, it was probably an imponant formative influence on her remarkable life of spiritual adventure. This was to culminate in 1924, when she became the first European woman to enter Lhasa.

Dorzhiev for his part was impressed with this ‘Alexandra’, saying that ‘even though she was born as a female she h�� trained herself to be wise’ – high praise from someone who was no ferrurust. Less gallantly, he also calls her old, though at the time she would only have been about thirty-one.lS
Joseph Deniker also makes the remarkable assertion that after Paris Dorzhiev went to London, though whether as a matter of transit or for some specific purpose is not stated. This is of course feasible, for in England too there were scholars who were connected with the international Buddhist network, so Dorzhiev would have had contacts.

No records of such a visit ha�e. �n discovered, however, though it is difficult to rule out the poSSibility that Dorzhiev did visit Britain at some stage, for other sources assert as much. The Buryat explorer A. l.

Termen, for instance, quotes a �ellow BU!’Yat called Aginsky as saying that Dorzhiev ‘hopes to spread It [Buddhism] in the Russian capital as effectively as in London and Paris’, and Joseph Deniker’s son, George, says quite explicitly in
.

a �etter of 19� 1 that �rz.hiev visited London in 1913.16 Finally, there IS an the RUSSian archiVes an undated letter from Dorzhiev to the explorer Piotr Kuz’mich Kozlov which says:
Greetings. Please let me know as soon as possible, so that I can set out via London for Darieeling. I would humbly suggest that it you are coming to Peterlsburgl in the near future that we discuss things, if that is not inconvenient to yoU. 17 A couple of months after Paris, Dorzhiev was back among the Kalmyks, where he found Ovshe Norzunov determined, even though married and the father of a baby child, to make a pilgrimage to Lhasa. This was in its way very useful for Dorzhiev. He promptly suggested they travel together, and in August 1 898 they left the lower Volga region, taking the Trans-Siberian as far as Verkhneudinsk and then proceeding in a tarantass18 to Urga, where they were put up for a month by Euzon Bakshi, the Tutor of the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu. Then, on 5 October, Norzunov set out for Lhasa bearing a sealed letter for someone Dorzhiev calls ‘the Kalon’; that is, one of the members of the Dalai Lama’s Kashag or Cabinet, the chief executive body of the Tibetan government. He also bore gifts for the Dalai Lama himself. Dorzhiev, who for some obscure reason remained in Urga, was in effect reporting on what had happened in St Petersburg and asking for further orders.

Norzunov and his two companions, a Mongol lama and a Kalmyk bakshi of the Lesser Derbet dan named Ochir Dzungruev, followed the official postal route for several days, then veered off to visit the monastery of Yungdrung-beise (probably Roerich’s Yum-beise Khiire)
before exchanging their horses for camels to cross the Gobi. After travelling for twenty-two days they reached An-hsi, where, taking advantage of his Oriental features to pass himself off as a Mongol pilgrim, Norzunov joined the caravan of a group of Kurluk Mongols, who agreed to guide him across their uninviting domains in the Tsaidam region.

Unfortunately, as the caravan approached its destination, Norzunov’s cover was blown. So far he had attempted to conceal the fact that he was a Russian subject by writing his travel journal in Kalmyk script, and though this differed only slightly from Eastern Mongolian script, the differences were spotted. Then, as he undressed during a halt, it was also noticed that he was wearing a doth jacket of European cut under his fur outer garments. It looked for a moment as though he would end up being ignominiously dragged before the beise, the hereditary prince of the Kurluks whose headquarters were at Kurluk-Nor, but a bribe of ten Ian 1 9 secured his guides’ silence; he also burned the offending jacket in front of them for good measure. Duly appeased, the Kurluks then led him on to the domains of the Teijiner Mongols on the southern edge of Tsaidam, where he hired horses to carry him up onto the Tibetan plateau and on across the Chang-Tang to Nagchukha.

62 Buddhism in Russia Having evaded the guards posted at Nagchukha to prevent foreigners gate-crashing the Forbidden Land, he crossed several passes across ‘the high mountain ranges of Gandan’ without experiencing any of the adverse effects against which he had been warned in Urga. In due course, safe and sound, he came to the Go-La, where he caught his first glimpse of the gilded roofs of Lhasa. The sight filled him with overwhelming joy. He jumped down from his horse, prostrated three times upon the ground and recited several prayers.

A few days after his arrival in March 1 899, Norzunov went to the Potala to present the Dalai Lama with the letter and the gifts with which he had been entrusted by Agvan Dorzhiev. He was conducted to the Red Palace, an angular building rising out of the massive main white structure, which is where the Dalai Lama lived and worked when in residence. On the roof, which is where the main entrance to the building is situated – to get to the lower storeys you actually have to work your way down from the top – were the Dalai Lama’s private quarters and Namgyal Dratsang, the ‘magnificent palace’ that accommodated his private staff. Norzunov was immediately reminded of his teacher, Agvan Dorzhiev, for it was here that the Buryat lama formerly lived.

Marvellous as these sights were, they did not compare with the
‘astonishment and joy’ that overtook Norzunov when he at last gazed on the ‘luminous face’ of the Dalai Lama, who was seated on his throne dressed in sumptuous yellow robes and surrounded by acolytes.

Respectfully, Norzunov knelt down and touched his head to the ground three times, then handed the great lama Dorzhiev’s presents. The Dalai Lama reciprocated by
.

laying his h�
nds on the Kalmyk’s head in blessing, after which he was given some nce and tea thought to possess special mystic qualities because the Dalai Lama had already tasted it. ‘The tea was very good’, Norzunov later �rote, ‘with a delicious bouquet’.2o Finally, as Norzunov was le�
vmg the audience, he was given two hundred Ian (one Ian = 10 uruts of gold) on the orders of the Dalai Lama for faithfully carrying out Dorzhiev’s commission.

Norzunov left Lhasa reluctandy in April 1899 with what Dorzhiev calls ‘a genuine answer from the Dalai ta.ma�. Following in the footsteps of his master, he travelled south to Dar)eehng and Calcutta where he retained the services �
f a

.

Mongolian �lled ‘Lup-San’ (Lob�ng?), who spoke Chinese and Handl, before catching a boat for China.

During the voyage ‘Lup-san’ noticed that Norzunov was carrying a lot of money. ‘You’re lucky you’ve an honest man like me to deal with’, the Mongol said; ‘anyone else would have quickly snatched aU
you’ve got:
‘How would they have done that?’ Norzunov asked.

‘Oh, it would have been easy – just a matter of slipping a little poison into your food and running off with the loot.’
Norzunov smelt a rat. From that moment onward he was on his guard:
if, for instance, he found that a cup of tea had been poured out for him, he would offer it politely to his man and pour another for himself.

They were quarantined in Penang for six days in May, then went on to Hong Kong, by which time things had gone from bad to worse. Knowing no Chinese himself, Norzunov was at Lu�san’s mercy – and the wily Mongolian knew it. It finally became a case of the servant becoming the master – and if not actually stealing his funds, then spending them as though there were no tomorrow. The parting of the ways came at Tientsin, and from there Norzunov went on alone to Peking, where he arrived on 17 June. On 25 June, he hired camels and guides at Kalgan to take him to Urga, where he was reunited with Agvan Dorzhiev on 25 July .

Lev Berlin says that in the lener that Norzonov brought, Dorzhiev was requested to ‘return immediately to Lhasa to help with a number of state problems’. DOrzhiev himself says that the Dalai Lama thanked him for his own lener and presents, and described the political situation in Lhasa, saying that opinion was split between three factions and asking him to come quickly to discuss matters on a personal basis.2 1 He needed no further bidding but at once got ready to leave, and in September was once more on the caravan trails of Central Asia heading for Peking and the Chinese ports.

It was then on by sea to Calcutta and so via Darjeeling back to Lhasa.

Dorzhiev arrived back in the holy city in December 1 898. He must have been heavily laden with treasures, for at the Monlam Chenmo festivities of the following February, when ‘the supreme leader of men and gods’ was invited to take his place in a vast gathering of thousands of learned lamas, he presented him with ‘diamonds and many other kinds of gems, various silks, and one hundred and eight silver ingots’:
And to each of the noble assembly I offered five zho. At the row of golden buner lamps offered by Longdol Ngawang Lobsang [1719-1795, tutor of the Seventh Dalai Lama] before Lhasa’s great Jowo, I placed new golden lamps made from about forty sang of gold. I also made gifts of gold and donated thousands of the five kinds of offerings to all the supreme supports, the greatest of which are the two Jowo [the statues in the Jokhang and Ramoche temples]. In each of the great monasteries of Sera, Drepung and Ganden I offered or requested an abundant distribution of provisions. Without wasting the faith·substances
[given by] many benefactors, this was the best I could do to produce the good fortune capable of fulfilling all their wishes.22 Despite this, which one would have expected to heighten his popularity, Joseph Deniker maintains that he ‘found that his standing was very much compromised’.H His liberalism greatly offended the traditionally ultra conservative monastic establishment, who were panicularly scandalized by a photograph he brought back showing him sitting with … a Russian woman! Dorzhiev pointed out in his own defence that the revered and compassionate White and Green Taras were of female form; moreover,
‘In the West, if you wish to have friends, you must have the influence of women.

For this reason I would not have wished to displease the Russian lady, who is already a fervent admirer of our religion. ’24 He was denounced too for having taken photographs of Tibet to exhibit in the West and was forced to destroy his camera in front of the whole court of the Dalai Lama. Nevertheless, Deniker maintains that ‘with a tact characteristically Asiatic’ he managed to redeem his position.

Dorzhiev himself understandably says nothing of all this, merely recording that in reward for his services, the Dalai Lama, ‘mistaking a dod of earth for a nugget of gold,’ conferred on him the rank of Great Abbot, which was a political rather than a religious accolade.

He also gave him presents and offered up prayers for the success of the Buddha-dharma. Purchok Rinpoche moreover bestowed on him the authority to perform monastic ordinations. ‘Make sure you create a lot of fully ordained monks’, the great tulku told his former student.

Politically, Dorzhiev did indeed find opinion split three ways on his return to Lhasa. Firstly, there was a pro-Chinese faction which maintained that ‘since the kindness of the Manchu Emperor is so great, even now his compassion will not fail us; so we must not separate ourselves from China’. The second faction disagreed, arguing that the best way to stave off the British threat was to make friends with the Government of India. The third, pro-Russian faction meanwhile maintained that, as Russia was powerful enough to defend Tibet against the British, yet far enough away not to seek to ‘devour us’, close relations should be established with that nation.

These factions were more or less evenly matched but the pro-Russian

one seems to have had the ear of the Dalai Lama and ultimately 
triumphed, for Dorzhiev was entrusted with another official letter 
bearing the Dalai Lama's own seal as well as the obligatory presents 
and told to take them to the Russian Emperor. The exact nature 

of his brief for this second mission is not dear, but it seems that 

while the Tibetans in general �i.

                               shed

                                    . 

                                    to maintain their policy of 
isolation, they were now more poslUvely mterested in obtaining Russian 
protection. Berlin merely says that 'Oorzhiev was sent to Russia by

the Dalai Lama to obtain a more definite answer from the Russian Emperor’.2s There is also in British official records an interesting repon by the Deputy Commissioner for Darjeeling, dated 7 October 1 901, to the effect that Dorzhiev had been giving out in Lhasa that ‘China has been conquered by the English, who have driven the Imperial Coun out of Peking, and that within a shon time they would invade Tibet’; the Dalai Lama should therefore secure the protection of the Emperor of Russia.

His Holiness, ‘attaching much weight to his representations’, spoke to his advisers (probably the members of his Kashag or Cabinet), upon whose advice he three times consulted the Tsongdu (National Assembly), but this body was ‘not unanimous … considering that the Russians, like the English, were not Buddhists, and it was moreover uncenain whether China had collapsed altogether as a great power’. After deliberating again with his Kashag (Cabinet), however, His Holiness decided to send Dorzhiev to Russia again with valuable presents, including the one hundred and eight volumes of the Tibetan scriptural canon ( Kangyur)
written in gold; also ‘the consecrated cushion-seat on which the Grand Lama sat on the occasion of his ordination’, which was being sent, it was thought, as a prelude to the Lama’s visiting St Petersburg himself.26 It is not precisely clear to which year this repon specifically refers or whether it is in fact a conflation of various repons culled over a period of time. Whatever the case, in March 1 900 Dorzhiev did set out for Russia once more, again taking the route through British India. When he arrived at Darjeeling, however, he received some rather disturbing news. Norzunov was in deep trouble.

The Affair Of The Steel Bowls 1 899 – 1 901

After parting from Agvan Dorzhiev in Urga, Ovshe Norzunov had arrived back on his native steppe in August 1 899. But he was not to stay there long, for ‘On 10 January 1900 I was sent by Agvan Dorzhiev to Paris, on Tibetan business, notably to take delivery of sacred bowls that had been manufactUred in that city for Tibetan lamas, because they were unable to make them as well themselves. At the same time the Imperial Russian Georgraphic Society commissioned me to take photographs of Tibet and lent me an excellent camera [for that pUrpose].’1 As regards the bowls, Khensur Ngawang Nima in his notes to Dorzhiev’s autobiography records that a Dzungarian named Tsering Dondrup had made an offering of five hundred begging bowls to the Lower Tantric College in Lhasa. Shortly afterwards some were lost when a coracle carrying a group of lamas to a religious ceremony at the college capsized. Tsenzab Rinpoche sent Norzunov to Paris to have replacements made.�
On his way to Pans Norzunov may have passed through St Petersburg and had an audience with the Emperor, for a note from Prince Ukhtomsky to Nicholas II begs the Emperor to receive two members of the Kalmyk nobility: one Arlyuev, who ‘on his own account has recently equipped and led the expedition known to Your Highness to the Kalmyks of western M�
mgolia �, and Norzunov, who had given the Imperial Russian GeographIcal Society the notes on the journey to Lhasa for publication. Ukhtomsky adds characteristically:
You know how I love Buryats, but Kalmyks arc closer and morc akin to us on account of their martial character and other virtues. We have not yet had the last word on the awakening of Central Asia)
And SO to Paris, where Norzunov �
rrived on 13 (NS 25) January. There, everything to do with the collection and shipment of the bowls was arranged by joseph Deniker, who no doubt, like everyone else, was fascinated by the Kalmyk’s descriptions of Tibet. Some sort of deal must have been struck between them, for Deniker subsequently began publishing Norzunov’s accounts of his travels, along with photographs, in the Western press. The two were to remain in contact for many years. Deniker also introduced his guest to Baron Hulot, the Secretary of the Paris Geographical Society, and he attended one of the society’s meetings.

He inspected the Buddhist collection at the Musee Guimet too .

On 28 january (NS 9 February), Norzunov left Paris for Marseilles, where he boarded a steamer, the S S Dupleix. A small portion of the steel bowls plus some other articles packed in three crates went along with him; the rest, packed in twenty-eight crates, were to follow a month later on the S S Anna”,. Norzunov reached Calcutta on 22 February
(NS 6 March), where he booked into the Continental Hotel, signing the register in the name of ‘Myanoheid Hopityant’, specifying ‘Russian Asiatic’ as his nationality and describing himself as belonging to the ‘Post and Telegraph Department, Saugata, Stavoopol [sic] Government’. He also had a letter of introduction to the French Consul.

Almost at once things began to rum sour. According to Norzunov’s own account, a rifle that he was carrying was found by customs officials and confiscated. Then he learnt from a British citizen of jewish origin who happened to speak Russian that he would be arrested on his journey to Tibet. This was probably Branson, the Accountant-General of Bengal, who understood Russian and to whom Norzunov was sent by the French Consul. The arrest story was at most only slightly true; so far the Government of India had merely noted him as a suspicious character; but the whiff of trouble was enough to throw Norzunov into paranoia and on 10 March he changed into Chinese dress, booked out of the Continental and caught the train for Darjeeling, where he planned to make a dash for the Tibetan frontier, and from there send some trustworthy person back for his crates.

The train journey north was a nightmare. Not only was his carriage packed, but the heat was suffocating. To make matters worse, opium was being smoked, which gave the good Kalmyk such a headache that he almost passed out. A drink of water might have helped, but he dared not go to station buffets lest the British detect him, and the Indians in his compartment refused to share their water with him for reasons of caste propriety. He did, however, at some unknown station before the railhead at Siliguri, persuade a kindly 68 Buddhism in Russia poner to pour some water into his cupped hands; that was the only refreshment he got.

Worse things were in store at Darjeeling. According to Norzunov himself, when he got there on 11 March, he was stopped and questioned by a police officer. Frightened, he tried to bluff his way out of the situation, pretending he did not understand what he was being asked, but the observant officer spotted a label on his luggage on which his name was written.

Norzunov then went to stay at Ghoom monastery, about five kilometres from Darjeeling, where he was the guest of a Buryat lama named Sherab Gyatso. This man had been sOlp6n (an attendant who elicits offerings) to the Sengchen Lama of Shigatse: the man who had been executed for assisting the Bengali scholar, Sarat Chandra Das, during his illicit travels in Tibet. Sherab Gyatso also helped Das compile his Tibetan-English Dictionary and, like Das, was a British agent, receiving a stipend of Rs 55/- a month for supplying information on the Tibetans who frequented the Darjeeling markets.4 As A. Earle, the Deputy Commissioner for Darjeeling, had been detailed to watch Norzunov and see that he did not escape over the border to Tibet, he interviewed Sherab Gyatso about his guest. The lama gave the truth, though economically.

By Norzunov’s account, he was on 13 March summoned to the District Commissioner’s Office in Darjeeling for funher interrogation and then allowed to go free in the charge of Sherab Gyatso until funher orders arrived. For the next few months he had to walk every two or three days from Ghoom to present himself at Darjeeling, where the Deputy Commissioner would make a few token notes, after which he would walk back to Ghoom.

Official British records differ somewhat. They maintain that Norzunov was first interrogated by the Darjeeling Police at Ghoom on 12 March. He then declared that he was a trader coming from Peking and proposed to go to Yatung in the Chumbi Valley to await remittances from his agents in Tibet and Mongolia. He disowned the names Hopityant and Norzunov

Pans and concocting a cock-and-bull story to explain his previo�
s fi�ons. 5 �e was also interviewed on 3 April, and then gave confuSUlg rnformanon about the ships on which he had sailed to Calcutta.

While at Ghoom, Norzunov got word of his arrest through to Lhasa and at the end of May three men arrived from Tibet with a document certifying that he was a Buddhist and had already made a pilgrimage to Lhasa. Though for some reason he chooses to remain reticent about it

Unfortunately, the lener from Lhasa cut no ice with the Deputy Commissioner, to whom it was delivered by a servant, so, beyond commiserating with his hapless amanuensis, there was linle Dorzhiev could do to help the situation. He therefore proceeded on his own way to Calcuna, where he heard that the British had issued a writ offering a reward of Rs 10,0001- to anyone ‘who kills and then brings the head of that evil man Dorzhiev’. This must be an instance of poetic licence: the British did not offer rewards for people dead or alive, and in any case Rs 10,0001- was a sum beyond the dreams of Croesus.

The high degree of pressure under which Norzunov was kept eventually eased, and he began to take photographs of the district.

Another man also arrived from Tibet in July, to whom he entrusted the three crates that he had personally brought from Paris. Unfortunately, this man died shortly afterwards and his wife refused to return the crates.

This upset poor Norzunov so much that he sent several appeals to Joseph Deniker, though for some sinister reason some of Deniker’s replies did not reach him: marked ‘UNKNOWN’, they were returned to sender.

Growing ever more desperate, Norzunov again contemplated fleeing to Tibet but his confinement ruled this out, so instead he sent his translator down to Calcuna to find out about his other crates, which had also been subject to various misadventures.

On 24 August the hapless Norzunov was escorted down to Calcuna by three armed policemen. On arrival he was put into a car and whisked to the police station, where, through an interpreter, he was again interrogated about his journey by a stern English officer with white hair. At the end of the interview he was told that he could consider himself under arrest.

While in detention, where by his own account he was fed on Indian food and generally treated well, he heard that his twenty-eight crates had been collected by a powerful person named ‘Koukanson’. The ensuing days were an ordeal. Not only was Norzunov suffering from fatigue
(probably stress induced) but he was plagued by the enigma of who the mysterious Koukanson could be. Finally, a desperate man, he reported the maner to the police, who made inquiries that subsequently revealed that Koukanson was in fact an employee of the esteemed shipping agents Thomas Cook & Son. Apparently the crates had been impounded in Calcuna because their owner was deemed suspicious by the Government 70 Buddhism in Russia of India. When a day later a man from Cooks came to find out what he wanted done with the crates, Norzunov told him to deliver them to a named person in Tibet. This was done. Cooks were also able to reclaim the three lost crates from the dead man’s widow, threatening her with the wrath of the Dalai Lama and possible excommunication if she refused to co-operate. For all these admirable services they billed Norzunov a modest Rs 497/-.

The British had now thoroughly examined Norzunov’s luggage. It was found to consist of five cases of personal baggage containing inter alia, one telescope, two phonographs, photographic apparatus, and of course the aforementioned rifle: total value, Rs 2951-. In addition, there were thiny-one boxes of trade goods containing 590 metal bowls, a quantity of strong metal beads and hooks ‘for suspending the bowls’, three small spirit lamps, five specimen coral branches, three coral necklaces, camera film and silk curtains: total value, Rs 3,300/-. All was cleared through customs apart from the rifle, though due to the various delays that they had undergone the telescope, phonograph and various eletrical gadgets

were ruined - or so Norzunov maintained. 

  As for the man himself, the British authorities had decided that he 
should be deported 'on the ground that it was undesirable that a 
Mongolian or quasi-Russian adventurer with several aliases should 
trade with Tibet through British India, and that though Norzunoff's

goods seemed to be harmless, his intentions might be the reverse’.

Before the deportation order was carried out, however, he was again interviewed by the Calcutta Police and it was then discovered that he was carrying a passport in the name of ‘Ovshe Moutchkindoff Norzunoff’ issued in Stavropol Gubernia in September 1 899. He had also, it was ascertained, signed his name as ‘Ovisha Muchkanoff Norsunoff’ on the back of a photograph he had given to a Mongolian in Darjeeling on 26 July, at the same time specifying his age as twenty-six. In addition, he had in his possession a letter of recommendation on Imperial Russian Geographical Society notepaper signed by Prince Ukhtomsky, in which he was descri.� as a mem�r of t�e society ‘undertaking a journey to Tibet on a palgnmage and an the mterests of commerce and science’
.

also Geograp a similar document signed by the General Secretary of the Pari�
hical Society – his frien� Baron Hulot, no doubt. He now admitted, too, that he was travelhng at the expense of a rich Chinese Mongolian lama living in Urga, by name ‘Akchwan Darjilicoff’, who had studied in Lhasa for fourteen years and also visited Paris and … London.

Though only slighdy scrambled, Dorzhiev’s name seems to have rung no bells in Calcutta.

When this thoroughly undesirable alien was asked by the British authorities whether he wished to be sent home by way of Peking or Paris, he replied, ‘Send me via Odessa’. So on 30 August, at the expense of the Government of India, he became a second class passenger on the same ship on which he had made his outward voyage, the S S Dupleix.

On disembarking at Odessa on 3 October, he lamented that, apan from a few photos of Darjeeling and environs, his journey had been largely unprofitable.

After leaving Norzunov in Ghoom, Dorzhiev had spirited himself out of India and made his way by sea to China. However, in the summer of 1900 the Chinese finally struck back against the innumerable humiliations that the European powers had been inflicting upon the terminal Manchu empire. Since in Peking itself the foreign legations were besieged by the Boxer rebels, Dorzhiev was obliged to travel to japan. Landing at Nagasaki, he was a keen observer of japan and its way of life, noting, for instance, that there were ‘many people but little land’ and ‘many Buddhist temples but few people to suppon them’. He also sensed japanese xenophobia and nationalism, as well as detecting what he calls the ‘mental uniformity’ of the people: a characteristic to which he perceptively attributed japan’s rise in the modern world.

From japan he went to Vladivostok, where he boarded a train for Khabarovsk, proceeding thence by steamer up the Amur River, along which marched the frontiers of Manchuria and Russia. At this time the Russians regarded Manchuria as one of their spheres of influence and the Boxer Uprising was gleefully welcomed in some powerful circles as a golden opponunity for fresh aggressions against the Chinese. In the Chinese town of Aigun, for instance, Dorzhiev saw that ‘all had been burned and killed without trace’ in reprisal; he also saw women and children drowned in the Amur River. ‘Thus even human beings can be more vicious than tigers and leopards’, he reflected sadly.

Arriving at last at Sretenka, he boarded the train for St Petersburg, where he arrived probably in August 1900 to find that Prince Ukhtomsky was away in Peking. We do not know whether he was actually there during the siege, but if so, he would cenainly, as a scholar and antiquarian of great sensitivity, have deplored the disgraceful looting perpetrated by Russian troops after their entry into the city in August.

In Ukhtomsky’s absence, Dorzhiev applied to the Foreign Minister, Count Lamsdorff, for a second audience with the Emperor. While this was being arranged he again took himself off to Paris, where he arrived in September and was reunited with his friend joseph Deniker. This time Dorzhiev recounted his life history to Deniker – they always spoke together in Russian – but the main purpose of the visit was again to order the manufacture of Buddhist votive objects. Deniker talks of ‘some metal vases [bowls] for the use of the Buddhist monks, and other objects’.6 Whether these were the original bowls – in which case he had his dates mixed up – or a new set is not clear, nor of what the ‘other objects’ consisted.

His business completed, Dorzhiev left Paris in September 1900, and on the 30 September was received for a second time by Emperor Nicholas.

The setting on this occasion was the Imperial summer residence of livadia near Yalta on the Black Sea, the scene years later of the famous meeting of Allied heads of state towards the end of World War II. As usual, we have only the sketchiest details of what took place. Berlin is most forthcoming:
The Tsar received Dorzhiev, who arrived with gifts and an official lener from the Dalai Lama. Nicholas II gave a gold watch decorated with diamonds to Dorzhicv for the Dalai Lama, declared to Dorzhiev the ncccssity of establishing links with Tibet and the exchange of information, and promised help in extremely vague tcrms.7 Dorzhiev himself merely says that he handed over the letters and gifts he was carrying, that the Tsar reciprocated with valuable gifts and told him to carry them quickly back to Tibet.

In wider discussions that he held with Count Lamsdorff, Count Witte and General Kuropatkin, however, it was made clear to Dorzhiev that Russian protection could only be promised if the Tibetans would agree to a Russian consulate being set up on their soil. Dorzhiev again explained that the Tihetan authorities could not countenance this as it would only pave the way for a general influx of Europeans, which would in the long term prove deterimental to Russia. A compromise was finally reached whereby the Russian consulate would be set up, for the purpose of ‘establishing direct and constant relations between the Imperial Rusian Government and the highest Buddhist authorities of Tibet’, not in Tibet itself but in TatsienluB, which while populated by ethnic Tibetans, was technically in the Chinese province of Sichuan, near the city of Chengdu. Though it seems unlikely that such a consulate was ever set up, Dorzhiev’s peripatetic Buryat friend, Budda Rabdanov, was at some stage considered for the post of political agent .

When this audience was reported in the official JOllrMl ck Sainte-Pitersbollrg on the 2 (N S 15) October 1 900, an au-act of the item was at once forwarded to London by Charles Hardinge, the British Charge d’Affaires in St Petersburg, who added to his communique, ‘I have not been able, so far, to procure any precise information with regard to this person [i.e. Dorzhiev) or to the mission on which he is supposed to come to Russia’.9 Subsequently, having quizzed the enigmatic Dr Badmayev, who assured him that Dorzhiev’s mission ‘was merely of a complimentary nature’, Hardinge surmised that its purpose might be to settle some pastoral matter relating to the Buryat and Kalmyk Buddhists of Russia. Whatever the truth, he was sure that the Russian Government would try to make political capital out of the visit: another representative of an oppressed people seeking protection from the fount of all magnanimity, the Emperor of Russia. This was somewhat ominous; the extension of ‘protection’ was a contemporary Russian euphemism for annexation. ‘ 0 Though news of the Livadia audience was also reported in the Indian press, it caused no great stir in official circles. Sarat Chandra Das was consulted but claimed to know nothing of it, which is puzzling as he was well aware that Dorzhiev had visited Norzunov at Ghoom (Das lived in Darjeeling himself); indeed it was he who provided the British with the proper name of the mysterious ‘Tsanite Khamba’ who had come from Lhasa to Ghoom. The sleek Bengali babu merely surmised that if such a mission did visit Russia it had probably been dispatched by the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu of Urga; he also suggested to his masters that they make discreet inquiries at the annual Kalimpong fair at the end of November, which many Tibetans would attend. As for the russophobic Lord Curzon, he was not penurbed either; in fact he was inclined to think ‘the Tibetan Mission to the Tsar is a fraud’, and that the notion that ‘the Tibetan Lamas have so far overcome their incurable suspicion of Europeans to send a Mission to Europe seems to me most unlikely’. I I
He was sufficiently dissatisfied with the inadequate information that he had received, however, to note in a communique to Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, that there needed to be
‘some better arrangement at Darjeeling for the acquisition of political intelligence’. 12 As for Agvan Dorzhiev, he was by this time back in his native Trans-Baikalia, from where he sent a letter to Norzunov, asking him to join him in Urga. The Kalmyk needed no special inducements; to return again to Lhasa was his dearest wish, his previous misadventures notwithstanding. He therefore travelled with all possible haste by train and horse to Urga, from where with six other companions he and Dorzhiev set off on 5 December 1900. Despite the fact that caravans did not usually ply during that season, they travelled day and night to cross the Gobi in record-breaking time and arrived in Lhasa in February 1 901. Berlin maintains that during this journey, which Dorzhiev says took him in all seventy-two days, the Buryat lama became convinced of the imminent fall of the Manchu dynasty having witnessed for himself the ‘widespread corruption of the Chinese authorities’.

At the Monlam Chenmo of 1901, Dorzhiev again distributed munificent hand-outs and also witnessed the Dalai Lama make precious offerings before the Jowo Rinpoche. Norzunov, meanwhile, was interviewed by the Dalai Lama and, through an interpreter, asked how he had been treated during his captivity at the hands of the British. Mer the Kalmyk recounted all – in minute detail – he was given a ‘gift of the third class: a kind of carpet made from tiger skin’, traditionally the covering of the seat of honour at lamaist rites, a gift so imponant that its donation was entered in a register. He was also able, during the shon time that he and Dorzhiev were in the holy city, to take photographs with a camera given him by the Secretary of the St Petersburg Geographical Society, V.V. Grigoriev. Norzunov’s photographs, which were subsequently published by Deniker, were some of the first of the Tibetan capital seen in the West.

The Dalai Lama and his ministers gave Dorzhiev an enthusiastic welcome and were very pleased with the result of his mission. Old doubts about Russia dissolved and the general feeling was ‘that Tibet had finally found its parron, more [strong) and more reliable than China’. However, inside Tibet popular prejudice against Europeans had, as a result of the trouble in China, built up to such a degree that it was thought impolitic for the time being to invite Russian representatives, even though the higher authorities apparently now fully wished to do so. It was therefore decided to dispatch Dorzhiev to Russia for a third time ‘to explain these circumstances and conclude a treaty on a firmer foundation’. On this occasion, however, it was not to be a modest one-man show but a full-scale official mission: Dorzhiev would be accompanied by three high Tibetan dignitaries – consular representative Losang Khechok, his assistant Gyaltsen Puntsok, and Ngawang Ch6-dzin, a consular secretary. Two men whom Dorzhiev simply calls Jigje and Tsultrim, who may have been Jigje Gazonov (probably a Mongolian) and Dorzhiev’s sometime Mongolian lama-secretary, Tsultrim Gyatso, went along too, as did Ovshe Norzunov. u The Buryat scholar, Gombozhab T sebekovich Tsybikov, also happened to be in Lhasa at �is tim� and he records in his diaryl4 that Agvan Dorzhiev invited him to hiS house on 22 March (OS), along with the other Buryats who were in town.

Tsybikov, who is generally regarded as the first Russian scholar to have carried out scholarly research in central Tibet, had studied at Tomsk and St Peterburg universities. He had left his native Urdo-Aga for Urga, and from there set out for the Land of Snows in the autumn of 1 899 with another Aga Buryat named Markhaem Sanchzhiev. Travelling by way of Alashan and Kum-Bum, he made a detour to the great monastery of Labrang (Labrang Tashi Kyil, founded in 1 709 by Jamyang Zhepa, an abbot of Drepung), afterwards returning to Kum-Bum to join a caravan bound for Lhasa by way of Nagchukha. During this long journey he had begun translating Tsongkhapa’s Lam Rim Chenmo.

On arrival in the holy city on 3 August 1 900 (OS), one of the first people Tsybikov met in the streets was a fellow Aga Buryat named Gonchok Sanzhiev, who conducted him to the Eastern House
(its name could also be translated as House of Arts) in the city centre, where lived yet another Aga Buryat, Dampel Sukhodoyev
(died c 1 937), a plump and benign old man who had spent some twenty years in Tibet and had become both ‘a master of Tibetan sciences’ and ‘close to the Dalai Lama’. 1S Sukhodoyev arranged for Tsybikov to stay in his own house and helped him set up business connections; he also carried Tsybikov’s first mail home when he left for Russia in September 1900 – letters to Tsybikov’s father and to orientalists like Veselovsky and Grigoriev. Tsybikov also made contact with Dagdan Badmayev, the husband of an elder sister, who had come to Lhasa to ‘defend a dissertation for the degree of gabzhi [geshe]’.

Badmayev was to act as his guide and interpreter on all his subsequent expeditions in Tibet.

Tsybikov spent over a year in Lhasa and central Tibet, gathering information, taking photographs and amassing a useful collection of books and artifacts. He of course visited many important sites in the holy city and environs, including the three great monasteries, the Potala palace, where His Holiness touched him on the head with his rosary, the medical college at Chakpori, and the old Lhasa mint at Dodpal below the Potala, where he observed a man wearing European dress and a white turban who, he was told, had something to do with building operations. He was also several times at the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama’s summer palace, where he organized theatrical performances, competitions and races, and where he again saw His Holiness, who was sitting in a palanquin. ‘No one hindered Tsybikov’, writes Sergey Markov, ‘and he conversed with Buddhist monks and carried on his great scholarly work’.

Tsybikov was also able to travel outside Lhasa to the southern cities of ShigatsC and Gyantse as well to places like Tsetang on the Brahmaputra, about 170 kilometres south-west of the capital, where the local bedbugs inflicted three sleepless nights on him. He also visited Samye, the first monastic foundation of Tibet, the great monastic university of Tashilhunpo, and Samding monastery near Yamdrok-Tso, where he photographed Dorje Pamo, a holy lady who enjoyed the rare distinctions of being both a female tulku – she was considered an incarnation of Vajravarahi,16 the consort of the yidam Chakrasamvara – and the abbess of a community of monks.

On 1 January 1901 (OS), Tsybikov finished his translation of Tsongkhapa, and on the same day Dagdan Badmayev gained his degree at Gomang College, an event which Tsybikov also photographed.

Thereafter, Badmayev was preoccupied with the onerous duty of treating the thousands of monks at Drepung with the obligatory food offerings.

About eight months later, on 10 September 1901 (OS), after further expeditions and a period of illness from which he recuperated at a monastery, Tsybikov finally left the holy city. He returned to Russia with some of the earliest photographs of Lhasa and later wrote a pioneering book, A Buddhist Pilgrim in the Holy Places of Tibet (1919). In 1902, he was appointed a professor at the Oriental Institute in Vladivostok.

On a high pass somewhere outside Lhasa, Tsybikov met a party of six Buryats. They had delayed their arrival because of a rumour they had picked up to the effect that Agvan Dorzhiev had been executed. In fact, Tsybikov notes, the great man was by then in his native land, working on a report for the Russian Government .

Shortly before receiving Tsybikov at his house – that is, at the end of March 1 901 (OS), Dorzhiev had taken his leave of Purchok Rinpoche, who gave him three �ieces �f. �dvice: ‘You will need blessings for the success of your teachtng aCbvtnes … Your intentions will be realised by dint of great merit … You should travel through Nepal:’ 7 According to intelligence glean� much later by the British, he then left Lhasa suddenly beca�se �e.

�hin� Amban, I 8 angered no doubt by his conducting diplomah� aChvlhes without authorization from Peking, had issued a warrant for hiS arrest. �e was, however, carrying lamyiks, or special permits, issued by th.

e Dalal Lama entitling him to transport and anything else he might reqUire,
.

� he was able to get away expeditiously on this, his most important miSSion to date.

Nevenheless, to get to a boat sailing for Russia, he and his companions still had to negotiate the vast expanses of India, so they were by no means out of danger yet.

The Tibetan Mission Of 1 901

The Tibetan Mission (as we shall call it) broke its journey at Tashilhunpo, the great monastic university near Shigatse founded in 1447 by Gendun Drup, the nephew of Tsongkhapa. Accommodating around three thousand Gelugpa monks, this was the seat of the Panchen Lama, second only in the Lamaist hierarchy to the Dalai Lama. Unfortunately, the Chinese had since the eighteenth century conspired to build up the power of the Panchen Lamas as a foil to the growing power of the Dalai Lamas in Lhasa. Thus rivalry existed between the two patriarchs – or at least between the political cabals surrounding them.

During the two days they were at Tashilhunpo, Dorzhiev received from the Ninth Panchen Lama, Chokyi Nyima (1883-1 937), gifts
(including some golden statues), secret teachings and, most significantly, oral readings of the Prayer of Shambhala, a popular text composed by Losang Palden Yeshe, the Third Panchen Lama (1737-80), concerning the millennial Buddhist kingdom of Shambhala, which was of central importance to the visions of Agvan Dorzhiev.

According to Buddhist mythology, the Buddha himself propagated the teachings known as Kalachakra (lit. ‘The Wheel of Time’), thought by many to be the apogee of the T antric system and, with its portrayal of the destruction and renewal of the Buddha-dharma, of special relevance in our own spiritual dark age. These teachings were heard by King Suchandra and taken to his kingdom of Shambhala, where they were preserved for a millennium until Indian masters arrived to recover them. They were later transmitted from India to Tibet between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries CEo Kalachakra is still a very highly venerated tantric teaching within the repertoire of the Gelug school, and in modem times high lamas, notably His Holiness the Dalai Lama, have given initiations at huge gatherings both in Asia and in the West.

The kingdom of Shambhala is a pure land where fortunate though still slightly imperfect beings lead charmed lives, with enlightenment assured them in either this or their next life. Shaped like a lotus, it is surrounded by an outer curtain wall of snow mountains, with radial ranges separating eight internal regions from each other. A smaller circle of mountains at the heart of the kingdom defines the central pericarp of the lotus, and in this raised sanctum is situated the jewelled city of Kalapa, a place so lustrous that night and day are indistinguishable there and the moon fades to a pale disc. To the south of Kalapa, in a sandalwood pleasure garden, is a great three-dimensional representation of the Kalachakra Mandala.

The gloriously outfitted and radiant kings of Shambhala are called kalkis, which connects the Kalachakra myths with those relating to the great Hindu god Vishnu, whose avatars (incarnations) are thought to appear in the world at times of extreme crisis. Such a time will be reached about four hundred years from now, Kalachakra devotees believe, when the world will have become such a sink of corruption that the T wenty-fifth Shambhala Kalki, Raudra Cham, will ride out of his kingdom on a ‘stone horse with the power of wind’ to lead his warriors with all their war elephants, stone horses and chariots in a great battle against the barbarians and demons who have come to dominate the world. In this Armageddon, the forces of darkness will be completely defeated by the forces of light and a new Krita Yuga or Age of Perfection inaugurated.

In his Prayer of Shambha/a, the Third Panchen lama expressed the wish to be reborn in Shambhala during the reign of Raudra Chakri and to rank foremost among his disciples. He also wrote a guide-book to Shambhala, the so-called Shambha/a LAmy;g: based on pre-cxisting texts, this describes the route to the mythical kingdom. This devotion was not restricted to losang Palden Yeshe, however: a special connection was thought to exist between the whole line of Panchen lamas and Shambhal� and indeed some of them were thought to be incarnations of particular Shambhala kalkis. At Tashilhunpo there was moreover a Kalachakra college, Dukhor Dratsang, where selected students studied and practised these abstruse teachings.

Of course the Kalachakra myths, particularly that of the final Armageddon, could be esoterically interpreted as a metaphor for the internal struggle that each Buddhist must join with the defilements that hinder enlightenment; but there were – and continue to be – literal interpretations that look forwar� to a real Armageddon, a kind of future Third World War waged With the most technologically advanced weapons. Shambhala too could be regarded as a metaphor for a state of consciousDCSS; but manr �lachakra devotees, including the present Dalai � believe that It IS �� actual place, though admittedly not to be found on any map and VISible only to the eyes of the spiritually enlightened.

But if it does actually exist, where is Shambhala to be found? This question has long exercised Central Asian Buddhists and numerous possible locations have been suggested. Usually it is said to be vaguely to the nonh of India, but one writer, the Japanese Buddhist monk, Ekai Kawaguchi, who was in Tibet between 1 900 and 1902, reports rumours that he heard in Lhasa to the effect that Dorzhiev had written a pamphlet to prove that ‘Chang lie. North) Shambhala’ was Russia. The Emperor, moreover, was an incarnation of Je Tsongkhapa, and would ‘sooner or later subdue the whole world and found a gigantic Buddhist empire’. 1 No solid evidence exists that Dorzhiev wrote a pamphlet of this sort and even Kawaguchi himself admits that he himself could not get hold of a copy,2 though a book with that general drift of argument was published in St Petersburg much later by the Kalmyk lama Dambo Ulyanov. It would be wrong to dismiss Kawaguchi’s remarks out of hand, however, for we do certainly know that Dorzhiev, having received an abhisheka or initiation from Purchok Rinpoche, was a practitioner of Kalachakra and that he took the Shambhala myths very seriously. In fact, he linked them with the potential he saw in the great heartland of Central Asia for a glorious Buddhist regeneration, as W. A. Unkrig recalls:

In my opinion, the religiously·based purpose of Agvan Dorzhiev was the 
foundation of a Lamaist-oriented kingdom of the Tibetans and Mongols (and 
all other small Lamaist peoples) as a theocracy under the Dalai Lama ... [and] 
under the protection of Tsarist Russia ... In addition, among the Lamaists there 
existed the religiously grounded hope for help from a 'Messianic Kingdom' in 
the North ... called 'Northern Shambhala ... ' Agvan Dorzhiev had on occasion 
identified this Shambhala with Russia}

Admittedly, history has taken a very different course and the whole area has long since been devoured by the great empires of China and Russia, which, coming under the domination of Marxist regimes, have decimated the local Buddhist traditions. But less than a century ago the possibilities were very different: the Buryat lands in the north, Mongolia, parts of eastern China and the whole of Tibet could well have become the zone of a great Lamaist Buddhist confederation of the kind envisaged by Dorzhiev. Perhaps, despite everything that has happened, dormant vestiges of that potential remain .

After the Shambhala teachings at Tashilhunpo, Dorzhiev and his parry, plus the fifteen Tibetans who were carrying their baggage, crossed the Great Himalaya into Nepal. Unable to use horses in the mountains, they

were all obliged to go on foot, except for Dorzhiev, who Norzunov 
maintains was carried over on a porter's back. After paying off their 
porters, they then proceeded to the Nepalese capital - Norzunov calls 
it 'Yamb' and Dorzhiev 'Yambo': one presumes they mean Kathmandu 
- and stayed there for five days while permission was being obtained 
from the King of Nepal to cross into India. They were at this stage 
masquerading as a group of pilgrims wishing to visit the Buddhist holy 
places in northern India. 
  Dorzhiev had political business in Nepal. Following the news of his 
reception at Livadia, he says that the British newspapers had begun to 
declare that before Russia could seize Tibet by using the Buryats, Britain 
would do so using the Nepalese. He then mentions three letters which 
he claims were sent to the Dalai Lama by the British via the Kings of 
Nepal and Sikkim and the Governor-General of Ladakh - actually this 
is very garbled, as we shall sec in the next chapter - inviting His Holiness 
to conclude a joint treary for mutual benefit. The Nepalese were not 
apparently ready to be inveigled into the British game, however, and, 
as a token of their good will towards Tibet, their king had recently 
presented the Dalai Lama with a horse worth Rs 15,000/-, a 'brilliant 
carriage' and had promised shortly to send an elephant with a lavish 
caparison adorned with silver and gold. Dorzhiev's brief in Nepal was

to make sure that these tokens of friendship were sincere.

Dorzhiev records that dark deeds had recently been perpetrated in Nepal:
In January 1901 the king was murdered by his minister, who took his place, and I witnessed him inspecting [his) troops and [also) when he was present at a sports game together with an English official, who delivered a letter of congrarularion from London. 1M king comes from tM Gurkha tribe … 4 He was not much impressed with religious life in the Kathmandu valley.

‘In general, monasteries and khuvarak are not many in number’, he records. But he was moved by the height and antiquiry of two great suburgans (stupas), notably ‘the great Jarung Khashor’, by which he probably means the great stupa at Bodh-Nath, where, after he had made offerings of several ounces of powdered gold, saffron and so forth, a sudden shower broke and washed the stupa clean. ‘I took this as a sign that my objectives would be realized; he says.s He was also indiscreet enough to show the stupa’s presiding lama his ‘curious’ watch, boasting that it was worth Rs 300/- and had been bought in Russia. This information was subsequently picked up by British intelligence .

They were, however, only cursorily searched by the border guards, for their masquerade as pilgrims was accepted. This is a little surprising as the British were now alen to Dorzhiev’s comings and goings, and indeed at one railway station where his party spent a day waiting for a connection he claims to have caught sight of another wanted poster, this one bearing his rough likeness and again offering a reward of the unlikely sum of Rs 10,000/- for his head. Later, at another station, perhaps Ragpur, where on 10 May his party tried to buy through tickets for Bombay, the unsuspecting station master told Norzunov about a sinister Russian of Mongolian stock who had the year before tried to slip into Tibet from Darjeeling but had been caught and deponed. ‘The Russians do not have good intentions,’ the station master said. ‘They should not be allowed to reach Lhasa.’ Norzunov, looking suitably concerned, agreed wholeheanedly and swore to keep a keen look out for any sinister foreigners; at the same time he was silently praying to all the buddhas for help. His prayer worked: they got their tickets .

Though no Kim or Hurree Babu foiled the Mission’s transit through India, Dorzhiev himself claims that the police watched them the whole time, and indeed on this occasion British intelligence was able to piece together some information about their movements, though only after the birds had flown. One British repon talks of the party going by train from Raxaul to Bombay, where the youngest of four Mongolian lamas who were travelling with them – the British strongly suspected them of being Russians – shaved, donned European dress and went on board a ship for Singapore. This man apparently knew English, for he had been ‘always able to read their railway tickets and detect when they were overcharged’. These ‘Mongolian’ lamas were also, the British ascertained, great meat-eaters, and they could not understand Tibetan

They were therefore obliged to continue their travels through south India, where some kind of epidemic was raging, so they voluntarily quarantined themselves at the railway junction of Tuticorin for five days before travelling on to Ceylon. There they visited a number of Buddhist sites, including the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, before finally, with the aid of the Russian consul and an agent named Malygin, boarding a Russian steamer of the Dobrovolnyi F1ot, the T ambov, at Colombo on June 12 1 901.

A fortnight later the world knew that something politically important was afoot. ‘Odessa wiII welcome today an Extraordinary Mission from the Dalai Lama of Tibet which is proceeding to St Petersburg with diplomatic instructions of importance’, the newspaper, Oddeslt.ia Novosty, proclaimed in the columns of its edition of 25 June. It went on:

The personnel of the Mission consists of eight prominent statesmen with the 
Lama Dorzhiev at its head. The chid object of the Extraordinary Mission is a 
rapprochement and a strengthening of good relations with Russia ... 
  The Extraordinary Mission will among other things raise the question of 
the establishment in St Petersburg of a permanent Tibetan Mission for the 
maintenance of good relations with Russia . .. '

Smith, the British Consul General in Odessa, wired a copy of the item to the Foreign Office in London on the same day. The British could no more regard Dorzhiev as a small fish or a figment of the imagination; from now on virtUally his every move was watched, reported, pondered and debated.

The Mayor of Odessa welcomed the Tibetan Mission in the traditional manner with bread and salt; Dorzhiev later wrote to thank him for the warmness of his reception. The Mission then proceeded by rail to St Petersburg. Norzunov in his own writings says that he went his own way at Odessa and returned to his Kalmyk steppe, but he has been identified in a photograph published in The Graphic on 17 August 1 901, where he sits in an open carriage beside a Tibetan aristocrat in European dress. Opposite, grim, bemedalled and finely hatted, sit two other men with heavy moustaches, one of whom may be Dr Badmayev.

In the background rears the famous Bronze Horseman: the equestrian statue of Peter the Great by Falconet which stands in the former Senate Square, now Decembrists’ Square, in St Petersburg.

On 25 June (NS 8 July), the Messager Officiel reported that on 23 June (NS 6 July) the Emperor had received the ‘Extraordinary Envoys of the Dalai Lama of Tibet’ at Peterhof. Afterwards they were received by the Dowager Empress, Maria Fyodorovna. Also presented was a ‘Second Captain Ulanov’, a Kalmyk officer of the 1st Don Cossack Regiment, who was attached to the Tibetan Mission as interpreter. This is almost certainly Dambo Ulyanov, a gelong (Buddhist monk) attached to the Guards Regiment, who travelled to Tibet several times and wrote the book, Predictions of the Buddha about the House of Romanov and a Brief Account of my Travels to Tibet in 1 904-5 (St Petersburg 1 913),
in which he linked the destiny of the House of Romanov with the Shambhala myths.10 That Dorzhiev needed his services as translator indicates that at this point he was none too proficient in Russian.

Again we have vague and contradictory reports of what went on at Peterhof. Dorzhiev merely says, ‘We met the Great Tsar together and offered him letters and gifts from Tibet. We received in return abundant gifts and letters in gold [discussing] relations with the Land of Snows. ‘)) He also adds elsewhere that he discussed a problem that had arisen among the Kalmyks with the Emperor and his ministers, and also received the Emperor’s permission to build a Buddhist temple in the Russian capital. L. E. Berlin, on the other hand, records that the Emperor ‘promised Tibet assistance and expressed the desire that closer friendly relations be established between Tibet and Russia’. When the two Tibetan envoys returned to Lhasa bearing the usual ‘letters and gifts’, the Tibetan Government was encouraged by what they were told and took a tougher stand against the British, who, then embroiled in the Boer War, were in no mood for embarking on new contentions.

C. Nabokov, at the time Second Secretary at the Russian Foreign Lamsdorff.

Of6� was present at interviews between Dorzhiev and Count He maintains that these were ‘a painful ordeal’ for the

geography 
Foreign Minister because he was 'utterly ignorant of the history and 
          of Tibet'. However, 'not a single reference to political 
matters was made', proceedings never progressing beyond 'the flattest

deeper banalities’. Any suspicions that the British might have harboured that machinations were in progress were therefore based ‘not on facts but on fancies’. ll A rather different and more multi-faceted account is that of the highly able Russian diplomat, Ivan Yakobevich Korostovers, who met Dorzhiev, whom he maintains had orders to put out feelers and try to direct the attention of the Russian government to Tibet, and particularly to gain diplomatic suppon against China and Britain. Dorzhiev was presented to the Tsar, who bcnevolendy ac.apted his reports on the present situation and on the personality of the Dalai Lama. The Tibetans, Dorzhiev said, w� looking with great hopes on Russia, the protector of all the religions of the East, and they hoped for the White Tsar’s assistance against their enemies. Tsar Nicholas II, as was well-known, was especially interested in the Far East, w� he had travelled when he was Tsarevitch, and he had a weakness for all sorts of Eastrm and exotic adventures. which w�
often not worth attention. Dorzhiev spoke with marked authority and expertise, and mightily pleased the Tsar, in spite of his fantastic plans., which were not to be realised and which implied the Russian advance across the Himalayas in order to liberate the oppressed people. This of course increased Tibetan prestige within government circles, and even engaged the attention of the Minister, Count Larnsdorff, who was disinclined towards everything Eastem.1l Korosrovets maintains that his graceful reception by the Emperor encouraged Dorzhiev, who then called on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the General Staff to hand over reports on Tibeto-Russian rapprochement and to try to gain suppon. Throughout, the Buryat lama
‘behaved in a very modest way yet [one] demanding respect’, while at the same time being very anxious to avoid attracting the attention of the British. Moreover:

Judging by his behaviour and flattering ways, one could have mistaken Dorzhiev 
for a Catholic priest had not his narrow Mongolian eyes and broad cheekbones 
betrayed his origin. He always wore a long robe, and sometimes on top the dark 
red outer robe of Buddhist monks.

Initially, Korostovets concludes, Dorzhiev’s winning diplomatic overtures did arouse interest to the extent that a special conference was held at which a draft Russo-Tibetan treaty was discussed. The Russian Government finally drew back, however, for while it was interested in undermining the British, the draft treaty threatened the very significant danger of conflict without offering any significant advantages . ..

The Russian press was full of news and editorial comment about the Mission. The 17 June (NS 30 June) edition of Novoye Vremya spoke in sabre-rattling terms of Russian advances in China, then went on:
Under the circumstances, a [Tibetan) rapprochment with Russia must seem to him [the Dalai Lama) the most natural step, as Russia is the only power able to counteract the intrigues of Great Britain, who has long been endeavouring to obtain admission, and only awaits an opportunity to force an entrance …

The difficulties encountered by the Tibetan Mission on its journeys through India explain why Tibet, who has already seen the lion’s paw raised over it, tums its eyes towards the Emperor of the North. 14 Ukhtomsky’s St Peterburgskiye Viedomosti was more moderate:
Talking about a Protectorate can only have the result of bringing misfortune to our countrymen who may be travelling in these countries, embitter the Chinese and excite the British Indian Government to a more active policy. I S
One person was much quoted in the press. This was St Petersburg’S
own semi-official Tibet expert, Dr Piotr Badmayev, who, as a close confederate of Ukhtomsky and Witte in the powerful Eastern Lobby, was undoubtedly playing a very active pan behind the scenes. Although he gains no mention in Dorzhiev’s autobiography, Badmayev was, like Ukhtomsky, a key figure in this phase of the Buryat lama’s career .

The Badmayev storyl6 begins in 1 857 when a Buryat doctor named Tsultrim Padma – ‘Badmayev’ is in fact a russification of ‘Padma’ –

arrived in St Petersburg. He is said to have studied Tibetan medicine at 
Chakpori, the medical college near Lhasa; also at the medical faculty of 
the Aga Datsan near Chita in eastern Siberia. He subsequently russified 
himself to the extent of changing his name to Aleksandr Badmayev, and

set up a Tibetan phannacy in the Russian capital, which was the first of its kind in Europe. This was not a great success until his brother Zhamtsaran (185 1-1 919) began to work there. He possessed a magic touch – in more ways than one – and aher Tsultrim’s death in 1 873 he ttansfonned this ‘obscure little shop’ into a great ‘sanatorium’:
The fame of Badmayev’s magical cures spread rapidly, and climts flocked to him from aU classes of society, seeking to be cured in his sanatorium. His followers maintained that he could charm away the most srubbom troubles in a marvellous fashion, and that his curative treatmmt was particularly succnsful ‘in serious cases of srubbom nervous diseases, mmtal maladies, and disrurbances of female physiology” ”
Zhamtsaran had been born in the Aga district (Dulidurginsky rayon),
where in his youth he had tended his father’s la� herd of cattle until at the age of twelve he was sent to the gymnasium at Irkutsk. His brother brought him to the capital when he was about twenty, and he later attended two St Petersburg institutes of higher learning: the Military Medical Academy and the University of Eastern Languages. Highly ambitious and able, not to say opponunistic, he got ahead quickly.

While still a student, he convened to Onhodoxy – undoubtedly a tactical rather than a spiritual move – his godfather being Emperor Alexander III himself. He thereupon ceased to be simple Zhamtsaran and became Piou Aleksandrovich. Imperial sponsorship gave him an entree at Coun and the rare privilege of being able to communicate directly with the Emperor.

Aher completing his university career in 1 875, Zhamtsaran Badmayev served in the Asiatic Section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs until 1 893, at the same time holding a lectureship in Mongolian at St Petersburg University and continuing his successful Tibetan medical practice. His political and diplomatic skills, meanwhile, were frequently called upon by the Emperor and he was entrusted with imponant political commissions. Like Ukhtomsky, Badmayev was an advocate of Russian expansion in Asia. While still at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he submitted a memorandum to Alexander III through Count Witte in which he proposed extending Russia’s railwav links into Chinese territory. He also proposed a plan for extending Russian economic influence in Asia. Some sources go so as far as to suggest this involved encouraging the Mongolians, Chinese Muslims and Tibetans to rise up against their Manchu overlords; these rebels would succeed, he predicted, and would then appeal for the Emperor’s protection.1 8 Around 1891, with Russian government backing and a grant from the Treasury of two million rubles in gold, Badmayev departed for the east and remained there until 1896. In November 1 893 he opened his trading firm – it had its headquarters in Chita – and during the next few years this concerned itself with organizing large-scale canle-breeding operations in Trans-Baikalia, leasing land from Russian senlers, purchasing transport animals and opening shops. Then in November 1895, the firm began publishing a newspaper in Chita; it was called Life on the Eastern Peripheries, and appeared in both Russian and Mongolian editions; its editor was Budda Rabdanov. It was in fact the first Buryat newspaper and was very popular locally, dealing as it did with the development of the Buryat economy, Buryat culture and aspects of Chinese, Tibetan and Mongolian life. Agents were also dispatched to Mongolia and Tibet to investigate local trading conditions. As we have seen, some of these agents got through to Lhasa and were in touch with Agvan Dorzhiev; others got to Sining.

These activities depleted his financial resources, however, for he eventually applied to the Russian Government for further finance. This was denied, and in 1 89617 his newspaper went bankrupt and ceased to appear. The reasons for this withdrawal of official support are unclear but Badmayev had his detractors. Wine came eventually to regard him as a criminal opportunist, and I. Y. Korostovets, who witnessed his operations in eastern Siberia, believed he had been concerned mainly with feathering his own nest. Beyond acquiring land in his own name and sening up a haberdashery shop, Korotstovets believed Badmayev achieved linle; he was, moreover, unpopular with the local Buryat, who disapproved of his conversion to Christianity.

Badmayev continued his political activities afterwards. He published several works on Russia’s Asian policy. Also, as a wealthy and influential man, he was able to do much good work on behalf of his fellow Buryats in St Petersburg. He represented Buryat interests to Nicholas II and he arranged for many Buryats to visit the Imperial capital, notably for Nicholas’s coronation celebrations in 1 896. He sponsored a Buryat school in the Russian capital too; though, according to one source, when in 1896 the Russian Government suppressed the teaching of Buddhism in favour of Orthodoxy, the students revolted and the school was closed down. 19 Finally, he is credited with giving financial support to Aga Buryats wishing to study at St Petersburg University – G. Ts.

Tsybikov was one of his beneficiaries.

Badmayev also continued his medical practice, augmenting his Tibetan knowledge by studying western approaches at the Academy of Military Surgery. His favour at court continued into the reign of Nicholas II,
whom he treated medically. One repon mentions the successful cure of a stomach complaint with a mixture of henbane and hashish – “the effects of which were marvellous’. During consultations the Emperor often asked Badmayev for political as well as for medical advice, and they discussed the appointment of high officials. The doctor had a encoded marvellous filing system, FUlop Miller maintains, in which medical and political data were combined.

Tibet therefore figured highly on 8admayev’s agenda; in fact, he actively preached its annexation. It is doubtful that he ever travelled there himself, though unconfirmed reports from Paul Mowis, a Darjeeling trader, news-hound and Tibet-watcher, did lead the Government of Bengal to deduce that a cenain Baranoff, who might have been Badmayev, possibly led some kind of mission to Lhasa in January 1 898. He was cenainly in touch with Dorzhiev, however, and when the Tibetan Mission arrived in St Petersburg in 1901 he showed himself extremely well informed, notably about Donhiev himself. In general he expounded the official line that the Mission could not be regarded as either political or diplomatic but was rather of a pastoral nature. He did speak, however, of Russia being actively concerned “to uphold the integrity of China’, so the Tibetans, who were subjects of the Emperor of China, were naturally welcomed in Russia when they came “to pray for assistance against any attack on Tibet’. A summary of an interview in the St PeteTs#ntrg Gautte, also records that he considered “Tibet is really quite accessible to Russians, but that the object of the Mission is to make it more so. He fears that the English, who have now firmly established themselves in Cashmere, may anticipate Russia in that country.’lO
The British Ambassador in St Petersburg, Sir Charles Scon, conscientiously culled 8admayev’s pieces from the Russian press and wired them along with other relevant items to London. He also spoke personally with Count Lamsdorff on 3 July and again on 8 July, having heard in the interim that members of the Tibetan Mission had paid visits to Count Witte as well as to Lamsdorff himself. On both occasions Lamsdorff assured Scott that the mission had no diplomatic status or political purpose, as had been irresponsibly suggested in some quaners of the press. It was “of the same character as those sent by the Pope to the faithful of foreign lands’. Dorzhiev, a member of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, came occasionally to Russia with the object of
‘making money collections for his Order from the numerous Buddhists in the Empire’. He had brought Lamsdorff an autograph letter from the Dalai Lama, which on translation had been found merely to contain a simple message to the effect that the Dalai Lama was happy to say that he was well and hoped that Lamsdorff was likewise. As for Dr Badmayev, Lamsdorff dismissed him as an ‘eccentric character’.2 1 Lamsdorff’s assurances were officially received ‘with satisfaction’ in London, though at the same time it was made dear that the British Government ‘could not regard with indifference any proceeding that might have a tendency to alter the existing status of Tibet’. Beneath the diplomatic niceties, however, both London and Calcutta were alarmed and agreed that a new situation was developing. In the following months their suspicions were to intensify and their attitude to harden.

After 1 901, the Dorzhiev phenomenon, whatever the good lama’s personal motivations, was no longer marginal but fully integrated into the dynamic pattern of history. There, along with other contributory factors, it served to bring to a head the current phase of the long-standing rivalry of Britain and Russia in Asia.

Among The Kalmyks And The Buryats 1 901 – 1 903

In August 1 901, bearing the Emperor’s letter and gifts, Losang Khechok and Gyaltsen PuntsOk set out to return to Lhasa by the overland route, the only safe one as the British were fully aware of their comings and goings. As for Dorzhiev, despite reports that the British received from Chandra Das, Sandberg and other agents to the effect that he returned to Lhasa early in 1 902 to a cold reception from the conservatives who disfavoured rapprochement with Russia, he himself records that he remained away from Tibet for the next two years or so, devoting himself mainly to the service of the Buddhists of his native Russia.

He had clearly received a mandate from the Thineenth Dalai Lama to build monasteries, ordain lamas and generally revitalize Buddhism in the Russian Empire. Berlin merely says that he was having ‘a rest’ during this period. A rest from politics it cenainly may have been, but not a time of inactivity by any means; as always, Agvan Dorzhiev was a very busy man.

Between January and March 1 902 Dorzhiev paid another visit to the Kalmyks, staying at khuruls in the ulus of Bagatsokhurov, Maloderbet, Ikitsokhurov, Kharakhusov and Erketenov. According to his memoirs, one of the main reasons for this visit was to attend to a panicular problem that had arisen. It had been proposed, perhaps by Dorzhiev himself with the Dalai Lama’s backing, to establish two choira1 or colleges of higher Buddhist studies; but an imponant lama, Shachin Lama, was set against the idea, as were some of the elder monks.

Representing the local religious establishment, they may well have felt threatened by the arrival of a prestigious lama from the coun of the Dalai Lama, who was not only causing a great stir in the Kalmyk steppe but may moreover have been something of a new broom.

A Kalmyk magnate or noyon whom he calls Tsering Da..o – perhaps this was Tscren-David Tundutov – disagreed with them, however. ‘Even

I [know that] the Buddha, the Second Buddha and others have clearly 
said in all their teachings that in the Holy Perfection of Wisdom 
[Prajnaparamita] it is declared that we need to listen [to teachings], 
reflect and meditate [upon them], and train in the stages of the path', 
he declared. 'And in the teachings of the Great Dalai Lama it is said that 
the time has come to establish monastic colleges'.2 
  Having been authorized by the Emperor and his ministers to sort the 
matter out, Dorzhiev maintains in his memoirs that he did so to his own 
satisfaction, deciding that Shachin Lama had no authority to impose 
a veto and that the choira should go ahead. To assist with the task 
he recruited two Buryat lamas holding the degree of doramba geshe,3 
Gelek Gyatso and Chojor Chonyingpo, who had received their training 
at Gomang College and were disciples of another Buryat, Sonam Gyatso, 
at Padkar Choling. He also invited a third lama from Tibet, Geshe 
Shakya Gyeltsen, who had a reputation for having 'practised with great 
diligence [and] without regard for his cherished life'. And so, Dorzhiev 
maintains, the two Kalmyk choira were set up according to the noble 
traditions of Gomang College. 
  Two choira were in fact established along the lines of Buryat datsans 
at Amta Burgusta and Sanzyr in the Maloderbet and Ikitsokhurov ulus 
of Astrakhan province, though work on them did not start until 1 906 
and 1 907 respectively." The Amta Burgusta foundation was situated on 
the domains of the noyon Prince T undutov, who had previously donated 
a house in which a kind of illegal choira had operated. Upon Dorzhiev's 
arrival in 1 906 a 'massive building programme' began. 
  According to the prospectus: 

The aim of the college is to explain to the students the principles and the will 
of the Buddha, the Master, in order to show them how to stay away from evil, 
how to lead a righteous life and how, through correct realisation of the true 
meaning of an honest conduct in life, one may strive for Nirvana.s 

Actually, what was taught was Dorzhiev's forte: tsenyi,6 the traditional 
programme of Gelugpa dialectics. As at his Alma Mater, Gomang 
College, the course here was a protracted one, lasting eighteen years. 
There was no shortage of takers, however. Originally an intake of a 
hundred students was planned, but soon after opening a hundred more 
applied, so entry had to be restricted to only the most talented candidates, 
who were usually monks and novices of fifteen and over recommended 
by their abbots. Thirty-five houses were built to provide accommodation 
at a cost of some ninety rubles each. Dorzhiev himself personally 
donated five thousand rubles; he also generously gave a complete set 
of the Tibetan Buddhist canon brought from Tibet itself, buddha-rupas,

votive vessels and other ecclesiastical objects. Other funds were donated by the Dalai Lama and wealthy local residents; also one ruble was levied from each kibitka (yun). The actual running expenses were made the responsibility of the local khuruls, the larger ones contributing 214 rubles per annum and the smaller ones 1 17. Dorzhiev also donated his teaching revenue.7 The syllabus included lectures, study and devotional rites, while instruction was in both Kalmyk and Tibetan and also in Russian at the insistence of the Depanment of Foreign Creeds, with whom Dorzhiev formally negotiated permission for the college. Among the text-books used were F. I. Stcherbatsky’s Theory of Cognition and Logic According to the Teachings of the fAl,ly Buddhists, as well as works and translations by Zaya Pandita and other scholarly Kalmyk lamas.8 The house rules were strict: smoking, drinking, playing cards and going to market were prohibit� and students had to dress and furnish their cells, of which there were fony-eight, in a simple manner. Only six hours were allowed for sleep, and meat-eating was forbidden ‘according to the ancient Buddhist rules of the Vinaya [monastic code), as it inhibits the faculty of discrimination and leads to somnolence’.9 As for the lkitsokhurov choira, work on this began in the spring of 1 907 with the suppon of wealthy and influential local residents, notably the gelong Dzhomak Gontiev and the zaisan Tseren Badmayev. Funds of about 70,000 rubles were involved. No official permission seems to have been sought, however, for when news of the choira’s construction reached the Governor of Astrakhan he sent an official named Kardayev to inspect the place. In August 1907 Kardayev reponed on the state of building operations. In addition, there were twenty-five kibitkas to accommodate students when they arrived. They would be under the direction of the gelong Segal’tya Dobdonov; another lama named Dandir Buyuntayev was also brought in from Buryatia to suppon him.

Building work was suspended in the autumn of 1 907 but resumed again in the early spring of 1 908; the choira was consecrated in the same year.

Responsibility for its upkeep was much the same as in the case of the other choira: 300 rubles per annum were to be contributed by the larger khuruls in the area and 150 rubles by the smaller ones; in all, some 1 ,500 rubles were expeaed to be required. In addition, a quantity of sheep, cattle, horses and camels were also donated. 1o As instructed by his teacher, Purchok Rinpoche, Dorzhiev also began ordaining Kalmyk monks and novices according to the Li�ok rite
‘which the Dalai Lama had given me’. When writing his memoirs, he believed that he performed the Puja of Accomplishment, the highest offering ceremony at which practitioners give away all spiritual benefit gained through their practice. In addition, because he was concerned that local medical practices offended against the central Buddhist principle of compassion – ‘most of the doctors in these lands did not refrain from taking life and practised such things as treating illnesses with the juice of cooked meat’ – he invited a doctor of Tibetan medicine, Jangchub Dorji, to help found a medical college.

And he also encouraged Padma Tsultrim, a Torgut lama who possessed a Lharampa degree, to train as a teacher with a view to setting up a Kalachakra college. The good geshe eventually accomplished this at a place Dorzhiev calls ‘Bagachonu’, having studied with Tashi Donden, who possessed a kachu degree: a lower form of geshe degree awarded at Tashilhunpo, where, as we have noted, there was a Kalachakra college.

In addition to all this, Dorzhiev also carried out much pastoral work among ordinary lay Kalmyks. He dispensed Buddhist layman’s vows and ‘one-day vows’ to pious men and women who wished to submit to a number of strict rules (not to eat after noon, not to sleep on a high or luxurious bed, to refrain from sexual activity, and so fonh) for a twenty-four hour period. At such ceremonies, he tells us, up to ten thousand people were in attendance. He also bestowed popular initiations into the practice of the mantra OM MANI PADME
HUM, the quintessential mantra of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as into Mig-tse-ma, a practice based on the recitation of a simple four-line verse praising Je Tsongkhapa as a personification of the great bodhisattvas Maiijushri, Avalokiteshvara and Vajrapani. He stressed to those who received these initiations the benefits that would accrue from reciting the appropriate formulae.

He also gave ‘long-life’ initiations: common-place tantric ceremonies in which Amitayus, the Buddha of Infinite Life, and other deities connected with longevity – usually White Tara and Usnisha Vijaya

Again in his general discourses he was moved to speak out against the abuse of alcohol and tobacco, both among the clergy and the laity. Even Benjamin Bergman, writing of his travels among the Kalmyks a century before, noted that the drinking of spirits took place among the clergy, particularly the lower clergy, and that tobacco smoke could even be detected in temples. ‘I explained to them the negative consequences [of such behaviour],’ Dorzhiev writes. ‘However, very few paid much attention.’
Having done so much among the Kalmyks, Dorzhiev turned his attention to his fellow Buryats. He had it specially in mind to activate Buddhism in Irkutsk province, to the west of Lake Baikal, where his ancestor Ukhin Akhaldayev had gone to live back in the late eighteenth century. Shamanism was still widespread there, though many local Buryats had also convened to Onhodox Christianity. His dfons proved fairly successful in the long run and on the official count there were 335 conversions to Buddhism from both shamanism and Orthodox Christianity.

The authorities were not pleased with his success, however, so when about ten years later he lodged two petitions with the Interior Ministry for permission to build, at his own expense, a dawn at Kirmen in Verkholensk okrug (district), where his family still held land, and for lamas to be allowed to ‘reside freely among the Buryats of Irkutsk province in order that they might practise the methods of Tibetan medicine” 1 3 both were rejected ‘because the authorities detected an underlying desire to propagate Lamaism’ .14 Dorzhiev himself always emphatically dmied any evangelical zeal, maintaining that the inclination of the shamanistic Buryats of Irkutsk province to Buddhism certain was not the result of any efforts on his pan but represented ‘a historical and psychological process’; it would moreover be a ‘contribution to the general progress of the state’. H Despite his penhons being turned down and his also being himself eventually prohibited from visiting the Irkutsk Buryats by the local Governor General, General Selivanov, the Kirmen Datsan was built to a design by Richard Andreyovich Berzen, who also worked at the St Petersburg temple (which it resembled); it was opened around 1912. A second datsan, the Koimor, was also opened in Cis-Baikalia, but much later, probably in the 1920s; it was the first in Irkutsk province to have a tsenyi faculty.

What was special, indeed unique about Dorzhiev as a Buddhist was that he was not, as one might have expected of a person schooled within the Gelugpa church and received into its establishment, an ossified conservative and fundamentalist. Quite the contrary: he was of a modem, progressive tum of mind, concerned on one hand to strengthen the Buddhism of the Buryats and Kalmayks by purging it of the venal abuses that had become endemic and, on the other hand, to expunge the dark, primitive aspects of the religion in order to reconcile it with modem Western thought, notably rationalism .

Unfortunately, Dorzhiev arrived back in his homelands at a time of crisis. For many years Russian government policy towards the Buryats (and similar ethnic minorities) had been that enshrined in the enlightened Speransky Statute of 1 822, which safeguarded their traditional lifestyle by granting them a high degree of independence.

They had their own courts and administrative institutions; also religious freedom and special exemptions. All that changed at about this time when, as part of an assimilation drive, the Speransky system was abandoned in favour of a vigorous russification programme. This culminated in a series of regulations (polozheniye), imposed between 1 902 and 1 904, which are said to have ‘constituted a direct atrack on the whole Buryat social structure and landholding pattern’. 16 Buryat courts and administrative institutions were scrapped, military service was threatened (in the event it was not imposed), but worst of all, parcels of Buryat land, which as in all traditionally nomadic societies was held in common, were privatized and handed over to Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, increasing numbers of whom gained access to the region by means of the newly-opened Trans-Siberian Railway.

Concerning himself with these problems, Dorzhiev found it ‘difficult to decide what would be best for all the Buryats, whose minds were suffering’, but he eventually decided to make an appeal to the 96 Buddhism in Russia government. ‘It was like trying to make water flow up a steep hillside’, he records.

In the long run, far from destroying Buryat identity, such crude attempts at russi6cation only served to galvanize national, cultural and religious self-consciousness. Pan-Mongolism was also given additional impetus, for many Buryats felt that their salvation lay in their racial links with the other Mongolian peoples.

Attempts by the Orthodox church to convert them to Christianity were another cause of woe for the Buryats. This had been going on for some time, even during the era of the Speransky system. Venyamin, Archbishop of Irkutsk between 1 873 and 1890, had been notorious in this respect; and Prince Ukhtomsky had investigated complaints of forcible conversion. The intolerant Christians of the region now turned their attentions to Dorzhiev and made him the butt of various calumnies and false accusations. After three appeals to the Emperor, these intolerant
‘long-hairs’, as he calls them, called off their smear campaign, but even so the local Buddhists were only able to establish four new datsans. Again, pressure from Orthodoxy tended in the long term to strengthen rather than weaken Buryat Buddhism, which was in any case the central pivot of national identity. 17 Besides his specifically Buddhist work, Dorzhiev was actively involved in both Buryat (and Kalmyk) nationalism and in Pan-Mongolism, which again brought official displeasure upon him to the extent that he was eventually put under secret surveillance by the Ministry of the Interior. It was his special contribution to expand Pan-Mongolism, which has been called ‘the most powerful single idea in Central Asia in the Twentieth Century’, into the more expansive Pan-Buddhism, which, as we have already noted, he based upon the Kalachakra myths, including the legend of the messianic kingdom of Shambhala.

A resume of Dorzhiev’s nationalist activities is included in a brief document drawn up by the Interior Ministry ‘in connection with the arrival in St Petersburg of a Tibetan representative, Agvan Dorzhiev, with the purpose of petitioning the Russian Government to recognise the sovereignty of Tibet’,” Dated 191 1, this states:
In thr prriod of the so-callrd librration movmlmt, a frw of thr Buryat intdlectuals, under the influenu of thc nrw idas of national sdf-dnrrmination, began, in imitation of other minorities, to OrganiK factions and socinin and to lay down a programrnr of activity. Among thc Buryats this movrmmt was Univcnity, and pncratrd bDorzhic y rwo prrsons – Zhamtsarano, a lecturer at St Pnersburg v. Boc:h of than prepared thr ground for an activr cnp&at nationalist movement among the Buryats: thc forrnrr. masqurrading as someone m professional business activities, conductrd propaganda among Buryat teachers, and Dorzhiev among the nobility. For this purpose they travelled from one ulus to another in Trans-Baikalia and Irkutsk province. Their activity was primarily directed towards the Buryats of Irkutsk province as these had to a greater extent than the Buryats of Trans-Baikalia, lost their national identity and been assimilated by the Russian population.19 These activities probably did not fully come into their own until the revolutionary year of 1 905, for the document continues:

Simultaneous with the generation of a purely nationalist movement among 
the students and teachers, the narodniks (populists) tried to exploit the 1 905 
Manifesto to strengthen the foundations of religious tolerance. They recognised 
lamaism as a national religion and accordingly began to propagate it among the 
shamanistic and Orthodox Christian Buryats of Irkutsk (provincel.20

Such activities must also have been carried on among the Kalmyks, for the document concludes by observing that Dorzhiev was not only put under surveillance by the Ministry of Internal Affairs but in 1911 the Prime Minister, P. A. Stolypin, issued instructions to the governors of Astrakhan and Stavropol provinces and to the hetman (commanding officer) of the Don Cossacks that he was to be sent away if he appeared in the territories.21 Dorzhiev was also, as an extension of his Buryat nationalism, concerned with the promotion and protection of Buryat culture. The Interior Ministry document mentions one of his joint achievements in this field with his colleague Zhamtsarano: the development of a Latin-based alphabet to replace the strange vertical method of writing hitherto used by the Mongol peoples:
Since the Buryats had no wrinen alphabet of their own and the Ministry of Public Education demanded that they use the Russian alphabet in their schools, the question of an alphabet for these schools was raised. Ultimately, preference was given to a new Buryat-Mongol alphabet created by Dorzhiev with the help of Zhamtsarano for the purpose of unifying all the Mongolian peoples.22 In the event, however, few books were published in this alphabet.

Later, in 1910, Dorzhiev was involved in setting up the first Buryat publishing house. It was called Naran (lit. The Sun), and it put out books on ‘the social and political history of Buryat thought, philosophical and artistic works’. 2J
Dorzhiev was therefore a multi-faceted person. At base he was a dedicated Buddhist, but one of a progressive and reformist disposition; he was also politically active as a Buryat nationalist; as an intellectual, he furthennore concerned himself with Buryat culture; and in a wider sense he was both a Pan-Mongolist and a Pan-Buddhist. All these were aspects of one and the same man, and they fitted together without tension or contradiction.

Dorzhiev’s coUeague, Tsiben Zhamrsacavich Zhamtsarano ( 1880-1942?),
was a Buryat intellectual from the Aga steppe who was sent to be educated at Irkutsk University, where he developed an interest in socia-political and scientific matters. He then travelled among both the Cis- and Trans-Baikal Buryats as well as in Mongolia, collecting folklore and ethnographical material. Having published a number of Geographical books, he was in 1906 awarded the gold medal of the Imperial Russian Society; he also began to lecture in Mongolian language at During St Petersburg University.24 his various field trips, Zhamtsarano amassed a great deal of knowledge and became at the same time acutely aware that the more advanced Buryats were ‘searching for an escape from the darkness’;
in particular, they were looking for political reform. He subsequently wrote a number of impassioned articles in which he appealed to Buryat intellectuals to strive for the realization of these objectives. In addition he was concerned with popular education and planned an ambitious publication programme that would enlighten his people in the various fields of modem scientific knowledge .

Dorzhiev also brought to Trans-Baikalia during this troubled period some four thousand rubles with which he had been entrusted by Prince Ukhtomslcy to commission local master-craftsmen to fabricate a dewachen (corrupted in Russian to ‘devazhin’): an ambitious model of Sukhavati, the Western Paradise of the compassionate buddha Amitabha where followers of the Pure Land school of Buddhism aspire to be reborn after death. Ukhtomslcy wrote to the Chancellery of the Russian Museum in 1 905:
This has k>ng been ready and is kept packed in the home of Bandido Khambo uma Iroltucv. When I handed over my collection of Buddha·
rupas to the Alexander III Museum [he did this in 1902], I also gavc them the right to m;civc this Dcvazhin, which was to be a supplement to It. ·U
According to Professor Poppe, there were many such models in the datsans of Trans-Baikalia, and a particularly beautiful one at the Aga Datsan in Chita:
This model contained scores of miniature temples, hundreds of statuettes worked in the most delicate filigree, depicting various saint$, and an infini�
of figurines of animals, birds, metal Rowers and trees. Each figure was made of gilded copper and silver and covered with an extremely fine layer of enamel. 26 In January 1 902 news reached London that towards the end of the previous year Dorzhiev had passed through Moscow and had presented the Imperial Russian Geographical Society with ‘interesting Tibetan antiquities’. It was reported at the same time that he intended to visit Paris during the coming summer and deliver a collection of Buddhist objects to the MuS« Guimet.27 He actually arrived in Paris in October, where according to Joseph Deniker he commissioned a tse-bourn or vase of life, which, as we noted above, is one of the main ritual objects used in long-life ceremonies.

According to Deniker, this particular tse-boum consisted of an image of Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light (of whom Amitayus, the Buddha of Infinite Life, is a bodhisattva reflex), carved in ivory and tinted red. This was supported by an ivory bowl, again tinted red, which in its turn rested on a silver planer adorned with two dragons. The whole object was about eight inches high. Apparently the Dalai Lama, despite his youth, was rather frail, and handling this two-and-a-quarter pound object during protracted ceremonies caused him to suffer some fatigue. Dorzhiev therefore came to Paris to ‘find a craftsman sufficiently skilled to make a similar tse-boum, which would be lighter and more precious’ .28 Deniker recommended aluminium for lightness but Dorzhiev, who had seen a photographer burn aluminium powder, dismissed the suggestion and opted instead for silver gilt for the lower planer and the two dragons, which were made detachable (they were in fact only included as a sop to the Chinese and could be taken off if none were present).

The image of Amitabha and a supporting bowl, meanwhile, were carved from coral, which Dorzhiev obtained personally from Livorno in Italy.

Various other modifications were also made to the original design. The image of Amitabha now rested on a lotus of white chalcedony, his head surrounded by a halo of lapis-lazuli. Above were a chalcedony moon, a sun of ‘yellow stone’ and a flame of coral (‘symbolizing the radiance of wisdom’). This beautiful piece, the work of five French craftsmen, weighed only a pound and three-quaners. Before being shipped to its destination, it was displayed in the MusCe Guimet for a week .

In Paris in October 1902, Dorzhiev met the exiled neo-Realist poet Maksimilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin (1877-1 932), who was one of those Russian intellectuals who were attracted by Eastern religious philosophy.29 Born in Kiev, Voloshin had, following the early death of his father, moved to the southern Crimea, where he was raised by his mother. He later went on to the Faculty of Law at Moscow University but was expelled for taking pan in student unrest. He thereupon decamped to Central Asia in the autumn of 1 900, and the six months that he spent there, ‘with camel caravans’, drastically altered his views and initiated an intereSt in oriental matters; in panicular he was inspired to embark on a critical reappraisal of European culture. He then went to Paris to complete his studies but afterwards, as he told his friend A.M.

Peshkovsky, I want to set out and explore India, China and Japan on foot. I want to familiarize myself widI their cultures, not through European eyes – that would be arrogant and contm1ptuous – but from an objective point of view.1O
The young poet’s grand plan lost its priority as he fell victim to the charms of 6n de siecle Parisian life, at the time at its most gay and bohemian; but the arrival of Agvan Dorzhiev temporarily reawakened it and the two became acquainted. ‘Imagine my delight when I was invited to a restaurant by a Tibetan holy man’, Voloshin wrote enthusiastically to Y.A. Glotov; ‘and I went shopping for the Dalai Lama at the Bon Ma [Bon Marchej with him! On Monday he is coming over to spend the evening with me:]l They talked at length about Buddhism through an interpreter:
Meeting the Khambo Lama, I developed a passion for Buddhism . . . This is my first rdigious sup . .. He spoke often about Nirvana, which utterly changed many of my ideas. I kamed from him, for example, that Buddhism regards proselytizing with a horror almost equal to that in which it holds violence against the penon. How moraUy admirable this is compared to Christianity,
[which is) a religion of propaganda and violence! And the meaning of my talc IIimbtIr SZJJbIM? You didn’t understand it at all. It is not a challenge but a warnins. It was composed on the sttmgth of our talks about banning the entry of Europeans to Tibet. Isn’t this like encouraging hunting when there is a ban on hunting packs? And Europe is worse than a hunting pack. None has 10 foully darroyed ochtt cultura as Europe. No other pan of the world has such a bloody history.J2 The picture that Voloshin gives of Dorzhiev himself is of an innocent abroad: ‘He appears to have no more idea about Europe than Europeans have about Tibet’, he told Glotov – but he was ‘very saintly’.

In December 1 902, inspired by this meeting, Voloshin announced to his friends that he intended to go to the Far East, visiting the Baikal region on the way, ‘where there will be a letter waiting for me at some Buddhist monastery’. He did in fact leave Paris for Russia in january 1 903, but he never reached his destination. As V. Kupchenko writes:
A series of incidents, as much literary as personal in character, deflected him …

Paris would nor give leave of absence to its disciple. It is uncenain whether he was affected by the [subsequent] distant activities of Dorzhiev, who more than once [re]appeared in Russia, and hence in Soviet publications.H
Dozhiev probably returned to Trans-Baikalia sometime in 1 903. We do not know precisely how long he stayed, but eventually he joined company with a high lama who was going to Tibet. He calls him
‘great abbot Tripopa, master of the Kangyur, wise in the sutras, tantras and sciences’.34 This venerable lama had set up the four new Buryat monasteries mentioned above according to the traditions of Gyu-me, the Lower Tantric College founded in Lhasa in 1433 by je Sherab Senge, which specialized in training monks in tantric doctrine and practice.

On the way back to Tibet they paused at Urga. There the jebtsundamba Khutukhtu, in response to their requests, granted them an oral reading of his own collected writings. Curiously, the Khutukhtu’s omze (leader of chanting), a monk named Chog’i Chime, also told them that the Khutukhtu had declared that the Dalai Lama would soon be coming to Urga and that it was necessary to prepare special quaners for him.

Dorzhiev found the suggestion farcical, but in the event the Dalai Lama did arrive in Urga a year or so later, proving that the Khutukhtu either had the gift of second sight – or the luck of the devil. Moreover, when Dorzhiev and Tripopa took their leave of him, the Khutukhtu said,
‘Soon we will encounter happiness’ – and gave them several silver ingots in protective casings, as well as ‘abundant gifts’ and of course the obligatory blessings.

For two years or more Dorzhiev had been on the sidelines of power politics. Now, however, he was about to be plunged right back into them for momentous events were under way in the Land of Snows – events which he had unwittingly played no small pan in precipitating.

The Younghusband Mission To Lhasa 1 903 – 1 904

It had long been known in Britain that the Russians entenained grandiose to world dominance, something that they had perhaps by reversion from their erstwhile Mongolian conquerors.

World domination would of necessity be preceded by dominance in Asia and hence possession of India, the jewel in the British crown.

During the eighteenth century, a rumour gained currency that Peter the Great dreamed such dreams and on his death-bed in 1 725 willed his successors to realize them. Some Russian emperors appeared to take Peter’s injunction seriously. In 1 801, the unstable Paul I dispatched twenty-two thousand Cossacks to drive the British out of India, though after he was mangled in his own palace the force was recalled by his successors and so saved from almost certain disaster. Later, Alexander I and Napoleon hatched a scheme for an overland invasion.

During the rest of the nineteenth century, however, the rivalry of Britain and Russia in Asia settled down to a chess-like panern of move and countermove that became known as the Great Game.

The Imperial Russian war-machine advanced remorselessly across the Central Asian chessboard, taking one pawn-like khanate after another

The key figure in the Great Game at the turn of the century was George Nathaniel Curzon (1859-1925). In his younger days a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and Tory M P for Southpon, he was a brilliant, courageous and highly able man whose career, it was generally agreed, would rise to the heights. Serving as Under Secretary for India (189 1-92)
and for Foreign Affairs ( 1895-98), he had taken a special interest in Russian expansion, and in the summer of 1 888 rode the new Russian Trans-Caspian Railway through Geok-Tepe, Ashkhabad, Merv and Bokhara to Tashkent in the Islamic south-east, taking copious notes
(panicularly of a strategic nature) in these areas where the two-headed Imperial Russian Eagle had only recently been hoisted. Curzon, a committed imperialist himself, fully understood and in many ways sympathized with Russian aspirations to dominance in Asia: ‘It is a proud and not ignoble aim, and it is well worthy of the supreme moral and material eHons of a vigorous nation’, he wrote. However, if Russia was entitled to her ambitions, ‘still more so is Britain entitled, nay compelled, to defend that which she has won, and to resist the minor encroachments which are only pan of the larger plan’. ! In other words, he was for a British forward policy in Asia.

One of the first things that Curzon did when he achieved his supreme ambition of becoming Viceroy of India in January 1 899 was to change British policy towards Tibet from ‘patient waiting’ to ‘impatient hurry’.

What he inherited from his predecessors was, in any case, a highly unsatisfactory situation. For a long time various minor but vexing border and trade disputes had dragged on without resolution because the Tibetans declined to enter into discussions with the Government of India in a stateSmanlike way. In fact they stubbornly refused to have any relations at all, explaining that to do so would annoy their Chinese suzerains. Nothing positive came of attempts to deal directly with the Chinese either, for which the Chinese in tum blamed Tibetan intransigence. It was a classic case of passing the buck back and fonh ad infinitum and ad absurdum. Concluding that Chinese suzerainty was ‘a farce’, Curzon decided that ‘our dealings must be with Tibet and Tibet alone’, for ‘it is imponant that no-one else should seize it, and that it should be turned into a son of buffer state between the Russian and the Indian Empires’. 2 So he began a new round of efforts to open communications with the Dalai Lama. A means of doing so was difficult to find, but eventually two letters were dispatched. One of them was handed over to the Dalai Lama’s Garpc>ns or Viceroys in Western Tibet by Captain Kennion, the Assistant Resident in Kashmir; the other was taken directly to Lhasa by Kazi Ugyen Dorji, the Bhutanese Vakil (Agent) in Darjeeling. Both letters were returned unopened. How galling for a supremely proud man like Curzon to receive such a snub – and at about the same time to learn that its perpetrator, the monkish ruler of a backward Oriental country, was freely corresponding with the Emperor of Russia via Lama Dorzhiev.

Inevitably, Curzon became more and more convinced that the Russians were beginning to mount their anticipated penetration of Tibet and that a full-blown protectorate might only be a decade away. As for Dorzhiev himself, though Curzon was not precisely sure what he was, he inclined to the view that the Russians were using him as an agent. As he wrote on 11 September 1 901 to Lord George Hamilton at the India Office in London: ‘I do not myself believe that he [Dorzhiev) is upon a mission, or that he conveys a formal message from the Dalai Lama to the Tsar, but that he will go back with such a mission and such a message, I have not the slightest doubt whatever’. 3 In the months following the Tibetan Mission’s reception in St Petersburg, ominous reports reached the British of new and disturbing developments in this particular phase of the Great Game. In January 1 902, a Lhasa trader informed Walsh, the Deputy Commissioner at Darjeeling, that an actual treaty existed ‘by which Russia undenakes to protect Tibet from any attempt of the British to enter the country’.” And in November Charles Hardinge, the British Charge d’Affaires in St Petersburg, reponed that information from a reliable intelligence source led him to believe that, if no formal treaty existed, there was cenainly some kind of secret agreement whereby, in return for non-interference in the collection of tithes among the Russian Buddhists, the Dalai Lama would allow the Russians to post a consular officer in Tibet and permit the practice of the Orthodox religion. For fear of antagonizing the British, the Russians had apparently refrained from sending a consular officer, but would instead send a ‘duly-accredited secret agent’. The man selected for this sensitive posting was ‘M. Badengieff’,s though in fact, as we have seen, the man actually selected for this posting was Budda Rabdanov. Some corroboration was given to such reports by information emanating from Lhasa at about the same time that the Chinese Amban had also got wind of a secret Russo-Tibetan agreement and was much annoyed. At his instigation, the Tsongdu ( Tibetan National Assembly) had been summoned and had expressed its opposition to ‘any protectorate by Russia or interference with the Chinese sovereignty’.

What disturbed Curzon more than Dorzhiev’s activities, real or imagined, however, was a series of reports received in 1 902 and early 1903, notably from Sir Ernest Satow in Peking and Captain Parr, the Chinese Trade Agent in Yatung. In return for supporting the ailing Manchus in various ways, the Russians would be granted extensive political and commercial rights in Tibet. British official commentators discerned in this the Machiavellian influence of the politically penetrative Russo-Chinese Bank and its gold-mining subsidiary Mongolor – and hence by implication the hands of Prince Ukhtomsky and his man in Mongolia, von Groth, who was believed to have designs on the rich gold fields of Tibet.6 For their part, the Russians were equally suspicious of British designs on Tibet. In October 1 902, their Charge d’Affaires in London, Baron Graevenitz, declared that his government had heard that the British were sending troops to Tibet to protect the construction of a railway line, and in December he asked whether the British contemplated a military expedition. Again, in February 1903, he informed Lord Lansdowne, the Foreign Secretary, that his government had heard that a British military expedition had reached ‘Komba-Ovaleko’ on its way north from the Chumbi valley, and that, viewing the situation with gravity, his government might be forced to take steps to safeguard its interests. In the same month the Russian Ambassador in London, Count Benckendorff, assured Lansdowne that the Russians had no political designs on Tibet, and in April he relayed Count Lamsdorff’s categorical assurance that Russia had not concluded any sort of agreement over Tibet, nor had Russian agents been posted there. It was again stressed, however, that the Russian Government could not be indifferent to any change in the status quo vis-i-vis Tibet. Lansdowne in reply gave assurances that Britain had no intention of annexing Tibetan territory, but he left the door open for future military intervention by adding that his government reserved the right to enforce any treaties that the Tibetans might fail to honour. Benckendorff expressed his satisfaction with this.

Such statesman-like pleasantries cut little ice with Curzon. By the end of secret 1 902 he had become convinced of the existence of some kind of Russo-Chinese deal over Tibet and was resolved to ‘frustrate this little game while there is yet time’. In a letter to Lord George Hamilton of 13 November 1902, he oudined a plan to send to Lhasa a ‘pacific mission’, accompanied by ‘a sufficient force to ensure its safety’, to negotiate a ‘treaty of friendship and trade with the Tibetan Government’ .7 Unfortunately, though it was agreed that some kind of action was now necessary, the notion did not meet with a very positive response in London. In no mood to add to the white man’s burden, the British Government preferred to toy with safer and less potentially unpopular alternatives, such as pressing on with diplomatic efforts or setting the bellicose Gurkhas of Nepal at the throats of the Tibetans.

Curzon felt nothing but contempt for the ‘inveterate flabbiness’ of the politicians and bureaucrats of London and was determined not to be overruled. Imperial history knows many instances of conflict betwccn the men in Whitehall and the men on the spot in the outposts of empire, but what was about to take place was to be a classic of the genre .

Throughout the period under discussion the pawn-play of petty border disputes had gone on without pause. Trade had been interfered with, boundary markers set up and thrown down, the Tibetans had occupied Sikkimese territory and been roughly evicted – and of course the vexatious lack of communication continued. Then early in 1903 the Chinese reopened negotiations with the Government of India and agreed to send deputies to participate in discussions, either at Yatung on the Tibetan side of the frontier, or in Sikkim – ‘or in some other place as may be decided upon by Your ExceUency’. This was enough for Curzon.

Placing his own interpretation on the proposal, he obtained permission from London to dispatch a small negotiating party to Khamba Dzong, which lay a few kilometres inside Tibetan territory, on the road to Lhasa.

The Frontier Commission, as it was called, was led by John Claude White, the Political Officer in Sikkim, but Curzon contrived to send along as well a man of similar stripe to himself, who soon eclipsed White. This was Colonel Francis Younghusband ( 1 863-1 942), born at Meerut on the turbulent North-West Frontier and a man of action in the best Kipling tradition – the type who tackled a difficult situation by seizing the most dangerous option. At the tender age of twenty-four he had won the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society by making an epic east-west journey across China by a route not hitheno attempted by any European; it ,
cul, minated in a pe�
ilous winter crossing of the Mustagh Pass between 5mklang and Kashmir. Later, in 1 889 and 1 890, he proved himself no slouch at the Great Game when he became a front-line player in British moves to block Russian penetration of the mountainous no-man’s-land in the remote north-west. High in the Pamirs he twice met, and socialized affably enough in the manner of the military men of the period, with armed Russian parties, one led by Captain Grombchevsky, the other by Colonel Yanov, who left him in no doubt at all as to Russian intentions. He and Curzon subsequently began to correspond and eventually met up in Chitral in October 1 894, when Curzon, still an M P but out of office, was on a tour that also included Hunza and the Pamirs. Curzon’s cocksureness and argumentative House of Commons debating manner initially grated on Younghusband, who was the local Political Agent, but nevertheless they opened up to each other and the rugged frontier man eventually discovered that the sleek Tory M P’s views on frontier matters were in perfect accord with his own.

Eight years later, having more lately been confined to a humdrum job as Resident at Indore, the prospect of a mission in Tibet was meat and drink to Younghusband:

I was proud indeed to have been selected for this task ... I was suddenly myself 
again, and all the exotic life of Maharajahs and Durbars and gold chairs and 
scarlet chaprassiesl a sickly dream. Hardships and dangers I knew I should have. 
The whole enterprise was risky. But men always prefer risk to ease. Comfort 
only lulls and softens their capacities, whereas danger tautens every faculty. And 
Lord Cunon was risking much in pressing his scheme forward against so much 
opposition.9

London had only agreed with reluctance to the move to Khamba Dzong and hemmed Curzon around with all kinds of restrictions, notably that he should not allow the Commission to proceed any further. 50 there it stayed from July to November 1 903, camped behind fortified earthworks. Nearby, a typical Tibetan dzong or fort surmounted the crest of a sharp hill; around stretched a barren plain separated by a range of low hills from the snow-clad Himalayas; Everest was visible in the far distance. ‘Life was not unpleasant’, wrote one observer, ‘but no business was done’ – for both sides were stalling. The Tibetans wanted to get the British out and to return to the former status quo; Curzon and Younghusband were playing for time in order to build up a strong enough case for pushing on to Lhasa. As for the Chinese, none of sufficient consequence showed up.

In camp at Khamba Dzong in October 1 903, Younghusband, who understood dearly that his job was about frustrating Russia in Tibet rather than resolving piffling trade and border problems, reviewed rurrent British knowledge of Dorzhiev and his Russian associates.

What had become of the Buryat lama was difficult to say, he wrote, but ‘I am inclined to think that Dorjidf was “worked” by some agent such as Badmaidf or Von Groot, an ex-official of the Chinese Customs service, who resides at Urga and is known to have great influence with the lamas both of Peking and Tibet’ .10 By November 1903 the Viceroy had the ammunition he needed. A
few petty infractions by the Tibetans were blown up into instances of
‘outrageous conduct’ to convince a still reluctant British Government of the need for an advance deeper into Tibetan territory. So in December crossed the 1903, as sole head of a reconstituted Commission, Younghusband Jelap-La with the advance guard of his military escort, which command. marched Brigadier-General J R L. Macdonald had been appointed to up the Chumbi Valley and set up camp at Tuna on the edge of the Tibetan plateau. All that the Russians did was lodge a vigorous protest through Count Benckendorff, who in reply was politely reminded of his country’s encroachments elsewhere in Asia, and also asked whether Russia would have shown patience if provoked by Tibet as Britain had been. Confronted by such ineluctable logic, Bcnckendorff was obliged to bow to the necessity for the British move, with the reassurance that its objectives were strictly limited.

In December, Younghusband reported to Curzon that he had heard from several independent sources that the Tibetans were rdying on Russian support and that Russian arms had entered the country. He went on: ‘It may be assumed as certain that Dorjief£ … is at present in Lhasa; that a promise of Russian support has been given by him to the Tibetans; and that the Tibetans believe that this promised support will be given to them.’11 Younghusband was surely mistaken on all counts. That Dorzhiev was back in Tibet at this time is unlikely, as indeed is the notion that the Tibetans were sanguine of Russian support. Had support been forthcoming, which it was not, it would in any case have been passionately opposed by the traditionally xenophobic ultra-conservatives in the great monasteries, and sought only by the Dalai Lama and his pro-Russian faction. Prominent among these, the British identified the Kalon (Cabinet MInister) Paljor Dorji Shatra, but he had been removed from office, before Anglo-Tibetan hostilities began in earnest, for advocating a conciliatory line. As for Russian shipments of arms to Tibet, reports of these had been made by Ekai Kawaguchi, the Japanese Buddhist monk who was in Lhasa in 1 901 and early 1 902,12 but in the heightened atmosphere of actual engagement they inevitably proliferated – and not only of war materials but of ‘skilled assistance’ being sent to Tibet and of Tibetan forces being led by Russians. There was even a Reuter report, mentioned by Curzon in a letter to Hamilton, that ‘several hundred cossacks have been sent to Tibet’. 13 In actual fact, no Russian arms or personnel were ever discovered.

Ironically, the Tibetans themselves gave Younghusband a truer account of affairs when he actually met their leaders face-to-face a few months later.

While the Commission was camped at Tuna, suffering all the rigours of the Tibetan winter, Tibetan troops under Lhading DepOn, a general from Lhasa, began to mass at Guru a few miles to the north. Monastic officials were with them. Younghusband boldly decided in February to ride over there, accompanied by only two fellow officers, to hold informal talks.

Years before he had attempted a similar exploit at a dacoits’ lair in Hunza and brought it off – just. Having been cordially welcomed by the Tibetans, he asked why they were on friendly terms with the Russians but continued to keep the British at arm’s length. They assured him that his suspicions were unfounded: they had no dealings with the Russians, there was no Russian near Lhasa and Dorzhiev merely followed the customs of his Mongolian people in making offerings at monasteries.

The reason they debarred Westerners from their country, they explained, was to protect their religion.

Things went well up to a certain point; then the monks present, who appeared surly to Younghusband and intent on fomenting trouble, began to demand that he name a date on which he would retire his forces from Tuna. ‘The atmosphere became electric’, he wrote; ‘the forces of all became set; a General left the room; trumpets outside sounded and attendants closed round us. It was necessary to keep extremely cool in the circumstances.’14 But cool he remained and he lived to lead his mission on from Tuna on 30 March – and straight into the first inevitable and tragic confrontation with the Tibetans. At Guru, the Tibetan force had built a sangar (defensive wall) and dug itself in at a strategically good place where a rocky spur met a marsh fed by a spring. Further discussions between the two sides were held here, then British troops moved forward to the wall and began to try to disarm the Tibetans.

Suddenly a shot rang out. It is unclear who fired it but it precipitated a pitched battle. The Tibetans, armed only with matchlocks and swords, stood absolutely no chance against superior British firepower. Estimates vary, but perhaps five hundred or even seven hundred of them were simply mown down, including Lhading Dep6n. As Edmund Candler, the Daily Mail special correspondent, who was badly hacked about in the engagement, wrote:
Perhaps no British victory has been greeted with less enthusiasm … Certainly the officers, who did their duty 50 thoroughly, had no heart in the business at all. After the lim futile rush the Tibetans made no further resistance. There was no more fighting, only the slaughter of helpless mm.1.S
After one more engagement, in which the Tibetans again suffered heavy losses, the Mission pushed on to Gyantse, which was as far as London permitted Younghusband to go at this stage. Gyantse is dominated by an imposing crag rising some four or five thousand feet above the surrounding plain, which is ribbed with defensive walls and surmounted by an ‘almost impregnable’ dzong. The buildings of the township, many of them monastic, cluster below, dominated by the great gold-capped Kum-bum, a many-storied chorten (stupa) honeycombed with chapels.

Younghusband did not occupy Gyantse; instead he installed himself in a nearby village while Macdonald went back with the main force to fetch reinforcements. Many of the Mission’s difficulties were attributed to Macdonald’s hesitancies, for which he earned the nickname ‘Retiring Mad’. This time he erred on the side of incaution, however, for soon Younghusband’s small escort found itself under attack. Some sources say, though on what grounds it is not clear, that Dorzhiev masterminded this – a highly unlikely possibility. The escort managed to beat off the attackers, but it was now dear that the Tibetans had themselves brought up reinforcements and were prepared to make a vigorous stand. They took possession of the dzong, which the British had unwisely failed to occupy, and from there ineffectively pounded Younghusband’s main position with primitive artillery.

By this time Younghusband’s morale had reached a low ebb. In a sense he had outcurzon’d Curzon, who had by now gone home on leave, for while h� had grown ever more convinced of � necessity for pushing on to Lhasa, Whitehall stubbornly refused to give him free rein to take what his martial instincts told him would be th� most effective course. Wider considerations, including relations with Russia and public popularity seemed to matter more in the corridors of power than the succes�
of the mission or the well-being of his men. Frustrated, he had been brusque in some of his communications, which he was later to regret.

He received an official slap on the wrist for impertinence and was told to stay one month more in Gyantse in order to give the Tibetans time to negotiate.

Younghusband managed to fob off Tibetan attempts at negotiation and at the end of the month was reluctantly given the official go-ahead to advance on Lhasa. First, however, he had to dislodge the Tibetan force from the dzong. After a dummy manoeuvre, the main attack was launched before daylight on 6 july 1 904 on the eastern flank, where the rock was steepest. The British battery first pounded the walls until a large breach was made, then, supported by energetic fire from below, the Gurkhas and Royal Fusiliers of the storming party began to clamber up towards the dzong. Looking in the far distance like a swarm of ants, they finally streamed through the breach and began to fight their way through tier upon tier of fortifications, until at last they could be seen raising the Union jack on the topmost pinnacle in best Peninsula War style. The road to Lhasa now lay open .

By this time Russia herself was deeply embroiled in a war with japan, the culmination of a long-standing rivalry in East Asia that seemed destined to end in conflict. The japanese tried at the eleventh hour to avoid a conflict by offering to recognize Russian interests in Manchuria in return for Russian recognition of their interests in Korea, but the Russians arrogantly disdained to accept their proposal, and at a crucial moment the Emperor dismissed Witte, his ablest minister; so, without a proper policy or leadership, they blundered into a war that was to prove disastrous.

Dorzhiev records that he returned to Tibet ‘when Russia and japan were at war’, which means sometime after january 1 904, most likely March or April. As usual he made offerings – he mentions ‘raiments’

Ekai Kawaguchi reports hearing that he brought from the Emperor a suit of Episcopal robes: ‘It was a splendid garment glittering with gold and was accepted, I was told, with gratitude by the Grand Lama.’16 At Ganden, meanwhile, he offered a canopy for the tomb of je Tsongkhapa, and at Gomang College embroidered hangings with pendant strings. He then remained considered returning to Russia but, after consulting the Dalai Lama, in Tibet for the time being.

Surprisingly, Dorzhiev’s advice to the Tibetans at this critical time was the same as that of ex-Kalon Shatra and the Chinese Amban: to act with restraint since the British were powerful and the Tibetans weak. He reiterated this moderate line several times but it went unheeded, for the Tibetans had blind faith in the occult power of their dharmapalas, those Buddhist transformations of the old gods of India and Tibet who may be ritually invoked to defend faith and fatherland in times of danger.

Though he fully appreciated the great spiritual wisdom of the Tibetans, from his knowledge of the world Dorzhiev knew that superstitions like these could not stop a well-equipped modem fighting force. Not wishing to be caught up in the impending nemesis – he talks somewhat platitudinously of having too much bad karma to be able to die yet –
he started preparing mules for a prompt departure via Drigung, to the north-cast of Lhasa; but he was again asked to stay.

According to the Filchner-Tserempil adventure story, Dorzhiev, who had returned to Tibet in 1 902, served as War Minister during the Anglo-Tibetan hostilities and organized the procurement and shipment of armaments. Under his orders his protege, Tserempil, who had directed the Tibetan resistance to date, was able to start one Indian rifle factory with the help of some Moslems; small cannon and gunpowder were also made.

The lama’s own account is more modest: that he served the Tibetan cause by helping to construct a water-powered mint. Hitherto the process whereby Tibetan coins were struck had been extremely arduous.

According to Tsybikov, who witnessed it at the large hardware manufactory and mint at Dodpal at the foot of the Potala during his visit of 1 900/1, thin bars of copper-silver alloy were first beaten out by hand on stone anvils, then discs were cut with shears and finally these were struck in a vice with an engraved die. 17 Waterpower could speed up the process, Dorzhiev believed, especially at the beating stage.

The new water-driven mint was at Dode,l s where there were waterfalls. The site was visited in 1 904 by Brevctt-Major W. J. Ottley:
Proceeding up the Lhasa valley, we rounded a spur cast of the Sara [sic) monastery
… About four miles up, the valley divided into two, one going north-cast and the omn north. We followed the latter, which soon became narrower and narrower, and steeper and stftPCT· Further on was a Cllincsc joss-house, and at about six mila the new Tibetan Mint, which had just been built for the purpoK of a new coin.aF. The machinery had not yet been put in. and probably never will be now. I’
Ottley was wrong; when Sir Charles Bell and Lieutenant-Colonel R.

Kennedy visited the Dode Mint in 1 921, they noted about thiny or fony machines of local manufacture there. They were all hand-operated bar two, which were harnessed to a twelve-foot water-wheel. Bell noted:
‘It would seem that by using belts a good many more of the machines could be harnessed to the water-wheel. ’20 L. Berlin corroborates much of this, but adds that Dorzhiev also
‘worked for defence’, specifically on reconstructing antiquated Chinese guns, ‘which made it possible for the Tibetans to offer the British more serious resistance’. The British also picked up rumours that Dorzhiev was in charge of the ‘Lhasa arsenal’, which at the time was situated at Tip, on the south bank of the Kyi-Chu.21 However, these rumours were soon supplanted by others to the effect that he was ‘devoting the whole of his attention to the minting of silver coins’, and it was extrapolated from this that ‘he meditates flight from Lhasa before the arrival of the Mission’.22 It would appear, therefore, that Dorzhiev’s contribution at this critical point in Tibetan history was mainly numismatic .

Younghusband, meanwhile, in hiS advance on Lhasa from Gyantse, had anticipated some Tibetan resistance at the Karo-La. But that soon fizzled out and his Mission, which by now included some eight thousand troops, officials and camp followers, proceeded comparatively unhindered to the lake of Yamdrok-Tso. Nearby, at the village, of Nagartse, Yuthok Kalon, the Chikyab Khenpo or Lord Chamberlain, a member of the Kashag
(Tibetan Cabinet), arrived with several monastic representatives to try to halt his advance by gentle persuasion. It was to no avail:
Younghusband forged on into the fertile valley of the wide, deep and fast-flowing Tsangpo river. It took a week to ferry personnel and equipment across at Chaksam, using abandoned Tibetan ferry-boats and two canvas Berthon boats. Here more high officials arrived from Lhasa, now only about three days’ march away, with urgent letters and further entreaties that the British call a halt – but again to no avail.

With the British so near, there must have been extreme panic in the holy city. What the Tibetans had feared most for over a century was on the verge of happening. The Dalai Lama, who had been engaged for Over a year in a nyen-chen or long retreat – it should have lasted three Or four years – at a monastery about eighteen miles from Lhasa, had not been directly involved in events so far.2J The Tibetan Government, unsure of precisely what course to take at this critical juncture, consulted the Nechung Oracle who, having gone into an awesome ritual trance in which he was possessed by the powerful protector spirit, Dorji Drakden, duly pronounced that the Lama should emerge from his seclusion and leave for Mongolia.24 Dorzhiev, naturally concerned too for his old pupil’s safety, had arrived at a similar conclusion. Protocol prevented him from saying as much directly, so he sent the Lama a letter ‘asking how I would know if it came time to leave for Mongolia’.25 The next evening, 29 July, the British still at Chaksam, he was summoned to the Dalai Lama’s summer palace, the Norbulingka, which lies in pleasant grounds about four kilometres west of Lhasa. Here he was informed by His Holiness’s personal staff that preparations had been made for his departure. The decision may have been taken or at least endorsed by a joint meeting of the T songdu and the Kashag; their concern, according to T sep6n W.O. Shakabpa, being not so much for the Dalai Lama’s safety as that there was a danger of ‘his being forced to sign an agreement harmful to the long range interests of Tibet’ .26 More unproductive letters had in the meantime been dispatched to Younghusband, including one from the Dalai Lama himself, which had been delivered by the Lord Chamberlain.

At about two o’clock in the early hours of 30 July 1904, Dorzhiev presented himself at the Potala. There, probably in the Dalai Lama’s own private apamnents at the top of this majestic mountain of a building, the final preparations were made. Then, in the first dawn light, the Dalai Lama left Lhasa with eight companions and headed nonhwards on horseback towards the Go-La pass. Dorzhiev of course was with him.

The Dalai Lama In Exile 1 904 – 1 908

When the British arrived at Lhasa early in August 1904, they were not without their apprehensions. At Gyantse they had learned that the Tibetans could fight, and there were some who grimly imagined that at Lhasa they would now find themselves attacked by forty thousand fanatical monks armed with Russian rifles – ‘We saw them mown down by Maxims, lanes of dead, a hopeless struggle and an ugly page in military history.’! But as things worked out, the mission reached the holy city on 3 August without a fight, and during the whole of its six-week stay there no blood was spilled, except by a hefty dop-dop
(fighting monk) who went berserk with a broadsword and was duly hanged as an example. No substantial evidence of Russian arms, advisers or troops was found either, proving that repons of such had been largely chimerical, or else exaggerated in the interests of making political capital.

Nor, of course, did the British find any trace of the Dalai Lama and Agvan Dorzhiev. Their small party was by that time travelling northwards via the monasteries of Talung and Reting, which lie about sixty-five and a hundred kilometres north of Lhasa respectively, to Nagchukha. Messages were sent after them by the Amban and the Tsongdu – ‘said to be angry with him in consequence of his flight’,
Younghusband recorded – requesting His Holiness to return to Lhasa.

One was brought by Yuthok Kalon who, according to Dorzhiev, told the Dalai Lama, ‘If you return to Lhasa you will be received with tributes and respect and come to no harm.’ The Lama did not buy this, however, and promptly took the high road to Urga.2 Younghusband was therefore obliged to negotiate with the Tsongdu and with the Regent, the T ri Rinpoche of Ganden, to whom the Dalai Lama had transferred power before leaving Lhasa. It has been maintained, however, that the seals of office with which the venerable Ganden Tripa had been entrusted were the Lama’s religious ones, not those used for transacting temporal affairs,3 so His Holiness may have had it in mind to repudiate any agreement that was negotiated .

In Russia, meanwhile, the antiquarian and scholarly susceptibilities of Prince Esper Ukhtomsky had been aroused at the prospect of the profanation of the hallowed shrines of Tibet by the brutish British:
What is the chief danger of the movement of the English armies to the ‘land of the Lamas’? The Tibetan monasteries are exceedingly rich, and form real treasure-houses of ancient culture; they contain religious objects of the highest

artistic value, and the rarest literary memorials. If the Sepoys reach Teshu-Lunpo 
[sic) and Lhasa, with their fanatical passion for loot, which was so signally 
exhibited 

precious 
          in the recent Boxer campaign, it is beyond all doubt that the most

dangu.

treasures on the altars and in the libraries of the Lamas will be in It is impossible even to tell how great an injury may thus be caused to Orimtalism, how the solution of many scientific problems may be put off, problems which arc closely bound up with the gradual revelation of the secretS
of Tibet. The vandalism which was a disgrace to our age, when Pekin [sic) was recently ransacked and looted, will pale before what the English will probably do by the hands of their dusky mercenaries.4 He went on to lament that Russia had been too late ‘with her obscurely felt inclination to enter into closer relations with the realm of the DalaiLama’ – but there was hope that some future Dalai or Panchen Lama might be reborn ‘within the sphere of Russian influence’; thus, ‘England may gain territorial control of the Lamaist world, but to win it spiritually and to bring it closer to them will be given only to those who will not raise a destroying hand against the shrines of Buddhism.’
Given his views, Ukhtomsky’s feelings are perhaps understandable, though his specific fears proved unfounded. The discipline of the Indian troops, who included Pathans, Sikhs, Gurkhas and Punjabi Moslems, was, according to Younghusband, ‘excellent’, though he conceded that
‘in their natural state, under their own leaders, and uncontrolled by British officers, they would have played havoc in Lhasa’.s By the middk of August the Dalai Lama was reported to have left Nagchukha and to be travelling across the Chang-Tang towards T saidam.

Even in Lhasa, according to Sir Charles Bell, he would often discard the ceremonial palanquin for a pony or mule; now he rode fast, putting a good distance between himself and British troops. At one point, when both men and horses felt a severe earth tremor, His Holiness explained that they were on the border of Shambhala.6 The Ganden Tripa was meanwhile proving himself a skilful diplomatist. He got on well with Younghusband and a formal treaty was rapidly negotiated, ratified by the Tsongdu (though not by the Chinese Amban) and signed on 7 September with all due pomp and ceremony in the great Audience Hall of the Potala. This so-called Lhasa Convention settled various outstanding trade and frontier problems, provided for the establishment of trade marts at Gyantse and Gartok, imposed an indemnity of Rs 7,500,000/- on the Tibetans to be paid over a seventyfive-year period (during which time British troops would occupy the Chumbi Valley), and bound the Tibetans to have no dealings with any other foreign power without British consent. An addendum allowed for the British Trade Agent at Gyantse to visit Lhasa.

Afterwards, able to relax at last after weeks of tension, Younghusband rode off alone into the hills outside Lhasa and received a profoundly transformative mystical experience:

My task was over and every anxiety was passed. The scenery was in sympathy 
with my feelings; the unclouded sky a heavenly blue; the mountains softly 
merging into violet; and as I looked towards that mysterious purply haze in 
which the sacred city was once more wrapped, I no longer had cause to dread 
the hatred it might hide. From it came only the echoes of the Lama's words of 
peace. And with all the warmth still on me of that impressive farewell message, 
and bathed In the insinuating influences of the dreamy autumn evening, I was 
insensibly suffused with an almost intoxicating sense of elation and good-will. 
This exhilaration of the moment grew and grew till it thrilled through me with 
overpowering intenSity. Never again could I think evil, or ever again be at enmity 
with any man. All nature and all humanity were bathed in a rosy glowing 
radiancy; and life for the future seemed nought but buoyancy and lightJ

Unfortunately all was not buoyancy and light when Younghusband got back to London. Despite being popular with King and country, the men in Whitehall, notably Sir John Brodrick who had replaced Lord Lansdowne at the India Office, were annoyed that he had overstepped his mandate and were bent on emasculating his treaty. With only a KCIE,
a less prestigious order of knighthood than might have been expected, he SOOn returned to India, where he served as Resident in Kashmir from 1906 until his retirement in 1 909, after which he allowed scope to the rdigious side of his nature, going on to found the World Congress of Faiths, a forward-looking organization concerned with bringing the great religions of the world into harmony with one another.

As for his mentor, Lord Curzon, he had been on leave in England during the negotiations in Lhasa and subsequently had also to grit his teeth and watch his cherished Tibetan policy pulled apan. Such was the fate of two of the last of the classic breed of imperialists .

From Tsaidam, the Dalai Lama and his party travelled into the domains of the Kurluk Mongols on the northern edge of Tsaidam, where he was received with ‘respects, tribute and glory’ by the local beise and others, who were devoted Gelugpas. Indeed, taking advantage of a rare opportunity, the faithful came out all along his route to make offerings and to receive blessings, even when he was passing through bandit country. In several places stone thrones were erected in his honour, and a stream once known as ‘The Bad Spring’ was renamed ‘The Holy Spring’.

Such things served for long afterwards as memorials of his transit.

When His Holiness eventually reached the lands of the Khalkha Mongols, he and his party were hospitably entertained for some days by ‘the tulkus, lamas and teachers who illuminate the Dharma at the monastery of Yungdrung Pai-se’, which may be the Yumbeise kiiren referred to by Yuri Roerich, a monastery situated in the assem southernmost pan of Mongolia, consisting of two dukhangs or bly halls surrounded by a cluster of white houses.8 From there His Holiness proceeded to the monastery of the ‘Great Abbot Nomonhan’,
and then into the aimaks or provinces of Sain Noyon Khan and T ushetu Khan. When the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu got wind of his approach, he dispatched his brother and two ministers with a palanquin to escon him for the last twenty-eight days of his journey. By the time he reached Urga in November 1 904, after three gruelling months in the desens and mountains of Central Asia, his party had grown to several hundred persons and his baggage was carried by a small army of camels.

Why did the Dalai Lama chose to flee to Mongolia in 1 904? Tibetan hagiography tends to pomay events in a pious light, untainted by worldly considerations. So, if we are to believe such contemporary Tibetan historical accounts as The String of Wondrous Gems, for instance, the coming of the British to Lhasa merely gave His Holiness opportunity to embark on an extended pastoral visit to his Mongolian and Chinese flocks, and at the same time to fulfil a long-standing desire to sec two of the great sights of the Buddhist world: the birth-place of Je Tsongkhapa at Kum-Bum and Wu rai Shan, the Buddhist sacred mountain in China.9 Although this is not a merely fanciful reading

The Russians certainly gave His Holiness a warm welcome when he arrived in Urga. Fifty Cossacks from Kyakhta fired a salute, and during his stay he enjoyed the protection of the Russian consuPo (British sources merely say that he was ‘carefully shepherded’) whom Dorzhiev visited almost at once on His Holiness’s orders. Through him, Nicholas II was informed of recent events in Tibet and that ‘the direct aim of his arrival in Urga was the wish to receive help from Russia against the British’. ! 1 Then in June 1 905 Dmitri Pokotilov, the new Russian Minister to Peking, visited him en route to his new posting, bearing gifts from the Emperor and promises of support despite the war with Japan. As a former Director of the Russo-Chinese Bank in Peking and afterwards a member of its Directory Council in St Petersburg, Pokotilov would have at one time worked closely with Prince Ukhtomsky. Like the prince, he was also an Orientalist. 12 According to Berlin, Dorzhiev left Urga for St Petersburg in March 1 905 with the Dalai Lama’s Secretary, Tseren Damba Dobdanov, and, through the good offices of the Foreign Minister, Aleksandr Izvolsky, was granted an audience with the Emperor. As Izvolsky did not become Foreign Minister until May 1 906, there is some confusion here. Berlin goes on to say that as well as outlining recent events in Tibet and relaying the Dalai Lama’s wish for Russian support, Dorzhiev also informed the Russian Government that the Dalai Lama wished to visit Peking. The official reply to this was that it would be best if the Lama stayed in Mongolia for the summer of 1 905, but when he did go to Peking the Russian Minister there would be given the ‘necessary directives’. 13 In Dorzhiev’s own account it is clear that the audience took place much later. Nicholas II and his ministers then agreed that assistance be given to Tibet, though because of Russia’s defeat in the war with Japan this would necessarily have to be of a gradual nature. Specifically, they promised to help by negotiating with China and Britain.

Dorzhiev was also at pains to clarify certain matters concerning the Panchen Lama. The press, he suggests, had been putting it about that the Dalai Lama had transmitted his powers to the Panchen Lama – and not merely his temporal powers but perhaps the very spiritual principle that incarnates in the line of the Dalai Lamas. By describing the way in which tulkus (reincarnating lamas) are recognized in Tibet, Dorzhiev showed the Emperor and his ministers that the Dalai Lama could not make such transfers.I4 All this in fact makes good sense, for in January 1906 the Panchen Lama had visited Calcutta and met the new Viceroy, Lord Minto, though the idea had originated with Curzon, who believed that the Panchen could be used as a medium for maintaining British influence in Tibet following the emasculation of the Lhasa Convention. This of course would have entailed building up the Panchen’s powers at the expense of those of the Dalai Lama, a policy against which the Russians, who at the time saw their interests as lying with His Holiness, warned the British. The British in their tum protested about reports that a Buryat escort would accompany the Dalai Lama when he returned to Tibet; the Chinese were also concerned about this.

No report of an audience appears in the British records until 14 March 1906, while Lamsdorff was still Foreign Minister. Cecil Spring-Rice, the Charge d’Affaires in St Petersburg, then reported to Sir Edward Grey at the Foreign Office in London that he had been told by M. Hartwig, Director of the Asiatic Department, that Dorzhiev had recently arrived in the capital and requested an audience with the Emperor in order to present a message and gifts from the Dalai Lama. Nicholas had subsequently seen him and accepted the gifts, which consisted of an image of the Buddha, a Buddhist text and some fabric.

“The message was to the effect that the Lama had the uttnost respect and devotion for the ‘Great White Tsar’ and that he looked to His Majesty for protection from the dangers which threatened his life if he returned to lhassa [sic], which was his intention and duty. The answer returned to him was of a friendly character, consisting of an expressio-n of His Majesty’s thanks for his message and of his intereSt in his welfare.

M. Hartwing said that he wished His Majesty’s Government should hear exactly what had occurred. as the press would probably make out that the audience had a political character. IS
Following the audience, the Emperor sent a friendly and vaguely supportive telegram to the Dalai Lama, the text of which was published in the Russian Messager Officiel of 5 April 1 906:
My numerous subjects professing the Buddhist faith had the happiness of saluting their spirirual chid during his sojourn in the north of Mongolia on the borden of the Russian Empire. Rcioicing that my subjects were able to rcaive a beneficent sptnrual inftucoa from Your Holiness. I beg you to bebeve my fcding of sincere gratitude and estcm1 towards you. I.

This and other recent developments further alarmed the Chinese Government, which sent a special mission to warn the Dalai Lama against intrigue with Russian officials and that disregard of this would entail his being deposed.17 Putting all the evidence together, it is almost certain that Dorzhiev’s audience with the Emperor took place in February or early March 1 906.

As this was towards the end of the Dalai Lama’s stay in Mongolia, why the delay? The explanation must lie in the fact that 1 905 was an acute crisis year for the Russian autocracy – a full dress rehearsal for 1917. In May Russia received the coup de grace at the hands of the Japanese when her Baltic Fleet was sunk off the island of Tsushima – the first time that a European power was defeated by an Asiatic one. At home, meanwhile, the year started with Bloody Sunday (22 January), when troops in St.

Petersburg opened fire on a crowd of striking workers led by Father Gapon, killing many. It continued with strikes and revolutionary strife, obliging Nicholas, with extreme reluctance, to summon a Duma or National Assembly and to concede what amounted to a constitution, the so-called October Manifesto, which was generally seen as a faltering but positive first step towards representative government.

Thus beset, had Dorzhiev arrived in the capital some time in the first part of 1 905, Nicholas would understandably have been in no mood to address himself to the problems of the Dalai Lama, especially if the Lama was declaring his desire to enter the Russian empire. 1 8 So Nicholas probably temporized and Dorzhiev was for the moment unable to fulfil his mission.

But it is hardly likely that Dorzhiev spent the whole of 1 905 idly kicking his heels in St Petersburg. Instead he probably got involved in the upsurge of nationalist activity that took place in Buryatia during that momentous year. This included the election of a Buryat congress, which demanded autonomy, judicial reforms and use of the indigenous language in local government and education,I9 while at the end of the year there was a boycott of the Russian administration and the election of local officials.

The evidence is slender on this point, but it includes the Russian Interior Ministry document of 191 1 to which we have already referred.

This records that ‘during the period of the so-called Liberation Movement’, Agvan Dorzhiev and the Buryat scholar and folklorist Ts. Zh.

Zhamtsarano were prime movers in nationalist activities. When the document mentions Zhamtsarano conducting nationalist propaganda among Buryat teachers. we can be fairly cenain that it is referring to the Banner of the Buryat People. an underground union of Buryat teachers and educationalists that he set up in 1 906 with the aim of promoting a Buryat national renaissance. giving the Buryat people a broad education.

nationalizing the schools and working for some measure of national autonomy and democracy.2o These aims were not essentially antiRussian; nor could they be strictly described as revolutionary but rather what the communists would later term bourgeois-democratic.

Slightly earlier. Zhamtsarano had criticized the provocative remarks of the War Minister. General Kuropatkin. who had threatened to obliterate the Buryats from the face of the eanh if they raised the slightest resistance to imperial authority.

The rip-roaring Sturm “ber Asien naturally has a far more exciting tale to tell. It maintains that during 1 905 Dorzhiev remained in Urga while. through his agent Zerempil. he anempted to foment insurrection against the Chinese in the Koko-Nor region of north-eastern Tibet and adjacent areas. In funherance of this. he procured and shipped arms.

mainly Russian and Japanese. across the Gobi to east Tsaidam. and also managed to dispatch a number of Russian deseners and adventures. His notion was to use the Kum-Bum monastery as the stamng-point for the planned revolt, which indeed did break out. though in the event it was ruthlessly suppressed by the Chinese. Eventually. at the insistence of the British. Dorzhiev was ordered by the Chinese to leave Urga and was sent by the Russians to Kalmykia. For a time he stayed at the spa of Pyatigorsk
‘for recreation’. All this. which reads like an imaginitive resuscitation of Dr Badmaev’s old scheme for fomenting rebellion in Chinese dominated territory. must be treated with caution .

More dependably. the doyen of Russian Buddhologists, Fyodor Ippolitovich Stcherbatsky ( 1 866-1942). records in a personal amcle that he met Dorzhiev in eastern Siberia in May 1 905. Intending to meet the Dalai Lama. Stcherbatsky had left St Petersburg on 26 April and travelled as far as Troitskosavsk near Khyahkta. There he was delayed for a week. unable to travel the last leg of his journey to Urga. as the Chinese authorities had commandeered all available transpon animals for Prince Friedrich Leopold of Prussia and his entourage. It was while waiting that Stcherbatsky met Dorzhiev, who. he interestingly reports, was in hiding, though why and from whom he does not say.21 Born at Kielce in Poland into the family of a Russian Army general, Stcherbatsky had been a pupil of the great Russian pioneer orientalist, J.P.

Minayev ( 1 840-90), and later of Georg Buhler in Vienna and Hermann Jacobi in Bonn. Rising eventually to the rank of a world authority on Buddhist philosophy, he produced a number of influential studies, some of which, notably his Buddhist Logic (two volumes, 1 930-32), a study of the epistemology of the ancient Indian pandits Dharmakirti and Dignaga, are still in print. Strangely, he wrote his major works in English, and when asked why this was so answered that he wrote exclusively for ‘those Russian noblemen who know only English’22 – an elitist reply if ever there was one, indicating that he was only interested in high intellectuals with a world or universalist view-point. Later, under the Communists, he more prudently said that it was so that his books could be read in India. He taught at St Petersburg (later Leningrad) University from 1 900 to 1 941, and trained a generation of eminent Buddhologists, including E. E. Obermiller and A.1. Vostrikov. His teaching methods, which were uniquely his own, were based on classical Eastern and Western approaches that laid primary stress on the teacher-pupil relationship.

He was also on the construction committee of Dorzhiev’s temple in St Petersburg, in which connection it has been suggested that he merely saw the temple as a convenient laboratory in which he could conduct research. This is perhaps a little cynical, for he was certainly very sympathetic to Buddhism, though not a card-carrying Buddhist like his pupils Obermiller and Vladimirtsov. Obermiller suffered from a hereditary disease for which he sought treatment from Tibetan doctors and believed his life thereby prolonged; Tibetan Buddhism was always for him a very close personal matter. Vladimirtsov, on the other hand, caused something of a scandal in the twenties when Soviet papers revealed that he was a practising Buddhist.23 Around 1 905, Stcherbatsky was concerned to vitalize his book knowledge of Buddhist philosophy by exposing himself to its living traditions. Dorzhiev, he wrote, gave him a letter of introduction to influential individuals among the Mongolian priesthood, which later gave him an entree to the court of the Dalai Lama as well as the chance of meeting him personally:
Finally on 12 May [OS] I was able to get horses, with which we reached Urga in five days. There at first I experienced great difficulty owing to my lack of familiarity with the Mongolian language . .. Not without some difficulty, I sucacded in finding a Tibetan, who had been with the Kalmyks and knew some Russian. With his help, I began to familiarize myself with the spoken Tibetan language. Meanwhile, I was able to arrange a meeting with the Dalai Lama’s Soibon Khambo [guardian), Agvan Choi-dag’u, and the Emchi Khambo [physician), Tub-van’u, with the letter of recommendation from Dorzheyev, and a date was arranged for my first audience with the Dalai Lama.24 The Dalai Lama urged both Stcherbatsky and his pupil, the Buryat intellectual Badzar Baradinevich Baradin ( 1 878-1937), to return to Lhasa with him, assuring them that they would be afforded every facility to pursue their researches. Stcherbatsky himself would have eagerly snapped up this unique offer – he was extremely keen to find the Sanskrit manuscripts that Sarat Chandra Das had told his teacher Minayev existed in the libraries of the monastic universities of Tibet

Another eminent Russian to visit Urga was the explorer P.K. Kozlov, Geographical who came to greet the Dalai Lama on behalf of the Imperial Russian Society; he had several audiences with His Holiness. A
portrait of His Holiness was also made by the St Petersburg artist, N.

Ya. Kozhevnikov, who was with Kozlov’s party.26 From the Aga steppe, meanwhile, came G. Ts. Tsybikov and his wife Lkhama Norboevna
( 188 1-1960), who travelled by relay horses accompanied by a farrier.

When he saw him again, the Dalai Lama recognized Tsybikov, and asked to know who he was and where he had seen him before. ‘I am a Russian professor’, Tsybikov replied. ‘I am a Buddhist and I saw you when you condescended to touch me with your rosary in your palace in Lhasa.’
The Dalai Lama spent just under two years in Mongolia. During this time he was feted both by the aristocracy and the ordinary people, and pilgrims flocked to him from Buryatia and even from as far away as the Kalmyk steppe for blessings. He performed this ritual mechanically, sitting in an arm chair in a palanquin outside which there was a handle from which some holy books hung by silk cord. Every time a devotee passed beneath the palanquin, the handle was set in motion and the book touched each of them as they made their prostrations.27 His Holiness stayed initially at the Gandan monastery in Urga, to which the most philosophically inclined lamas were attached. Here, according to Dorzhiev, ‘the fine students and sages at the two colleges
… posed a number of questions to His Holiness about the Five Treatises, the Sutras and the Tantras. He answered them with no difficulty at all and so was praised with immeasurable admiration and respect as an omniscient being.’28 In addition he travelled into the hinterland to dispense initiations and teachings; and thousands saw him celebrate Monlam Chenmo in Urga in February 1905 and February 1 906.

Unfortunately, though pious Lamaist sources tend to play it down, friction developed between the Dalai Lama and the debauched Eighth Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu, probably because the Khutukhtu became jealous of the veneration heaped upon His Holiness, who was also technically his preceptor. Certainly during his stay in Urga, coming more closely to know of the wayward young Khutukhtu’s peccadillos, His Holiness formed the opinion that he was ‘a man of indifferent character who does not follow the tenets of Lamaist doctrine’.29 It seems, moreover, that local subscriptions were raised to support the Lama and his sizeable entourage, which included a large number of Russian Buddhists, and this may have formed an additional cause of resentment.

Towards the end of his time in Mongolia, the Dalai Lama left Urga for Uliasutai and elsewhere in Sain Noyon Khan Aimak, where he was entertained by local princes. The Chinese were particularly alarmed when they heard that he had visited Van-Khuren, which lay perilously close to the Russian frontier.

The Chinese had of course been greatly humiliated by the signing of the Lhasa Convention over their heads. After 1 904 they therefore began an aggressive campaign to restore their prestige and power in the Land of Snows. They were assisted in this by the weakness of British policy towards Tibet in the immediate post-Curzonian years. As it was felt by some pertinent British politicians and officials that Chinese assent to the Lhasa Convention was advisable, discussions were held that resulted in the signing in 1906 of an Anglo-Chinese Convention; this de facto recognized Chinese authority over Tibet. In the same year Chang Yin-T’ang was appointed Imperial Commissioner for Tibet; his aim was to diminish British influence and authority and bring Tibet, reorganized into two Chinese provinces, under indirect Chinese rule. By the time he left Tibet in 1 908 he had effectively paved the way for possible future Chinese domination. There was also military activity on the eastern marches of Tibet, where from 1 905, Chao Erh-feng, Viceroy of Szechuan
(Sichuan), waged war against the swashbuckling Tibetan frontier tribes.

Chao was to be appointed Resident in Tibet in 1 908.

As for the return of the Dalai Lama to Lhasa, by 1906 the Chinese were thought to favour it, though their primary concern was to keep His Holiness away from the Russians. The former Russian Foreign Minister, Count Lamsdorff, who found the Lama’s presence in Mongolia an embarrassment, had been in favour too, but his successor, Izvolsky, thought otherwise. Conferring in July 1906 with Sir Anhur Nicolson, the British Ambassador at St Petersburg, he expressed the belief that in Tibet the Lama ‘might prove an element of danger and of trouble in that country’. Nicolson agreed with this.]O
Regardless of what these great powers deemed desirable, the Dalai Lama left Mongolia towards the end of September 1906. According to Dorzhiev, he travelled to Kandrowang and Duya monasteries, and in October arrived at Sining (Xining), where he was delayed by the faithful who �s ever came in crowds seeking blessings. A number of Mongolian princes and a guard from Uliasutai attended him, but no Russian Buddhists. The Chinese then stepped in and took him to ‘Kanchow’ or ‘Hanchow’ (Lanzhou?), ostensibly, so their officials informed their British counterpam, to remove him from Russian influence. In the next month, November, he was at Kum-Bum. The monastery there, a vast sprawling complex of buildings, was founded in 1516 amid the green hills of what was once the Tibetan province of Amdo but, since the Chinese redrew the map, now lies in Qinghai. It was (and still is) a great centre of pilgrimage, its special attraction being a miraculous tree said to have sprung from the placental blood of Tsongkhapa’s birth; on its leaves a hundred thousand images or else Tibetan letters are said to appear, hence its name.]1 Dorzhiev was meanwhile still in Russia. In November he was reponed to have been ‘in consultation with officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as to Mongolian matters’. Izvolsky, who privately informed Nicolson of this, said he had not seen the Buryat Lama himself.32 Dorzhiev also at this time submitted a repon, dated 20 November 1907, to the Vice-President of the imperial Russian Geographical Society, P.P. Semyonov-Shansky, entitled ‘On a Rapprochement between Russia, Mongolia and Tibet’. In this he rehashed the old arguments of the Eastern Lobby: that ‘Russia must be in every way a kind and constant friend, teacher and protector of the Mongols and Tibetans, and defend them against exploitation and oppression by China and Britain’, and that ‘we must undenake a peaceful cultural and economic conquest of these countries’. In a manner highly reminiscent of Dr Badmayev, moreover, he went on to propose the formation of a private commercial and industrial enterprise with a network of affiliated offices in these countries; its economic activities would be supplemented with cultural and educational work.JJ
The Dalai Lama had passed many months at Kum-Bum when, on 31 August 1907, a diplomatic event of deep significance for him took place.

After the humiliating defeat by Japan, the Russians wished to avoid funher confrontation with the British in Asia. The new Liberal Government that came to power in Britain late in 1 905 was also of a non-contentious disposition. Accordingly, lengthy discussions were held in St Petersburg between Nicolson and Izvolsky which resulted in the signing of an Anglo-Russian Convention. By its five articles concerning Tibet the two panies agreed to respect the territorial integrity of Tibet, to respect Chinese suzerainty and to deal with the Tibetans only through Chinese mediation except where the British enjoyed special rights under the Lhasa Convention. Funhermore, Russian and British Buddhists might maintain their spiritual contacts with the Lamaist church but there should be no representatives in Lhasa, no commercial concessions in Tibet and no interference with Tibetan revenues.

This Convention finally quashed His Holiness’s hopes of receiving Russian succour and inevitably exercised an imponant influence on the ensuing course of events.

Somcnme during 1907 or early in 1 908 the Lama seems to have abandoned the idea of retUrning to Lhasa and begun to think instead of visiting Peking. Dorzhiev suggests that this was a free decision:
After staying for some weeks in Kum-Bum, he wished to go to Peking.

When requests were made to the Chinese Emperor and his ministers, some listened and some did not. With the sole intention to devour [Tibet], they made him wait.14 The American Minister in Peking, William Woodville Rockhill, took a contrary view. This man, who had a keen interest in matters Tibetan –
in 1888 he had resigned his diplomatic post and made an unsuccessful attempt to reach Lhasa – says that the Dalai Lama went to Peking only
‘After much hesitation, with much misgiving, and only after repeated and peremptory representations from Peking’.ls Chinese ambitions in Tibet would of course have been immensely assisted if the Lama appeared, or was made to seem to appear, as a humble vassal come to pay homage to his sovereign, the Manchu Emperor.

Whether through indecision or because permission to proceed was withheld, His Holiness lingered in Kum-Bum until early in 1908, during which time he was again visited by Kozlov, who was then on his Mongolia-Szechuan expedition of 1907-09, during which he discovered the ancient city of Khara-Koto. A British observer noted that the explorer appeared to be on ‘very friendly terms’ with the Lama.

His Holiness and his considerable entourage then moved, causing much local dislocation, via Sining and Sian ( Xi’an) to Wu T’ai Shan, where they arrived in April 1908. According to the hagiographers, during the five months that he stayed at the sacred mountain at considerable expense to the Government of Shansi (Shanxi), he had visions and performed miracles. Various foreign visitors also came to see him, including in June W.W. Rockhill, to whom he had sent an envoy from Mongolia in August 1905.

Late in September 1908, his way, according to Dorzhiev, diplomatically smoothed by the new Russian Minister in Peking, I. Y. Korostovets

where they boarded a special train for Peking.

A new and particularly sensitive phase in the saga of his exile was about to begin.

A Heathen Temple In Christian Petersburg 1 908 – 1910

Vexingiy, our two main sources for the next phases of Dorzhiev’s life are occasionally at variance with one another. The first, the ‘History of the St Petersburg Buddhist Temple’ by Aleksandr Andreyev, is impeccably based on painstaking research in Russian State and other archives; the other, the biography of a Latvian Buddhist monk named Karlis Alexis Mikhailovich Tennisons by his loyal but somewhat eccentric devotee Friedrich V. Lustig (Ashin Ananda), is somewhat less reliable.

Born in Narva, Estonia in 19 12, Lustig became Tennisons’ principal disciple and, after his death, inherited his mentor’s grandiose titles of Buddhist Archbishop of Latvia, Sangharaja [Senior Buddhist] of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. His biography of Tennisons is a massive typescript running to nearly a thousand pages; it contains a mass vf information, some of it bearing on aspects of Agvan Dorzhiev’s career not covered elsewhere. Though much of the biography, including a few fine details, is verifiably correct, parts of it contain small errors, exaggerations and that kind of romantic exuberance that is often impatient of the constraints of accuracy. One hopes one is not doing the late Revd Lustig a grave injustice, but the ineluctable conclusion after reading his text and comparing it with others is that what we have is an attempt to magnify the importance of Karlis Tennisons, and that in this enterprise Lustig was probably faithfully following the example of his preceptor. To give an example: Lustig cites a letter published in the May 1 961 issue of The Maha Bodhi, a Buddhist journal published in India, in which Tennisons claimed to have been ‘a former Lord Abbot of the magnificent Buddhist cathedral Church in Petrograd (now Leningrad),; modern Buddhists from the Baltic states, on the other hand, have assured me that he was in fact no more than the caretaker at a time when the building was deserted.

However, even if Lustig’s text is slightly suspect, it cannot be overlooked, though the reader should bear the foregoing caveats in mind.

Lustig maintains that Karlis Alexis Mikhailovich Tennisons ( 1 8731962) 1, the ‘Mahatma of the Baltic’, was born at Laura in the Latvian province of Livonia, into a landowning family that had ‘professed Buddhism for generations’. This for a start has been contradicted by a Baltic Buddhist who told me personally in Leningrad in May 1991 that Tennisons was in fact an Estonian. But to continue … Having received a sound education and travelled widely with his father, he was at seventeen selected with several other lads to accompany Nicholas Romanov on his tour of the Far East ( 1 890-01 ). This exposed the young Tennisons to living Buddhism, which must have affected him deeply, for in 1 892 he travelled to Trans-Baikalia and at the Barguzin Datsan,2 near the eastern edge of Lake Baikal, he became a pupil of Mahacharya Ratnavajra.

This eighry-five-year-old monk, who had once been anached to the Tibetan monasteries of Ganden, Kum-Bum and Lhabrang, had been born Kunigaikshtis Gedyminas, the scion of a Lithuanian royal house.

In 1 893, on his twentieth birthday, Tennisons was himself ordained a monk. After finishing his brief training in Trans-Baikalia, he embarked on Buddhist missionary work in northern Siberia among such peoples as the Eskimos, Yakuts and Samoyeds. In 1 900 he was researching into Buddhist texts in Peking when the Boxer Uprising broke out; during the Russo-Japanese War he performed humanitarian work with the Russian Army in Manchuria. Later he wandered back to Europe via the Altai region and Tannu-Tuva, a Buddhist enclave which at the time was ruled by China as a province of Mongolia.

In the second week of May 1 907, this great walker wanders into Astrakhan, the great trading ciry on the banks of the Volga, and finds accommodation at the local Buddhist temple, where he is treated with great kindness by the Kalmyk in charge, who speaks excellent Russian.

As chance would have it, the room next to his is occupied by Agvan Dorzhiev, who has arrived in Astrakhan two days before from visiting his choira in the local province. They talk. Dorzhiev reveals that he is building a Buddhist temple in St Petersburg and asks Tennisons to meet him in the capital in July. This Tennisons does, and both lodge at the house of the beautiful Princess Olizetta Begaliyevna T undutova, a lady of Kalmyk origin whose patronymic suggests that her father’s name was Beg-Ali. Her husband, Tseren-David Tundutov, who had recently died, had been an enlightened noyon of the Maloderbet clan. After being educated in Moscow, he had returned to his people and worked for the abolition of serfdom; this was achieved in 1892. He also donated funds towards the construction of the choira that Dorzhiev organized in his district. J
Princess Tundutova holds glinering salons which are anended by
�
uch �u.

minaries as Prince Ukhtomsky and Anna Vryubova, the ladym-waltJng and confidante of the Empress.” Having visited the site of the.

Buddhist te�ple, on 4 August 1 907, Tennisons accompanies Dorzhlev and a Tibetan lama of Sera monastery, who is acting as Dorzhiev’s secret�
ry, to an .

audience with Nicholas II at Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkm). At thiS, the finance and construction of the temple are discussed in some detail;S also Onhodox objections to the project. After inquiring after the Dalai Lama and being told that he is presently at Kum-Bum, Nicholas II informs Dorzhiev of the fonhcoming Anglo-Russian Convention, assuring him, however, that ‘Russia would continue to regard Tibet as an independent state and do all it could for the preservation of the status quo; and that His Holiness the Dalai Lama would be a most welcome guest if he ever decided to visit St Petersburg’.

The three Buddhists then take tea with the Empress, Aleksandra Fyodorovna. Subsequently, having been warned by the Okhrana –
the infamous Third Section, precursor of the Cheka, GPU, NKVD and KGB – that British secret agents are shadowing him and might make an attempt on his life, Dorzhiev moves to another address in the city.

Dorzhiev finally leaves for Trans-Baikalia on 24 August. On 1 September Tennisons, who has been left in charge of work at the temple site, discovers that construction has stopped on the orders of Piotr Stolypin, the Prime Minister. He at once telegraphs Dorzhiev in Trans-Baikalia, and receives a telegram back telling him not to worry, that Dorzhiev is now on his way to Kum-Bum to see the Dalai Lama but will return to St Petersburg early the following summer. In the meantime Tennisons has an audience with the Emperor and Stolypin’s ban is lifted. Work on the temple cannot begin again, however, because the contractor and architects have decamped. Dorzhiev is back in the second week of June 1 908, bringing five Tibetan and Buryat lamas with him. He now receives full protection from the Okhrana. Three days later he has another audience with the Emperor at Tsarskoye Selo, from which he returns in high spirits. Later he and Tennisons go to Peterhof and find the missing contractor and architects working there on the orders of the Holy Synod. They are, however, persuaded to return to the site of the Buddhist temple and work there begins again. During Dorzhiev’s frequent absences from the capital Tennisons oversees the ongoing construction of the temple …

According to Aleksandr Andreyev’s more scholarly account, which makes no mention of Tennisons. Dorzhiev did not set off to see the Dalai Lama at Wu T’ai Shan until January 1 908. Up to that time the site for the temple had not been acquired. Dorzhiev himself merely says that he had an interview with the Dalai Lama at Wu T’ai Shan. He then rcrurned to St Petersburg and registered with the police as having taken up residence in Apartment No. 20, 13 Marlaya Morskaya Ulitsa
(now Ulitsa Gogolya – Gogol Strect).6 It was in fact unusual for him to take an apartment in the centre of town – Ulitsa Gogolya is just off Nevsky Prospekt – for he usually gravitated to the Petrograd district, where prices were cheaper. As always, however, he would probably have reserved one room as a shrine room.

Dorzhiev brought with him to St Petersburg two petitions from the Dalai Lama. One was a request for a loan from the Russian Government; the other was a new petition that permission be given for a Buddhist temple to be built in the Russian capital. He managed successfully to negotiate the loan at the Finance Ministry and some 1 10,000 yuan were lent to His Holiness, repayable in three instalments over six months at six and a haU per cent interest. This effectively financed His Holiness’ visit to Peking. Further loans of 250,000 and 40,000 Ian were subsequendy requested but turned down on the grounds that the first had not been repaid (it never was in full).7 The second petition, meanwhile, was received in the Foreign Ministry by Aleksandr lzvolsky, who on 12 July 1 908 wrote a confidential letter to Piotr Stolypin:
Taking into consideration that the Dalai lama is well disposed towards Russia and that the preservation of good relations with him holds vital significance for us with regard to our political interest! in China as well as giving us the possibility of successfully exploiting his inftumce over our umaist subjects, I am paying special attmtion to the petition of His Holiness. As for the request for the building of a temple, I consic:lcr it a duty to suppon this before Your Excellmcy in the belid that our good intmtions towards the wishes of the Dalai Ulna will produce a deep impression which wiU be to our advantage as well as to his and that of the coundcss umaists within the confines of Russia.8 Stolypin responded ‘completely sympathetically’ to this and gave his permission for the temple to be built. Nothing was done immediately, however, for Dorzhiev was soon on his way back to rejoin the Dalai Lama in Peking.

The Europeans who wi messed the state entry of the Dalai Lama into Peking in late September 1908 might have been watching a scene from the Middle Ages. He was formally met at the railway station by high Chinese officials and ceremonially carried into the city through the Ch’ien Men Gate on a yellow state palanquin with sixteen bearers.

He was then esconed by Buddhist monks in dark red robes, a military guard of honour, musicians and standard-bearers to the Huang-ssu or Yellow Temple, where he was to stay. This had been built for the state visit of his illustrious predecessor, the Great Fifth, in 1653, and recently renovated.

An audience was fixed for the 6 October but was cancelled because it was rumoured, His Holiness refused to make the full kow-tow, �
demeaning symbol of subservience. He saw himself as coming to the Emperor as the Great Fifth had done, as priest to patron, not as vassal to overlord. Dorzhiev arrived at about the same time, and perhaps it was on his advice that His Holiness then began petitioning various foreign diplomats. The Buryat lama was himself very active in this respect, first visiting Korostovets, who informed him that the time when Russia was concerned with advising or supponing Eastern rulers was at an end.

Dorzhiev thereupon remarked that if Russia would not help he had no alternative but to go to the British. Korostovets had conferred with his British counterpart, Sir John Jordan, so he was able to assure Dorzhiev that he would find no consolation in that quaner either. He did suggest, however, that Dorzhiev might visit W. W. Rockhill, who as the American representative might furnish him with disinterested advice. A meeting, arranged by Korostovets, took place on 2 October, Dorzhiev being accompanied by ‘another Khenpo, a confidential adviser of the Dalai Lama’. Rockhill found Dorzhiev ‘a quiet, well-mannered man, impressionable like all Mongols, and apparently but very little less ignorant of politics and the world in general than the Tibetans’.

Clearly devoted to his religion and the person of the Dalai Lama, he was definitely not the sinister intriguer he had been made out to be.

Rockhill wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt:

Dorjieff told me that the Dalai Lama had heard said that the Chinese Government 
was making cenain imponant changes in the internal administration of Thibet. 
He did not know their nature and extent. He wished to know whether in my 
opinion it were better for him to remain in Peking until the changes were made 
or to return at once to Lhasa. He was without any of his advisers on temporal 
matters; he felt unable to cope with the questions which might be raised without 
their assistance; but he feared to go until the programme of Thibetan reforms had 
been settled, for he apprehended that the Chinese Government sought to cunail 
the temporal power he and his predecessors had wielded before the Manchus 
came to the throne of China.9

Rockhill replied that whatever the situation had once been, the Dalai Lama’s present position was that of a vassal prince. The Chinese furthermore intended to carry out certain administrative, educational, military and other reforms in Tibet, to which he could not see that the Dalai Lama could have any objection. Dorzhiev agreed that there could be no objection to educational and military reforms; the Dalai Lama was moreover quite satisfied with the various treaties that had recendy been concluded; his main fear was that China might encroach upon his temporal authority. He also wished to place two matters before the Emperor which he considered of paramount importance; firstly, that the Gelug Church be maintained in all its honours, and secondly, that the right be given him to submit memorials (petitions) directly to the Throne and not through the good offices of the Viceroy of Szechuan and the Board of Dependencies, ‘either of which might pigeon-hole them’.

Before taking his leave, Dorzhiev told Rockhill that he would report to the Dalai Lama and then return with a draft of a letter that he wished to submit to the Emperor concerning the two points mentioned above.

Once these were settled the Lama could leave for Lhasa.

It was also at this time that a British official at last got to meet Dorzhiev face to face. This was the genial Major W. F. T. O’Connor, who had been with Younghusband in 1 904 and subsequently served as the first British Trade Agent at Gyanrse, though now he was chaperoning Sidkeong Namgyal, the Heir Apparent of Sikkim, on an educational tour of North America and the Far East. In his memoirs, Frederick O’Connor describes Dorzhiev as a ‘cheery looking monk of stereotyped description, about forry-five years of age, a voluble speaker, and evidently a man of intellect and character’. In a private letter he also wrote of their first meeting, which took place at Korostovets’ residence after dark one evening:
I went and we had a three-comcred conversation lasting an hour. It was an amusing anti-dimax to all our Tibetan schemes – our Mission, our military expedition, the fighting, destruction of property, bean-burnings and hard work.

Here we were sitting quietly round a table in the Russian legation at Peking

I enclose a photo of Dorjieff (taken some years ago) which Rockhill gave me. He looks much the same now but a good deal older (he is 55). He is still

the chief adviser and confidant of the Dalai Lama and is apparently on very 
intimate terms with the Russians. He says he is not going back to Lhasa with 
the Lama . .

            . 10

A day or two later Dorzhiev visited O’Connor at the British Legation and they had a long private conversation. He had in the meantime reported their previous conversation to the Dalai Lama, who, he said, would feel more equanimous about returning to Lhasa (when he fully anticipated trouble from the Chinese) if he was assured that the British Government bore him no hard feelings. His Holiness had been particularly impressed, Dorzhiev went on, by the friendly reception given in Calcutta to the Panchen Lama by the Prince of Wales and the Viceroy, of which he had received full reports. O’Connor did not have authority to give any assurances, but he did say that the British Government had no objection to His Holiness returning to Lhasa, that they harboured no resentments against him, and that ‘they would be prepared to enter into the most friendly relations with him – subject of course to any Treaty by which we were bound’. II
Ongoing Chinese efforts to pressure the Dalai Lama into submission culminated in a seventy-fifth birthday edict issued on 3 November in the name of the Empress Dowager, who was the real power behind the throne. This exchanged his official title to a longer but more demeaning form, granted him an annual allowance of ten thousand tads and ordered him to return to Tibet, whereafter ‘he must be reverentially submissive to the Regulations of the Sovereign State’ and report to the Amban.12 No wonder that Rockhill remarked, ‘His pride has suffered terribly while here, and he leaves Peking with his dislike for the Chinese intensified.’ \3 Ironically, China was in fact not only replacing Britain as the source of all evils in the Lama’s eyes (and those of Dorzhiev) but Britain was at the same time coming to be regarded as a possible new patron-protector of Tibet. Times were changing . ..

In December, the ineffectual Emperor departed for the ‘Western Paradise’. Sir Charles Bell wrote ominously: ‘Such evidence as is available of the happenings in the grim prison chamber within the high walls of the Forbidden City – at that time really forbidden –
points strongly to the conclusion she [the Empress Dowager] poisoned him.’l .. The machiavelli an lady died herself shortly afterwards, also a victim of poison, it was mooted, though in her case self-administered.

As the Manchus still venerated Buddhism (after a fashion), they were gratified when the Dalai Lama conducted religious rites for the deceased at the Yellow Temple. He is also reponed to have been present at the enthronement of the boy successor, the last of the Manchu Emperors. But these were his final acts in Peking. Realizing that nothing positive could be accomplished there, he prepared to leave for Tibet, sending Dorzhiev to pay proxy farewells to Korostovets and the ‘Chinese minister’, and offer them the obligatory gifts. I S
When the Dalai Lama left Peking on 21 December Dorzhiev did not go with him. Two representatives of His Holiness who called at the British Legation on the day he left (23 December) with presents and a khada for the King, told British officials that he proposed to remain for some time in Trans-Baikalia before proceeding to St Petersburg, where he intended to continue his work on his Buddhist temple pro;ect. 16 He was certainly back in the Russian capital by 16 March 1 909, for on that day he bought for 1 8,000 rubles a plot of land of some 648.5 1 square sazheny – one sazhen equals seven English feet

On the negative side, it was rather too dose for comfon to the Onhodox BIagoveshchyenskaya Church (Church of the Annunciation

E. Ukhtomsky, G. V. Baranovsky, V. P. Schneider, N. K. Roerich, V. L.

Korvich, A. D. Rudnev and F. I. Stcherbatsky. 19 Vasily Vasilyevich Radlov ( 1 837-1 918) and Sergey Feodorovich Ol’dcnburg ( 1 863-1 934) were members of the Academy of Sciences and co-founders of the Russian Comminee for the Study of Central and East Asia. Radlov was a specialist in the language and literature of the Turkic peoples. Ol’denburg was mainly a Buddhologist with a special interest in Buddhist art and legends; he is also credited as main initiator of the Biblioteca Buddhica, which was founded around 1 897 to publish Sanskrit texts and translations. Vladislav Lyudvigovich Korvich (or Kotwicz, 1872-1 944), who was Polish by origin, and Andrey Dmitrievich Rudnev (died c. 1919?), were both lecturers at St Petersburg University specializing in Mongolian studies.

Though Gavriil Vasilyevich Baranovsky is usually given as the official architect, at least two other hands worked on the project. Initially Nicholas Marveyevich Berezovsky was employed. He was still a student when first retained, so his fees were modest; but more importantly he had visited Sinkiang and so knew something of Buddhist art and architecture.

Though he probably contributed the seed of the design, being unqualified at the commencement he could not supervise actual construction, so Baranovsky was made the official architect. He was well-known in the first two decades of the century and, among other buildings, designed the Eliseyev house at 56 Nevsky Prospekt, opposite the Pushkin Theatre: an Art Nouveau exercise in Finnish granite (the same pinkish-grey variety as the temple) decorated with muscular statuary and a splendid frontal stained glass window. Eliseyev’s shop still does business on the ground floor and now resembles what Harrods’ Food Hall would probably look like if Britain had experienced seventy years of Marxist austerity. The Komediya Theatre functions in the building too.

Dorzhiev is thought to have provided the specialist knowledge of Buryat-Mongol-Tibetan temple architecture, Baranovsky to have interpreted this ‘in the spirit of European architecture and building technology’. In other words, this was to be a Buddhist temple built with European methods and materials. Unfortunately, late in 191 1 Baranovsky clashed with the Construction Committee and with Dorzhiev

Varvara P. Schneider, a niece of the great Indologist, I. P. Minaev
( 1 840-1890), was an artist.20 It was in the apartment she shared with her sister, A. P. Schneider, also an artist, at 3 Masterskaya Ulitsa, that meetings of the committee were held. The other artist on the committee is far more widely known nowadays for his later collaboration as set and COStume designer with Stravinsky and Diaghilev on the ballet, The Rite of Spring ( 1 913). Nikolai Konstantinovich Roerich ( 1 874-1947) was a mystical painter and poet. His earliest canvasses had been evocations of Russia’s past; later his subjects came from Russian legends and fairy tales; later still he attempted works in the manner of ancient Russian church paintings. Meeting Dorzhiev, however, opened up exciting new spiritual vistas for him:
It was during the construction of a Buddhist temple in the Russian capital that I first heard of Shambhala. Being a member of the committee, I met with a very learned Buriat lama who was the first to pronounce the name of Chang Shambhala. It will be known one day why this name pronounced under such circumstances had a great significance.ll With additional influence from Theosophy, to which he was introduced by his wife, Helena Ivanovna (she translated The Secret Doctrine into Russian), we may say that Roerich became intoxicated with the romance of Eastern spirituality and, in particular, obsessed with the myths of Shambhala and Maitreya, whose predicted advent he seems to have conflated with the Second Coming of Christ and similar myths in Islam and Hinduism. This inspired a completely new phase in his painting, culminating in his wonderful luminous evocations of the Himalaya and of Tibetan monasteries that seem organic extensions of the mountain crags on which they stand. It also inspired a grandiose messianic vision of the inauguration of a New Age of peace, brotherhood and enlightenment which he expounded in his cloyingly effusive visionary writings .

The initial estimate of the overall cost of the temple was 90,000 rubles.

Of this, 50,000 was pledged by the Dalai Lama (it was for this that he had applied to the Ministry of Finance for the second and third loans),
and 30,000 was given by Dorzhiev. As it was proposed to raise the remaining 1 0,000 rubles among the Kalmyks and Buryats, Dorzhiev established an appeal committee at the same time as he set up the Construction Committee. This was headed by two shiretuis (abbots):
Garmayev of the Atsagat Datsan and Soktoyev of the Tsulgin .

The distinguished alternative doctor and power-broker, Piotr Badmayev, was one of the contributors to the temple fund, though he had to be so anonymously as he was ostensibly a Christian. Since last figuring in our story, Badmaycv’s name had become linked with that of the dissolute staretz, Grigory Efimovich Rasputin, who shot to a position of unprecedented influence with the Empress, initially because of his mysterious ability to relieve the distressing symptoms of the Heir Apparent’s haemophilia. In Buddhism such paranormal powers, known as rddhis, are recognized as incidental by-products of spiritual practice; they are not, however, measures of any degree of spiritual attainment and practitioners are warned not to be seduced by them. Rasputin i�
would seem, did not receive such wise counsel, for he freely, licentiou
‘
sly used his powers to secure venal advantages. However, even though he openly indulged his proclivities for sex, drink, power and money (he accepted bribes), the Empress refused to hear a word said against him, preferring to see him as a shining example of the loyal and devoted muzhik (peasant) whom she believed collectively fonned a solid body of devoted support for the throne.

Inevitably, Rasputin’s rising fortunes gained him many enemies, one of the most bitter being the Orthodox monk lIidor (Sergey Trufanov),
who ironically had at first been one of his staunchest supporters. lIidor later composed a scurrilous pamphlet entitled ‘The Holy Devil’, in which he fancifully alleged that Badmayev, Rasputin and Anna Vryubova, the Empress’ confidante, were combined in a sinister conspiracy. The Buryat dOctor would first secretly administer a poisonous ‘yellow powder’ to the Heir Apparent so that Rasputin could come along later and pretend to effect a miraculous healing. We can fairly discount this allegation, for Badmayev was actually opposed to Rasputin until around the outbreak of the First World War, when they did begin to conspire together both on the political front and in business deals. There is evidence, for instance, that in 1916 Badmayev offered Rasputin a 50,000 ruble bribe to use his influence with the Emperor to have an ‘affair’, in which he was involved with a certain General Krulov, approved and funded.22 Such was the machiavellian world in which Badmayev moved for many years, yet he was nevertheless a benefactor of the temple .

According to a plan registered with the Building Department of the St Petersburg Council on 15 April 1909, building was scheduled to start at Dorzhiev’s temple at the end of April/beginning of May that year. Local brick-layers and workmen were engaged as well as ones from Kostroma province, none of whom were probably aware of what they were in fact helping to erect. The pace of work was at first brisk, for by 13 May the foundations had been laid and part of the ground floor. Then came the first of a series of official obstructions. On 16 May D. V. Drachevsky, the municipal chief, issued a directive that work be halted. This had originated at the Department of Foreign Creeds, whose Deputy Director, A. N. Charuzin, had sent a letter marked ‘secret and emergency’ to the effect that ‘no lawful permission has been received from the relevant authorities for the erection of this building in the place stated’.23 Dorzhiev was away at the time, so on 7 June Stcherbatsky applied directly to Stolypin for permission: firstly, to set up a construction committee, secondly, to build the temple on the site bought for the purpose, and, thirdly, to accommodate Buddhist religious at the temple. From this petition it is clear that what Dorzhiev had in mind was not a simple temple but a monastic complex of the traditional kind containing accommodation for monks and educational facilities in addition to areas reserved for religious rites and practices. Dependent on permission being given, a complement of twenty-one people was envisaged: the shiretui
(abbot), ten gelong (monks), and ten getsiil and khuvarak (novices).24 This was problematic, for existing Russian legislation drastically limited the number of religious that could reside in any Buddhist establishment, and in any case one situated in the capital itself had never been envisaged. Accordingly, Stolypin in his repon to the Emperor on Stcherbatsky’s petition agreed with the Depanment of Foreign Creeds that the present site was not suitable ‘in view of its distance from the centre of the city and the difficulty of supervising the community house’.

He di� however, in consideration of the growing number of Buddhists in the capital, recommend that a Buddhist temple be in principle approved, though not in Staraya Derevnya. To this the Emperor appended a laconic
‘S’ for ‘soglasen’ – ‘I agree’.25 This was bad news for the Construction Committee. With such a large pan of the available funds already spent, it was out of the question to think of buying another plot of land and starting over again in the centre of the city, where costs would anyway be far higher. Not deterred, however, Radlov again petitioned Stolypin, informing him that at its meeting of 22 June the Committee had decided to limit itself to building a temple only, with no ancillary accommodation; he also mentioned the expenses already incurred and attached a revised sketch plan drawn up by Baranovsky. The Emperor, who was then at Livadia, found this compromise acceptable. When official ratification from the Ministry of Internal Affairs arrived on 1 November, building began again at the previous brisk pace, and in a year the temple was well advanced towards completion.

It is difficult to believe that the initial embargo by the Depanment of Foreign Creeds, as well as subsequent obstructions, were not in pan at least influenced by the strident and vituperative protests of the Onhodox faithful. Dorzhiev himself expatiates passionately on this subject:
Pennission had already been granted to my request for a Buddhist temple to be bUilt In the capital; but when It came nme to begin the construction the long-hairs were unable to tolerate this and from all comers of the co�nrry appealed to the Tsar, asking him to please give an order that ‘no filthy Buddhist temple ever be erected in our celestial ciry of Petersburg’. In response the Tsar upheld his [previous] order for the temple to be built. Communities of long-hairs in Kiev, Kazan and Irkutsk then made this appeal: ‘This inauspicious man called
�Dorzhiev”, an adherent of the Kalmyk and Buryat BOn [shamanistic] sect, is Infiltrating our religion and spreading the doctrine of the Buddha. In particular, thiS construction of a Buddhist temple in the great capital is most unwonhy.

Having punished this man by exiling him far away and so on, it should be decreed that he never reside in this counrry [again].’
In response, no such decree was given and I stayed where I was. However, every day the long-hairs sent many kinds of letters to me. Some threatened that they would kill me and destroy the temple. Others informed me that within so many days I should run far away and out of sight, that I should die from a cenain poisonous substance and that members of their notorious ‘Bluebird Sociery’ had the means [to carry out these threats]. In spite of all this, I relied upon the Three Jewels and the power of truth and remained equanimous and content. But when a monastery staned being built in a place called ‘Tungkhung’
[probably Tunka, on the Irkut river south-west of Irkutsk] in the pan of Buryatia where BOn [shamanism] prevailed, cenain long-hairs including Makhashikhiev and others interfered and halted the construction of the temple. But even though they managed to have the doors [officially] sealed shut, they caused no real hann and [finally the monastery] tlourished.26 The Orthodox polemics were to continue and, if a batch of yellowing pages typewrinen in fuzzy Cyrillic and headed ‘Documents, Articles &
Materials Relating to the Buddhist Temple in Leningrad’ is anything to go by, during 1 910 and 191 1 they became particularly nasty – as we shall see in due course.

Far away in Tibet, meanwhile, the Dalai Lama was approaching his holy city of Lhasa. He had been on the long road from Peking for nearly a year. But if his exile of five years was nearly over, his troubles were certainly not.

The Turning Point 1 909 – 1913

On 25 December 1 909 the Dalai Lama took up residence again at the Poula in Lhasa. Within two months he was forced to flee for a second time as the advance guard of a Chinese force reached the holy city, thus fulfilling an ancient Tibetan prophecy: ‘In the Year of the Male Iron Dog, a war with China will occur’. On this occasion – a sign of the times and a ponent for the future – he sought refuge in the south: in British India.

Where else could he tum? The Russians, it was manifestly dear, were no longer interested in dabbling in Tibetan politics; but back in Peking, he and Dorzhiev had already begun radically to revise their view of the old British bogey. Not only had the sahibs treated the Panchen Lama hospitably but they had promptly withdrawn their troops following the signing of the Lhasa Convention, so they obviously had no intention of devouring the Land of Snows; they had also very honourably kept to the terms of the Convention.

Once he had made his dramatic escape across the Himalayas, though informed that the British Government could do nothing to help the Tibetan cause on account of the policy of non-interference, the Lama was treated in a very friendly manner. He and his ministers were accommodated at Government expense in Darjeeling; his security was organized by the Deputy Commissioner; he was allowed to go on pilgrimage to Buddhist holy places; and he formed a cordial relationship with his British liaison officer, Charles Bell, the Political Officer in Sikkim, who was to become an ardent Tibetophile. He was also received with honour in Calcuna by the Viceroy, Lord Minto, to whom, when putting his case, he gave the most earnest assurances that Dorzhiev had been solely a religious adviser – surely an example of the phenomenon of economy with the truth.

Besides appealing to the British for help, the Dalai Lama directed similar appeals to the King of Nepal and the Emperor of Russia.

Nicholas II ‘s reply, to the Lama’s embarrassment, was communicated through the British Government. It was according to type – cordial but non-committal.

There was also correspondence with Dorzhiev, who could not accompany His Holiness into this second exile. One letter was delivered by Fyodor Stcherbatsky, then on a year’s academic visit to India who gave it to the Lama’s chief secretary when they met on the path �bove
‘Hillside’, the secluded house set in woodland where His Holiness was staying. At a subsequent interview at which Bell was present, the ‘Russian professor’ first presented the seated Dalai Lama with a khada and laid Rs 20/- before him; then he thanked His Holiness for the gifts he had already made to the Buddhist Temple in St Petersburg, reported that there were plans to build a Buddhist hostel and library there, and asked for help in obtaining copies of old Sanskrit manuscripts from Reting monastery to the north of Lhasa and from an un-named monastery near Lake Manasarovar in Western Tibet.

His Holiness made a clean breast of the contents of Dorzhiev’s letter to Bell a few days later. Its gist was much the same as that of the interview:
a request for Stcherbatsky to be given permission to visit Lhasa and to be assisted in procuring sacred texts. ‘It would have been difficult to grant the request, as the Chinese would not have liked a European to come to Lhasa’, the Dalai Lama allegedly told Bell; ‘but as I have come to Darjeeling, the matter has been made easy for me’. 1 Bell ingenuously took this to be a shining example of the Dalai Lama’s frankness. In reality, His Holiness was again being economical with the truth, for he was, as in 1905, very happy for Stcherbatsky to go to Tibet. Nor were the British authorities averse to the idea. It was the narrow-minded bureaucrats at the Russian Foreign Ministry who, to his lasting resentment, again contrived to block Stcherbatsky’s way by failing to process his application for a Chinese visa. Russian officials in India even tried to stop him visiting the Dalai Lama. Stcherbatsky never did visit Tibet but some of his precious manuscripts were obtained for him by the Indian scholar Rahula Sankriryayana; others were collected by the Italian Buddhologist, Professor Giuseppe Tucci.

Other communications that the Dalai Lama preferred not to reveal to Bell must have passed berween himself and Dorzhiev, either via Stcherbatsky or by some other avenue, for in the same year, 1910, with unusual haste, building work was pushed forward on a four-storey house on the temple site in St Petersburg in anticipation of His Holiness’ arrival early the following year.2 He also planned to visit London on the way. Neither of these projected visits came off, though exactly why is not clear.

Stcherbatsky spent a fruitful year in India. He wrote in his report that ‘besides an overall acquaintance with the country’, the purpose of his sojourn

was primarily a quest after the relics of Buddhist philosophical literature, both 
the works of the Buddhists themselves and in those of the Brahmanas and the 
Jainas, inasmuch as these latter rdlected - directly or indirectly - the period 
(fifth to tenth centuries A.D.) when Buddhism flourished . . . At the same time 
I also wanted to familiarise myself with the present state of the study of Sanskrit 
languagr and literature in India ... 3

What he did, in fact, was to live in a house with an Indian pandit adept in Nyaya philosophy and spend several months speaking only Sanskrit and studying for many hours each day. On his return to St Petersburg in 191 1, he proposed to the temple construction committee that a Hindu temple be transported from Rajasthan to Russia by sea. This plan was not taken up but parts of the temple did reach the Russian capital and are still preserved there.

The construction of the stone house alongside the St Petersburg temple of course Aew in the face of the directives of the authorities, and it goes to show how bold and determined a man Dorzhiev was –
determined in this instance to fulfil his original plan of creating a functioning monastery rather than just a show-piece temple. As the Dalai Lama never arrived, he took up residence there himself on 30 November 1910, to be at hand personally to supervise building operations. Ovshe Norzunov, who was to manage the place, moved in too. Later occupants included Rinchen Zhanchatov, the Buryat master joiner who worked on the interior of the temple, the Buryat Cossack, T sokto Badmazhapov, and Chopel, a Tibetan assistant to Dorzhiev. In 1913 it accommodated the Mongolian Embassy to St Petersburg.

The yean 1910 and 191 1 saw Orthodox and ultra-reactionary fanatics attacking Dorzhiev’s blasphemous temple with unrestrained venom. In the vanguard was the unsavoury Union of the Russian People, a faction of the Chcrnyi Somyi or so-called ‘Black Hundreds’ gangs, who were usually more noted for their violent anti-Semitism. Somehow the Pctrograd Buddhists managed to arouse their hatred – probably no difficult task – for there appeared in its bulletin, The Russian Banner a series of diatribes like the following:
‘
SOME MORE WORDS ON THE SUBJECT OF THE BUILDING OF A PAGAN

TEMPLE IN ST PETERSBURG 
 ... At the very same time that people on the Don are so zealously trying to 
stamp out the last traces of paganism and purge the area of the temples and 
starues of devilish idolatry,4 in the capital of our Orthodox Fatherland - under 
our very bells, you might say - diabolical works are being wrought, [ones) fit 
only for the one enemy of our Saviour - the Devil. Our capital has not followed 
the Christian Path; it has yielded to some wild call ... Do not forget that you 
are the City of St Peter, who has lived among your citizens from cenrury to 
cenrury, from generation to generation, handing down prophetic utterances that 
your furure will be akin to that of SoJcm. In view of the recent happenings, is 
not the time at hand for the fulfilment of that terrible prophecy - that you will 
be swallowed into the earth or into the watery depths?S

A group of religious students at the St Petersburg Clerical Academy were meanwhile calling with equal ferocity for the destruction of the statue of the Buddha that had lately been brought to the city. A wag with the pen-name of Willy went so far as to cobble together a vituperative poem entitled, ‘The Buddha and the Seminarist’, to express their views (or rather prejudices). In this weird pastiche, Tiberius Gorobets, rhetorician, Khalyava, religious enthusiast, and Brut Khoma, philosopher – valiant spirits who had already ‘toppled Darwin and demolished the heresies of Copernicus’ – now set out to do likewise with the statue of the Buddha.

In straight prose the poem ends:

Then in October 191 1, as though the gods were on the Tibetan side, revolution broke out in China, toppling the decadent Manchus and quickly spreading to Lhasa, where Chinese troops mutinied. The Tibetans, notably the monks of Sera and Ganden monasteries (the monks of Drepung and Tengye ling were pro-Chinese), seized their opportunity to rise up against the occupying forces.

The Dalai Lama and his coun-in-exile fully supponed these Tibetan actions, which embarrassed the British, who ordered His Holiness not to encourage resistance. But by June 1912, though many Chinese troops remained and sporadic fighting continued, the Chinese hold on Tibet was essentially broken. Having been advised of an auspicious time and date by his astrologers, His Holiness then left Kalimpong, where he had for the past few months been staying at the house of the Bhutanese Vakil, Urgyen Kni, and set out on a slow return to Lhasa.

‘Soon after their departure daybreak broke,’ wrote Charles Bell, an eye-witness to the event; ‘and we could behold a gorgeous procession of men, joyful and determined, returning to govern their very own land, very different from the forlorn arrival of tired men on tired ponies that was wimessed two years before.’lO
Dorzhiev, who no doubt had been keenly watching developments, had by now also set out for the Land of Snows, bearing many ‘precious things’ for His Holiness as well as the usual letters and telegrams. As he retrea approached Tibet he began to hear ominous repons of auocities by ting Chinese uoops, and at Tsaidam he was told that there was still fighting in Lhasa. From Nagchukha, therefore, which he reached in the spring of 1912, he took a roundabout route along what he calls
‘the
�
northern Tsang road’. This brought him to Gyanrse, and thence to a settlement at the foot of the sacred Mount Chomolhari which
�
sed to have a reputation among British travellers of being the diniest In the world. There he was reunited with the Dalai Lama who tired from travelling, had paused at the Chatsa monastery at the req�est of the local people.

David Macdonald, a British official of Sikkimese-Scottish extraction who was the Trade Agent at Yatung in the Chumbi Valley, from where he had esconed His Holiness, was watching the ceremony of blessing the people on the morning of 7 July when a stoutly built man with an extraordinarily large head stepped out of the crowd and offered him a khada. The man revealed that he was Dorzhiev. They talked, and Dorzhiev was keen to impress upon Macdonald that his reason for being in Tibet was entirely unpolitical. The next day Dorzhiev called on Macdonald at the Phari dak-bungalow, and during conversation he related his adventurous life history. Afterwards they discussed politics, and Dorzhiev seemed most anxious to convince his host that he was in no way anti-British:
I asked him if he had incited the Tibetans to fight against us in 1904, but he vehemently denied this, laying all the blame on the Chinese … He stated that he now wished to return to his own country, and asked me if I would permit him to travel via India. This, of course, was beyond my powers, but I suggested he should apply to the Government of India through me. This he never did, and had he done so, I doubt very much if permission would have been granted.

This man seemed to be, even at that time, high in the favour of the Dalai Lama and lived with the ministers as one of themselves. I I
Dorzhiev was also seen a few days later by Sonam Wangfel Laden-Ia
(1 876-1936), an officer in the Darjeeling Police of mixed Sikkimese and
�ibetan extraction. While stressing his devotion to the Dalai Lama and hiS determination, no matter what the personal risk to himself, to help restore him to his former position, Dorzhiev also expressed his delight at seeing how friendlv the British Government were towards His Holiness.

He doubted, how�ver, whether the present difficulties in Lhasa could be resolved without British mediation, so he proposed to write to the Russian Government, suggesting that the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 be amended so as to allow this. ‘It was not the case, he added, that he Was a Russian agent, though he knew he was suspected of being one’, laden-Ia reponed. 12 It may have had nothing to do with Dorzhiev’s suggestion, but the British did shonly afterwards moot a relaxation of the terms of the 1 907 COnvention. The Russians were not averse to the notion either, though
“‘anted some kind of quid pro quo.

Old fears of the Russian bogey were revived in Indian Government circles by news of Dorzhiev’s rerum to Tibet and prompted the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, to send instructions to B. J. Gould, the British Trade Agent at Gyanrse, who had taken over the task of escorting the Dalai Lama from Macdonald, to warn His Holiness that ‘trouble would inevitably ensue from his inttiguing with foreign Powers’. In other words, His Holiness was to be politely pressured to break with Dorzhiev. Gould duly conveyed the message during a long private interview at Kangena on the evening of 14 July. His Holiness, who listened attentively, took the hint, promising that he would ‘take such action in respect of Dorjieff’ as would dispel any apprehensions of inttigue. 1 J
On 21 July, the Dalai Lama, with Dorzhiev still in attendance, arrived at Samding monastery on the lake of Namdrok-Tso. His Holiness intended to stay here until it was safe to rerum to Lhasa, but Dorzhiev could not linger as he was eager to be on his way to Mongolia before the winter set in. He says in his memoirs that when he told His Holiness this, he was given fifty thousand gold coins for the St Petersburg Temple and blessings for the journey. Berlin adds that he took decorations for the temple and new instructions.

We can have a fair idea what those instructions were. The two lamas undoubtedly discussed political prospects extensively during their time together, particularly the future independence of Tibet, which His Holiness was now more than ever determined to secure. High in both their minds was the model of Outer Mongolia, which had lately taken advantage of the revolution in China to proclaim its own independence under the sovereignty of the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu; a treaty had also .been negotiated with Russia which gave qualified recognition to Mongolian autonomy. The Dalai Lama therdore invested Dorzhiev with plenipotentiary powers to negotiate and finalize a rapprochement between Mongolia and Tibet as sovereign states. He also entrusted him with gifts and a letter for Nicholas II, and instructed him to find out whether the Russians seriously wished to maintain relations with Tibet and, if so, whether they might be interested in re-negotiating the 1 907 convention with a view to becoming, with the British, joint protectors of a fully autonomous Tibet. Trading concessions were to be offered as an inducement.

When the Dalai Lama and Dorzhiev eventually took leave of each other at Samding sometime in early August 1912, it was for the last time.

It is unlikely that they were conscious of this, unless of course either was en�?wed
.

with paranormal powers. Cenainly both were agreed that the Bnnsh wish

.

that they separate ha� to be seen to be taken seriously, for each wrote

.

mdependently
.

to Hardmge on 27 Ju�y, His Holiness stating that �rzhl�
v had been gtven orders tc:» leave Tibet without delay, and Dorzhlev himself that he would defimtely be returning to Russia via Chengri and the Chang-Tang. However, they probably regarded this move as just a temporary expedient. In any case, their relationship was a substantial one: it spanned nearly a quaner of a century and ran deep and through many levels; they had been through many crises and accomplished much together. Any British official, however lofty, who therefore believed that it could be easily terminated was deluding himself. Though they never saw each other again, these two powerful personalities remained in touch until the Dalai Lama died in 1 933 .

Dorzhiev left Samding on 2 August and travelled to Lhasa – a dangerous undenaking, for there were still unpacified Chinese troops in the holy city. The Chinese strongholds were at Trapchi, Tip monastery, and Tengye Ling, which was later destroyed for its perfidy. According to Macdonald, Dorzhiev distributed ‘very large presents to the great monasteries, the real seats of power in Tibet, funds for this being supplied by his Russian masters'”” Dorzhiev himself merely says that he collected offerings for the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu and Nicholas II, and for their respective ministers. IS British official sources repon him staying firstly at Drepung and later at Ganden, where he was reponed to be ‘spending a large sum on religious ceremonies’.

l6 Towards the end of August fighting died down and steps began to be taken to evacuate the remaining Chinese troopS from Lhasa and repatriate them by way of British India. Shonly afterwards, in early September, Dorzhiev was again on Central Asian trails, for on the
�th he wrote again to the British, on whom he was now clearly Intent on impressing his bona fides, to let them know that he was on the road to Russia. He expected to arrive early the following year, he said, and ‘Buddha’s Temple, St Petersburgh’ would be his address. This letter prompted the surmise that Dorzhiev could both speak and write English. 1 7

&ood 

At the end of November Dorzhiev turned up in Urga, having had a 
     journey from Tibet via Koko-Nor. He was seen there by his

old acquaintance, I. Y. KorostovC’tS, who had left the Russian Legation in Peking in 191 1 and, as Special Representative, signed the Russo-Mongolian Agreement and Protocol on 21 October (OS). Dorzhiev, who carried a letter for the Emperor and claimed to be authorized to negotiate with Russia on behalf of Tibet, told Korostovets:
The Dalai Lama had been misled about England, for the English were on the side of the OUncsc and aimed at a final annexation of Tibc’t. Therefore the Dalai Lama wanted to break with OUna. He had already been proclaimed secular ruler, had appointed new ministers and wanted to mter into a new pact with Russia similar to the Russo-Mongolian one. The basis for this pact or treaty could be a 0Unac mutual Russo-English protectorate over Tibet and the dimination of f.nsland sovereignty. “The conditions of the treaty would be as follows: Russia and to rP freedom of mtry to Tibet; the Tibetan Government to consult Russian and English advisers and instructors on the organization of its financial and military systemS. Russia to get the right of duty-free trade and a concession for exploiting the natural resources of the land. In exchange Russia to grant Tibet a financial loan, with its gold deposits as surety. Russia and England to provide anns for Tibct.11 Korostovets doubted that such a sophisticated scheme could have been devised by the Tibetans alone but must have been drawn up with Dorzhiev’s assistance. It was, however. unacceptable insofar as its aim was clearly to involve Russia in Tibet and win its suppon against the Chinese, thereby infringing both the Russo-British Treaty and a later better Russo-Chinese one. He therefore advised Dorzhiev that it would be if the Dalai Lama abandoned these ideas and instead tried to reach an understanding with the British.

Dorzhiev then revealed that the Dalai Lama’s Government was prcsendy seeking a rapprochement with Mongolia. Tibet, he argued
(displaying a somewhat sanguine understanding of the treaty that Korostovets had just concludcci), had just as much right to declare its independence and deal directly with foreign states as the newly autonomous Mongoli� which was recognized by Russia. He added that the drah of an agreement had already been given to the Khalkha pnnccs.

Though sometimes doubted, this Tibet-Mongolia Treaty certainly existed. It was signed on 29 December 1912 (OS) by Dorzhiev and two Tibetans on behalf of the Dalai Lama, and by two Mongolians for the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu. It stated:
Mongolia and Tibet, having freed themKlvcs from the dynasty of the Manchus and separated from China, have formed their own independent States, and.

havins in view that bcxh Sates from time irnrnanorial have professed one and me same rdipon, Wlth a view to strmgthming their historic and mutual frimdship The Turning Point 1 909-1 913 151 th� Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nikta Bili�tu Da-Lama Rabdan, and the Assistant Mlruster, General and Manlal Baatyr Beiseh Damdinsurun, as plenipotentiaries of the Government of the Ruler of the Mongolian people, and Gudjir Tsanshib Kanchen Lubsan-Agvan [‘Ass�st�
nt T�
tor, Great Abbot Losang Ngawang’. i.e. Dorzhlev), Dorur Agvan Cholnzln, DIrector of the bank Ishichjamtso, and the clerk Gendun Galsan, have made the following agreement:-
I. The Ruler of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, approves and recognises the formation of an independent Mongol State, and the proclamation of the 9th day of the 11 th month of Year of the Pig of Chjebzun Damba Lama of the Yellow Faith
[i.e. the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu) as Ruler of the country.

  1. The Ruler of the Mongolian people, Chjebzun Damba Lama, approves and recognises the formation of an independent [Tibetan) State and the proclamation of the Dalai Lama as Ruler of Tibet.

J. Both States, by joint consideration, will work for the well-being of the Buddhist Faith.

  1. Both States, Mongolia and Tibet, from now and for all time, will afford each other assistance against external and internal dangers.
  2. Each State within irs own territory will afford assistance to the subjects of the other travelling officially or privately on affairs of religion or State.
  3. Both States, Mongolia and Tibet, as formerly, will carry on a reciprocal trade in the products of their respective countries in wares, cattle, &c., and will also open industrial establishments.
  4. From now the granting of credit to anyone will be permitted only with the knowledge and sanction of official institutions. Without such sanction Government institutions will not consider claims.

As regards contracts made previous to the conclusion of the present Treaty, where serious loss is being incurred through the inability of the two parties to come to terms, such debts may be recovered by [Government) institutions, but in no case shall the debt concern shabinars or khoshuns.

  1. Should it prove necessary to supplement the articles of the present treaty, the Mongolian and Tibetan Governments must appoint special delegates who will conclude such agreements as the conditions of the time shall demand.
  2. The present Treaty shall come into force on the date of irs signature.

Plenipotentiaries from the Mongolian Government for the conclusion of the Treaty:. Nikta Biliktu Da-Lama Rabdan, Minister of Foreign Affairs; and General and Manlai Baatyr Beiseh Damdinsurun, Assistant Minister.

Plenipotentiaries from the Dalai Lama, the Ruler of Tibet, for the conclusion of the Treaty:.

Gud;ir Tsanshib Kanchen Lubsan-Agvan, Choinzin, the Director of the bank lshichjamtso, and the clerk., Gendun Galsan.

Signed [by Mongol reckoning) in the fourth day of the twelfth month of the second year of the Raised-by-the·Many, and by the Tibetan reckoning on the same day and month of the year of the Water-Mouse. ‘9 It is of course quite possible to discern here the rudiments of Dorzhiev’s Shambhala Project: his grand design for a Pan-Buddhist confederation in Central Asia. He must therefore have felt a considerable sense of achievement when in January 1913, having dispatched a copy of the treaty to the Dalai Lama for formal approval, he left Urga and began the long haul back to St Petersburg. After so many years of what would now be called shuttle diplomacy, he at last had something solid in his hands. A dynamic new movement was stirring in the dormant heart of that great Buddhist Central Asia. The auguries for the future must have looked promising.

On 14 February Novoye Vremya reported that a caravan from Tibet was approaching St Petersburg. It included some young Tibetans who were to be educated in Russian schools. This report is not confirmed elsewhere, though oral reports suggest that Dorzhiev did bring a boy back to be educated in the Russian capital, though whether he was a Buryat, a Mongol or a Tibetan is unclear. Having subsequently been with Dorzhiev at the Buddhist temple, he disappeared from Leningrad in the thirties but reappeared again in Buryatia in the sixties, having in the interim been a ‘secret lama’; he died in the late eighties. Novoye Vremya also reported that Dorzhiev, who had left the caravan and travelled on ahead, was planning to stay in Europe until May, ‘when the grass will be growing in Mongolia’, and to visit London.20 At the Buddhist temple, construction had long since been halted due to lack of funds, but as Dorzhiev had brought back with him the Dalai Lama’s pledged contribution, which had been held up, as well as an additional sum from the Treasury of the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu, work could begin again. Though still incomplete, the first religious ceremony was held on 21 February 1913 to mark the tercentenary of the House of Romanov. It was also no doubt to demonstrate to benefactors that their money had been well used. For the occasion the portico was decorated with the national Rags of Russia and Tibet as well as with prayer Rags embroidered with Buddhist emblems. As the shrine was not yet ready, one was prepared in the vestibule; it had on it a Buddha-rupa ‘in royal attire’, water bowls and a gold candelabrum.

On the wall behind there were portraits of the Emperor, the Empress and the Heir Apparent, whom the Dalai Lama had lately declared to be a bodhisattVa because all attempts to give him a Christian baptism had mysteriously failed. ‘All the clergy wore picturesque robes of red and yellow, and brocaded head-dresses in the shape of Phrygian caps’,
wrote the Novoe Vremya reporter. ‘The ceremony consisted of prayers accompanied by [the ringing of 1 small bells.’
The Turning Point 1 909-1913 153 Among tho� in �ttendance were Bandido Khambo Lama Itigelov, P.K. Kozlov and his wife E. V. Kozlova-Pushkaryova, Princess Tundutova
�nd her son Dansan, various Russian Buddhists, several military officers Including a cenain General E, two pupils of the School of Jurisprudence and the Mongolian Prince Khandadorji, who had first been sent on �
m.

ission to St Petersburg in 191 1 and �
gain i.

n 1912. After the ceremony, Ingelov and Dorzhiev made speeches In which they attributed all credit for the occasion to the beneficence of the Russian Emperor.21 On the temporal level things did not go so well, for the current Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Dminievich Sazonov (1861-1927),22 was very much in favour of rapprochement with the British. He had visited England in September 1912 and later repeatedly declared his solemn intention of keeping His Majesty’s Government informed of all developments regarding Tibet. The British were panicularly concerned at this point by rumours of the Tibet-Mongolia Treaty, which, if it existed and was recognized, might lure Tibet into the Russian ambit. Sazonov assured Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, that he attached no imponance whatever to what Dorzhiev had done. He indeed doubted Whether Dorzhiev – of whom he spoke in ‘very uncomplimentary terms’

Officials told him that since he was a Russian national he could not be officially recognized as a representative of the Dalai Lama; and when he Went on to reveal that he had a letter from the Dalai Lama to the Emperor suggesting a joint Anglo-Russian protectorate over Tibet, he was told that Russia, who was bound by the terms of the 1907 convention, had no desire to enter into such an arrangement, nor was there any reason to suppose that Britain did either.H
Undeterred, in April he handed another memorandum to the Prime Minister, Count Vladimir Nicholaevich Kokovstov, which contained the proposals that he had outlined to Korostovets in Urga. We can safely assume that his overtures fell on equally stony ground here.

But still this inddatigable man would not give up. He next set off for
�estern Europe, intending to try to drum up suppon in various capitals, Including Paris – where he renewed his acquaintance with his old friend Deniker – Berlin, Rome and London.25 He cenainly got to Paris and perhaps Rome and Berlin, but London, as we have already discussed, is problematic. In any case, his efforts in Western Europe were as unfruitful as those in Russia had been, which is not at all surprising since war clouds were gathering and soon the dogs of war would be loose all over Europe.

Remote Tibet, a speck on the periphery of the Western consciousness at the best of times – something perhaps to dabble with if you had nothing better to do – now summarily vanished from all agendas.

Thus Agvan Dorzhiev’s Tibet diplomacy was finally defeated by that most inexorable of adversaries: history itself .

Last rites were celebrated over the bones of the Tibet-Mongolia Treaty at Simla in 1913-14, when Britain, China and Tibet finally gathered around the conference table to attempt to settle the vexatious Tibetan question. China and Britain were for different reasons very apprehensive about the implications of the treaty, though Charles Bell, an assistant to the British plenipotentiary, Sir Henry McMahon, was sceptical that it even existed. He asked for clarification from the Tibetan plenipotentiary, LOnchen Paljor Dorji Shatra – once deposed from high political office but now reinstated.

The gist of Shatra’s reply was that the Dalai Lama never authorized Dorzhiev to conclude any treaty with Mongolia. The letter given to Dorzhiev was of a general nature, asking him merely to work for the benefit of the Buddhist religion.

‘It is the custom for us Tibetans to write to everybody asking for help, for instance, in letters written to you yourself we frequendy made requests similar to that which the Dalai Lama made to Dorjieff.

Unfortunately, the draft of this letter cannot be traced now, and it is feared that it was destroyed when the Yuthok house was burnt down, as the Chikyab Khenpo [ Yuthok Kalon] was in charge of the records relating to the tour of the Dalai Lama in Mongolia and China.’l6 Bell seems to have taken Shatra’s spiel as solemn truth – another instance of his naivete where Tibetans were concerned. Clearly the treaty did exist, and Dorzhiev had been given plenipotentiary powers to negotiate and sign it: why then did the Tibetans repudiate it? Perhaps for pragmatic reasons – in which case they would not necessarily have seen tnemselves as lying so much as deferring to the honourable oriental convention of telling others what they want to hear.

Lev Berlin makes the somewhat starding claim that the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government invited Dorzhiev to take pan in the Simla Conference.27 He was unable to attend due to pastoral commitments in The Turning Point 1909-1913 155 Buryati� and K�
I�ykia, which is.

perhaps j�st as well, for he might have heard himself vlh6ed by the Chmese plempotentiary, Ivan Chen who b�amed the Younghusband Mission on the fact that the Dalai Larr:a had given ear to the advice of his Buryat ‘assistant’ rather than to that of the Amban, Yii-Kang.28 But by and large things went rather well for the Tibetans at Simla. The Chinese naturally prevaricated and tried all manner of slippery tactics. Their basic argument was that Tibet had been an integral part of China ever since it had been conquered by Genghis Khan. (The fact that the khan had been a Mongol, not a Chinese, does not seem to have been a problem for them.) The British and the Tibetans could not accept this.

Eventually a draft convention was drawn up which divided Tibet into two zones: Outer Tibet, to which the strict terms of the treaty applied, comprised the massive area west of the Yangtze frontier which was traditionally the ambit of the Lhasa Government, and Inner Tibet, where the Chinese could have a freer hand, consisted of various peripheral regions. Britain and China recognized the autonomy of Outer Tibet under Chinese suzerainty or nominal overlordship; the Tibetans there would be free to conduct their own internal affairs without Chinese interference, and whilst an Amban might be posted in Lhasa with a small escort, large numbers of Chinese troopS should not be sent. As regards trade, Britain was to have most-favoured-nation status, new regulations would be negotiated and the British Trade Agent in Gyantse would be entitled to make periodic visits to Lhasa ‘in connection with matters arising out of the 1904 Treaty’. Britain was also to arbitrate in the event of any disputes arising from the convention.

Ivan Chen strove until the eleventh hour to get a better deal for China but was 6nally obliged to capitulate and initialled the draft agreement.

His government at once repudiated his action, however, thereby cutting themselves out of the negotiations for the British and the Tibetans went on to make a direct agreement between themselves. This marked the beginning of a dose relationship between Britain and Tibet that was to last right Jown until Indian Independence in 1948. During that tirne Tibet enjoyed a long and fruitful period of relatively untroubled autonomy. Credit for this is usually attributed to the strength of character of the Great Thirteenth Dalai Lama -who had returned at last to Lhasa, never to be driven out again, in January 1913 – but much credit must also go to his chief adviser, Agvan Dorzhiev. Without Dorzhiev’s tireless efforts, Tibetan history would have taken a very different course .

1913 was a turning point for Dorzhiev. In the changing circumstances of the times, his efforts as a shuttle diplomatist were no longer required. Fading from the Tibetan scene, he subsequendy turned his main attention to his native Russia and his ambitious schemes for developing Buddhism there.

The Fall Of The House Of Romanov 1 914 – 1917

On 1 August 1914 Germany declared war on Russia. The confrontation had been building up for some time, for Germany needed to break up the Russian empire and gain access to its vast resources if she was to fulfil her own global ambitions. For Russia, a state already in internal disarray, a crisis of this magnitude was hardly to be welcomed, but at the very outset of hostilities the prospects looked favourable enough, for her war machine was, in terms of sheer manpower resources, second to none.

. .

Agvan Dorzhiev responded patriotically to the new situation by Joaning forces with Bandido Khambo Lama Itigelov to head a committee to raise funds for the war effon among the Buryats and the Kalmyks.1 A year later, in 1 915, their ‘AII-Buryat Committee for Collecting Funds for War Needs’ carried out a large amount of propaganda work in the East; this included the release of a document to the Buryats in their OWn language intended to ‘explain the imponance of the war for the people and the whole State’.2 A number of datsans in both Buryatia and Kalmykia were moreover ‘equipped’ – presumably as hospitals or convalescent homes3 – and throughout the war zhud-khurals or ceremonies for the success of Russian forces were held regularly at the Buddhist temple in Petrograd (as St Petersburg was renamed in 1915 ).4 Ironically, such activities were later held against Dorzhiev and cited as proof of alleged complicity with the imperial regime .

. Otherwise, it was the good lama’s habit at this time to spend each Wtnter engaged in religious and nationalist activities among the Buryats, and the rest of the year either in Kalmykia or in Petrograd .

Problems had continued to beset the temple even after building work Was resumed in 1913, among them being the objection of the Depanment of Foreign Creeds to certain aspects of the decoration of the facade. V.

V. Radlov argued strongly that a Buddhist temple without decoration would be a stark and styleless one, but as early as 1910 the architect Baranovsky had been obliged to tone down the original plan, exchanging the gilded bronze doors that he had initially specified for plain wooden ones, and subduing the capitals of the portico columns from golden to dark bronze. Most of all, however, officialdom objected to certain typical Tibetan Buddhist decorative motifs, for it feared that anything overly demonstrative might offend or even lead the local Orthodox astray. The main brunt of disapproval fell on the gyeltsen, the gilded barrel-shaped ornamenrs that characteristically adorn the roofs of Tibetan and Mongolian temples and which probably date back to the remote nomadic past; also the frieze of bronze-gilt mirror discs (tolli)
intended to frighten away evil spirits, and the gilded eight-spoked Wheel of the Dhanna flanked by two standing fallow deer that symbolizes the Buddha’s first sennon at Isipatana. The latter was not put up over the portico until 19 15, when a ganjira (pinnacle) was also placed on the roof of the rear tower secnon.5 Problems concerning the number of religious allowed to reside at the temple had also continued. In a letter of 15 March 1912 to A.

A. Makarov, the recently appointed Director of the Department of Foreign Creeds, Radlov tried to explain the essential nature of Buddhist religious buildings: ‘In the Buddhist world there is in general no separate meditation hall unlinked to a monastic community, since apart from a community a building of that kind would possess no raison d’etre’, he wrote. ‘Buddhist ceremonies are not conducted apart from religious persons and have to be carried out by the whole community. ‘6 His entreaties fell on deaf ears. The number of religious was finally fixed on 2 May 1914, by special order of Nicholas II himself, at nine lamas, including five monks, one of them the shiretui or abbot; all should reside at the temple ‘without the establishment … of a monastic community according to the fonns of the Lamaist cult’. In the same year, on Dorzhiev’s recommendation, three lamas were brought in from Trans-Baikalia, four from Astrakhan province and two from Stavropol province; thus ‘the Petersburg Buddhist Community was at last fonned, being a union of Lamaist monks and Lamaist lay-people, for the most part drawn from the Buryats and Kalmyks who lived in Petersburg’. 7 There is reason for believing, however, that Dorzhiev had no intention of observing the official limitation on residents, for W. A. Unkrig maintains that in 1914 twelve lamas were lodged in the temple and an increase of up to forty was planned. 8
“The temple was finally consecrated on 10 August 1915. No detailed acc?

un

.

t of the event is available apan from one by Friedrich Lustig, which IS problematic for the usual reasons. According to the eccentric Est�
nian bhikshu (monk), there was more than one ceremony, all of which were ‘on a grand scale’. For two weeks beforehand, the place was overwhelmed with ‘lavish gifts of flowers’, and a panoply of distinguished monks participated in preliminary daily chanting. The Petrograd Mint also struck 25,108 gold, silver and bronze commemorative medals. The Dalai Lama could not personally attend but sent a ‘powerful delegation’ from Tibet ‘to represent the Buddhist Papacy and assist the Tibetan Envoy Dorzhiev’. The Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu also sent a delegation of five monks from Urga; and more ‘monks of high standing’ came from Siberia.

King Rama VI was represented by the Siamese Minister in Petrograd, and the Emperor, Nicholas II, who, together with members of his family had been shown over [he building by Dorzhiev a few days earlier, was represented by the Prime Minister, I. L. Goremykin; N. Shcherbatov, the Minister of the Interior, also put in an appearance. In addition there were Kalmyk Cossaks and distinguished academics like S. F. Ol’denburg, O.

O. Rosenberg, V. L. Kotvich, F. I. Stcherbatsky, B. Y. Vladiminsov and A. D. Rudnev.9 The ‘invocation and benediction service’ was chanted by Dorzhiev assisted by three lamas from Tibet: ‘May the body, speech and mind of every sentient being be offered to the Buddhas of the ten directions!

May all beings be firmly established in Righteousness until they attain the great final Deliverance! May they be free from pain and keep all their faculties unimpaired! May they never tum back from the quest of Supreme Enlightenment!’ chanted the great lama – or so Lustig would have us believe – sprinkling the congregation with holy water and scattering coloured grains of rice, while his ‘unforgettable words echoed through the immense cathedral in one continuous stream of majesty and obeisance’. J0 There are cenainly some elements of truth in all this, but they are obscured in the usual froth of exaggeration. For instance, commemorative medals were indeed struck but they were of bronze, not of silver or gold, and bore the Tibetan name of the temple: Kun la brtse mdzad thub dbang dam chhos ‘byung b’ai gnas’ – ‘Source of the Holy Teaching of the Buddha, Who is All-Compassionate’ . 1 1 W.A. Unkrig also confirms that Dorzhiev presided at the ceremony, but he makes no mention of any other distinguished participants besides ‘two monks and a high official’, who were representatives ‘of the only country in the world
�here Buddhism is the state religion’, by which he seems to mean Slam (modem Thailand).J2 It is moreover highly unlikely that the COnsecration was as ostentatious as Lustig makes out for we know that deep prejudice still persisted and both Dorzhiev and his colleagues received death threats through the post as well as threats to blow up the temple. They were therefore concerned to preserve a low profile and, for at least five years after the consecration, ceremonies were held at the temple only irregularly for fear of attracting hostile attention. 1 ]
Dorzhiev’s temple, which is believed to have been dedicated to Kalachakra, still stands in the bleak northern suburbs of Leningrad.

One comes across it almost by surprise: a solid little edifice faced in dusky Finnish granite sitting demurely in its own minuscule compound.

It is surrounded by monotonously uniform residential buildings and a few high-rise blocks put up since World War II. Restless motor traffic roars around it all day. To have come through some seventy-five years of neglect and mistreaanent by an unsympathetic regime surely proves that it must possess at least some of the positive characteristics of its great founder, notably his tenacity and ability to survive.

Russian accounts describe the temple as a dugan or dukhang.

‘Dukhang’ is a Tibetan word denoting the large halls in which monastic assemblies take place, but in Mongolia and Buryatia it seems to be applied to rather more complex structures also including educational facilities, of which this is an example. The temple is in fact composed of twO distinct parts. There is what we might call the dugan proper, using the word in its Buryat-Mongol sense, which is a two storey structure that includes the main assembly hall. Behind that there is a narrow tower section of four storeys. The whole structure is clad in dark reddish-violet granite quarried in Finland and is aligned on a north-south axis as is characteristic of Tibetan buildings. Another Tibetan fearure is that its walls and windows taper upwards, which is what lends it its very solid appearance.

At the southern end of the dugan, approached through a tree-filled garden and up a flight of granite steps, is an imposing portico consisting of four square pillars with elaborate capitals surmounted by an ornamented pediment on which stands the Wheel of Life and fallow deer motif. Behind, on the front facade of the building, the casings, jambs and lintels of the eight windows have been finished off in grey granite.

The crowning entablature is of red brick with horiwntal bands of blue glazed bricks decorated with white circles. There are two gilded gyeltsen on gonkhang the roof, one at each comer of the facade. The topmost storey of the tower is also of red brick decorated with bands of g1aud tiles and was once crowned by the gilded ganjira. It is said that during the
�
on�
truction of this tower Dorzhiev used to urge the workmen ‘Make

�
t higher – still a bit higher!’ I .. Unfortunately it was built too high and In 1910 the authorities decreed that it be pulled down and rebuilt.

. The doors of the main portico lead into a vestibule and from there mto the main assembly hall, down which run two rows of square columns, again with elaborately decorated capitals. These in effect divide the interior space into three parts. In the temple’s heyday, the columns, which like everything else in the building would have been painted in bright colours, were adorned with rich brocaded hangings and thangka paintings depicting Tantric deities. Immediately in front of them were the padded seats upon which the lamas sat during ceremonies, the highest seats, which were reserved for the highest lamas, being at the front (north) end, near the shrine. On small tables in front of the shrine votive objects, offerings, holy books and other Lamaist paraphernalia would have been placed.

Though the assembly hall is devoid of windows, a mystic half-light originating in a skylight on the roof diffuses down into the room
�hrough a series of glazed skylights. From the start, however, unlike Its Tibeto-Mongolian prototypes, the building enjoyed the benefit of electric light – in ‘rather stylish fittings’, IS though nowadays these have
�n replaced by modem strip-lighting. An elaborate cornice tricked out In many vivid colours runs around the room, while on the floor a lotus motif is depicted in glazed tiles. There was also once a swastika motif but that was smashed up early in World War II because of its Nazi associations.

IOn the floor above the main assembly hall there is a large, open area in which is to be found a glazed partition surrounding one of the skylights; this is decorated with the Eight Auspicious Symbols,16 said to have been designed by Nicholas Roerich. Along the east and west walls, meanwhile, there are cells for the resident lamas.

At the front of the building, on the mezzanine behind the portico, there are some rooms which, according to Unkrig, were originally reserved for Khambo Bandido Lama ltigelov. Two shuttered internal windows here enable activities in the main assembly hall to be discreetly viewed from above. �
The main shrine, though apparently a large niche in the north wall of the assembly hall, is in fact situated on the ground floor of the tower section. Around its external periphery runs a frieze with a legend in stylized Sanskrit lettering. In the early years, it was dominated by a great 8uddha-rupa some three metres high, with an ornamental surround, which would have been copiously draped with khada. It is rumoured to have been made in Hamburg and was of clay or plaster, though there were plans to replace it with a bronze or gilded replica.17 To the right and left of the rupa stood wooden cases containing smaller figures and various sacred objects, and all around were more elaborate hangings.

To one side of the shrine there is a smaller room, while on the other side stairs give access to the upper storeys of the tower. Andreyev maintains that immediately above the main shrine there was a second, smaller shrine room in which were to be found a sandalwood figure of a seated Shakyamuni Buddha, donated by King Rama VI of Siam, and one of Maitreya, the Coming Buddha, donated by G. A. Planson, the Russian Consul in Bangkok. Both subsequently found their way into the collection at the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism at Kazan Cathedral on the Nevsky Prospekt. The Maitreya, which was recently discovered in the museum’s attics, unfortunately missing its pedestal and head, has now been returned to the temple.18 There are hopes that other treasures will be returned in due COu.rse. 19 There is another room above this second shrine room, which is currendy used as a classroom and dining-room for novices. Then, at the top, about the level of the dugan roof, there is the gonkhang or protector chapel itself, to which access would have been restricted. This had thangka paintings on its walls depicting wrathful deities like Mahakala and Yamantaka or Vajrabhairava; also a shrine upon which stoOd a figure of Pelden Lhamo who, along with Mahakala, was one the temple’s most important dharmapalas. Finally, set high in the east and west walls are windowless cells reached by fixed metal ladders; these were put in for retreat purposes.

According to Unkrig, the temple had the uniq� facility of a ‘steam kitchen’ in which offerings of butter, flour and sweets were prepared, these ‘in their varying forms’ being such as would ‘do any of our confectioners credit’.20 It was also provided with a central heating system – oral reports talk of a hot-air rather than a hot-water system –
run from a boiler in the extensive and cavernous cellars, where reputedly during World War II hand-grenades were manufactured. There was also a library – Dorzhiev’s own archives were lodged here – and storerooms for ‘utensils, pictures and musical instruments’. The temple’s ritual objects were in fact ordered by Dorzhiev himself from specialist workshops in Peking and Dolon-Nor and paid for with ‘his own family gold’; they arrived in St Petersburg in two sizeable consignments in June and November 1910.21 After the consecration of the temple, Dorzhiev went into retreat to perform
.

t�e sadhanas (yogic practices) of Manjuvajra, Guhyasamaja, the Medlcme Buddha and Kalachakra.22 He does not specify where this �ook place, but it could conceivably have been at the Petrograd temple Itself, possibly in one of the retreat cells in the gonkhang.

Then in the autumn he went east to adjudicate in a monastic disagreement that had blown up around what in his memoirs he calls the ‘T ungkhen Khering Monastery’. He almost certainly means the Kiren Datsan, founded in 1817 in or near the Cis-Baikalian village of T ungka which lies south-west of Irkutsk in the direction of Tannu-Tuva. Th; main cause of controversy seems to have been the question of relocating the monastery at some new site. Out of three possibilities, Dorzhiev himself favoured a ‘quiet and radiant place in front of Mondarga’,
greatly appreciated by local yogis for its wholesome orientation and penchant for manifesting miraculous signs. ‘I think it would be good to go there’, he suggested.

Local opinion, however, divided into two factions, conservatives and progressives: the one whipping up confusion through wild talk bred of fear of ‘losing their monastic lineage and sponsors’, the other simply getting on with preparations for moving to a new site. Dorzhiev says that some of the latter were connected with the ‘Kh’oi-mo faction’, which
�uggests that they became sponsors of the Koimor Datsan, actually built In the early twenties on the other side of the Irkut river from the Kiren; it is usually described as Dorzhiev’s own second Cis-Baikalian foundation.

The fracas was not easily resolved: quarrels broke out and malicious things were said. Even when some sort of reconciliation was eventually achieved, bad feeling continued to fester beneath the surface, and it Was only when some sacred images were damaged that the contending factions were jerked to their senses.lJ
Unfortunately, just as the Buddhists of Petrograd were rejoicing in the consecration of their temple, Russian fortunes in the world war were Undergoing a dramatic decline. In 1915, after the enemy had launched a Successful offensive in May, the public at home were shocked to hear of terrible reversals and troop losses at the front. Many concerned and patriotic groups rallied to help the legions of wounded that were returned home, including the Petrograd Buddhists, for the four-storey stone house in the temple grounds was turned into a hospital for Buryat servicemen.

There was also a general clamour to pinpoint the causes of the debacle – and to find scapegoats. It quickly became clear that there had been gross mismanagement. in particular a serious failure in the supply of munitions – Russian troops had even on occasion been pitched into battle armed only with bayonets – but. looked at in the broader context. this was just one of a concatenation of secondary ailments that devolved from one central miasma: the imperial regime itself.

During the Cold War era. popular opinion in the West has been in the habit of thinking of Soviet Russia as a repressive and politically flawed state. What we tend to forget is that its precursor. Imperial Russia. was regarded in much the same way by our ancestors. After all. most Western European nations. if they had not actually abandoned monarchy. had by the rum of the century at least restricted its powers. bowed to basic notions of human rights and established the rudiments of representative government. Not so Russia. The Emperor doggedly continued to rule his gigantic swathe of territory. with its ethnically diverse millions, as though it were a private estate. He was like some Eastern pasha: beholden to no-one (except in theory God). advised by whoever gained his favour. his utterances enjoying the status of law.

his whims and caprices sacrosanct; and just as he was unnaturally elevated. so the vast mass of his ordinary subjects were correspondingly degraded. Even though freed from formal serfdom in 1861. the muzhik or Russian peasant was still at the tum of the present century bound to his local commune and debarred from moving elsewhere without penrusslon.

Like its successor. the imperial regime was also maintained by fear. and control exercised through a highly developed apparatus of administration and repression which included a police force augmented by a Corps of Gendarmes and a security police. the Okhrana; a colossal army; periodic censorship; a harsh system of punishments for anyone daring to defy the autocracy; a regional netWork of governors appointed directly by the throne; and a hierarchic bureaucracy. responsible directly to the Emperor. which not only loyally ran the country according to his ukazyi (dietats) but monitored. supervised and regulated every aspect of its life.

This system of government just had to change if Imperial Russia.

essentially a rural country populated by millions of backward and apathetic peasants. was to be pulled into the twentieth century. Nor was this just the insight of a few revolutionary exrrcmists – though these naturally attracted most attention with their dramatic terrorist actions – but ran right across the social spectrum. Unfortunately.

Nicholas II. though by no means a natural autocrat, had his head resolutely turned in the opposite direction. He believed that he had on assuming the throne, been invested with a sacred duty to maintain’ the absolute powers of the monarchy intact. In this he was wholeheanedly endorsed by his wife, Alexandra Fyodorovna, a retiring but proud and passionate woman, devoted to her family, but unable to bear the thought of her son, the Tsarevich Alexey, being deprived of the slightest ponion of his binhright. Thus Nicholas and Alexandra studiously spumed the advice of their more forward-looking advisors and strove instead to fend off the inevitable.

The first rude awakening came in 1905. The revolutionary events of that year forced Nicholas to make political concessions; but, strangely perverse man that he was, he afterwards refused to face the reality of what he had done and tried to go on playing the autocrat. He was panicularly concerned to outwit or limit the effectiveness of the Duma.

It was hardly to be wondered, then, that even the more moderate elements there were driven over to the left out of sheer frustration,
�nd its early sessions, seething with dissent, often degenerated into httle more than a platform for the dissemination of radical and even revolutionary propaganda.

During the years immediately following, up to the outbreak of war, Russia enjoyed a period of relative stability. The economy was relatively healthy; the rural folk were relatively prosperous and happy; there was a rapid advance in industrialization in a few places; and there was even something of a renaissance in the ans. But the old root problems lay dormant beneath the bland facade, and it only needed the military reverses of 1915 to reactivate them fully. Unfortunately, after the assassination of the last prime minister of ability, Piotr Stolypin, the imperial couple, deeply suspicious by nature and so inclined to value sycophancy above ability, appointed lesser men to high office

But the shock of 1915 did initially have some salutary effects. M�
ch needed military reforms did take place and, as a consequence, RUSSian f

�
onunes improved at the front. Unfortunately serious problems then to assen themselves at the rear as the cities were hit by economic IIlfta disc tion and acute shonages of food and fuel. This led to intense social ontent.

Rejecting all advice, Nicholas responded to the events of 1915 by making himself Commander-in-Chid of the Anny, which caused him to be away from Petrograd at anny headquarters at Moghilev for long periods. There he began to suffer from insomnia, depression and anxiety, for which in 1916 the Empress sent him a sedative concocted by Dr Badmayev. This again was thought to contain hashish,24 in which case the Russian Anny during World War I would have been under the technical command of a “stoned’ man.

With the Emperor away from the capital, the Empress was able to have a freer hand in politics. This was disastrous, for she was highly unpopular with 1M Russian people on account of her Gennan birth and at the same time ever more under the domination of her dubious “friend’, Grigori Rasputin. This in tum allowed the philandering starctz to begin to interfere directly in politics himself, to the extent of influencing the appointment of ministers – Shinner and Protopopov were his appointees
-and also of affecting the conduct of the war, which from the stan he had opposed. This provoked much annoyance in a society already in crisis, particularly among monarchists who viewed the unsavoury commoner’s closeness to the Empress as a dishonour. A plot was therefore hatched and the starctz was murdered in highly dramatic circumstances by the dandyish Prince Yusupov, aided and abetted by a most distinguished gang of fellow conspirators.

Nicholas, who returned from the capital towards the end of 1916, was deeply shocked to find so many dose friends and even family members involved in the murder. He severed ties with many and retired with his wife and children, to a reclusive existence at Tsarskoye Selo. There he lingered, a confused and tonnented man, protected by the sycophantic Protopopov from the almost universal clamour for his removal.

Naturally, life at the temple was not untouched by these events. An interesting though perhaps not entirely objective picture of what things were like there in 1916 is provided by a letter which the British Trade Agent in Gyantse in southern Tibet intercepted in November. It had been sent to the Dalai Lama by a retired Russian Anny officer, Staff Captain Mikhail Yakovich Orlov, asking for pennission to live and study the “wisdom of the ages’ in Lhasa – and please to send financial help too. For the past two and a half years, Orlov wrote, he had been living in Petrograd on a small government pension and had frequendy visited the “pagoda’, not to attend services but to pray. However:
… lately, when I went to the director of the house, I was refused by him to
�ter the pagoda, his refusal being based on the fact that they had a commission In the Academy of Sciences under the Presidency of Mr Radlovim [sic) to whom I should make application … I do not know on what grounds
‘

the above-mentioned monk based his answer, but I must state that I never received such an answer when the lamas DJIK DJAT and DODJIEF (who was born beyond the Baikals) lived there . ..

There is here only one Buddhist monk. A hostile �
nd serious attitude is being taken up by the female sex, which strives to appear In all respects similar to the male sex, and introduces disrurbances, which are most irritating to the monks and make life in the Shrine meaningless. Both religious services and life in the Shrine are impossible. Under the excuse, at one time of repairs, at another of attendance of the sick [undoubtedly a reference to [he use of [he temple as a hospital for the Burya[ wounded), the Shrine can in no way fulfil its lofty purpose.25
‘DJIK DJAT’ must be Sodnom Zhigzhitov, the abbot of the temple, who died mysteriously of typhus in the early twenties; ‘DODJIEF’
mUst of course, as the British authorities surmised, be Dorzhiev. The obstreperous women may have been feminists of some kind or other, not one would imagine pious Buryat ladies but perhaps radical or re�
o�utionary ones. As for the presence of only one monk at the temple, thiS IS explained by the fact that during the winter of 1916/17 most of the lamas had returned to their homelands as they were unable to bear the high cost of living brought about by the ongoing shortages.26 Not all Petrograders could leave the city, however, and their discontent, fOCused not only against the shortages but against war itself and the Emperor’s government, began to intensify to bursting point. In Febru�ry 1917, open demonstrations broke out in the streets of Petrograd, which
,,-:ere

.

SOOn joined by dissident workers from the industrial Vy�rg distt:tct. Soldiers, mostly raw recruits from the country temporanly garnsoned in the city, were detailed to quell the unrest, but they refused to carry out orders and began to fraternize with the demonstrators, whose grievances they understood and in many cases shared. Karlis Tennisons sampled the atmosphere of these turbulent times when he walked through the city some days later:
On March 10, dismays were most real and pressing. By noon. tens of thousands of people filled the streets near the Kazan Cathedral, and around Alexander III
lne monument there was political speech-making. The mounted police opened fire.

re were screams and groans, and the crowd dispersed.

27 Approaching Liteinyi Prospekt, he noticed that the cinemas were still

crowded 

drunk

and that many workers, who had just received their pay, were and uttering ‘unprintable’ oaths. Later he found Dr Badmayev sitting in a sombre, thoughtful mood in his office. ‘Some of our leading politicians are persons with a natural tendency to evade the truth’,
Badmayev declared. ‘They play into the hands of the cruel enemy. I
fear it is too late to right the wrong. The flaming utterances of Skobelev and Kerensky, the Duma representatives, can only ruin Russia.’
‘Have you told anyone about these ideas of yours?’ Tennisons asked.

‘Of course, I told Mr Protopopov. I told Mr Dobrovolsky. I told Mr Shcheglovitov [President of the Council of State]. But no one seems to be capable of formulating a constructive programme. ’28 chose Early in the crisis, the Emperor, estranged from reality as ever, unwisely to leave the capital for consultations at army headquaners. While there, he initially refused to believe reports of mounting chaos in the capital, and even when at last convinced of its reality, he vacillated, causing a power vacuum to open up. The Duma was best placed and qualified to fill it, but even though its members had been clamouring for fuller political powers for years, when offered them they too dithered, daunted by the sheer enormity of the responsibility – and afraid too that if the imperial regime regained control its wrath would descend upon them.

The Duma also now had a rival for power in the Petrograd Soviet, a loose convention of local socialist workers and soldiers, augmented by unelected sympathizers from various parts of Russia – the prototype, in fact, of numerous other soviets that quickly began springing up aU over the country. This body was reluctant to seize power too, but for a different reason: its members believed that the right moment for fullscale revolution had not yet arrived. Though the Duma and the Soviet were by no means of one mind in their political objectives, the leaders of the Duma decided that they must gain the Sovia’s suppon if they were to make the bold step of seizing some measure of power. They managed to do this – or, more precisely, they gained the suppon of the Soviet’s executive committee, Ispolkom, which was dominated by Mensheviks
(a faction of the Social Democrats). A Provisional Government was then established under the chairmanship of Prince Georgii Evgmevich lvov. Unfortunately, this quiet, grey-bearded man, who had done much good work in the zcmstvO movement – the zemstva were district and provincial ministtrs.

councils – was not made of the stuff of revolutionary prime As the British agent R. H. Bruce lockhan put it, ‘A man of The Fall of the House of Romano” 1 91 4-1 91 7 169 great charm, he would have made an excellent chairman of London County Council. ’29 The Provisional Government was essentially a stopgap body intended to

.

rule the country until a proper Constituent Assembly, elected on an uDiversal franchise, could be convened. Unfortunately, while its members Were very adept at voicing dissent and bandying hypothetical political proposals and programmes, they had little grasp of the practicalities of government; so, while they freely axed large sections of the old apparatus, including the police, they · set up nothing substantial in �eir place. Though suppon rallied to them from all walks of Russian bfe, even from former stalwarts of the old regime, what actually now happened was that the country began to fall apan – which, considering that it was still at war, was dire indeed.

There was also a high price to pay for the Soviet’s suppon: Ispolkom began to play an increasingly intrusive role in affairs. It even drafted and circulated its own radical directives to the army, which profoundly affected the already shaky discipline at the front – there had been large numbers of desenions for some time. Also, to please Ispolkom, a general political amnesty was announced, so terrorists and hardened professional revolutionaries, many of whom were in internal exile or ab�oad, were free to return to Perrograd. In his dingy lodgings on the Splegelgasse in Zurich, Vladimir I1ich U1yanov began to organize his transit across German territory; in New York, Lev Davidovich Bronstein began to pack his bags.

The Emperor did not return directly to Petrograd from army headqUaners. His special train was divened to Pskov, where pressure was brOUght to bear on him by high military officers, notably Ge.neral AIekseyev, to recognize the Provisional Government and to abdicate. �arching his conscience, he was initially reluctant �
o take this

.

fatef�
l rep, but after agonizing for some time, finally did so, naming hiS brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich, as his successor. In the b vent, Mikhail, whose shoulders were no broader than those of his rother, bowed out too, so the monarchy effectively �me to an end.

On one hand filled with a deep sense of shame and failure, on the other relieved that the incubus of absolute responsibility had been removed, It Was plain Colonel Nicholas Romanov who was reunited with his family at T sarskoye Selo some time afterwards. Unfortunately, though the �rovisional Government favoured sending him out of the country, the Increasingly powerful Ispolkom insisted that the imperial family be detained lest they become a focus for counter-revolution; it was therefore to the indignity of house arrest that the former Emperor retUrned .

Having personaUy known him and fully, if not fulsomely, extolled his vinues at the consecration of the Buddhist temple less that two years before, one might in fact have expected Agvan Dorzhiev to have shed a compassionate Buddhist tear for the fate of Nicholas Romanov. Not so, if we are to believe the evidence of his memoirs: these suggest that he accepted the news with total dispassion, laying the blame directly on the association with Rasputin. He even writes with sympathy of ‘the worthy Kerensky [who took over the premiership from Lvov in July 1 917] and other honest men who seized the capital’;lO and he inserts an apocalyptic meditation on the evils of monarchy (and government in general), which is loaded with distinct resonances of contemporary radical propaganda:
From the time of King Mangkut11 until the present day, kings and their subjects have IlOl managed to live in a harmonious way, with [the subjects] honouring me- above them and [the rulers] loving those below. Latterly governments
… have overpowCTed [their subjects] wi.da the sole c:lnire to oppress, torment and devour them. This intoluable situation prevails over most of the world.

The subjects too do fK)( hold their lords in high regard. and [consequently]
evil behaviour increases gready. In particular, hunger [for power] between govmunmts grows and they come to rely on jealousy and competitiveness alone. They drive their innocent subjects into the hands of their enemies and let them be killed. And as the seas of blood rise, wrong-minded and heartless governments probferate. Whenever those who are honest start to work for the suffering people with compassion and no regard for their own life, they are subjected to such intolerable things as murder and imprisonment.12 Friedrich Lustig paints an entirely contradictory picture. According to him, Dorzhiev was away from Petrograd until 2 May 1917. As he seems to have amended his dates to the Gregorian Calendar (NS), this would have been towards the end of April according to the Julian (OS). When Karlis Tennisons met him at the railway station that day, he seemed outwardly in good humour, but it soon became apparent that he was inwardly troubled and ‘quite heanbroken’ by the calamity which had befallen the Imperial House of ROmaDOV. The first thing he wished to do was present the Dalai Lama’s compliments to Nicholas, and to this end he went to sec Paul Milyukov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the new ProviUonai Government.ll Milyukov received Dorzhiev, who no doubt presented himscU as the official representative of the Dalai Lama, The Fall of the House of Romanov 1 91 4-1 917 171 a�d told him that the Dalai Lama’s compli.

m�
N
nts would be conveyed to I�hol. pe as by A. F. Kerensky, currently Minister of Justice, who went nodlcally to Tsarskoye Selo.

The.

interview must have taken place within about ten days of Dorzhlev’s return, for Milyukov, a leading supponer of the war was �orced to resign on the night of 4/5 May (0 S). The Kadet leader had
‘ been In the forefront of liberal agitation for many years; he was a patriotic and SCholarly man, and he was noted for his energy. But he had lately been �der intense pressure – there had actually been demonstrations against him – and his feelings must have rubbed off on Agvan Dorzhiev, for the lama returned sombre-faced from the interview, surrounded by clouds of foreboding for the future of Russia.

Shonly afterwards, Lustig maintains, Dorzhiev and Tennisons were a�ally invited to a reception given by Prince Lvov at which the sanguine Pnme Minister explained to a ‘smirking’ Dorzhiev that ‘an era of real pro�ess has come to our great Motherland’ – until surges of strident m�slc drowned his monologue. “‘How perfectly calm and contented Pnnce Lvov felt as he spoke to me,” Dorzhiev exclaimed, laughing Uproariously, when they had returned to the temple. “What a wonderful man! So there are no crises in Petrograd, no mobs yelling imprecations, and no German agents preaching defeatism. Good heavens! What a frame of mind!”’34 lUstig’s account, clearly subject to its own pro-monarchist biases, mUSt be treated with the usual caution; but even so it is a useful foil to Dorzhiev’s own record which has its biases too, for he wrote it at . ,
a brne when he was anxious to present himself as a loyal supponer of the new order with few regrets for the passing of the old. Taking everything into account, it is doubtful that he felt no pity for the personal fate of Nicholas II, though at the same time i.

t is q�
ite li�e1y that he had been entenaining mixed feelings about the Impenal.

r�me for SOme time. After all, Nicholas had done nothing very poslOve to help the Tibetan cause _ indeed he had finally abandoned it – and the irnperial bureaucracy had cenainly hindered the completion of the Petrograd temple. The autocracy was funhermore closely aligne� with the Onhodox Church, which had consistently thrown obstacles In the W�y of his Buddhist missionary dfons. . .

r Es�ally in this country of Russia’, Dorzhiev wrote In one �f �IS
a�e .

vltuperative moments, ‘the long-haired followers of the Chnsnan rehgJon were, with their growing power, persecuting all the adherents of the countless other religions . . . Even the Tsar a”d his ministers were tk�ved by these people.’35 But it was probably not merely dissatisfaction with the old order that influenced his thinking at this crucial time. Despite the prevailing political chaos, the shonages and the suffering, a revolution had taken place, and revolutions have a buoyant, hopeful, liberational aspect that touches those millennia I yearnings to which most people with any imagination are susceptible. In this case, moreover, the deadening hand of an iron autocracy was being released, so energies that had been thwaned for centuries could at last begin to express themselves.

The air was full of exciting possibilities …

From the time of his first visit to Europe, Agvan Dorzhiev had shown that he was not an ossified reactionary, hostile to all change, but a progressive, interested in the modem Western world and concerned to work with it. Even at around the age of sixty-three he probably retained enough visionary imagination to respond positively to the liberational spirit of the times – and he would also have been heanened by the enlightened stance that the Provisional Government had adopted on the issue of religion. The preferential status of the Onhodox Church was to go, opening up prospects for what looked like a new era of spiritual freedom and tolerance; at the same time there was official sympathy for the aspirations of the national minorities.

So a subde transformation began to become apparent around 1917.

The Buddhist monk Agvan Dorzhiev, who had at one time hob-nobbed with great autocrats like the Dalai Lama of Tibet, the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu of Urga and Emperor Nicholas II, was changing – not into an out-and�ut revolutionary on the left wing of the Social Democrat or Socialist Revolutionary panics, but at least into some kind of liberal, committed to forward thinking notions like democracy, social justice, reform and the ‘scientific’ viewpoint currendy fashionable among Russian intellectuals.

The World Turned On Its Head 1917 – 1918

Dorzhiev was not content to remain on the sidelines during the momentous revolutionary year of 1917. He firstly joined with Badzar Baradin and Sodnom Zhigzhitov, the abbot of the Petrograd temple, in the establishment of a Buryat-Kalmyk Committee in Petrograd.

This shon-lived initiative, which proclaimed itself ‘the central body administering the affairs of state construction in Buryatia and Kalmykia’,l had a rival in the Buryat National Committee (Burnatskom), which was fOUnded in March 1917 with the aim of ‘uniting the leading Ir kutsk and Trans-Baikal Buryats in their struggle for “national autonomy” and Protection of their lands from confiscation by Russians’.2 Burnatskom’s members included most of the leading Buryat intellectUals – Zhamtsarano, Tsybikov, Rinchino, Bogdanov and, so one source maintains, Baradin –
and established its headquaners at Chita, with a branch at Irkutsk.

and a representative in Petrograd. It was this representative, Dashi Sampl lon, Who reponed at a Burnatskom congress, held at Chita between 23 a�d 25 April, that the Buryat-Kalmyk Committee maintained a conservanve a�ent in Petrograd, a wealthy Irkutsk Buryat named Khankhasaev, who did not represent Burnatskom’s interests but merely lobbied for a r�rn to the principles of the old Speransky legislation and the r:eco”:struCtlon of the steppe dumas. Burnatskom’s platform was more radi�l: It �an�ed an entirely new internal order and an entirely new relanons�lp �Ith the Russian Government. Also it seems that Khankhasaev maantaaned no relationship with the soviets. On the basis of Sampil�
n’s report, B
Urnatskom sent a telegraph to Prince Lvov informing hIm that the Buryat-Kalmyk Committee did not represent them.

I� is clear, therefore, that the Buryat-Kalmyk Commi�ee ,-“as not a radi�l group but well to the right of Burnatskom, whIch Itself was a ml.ddle-of-the-road organization, acceptable to most.

Bury�ts but definitely not radical enough for those on the far Left, andudang the Bolsheviks, who had their own organization, the Central Executive Committee of Siberian Soviets (Tsentrosibir), though this and its main rivals were composed primarily of Russians rather than Buryats .

It may have been in connection with his work for the Buryat-Kalmyk Committee that Agvan Dorzhiev made the journey to the lower Volga region which Friedrich Lustig describes.

Tennisons, who as a Buddhist chaplain to the Russian Army had been at the front – he had wimessed. among others, the famous Battle of Tannenberg – and was going, at Dorzhiev’s suggestion, to recuperate at a mountain spa in Georgia, travelled with Dorzhiev to Rostov-on-Don via Moscow, Orel, Kursk and Kharkov. Frustratingly, the trains they used were sometimes slow and usually very crowded, mainly with military personnel; also, though Dorzhiev had managed to procure first-class tickets, first-class facilities were often not available – further evidence of the breakdown caused by the February Revolution.

Having. however, learned the ‘technique of acceptance’ as pan of the Buddhist monastic discipline, the two bhikshus ‘yielded themselves to the situation’; though Tmnisons admits that the journey was not completely devoid of charming interludes; on one slow train with creaking axles a Ukrainian lad played an accordion memorably, and there was also the temptingly prepared tea of the Ukraine to savour.

During the journey, Dorzhiev took the opponunity to sketch out his latest views on the future of Buddhism in Russia:
In the opinion of the learned Patriarch, Buddhist monasticism would not be able to remain merely contemplative, self�trcd, or aloof, but, taking into account time, place, and circumstance, would have to move on with the vital current of our modem agr.l Arriving at last at Rostov-on-Don, the bustling industrial centre and wheat pon near where the quietly flowing Don enters the Sea of Azov, Dorzhiev and Tennisons put up at a local hotel: a place distinguished, in manne Lustig’s account, for the lavishness of its floral displays and the mild rs of its waiters. The great lama planned to stay for two or three days here in his ‘pretty suite of rooms’ before going on to visit his choira in Astrakhan province. Tennisons, on the other hand. resumed his journey to Georgia the following day after an emotional farewell with his mentor. They did not in fact sec each other again until 1 920 .

yery soon afterwards, Dorzhiev showed up in eastern Siberia to take part m the second of four All-Buryat Congresses that took place that year. At these, various administrative, legislative, judicial, cultural, economic and religious maners were debated in anticipation of the convening of the long-awaited Constituent Assembly.4 This second one was convened at Gusinoye Ozero Datsan by the two Buryat leaders, Elbek Dorji Rinchino
(c. 1 885-1937) and Mikhail Nicholaevich Bogdanov ( 1878-1 919).5 It ran from 7 to 15 June (0 S) and followed an earlier conference held at Chita in May, which, according to the British communist, G. D.

R. Phillips, ‘put forward very mild demands for the establishment of a Buryat steppe “duma” or “parliament” and certain educational and land reforms’. 6 By Dorzhiev’s account, religion rather than politics dominated the agenda at the Gusinoye Ozero congress; in fact, he maintains that the eVent was convened to stem a general decline in spiritual standards among the clergy:
even among the Sangha (Community of Buddhist monks), there were those who, PQUess out of desire for wealth and enjoyment, would terrorize households, take ion of their goods and make the people their servants. �y did not engage in the activities of learning, refkcrion or meditation, but wasted their lives for the sake of worldly pleasures. Moreover, they did not teach their students, SO that although the mere name (of student) was used. in fact srudents were in such decline that they were virtually non-existent. � majority of teachers were interested only in honours and food; and, in most instances, no effort was made to improve the quality of uaining and students. Thus [my counuy) had become a place of which in all respects I could only be ashamecF
�pecjfically, the congress raised the notion that a comminee be set up III Petrograd to look after the interests of the Buddhist church, and It Was hoped that the orientalists of the capital would lend their support
. . .

to the 1t.8 Also, probably because of fears of what might happen to I
t an CUrrently lawless climate the Petrograd temple was declared a property f th ‘ . h the � e Buryat-Mongol people, while the two anallary oU5eS �n Site, built by Dorzhiev himself but technically belonging to the TI�an
�io� were earmarked as hostels for Buryats and Ka�Yks stu -r�g III the capital. Nothing was done to implement these �easlons �n b e follOwing year due to the further political upheavals In the caPI�, .

ut then Donhiev did contact the architect Richard Berzen about buddi ng a third house and a crematorium at the rear of the temple.’
Though Donhiev must have had a hand in some of these measures himself, he does not seem to have been too impressed ceedin with the P:i gs: ‘Certain people who did not want this to happen cau

disturbances', he says, 'and the event was a fiasco'.l° It is tempting 
to assume that he means hard leftist elements, panicularly Bolsheviks 
and their fellow travellers, who were natural rivals to the bourgeois 
nationalists, liberals and Buddhists that had dominated developments 
in the Buryat lands since the February Revolution. In fact, he is more 
likely to mean the conservative Buddhist clergy and their right-wing 
allies at the other extreme of the political spectrum: the predatory 
'noyons and lamas' of whom G. D. R. Phillips writes so disparagingly. 
These would undoubtedly have objected to the reformist views that he 
no doubt expounded with some force. 
  Also discussed at the Second AII-Buryat Congress was the intention 
of the Provisional Government to overhaul the statutes that regulated 
the Buddhist lamas of eastern Siberia in order to bring them in line 
with the new liberal spirit. A commission was to be set up under 
Professor S. A. Kodariyevsky, the Minister of Foreign Creeds in the 
Provisional Government, and would include Professor S. F. Ol'denburg, 
then Minister of Public Education, and representatives of various 
government deparunents and of the Buddhist clergy and laity. I I The 
congress elected Agvan Dorzhiev to the staff of the commission along 
with D. Sampilon, R. Bimbayev, S. Zhigzhitov, S. Tsybiktarov and B. 
Baradin, and they were furnished with instructions 'defining the will of 
the Buryat people as to their religious affairs', which they were to submit 
to the commission. These advocated the liberation of the Buryat Buddhist 
church from state interference and control (to as great an extent as the 
law permined); also the establishment of more democratic procedures 
of self-government for both the church as a whole and for the individual 
datsans based on freely and secretly elected congresses, councils and 
comminees. 
  Dorzhiev seems to have been generally pleased with the outcome of the 
Kodariyevsky Commission's work. 'Without [indulging inJ close-minded 
pettiness about our doctrines, we were able to revise our customs while 
confonning to our precepts', he wrote.12 
  His hopes that the national aspirations of his Buryat people would 
also have been encouraged when in August the Provisional Government's 
Foreign Minister, M. I. Tereshchenko, chaired a special conference on the 
oppressed indigenous peoples of Siberia. S. F. Ol'denburg is reponed as 
taking pan in this body too.1l

In the autumn of 1917, Dorzhiev made his usual annual pilgrimage back to his Buryat homeland and spent the winter of 1917/18 there. In

193_image_0.png
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Trans-Balkalia Ius-tern Sibenai.

3 JIIglns-k)’ Olkln!oky Datsan, founded In the earl)’ 19th centul’}-, A BUl’}’at steppe te(11�
simIlar to (he now rUined Arsag.al Datsan where Donh,e\ spent hiS formame years.

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5 The distingUIshed Russian Buddhist

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scholar Fyodor Stcherbarsky In Urga, Trans.8alkaha, alter his m�nng there wllh the 13th Dalal Lama In 1905.

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front row with, on hIs left, Ch’she Norzunov. SrcherbatSky �wlth moustache) IS ‘”
s«ond-from-back row, bang the camerJ., besIde a group of dlsnngUished Onen[3li¢
members of the BUilding Commm�. Dunng the FIrst World War the Temple was uSC’
panly as a hO!Jopuai and a small group of nUr)omg Sisters can be seen to the right of dI
photograph. In the back row arC’ BUl’}at soldiers.

II First G thr ctnrre

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d
” Others prrsent mclude Tsyren Dorzhl (0 the left of Dorzhlev). later arrested unng the pogrom of 1935, Zham(sarra o, 8aradm, and P.K. Kozlov.

11 n13n�b r.untmg of The \.’ heel of J ‘fe BhJ�al:hakra. comml …. ioned by Dnnhle� m 192� from O�lr Bada}·e�’.

200_image_0.png
201_image_0.png
201_image_1.png

15 The First All-Soviet Congress of Buddhists, Moscow, 20th-28th January Ovshe Norzunov is on his left.

of Canzan Norboyev, sixth incarnation of Ganzhirva-Gegen, on the high lama’s throne in the Leningrad Temple.

1- Danzan Norboye\ with pupils on the steps of the Lenmgrad Temple. Summer

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18 Dorzhle. Danzan ;o..:orbole\ and O\She l”‘orzuno\ seated at the entrance

202_image_1.png

19 DorzhlC’v in his own private room in

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203_image_1.png

the early 1930s.

21 Lama Zhaltsanov, one o( the lamas

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204_image_1.png

arrested at the Lt-mngrad temple In 1935.

11 I>c..nhle\ rhott,.u.lphcd In hL\ nan\t fun .. -fULL…th.t mortl\ N-I{‘rc hi, Jc.lth.

23 Yun George N., Roench ‘seated centre\ In Ulan Udr: In 1958.

205_image_0.png
205_image_1.png

The group Includes Bidya Dandaron far left, back row), and K.M.

Geraslmo\’a ‘at nght of standing groupl. Photograph probably taken at the Insnrue of Sciennfi, R�arch.

24 A group ot lamas photographed out.slde the Agmsh Datsan, near

205_image_2.png

25 Fnronch Lusng Ashm Ananda” Buddhist Archbishop of Lmla .lnd biographer ol

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“‘:arhs Tenmsons. �Photograph b�’ Kate \1:n�ler.,
16l”he lnungrad temple as It 1\ tO�.b�.

17 Ivolgmsky Darsan: Srupa.

207_image_0.png
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30 Gr(3t ).;.hural or MaJ{re�·a F(‘Sm-al. holgmsk) Dab.an 19�5. The lat� Abbot IS st’�

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Red Petrograd. meanwhile. the political tumult went through new and momentous phases that resulted in the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 and its world-shaking aftermath.

The leading Bolsheviks had begun to return to the capital in the spring of 1917. The foremost of them. Lenin (Vladimir Uyich Ulyanov 1870-1924). made his l�endary a�
rival at
.

the Finland Station on 3 Aprii (OS). Now. after frustranng years an both anternal and external exile. of splitting doctrinal hairs at socialist conferences �
ll over Europe and living the often hand-to-mouth existence of a professional revolutionary. he at last had the chance to get to grips with a real revolution. The core of his oven political agenda was unveiled the next day in his so-called April Theses: to move the revolution on from its bourgeois phase to that of full-blown proletarian-peasant revolution as quickly as possible. This meant ousting the Provisional Government and transferring power to the soviets. Lenin also called for a withdrawal of suppon for the war.

the creation of a popular militia to replace the army. the nationalization of land. and soviet control of production and distribution. His hidden agenda was to seize power; so. when he called for the transfer of power to the soviets. what he had in mind was not soviets as constituted in the spring of 1917 with a majority of Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). but soviets dominated by his own Bolshevik pany. Actually his aspirations did not stop there: once the revolution had been established in Russia. he wanted to see it spread internationally like a raging forest fire.

Lenin’s extreme stance alarmed many left-wingers (and even some Bolsheviks) and temporarily put him out on a limb; but he was not a man
� be disheanened by a little opposition. Of all the personalities that had eIther stumbled or strutted onto the revolutionary stage so far. he was far and away the most clear-headed. authoritative and coldly practical. He was also the most ruthless. Concepts like honesty. fair-play. justice
�d sticking by agreements were. in his view. contemptible bourgeois Indulgences; a member of the dedicated revolutionary elite had to be prepared to use any means, fair or foul. to realize his ends.

. Over the following months. this physically unprepossessing but 1Il IIUndcd
�lectually commanding man pursued his political goals with singledetermination. His pany was at first marginal. just one among a lIledley of groupings competing for power and influence; but. with its aggressiVe revolutionary posture. its propaganda machine churning out a plethora of incendiary papns and pamphlets, and its catchy slogans of <Bread, Peace and Freedom!’, ‘Down with the war!’ and ‘All Power to the SOViets!’. It began to wan grass roots suppon among the Petrograd “o� soldiers and sailors, who were increasingly impatient of the Agvan Dorzhiev was almost cenainly back among the Buryats when the response Oaober Revolution took place, but according to his memoirs his was positive. He singles Lenin for particular praise:
AI this point. out of compassaon for the weak and opprn.scd, Lmin. the leader of me BoIsbcvih, WMK mobvation was to take good can of the weak, together with many othcn bmcath him. compktdy overcame me government officials, me rich and the traders who were tormenting the oppressed people that lived in gmt misery and hllftFl” and rook over the government. U
In Buddhist tcnDS, howev� for a person to have become motivated by aluuistic compassion (Skt karuna) implies a lofty degree of spiritual ckve10pmenL True, some a�unts � almost uggcst that there was something chosal asccric about the way an which Lenin dedicated his life to his cause of communist revolution; and he is moreover said to have reprded himself, not as a man with ordinary egotistical motivations, but granc:Iesr as a channel through which the impersonal laws of history (in the Marxian sense) could operate. But it would be naive to read too much into this kind of thing. He was essentially a politician, and for all the noble rhetoric that he declaimed in his speeches and writings.

he was a conspiratorial, distrustful and, on occasion. coldly cruel man – and moreover an ickological atheist with a deep loathing for all religion.

Lacking a real spiritual dimension, therefore, his compassion would have been while essentially theoretical, something of the head rather than the heart, the real wdJ-springs of his motivation lay down in the depths of his unreconstrUcted subconscious, where in the Buddhist view the three conscious 6rcs of greed., batml and delusion hold sway unless transformed through spiritual practice. In his specific case there would have been greed for power, hatml of the former ruling and middle classes, and cklusion as to his own true narurc and motivation . Bolshev U seizing the rudiments of power had been easy for Lenin and the iks, consolidating it proved very much more difficult. During the weeks following their coup, they ran into much hostility and rcsistana in Pcuograd., for not only were ousted politicians unckrstandably vocal in proust and militant in attempts to claw back lost power, but many worUn were angem:l that the other radical parties had been excluded from Sovnarkom. “Then was even opposition at the core of the Bolshevik Pany itsdf. What remained of the administrative machine, furthermore.

duarmed to grind to a halt because the banks refused to mcase funds The World Turned 0″ Its Head 1917-1918 181 and the chinoviks in the minist�es went on strike. On top of all that, Kerensky, who had fled the cty after the first abortive attack on the Winter Palace, arrived at Gatchina near T sarskoye Selo with a Cossack force.

The Kerensky threat evaporated almost of its own accord, but Lenin tackled the other problems with tough decisiveness. He issued threats.

he closed down opposition newspapers; he published vituperativ; denunciations of his enemies and detractors; he nationalized the banks.

he set up revolutionary tribunals to try arrested dissidents; and h; attempted to appease popular dissatisfaction by encouraging workers to take over factories and peasants to seize land. He also whipped up class hatred by blaming continuing shortages and high prices on hoarding and profiteering by speculators, kulaks (Bolshevik newspeak for enterprising peasants), landowners and other enemies of the people.

These tough policies – an augury of even greater toughness to come

As a first step towards laying the foundations of the one party state, th6nat e Bolsheviks dissolved the long-awaited Constituent Assembly when it once ly convened in January 1918 (OS) – a great irony this, for they had posed as its champions. Then they gradually eliminated all other political parties and factions, not only enemies and rivals but eventually nen many former friends and allies, like the Left SRs and the Anarchists.

COmm When this had been accomplished, they attempted to impose their unist programme on the shattered remains of the old system .

. But the process was not by any means the easy inevitability that Soviet hi SOviet stOrians would have us believe. Following the October Revolution, power established itself only fitfully and precariously in many areas, while the Ukraane, the Baltic States, Poland, Finland, Transcaucasia and other parts of the old empire took proclaimed Bolshevik ideology
� the rights of nations to self-determination at face value to declare IQdepmdence and secede. Furthermore, from the summer of 1918
��
r� follOwing the humiliating Peaa: of ��t-Litovsk that the vlks Signed with Germany and her allies, Bnnsh, French, Japanese and American troops intervened on the soil of the newly-declared RSFSR (R�an SoViet Federative Socialist Republic16), supporting White or inti-Bolshevik resistance fighters, with the result that the advancing tide of Bolshevik revolution was temporarily driven back. A long and bloody Civil War lasting from mid-1918 until 1920 had to be fought before rcposscsscd effective oppos ition was finally subdued, the seceding regions and the Bolshevik communists were at last able to impose their will upon the vast swathe of territory that had once fallen beneath the sway of the two-headed imperial eagle .

Having rcrurned to Buryatia late in 1917, Agvan Dorzhiev was present December at a fourth Bwyat congras held at Verkh.neudinsk between 11 and 18 1917, when a twelve-man Central National Committee under the chosen chairmanship of Zhamtsarano was elected, a new Khambo Lama

Aherwards, over the following winter, it is likely that Dorzhiev kept in much with ongoing political developments and discussed them at Imgth with friends like Baradin and Zhamtsarano. He may also well have been bandying ideology with local Bolwviks, for he mentions in his memoirs knowing Yakov Davidovich Yanson (Hanama, bom 1886), a Latvian Bolshevik who, having spent some years of exile in Siberia during the final phases of the imperial regime, was active in the Irkutsk area following the February Revolution, becoming Chairman of the pany’s Eastern Siberian branch, and, between 1918 and 1920, the representative of Narkomindel (Peoples’ Commissariat for Foreign Affairs) in Irkutsk'” These meetings and discussions may well have staned to carry his thinking even further to the left. and he probably began to speculate whether it would be possible to work with the Bolsheviks if they managed to establish themsdves succ.esfully as the new power in the land. This would have been very much an open question at the region time, however, not least because the prccanous soviet power in �
was about to be seriously challenge. Not only did the JapaMSC
begin landings at Vladivostok in April 1918, but a swashbuckling local Cossack named Ataman Semcnov,l9 having collected a raggie-taggle army in Harbin over the winter, marched into Siberia with Frmch, and latrr Japanese, suppon in the spring of 1918, and by the surnrner had aublished humdf in Chita, from where he dominated a considerable pan of Trans-Baikalia for many months to come.

Befc:>re the Semenov depradations got fu.

lly under way, Dorzhiev had again depaned westward o� the Trans-Siberian, probably planning to SU�lse the new constructlc:>
n �ork at the Petrograd Buddhist Temple, which was scheduled to begin In the summer. A cholera epidemic was now added to the agonies of the ‘conquered city’, however, so with two attendants, Togme Droltar and Chakdor, both monks of the ‘Kalota’ monastery,20 he headed south for the Kalmyk steppe with the funds he had collected and the intention no doubt of collecting more.

Southern Russia was not a zone of tranquility in the early months of 1918. Indeed., for the next two years it was to be a major cockpit of the Civil War. White resistance centred on the Volunteer Army, founded late in 1917 by Generals Komilov and Alekseyev, but later commanded by General Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1 947). Many Cossack forces rallied to this, including the Kuban and Don Cossacks, and for a time it was able to build strong bridgeheads and disperse the Reds in the nonh Caucasus, the Caspian steppes, on the lower Don and Manitsch. There were also Kalmyk soldiers in the ranks of the Volunteer army, for loyalty to the old regime persisted among many of them.21 Among them were Kalmyk Cossacks commanded by Princess T undutova ‘s son, Danzan, who fought the Reds with General Tumen until he was defeated and disappeared some time in 1918.22 Many Kalmyks also participated with other Cossack and anti-Bolshevik forces in a South-East Union, which during its brief life developed into a secessionist movement.

Dorzhiev says in his memoirs that he had it in mind to visit a Kalmyk monastery that had been damaged in recent fighting; also to see doctors,
�ich is convincing because we know he drank kumiss (fermented mare’s milk) for the sake of his health in Kalmykia, and took mud baths too. liaving completed his business in the late spring or early summer, he and his attendants then left the Kalmyks, intending almost cenainly to return to Buryatia on the Trans-Siberian. Actually, the railway was by Dow in the hands of some 45,000 Czech deseners from the Austrian �y, who, whale on their way to Vladivostok and repatriation, had
�esl$ted when the Reds tried to disarm them and. joining forces with terminated IJ1tcrventionast Allied forces and anti-Bolshevik Whites, had effectively Bolshevik power east of the Urals for the time being. Before Dorzhiev and his attendants actUally reached the main line, however, they arnved at the railway Junction near Urbach (or Urbakh),2J
an old German settlement In the Saratov region, just east of the Volga and Ibetts to the south of the Urals. Here the line coming up from Astrakhan one coming from the east and another going west to Saratov. At this remote waystation the unthinkable happened: they were arrested by Red Army personnel and handed over to the local Chcka .

“The Extraordinary Commission (for Repression against Counter-revolution), better known by its acronym of Cheka, was set up as early as November 1917 by a hawk-faced Polish zealot named Feliks Dzerzhinky.

It appropriated wide-ranging powers. not merely to root out but also to try, sentena and execute counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs. Over the foll aiminaJ

owing months this remit was considerably widened to include and semi-criminal elements like speculators, hooligans and concern to From the start it was a tool, not of bourgeois justice with its nice bandits.

justice; separate the guilty from the innocent, but of revolutionary in shan. it became a conscious instrument of state terror whereby ohm population bIameIcss victims were killed in large numbers to impress upon the at large the foolishness of resisting Bolshevik power.

It was the local Chekists in Ekarmnberg (Sverdlovsk) in western Siberia who, panicked into precipitate action by fear of the westwardadvancing Czech forces, murdered the entire Romanov family on the fatdul night of 16/17 JuJy 1918 (NS) at the Ipatiev House, where they had lately been confined. One might have apected Agvan Dorzhiev to have mentioned this barbarous event in his memoirs and to have expressed grief and disapproval, for to take life is to flaunt the first chooses and most important of the Buddhist precepts; but for some reason he to remain silent.

According to A. Andreyev, the Urbakh Chekists accused Dorzhicv and his attendants of attempting to smuggle state valuables out of the country; that is, they were taken as speculators. Dorzhiev himself, on the other hand, intimates that he was suspected of being a counterrevolutionary: fighting had rcandy broken out in the region between the Reds and ‘an aUima of Ural Kalmyks, Cossacks and Russians’ –
he General Dcnikin’s may by this mean either forca attached to the South-East Union or Volunttcr Anny – and he was suspected of being in sympathy with them. 24 bundled No doubt deeply baffled as wdl as highly apprehensive, he was onto a prison train for Moscow, which had lately been declared the new capital of the RSFS� and on arrival was incararated behind the brick walls of the infamous Butyrki prison.

n.e origins of this grim bastion near the old Butyrki Gate go back ro the reign of Catherine II, when it was used hom as a barracks and as a prison. “The great rebel Pugachev was kept In chains in one of its towers, later known as the Silo. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn it �en lay empty for many years before undergoing, in more ‘enlighten;d’ ames, a radical conversion.

‘The mason’s chisel and the plasterer’s trowel enabled the suites of rooms to be divided up into hundreds of spacious and comfonable cells’ writes the author of The First Circle with black Russian humour; ‘whil�
the unrivalled skills of Russia’s blacksmiths forged unbendable bars to go over the windows and made the tubular frames of the beds, which were let down at night and pulled up in the daytime . .

.’lS
T wenry-five beds were fixed to the walls of each cell, so that there were a hundred prisoners to every four cells and two hundred prisoners to a COrridor. ‘And so this salubrious establishment flourished … ‘serving
�e old regime well until 1917, when in a wave of revolutionary Idealism the inmates were released. It afterwards quickly revened to its old function, however, becoming primarily a place of detention for
�ose under investigation by the Cheka. l6 It still exists (and is probably 10 use) – take the Metro to Novoslobodskaya: it is opposite Savyelovsky railway station.l7 The summer of 1918 was a most inauspicious time in which to fall into Chekist hands, for in that month there was the build up to the unprecedented orgy of paranoid bloodletting known as the Red Terror,
…ruch was officially unleashed in September. The immediate causes of this were not only foreign intervention and increasing White resistance, but also an attempted coup initiated by Marya Spiridonova’s Left SR faction and a number of politically inspired murders or attempted IDurders of prominent figures. On a single day in August, Fanya Kaplan IIlade an attempt on Lenin’s life and M. S. Uritsky, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, was assassinated. The Bolshevik response, executed lIlainJy by the Cheka, was draconian. Tens of thousands of Russians at a conservative estimate were arrested and liquidated; also the practice of taking hostages was begun and, a little later, the foundations of the C

DistUrbi �lag were laid with the opening of the first prison camps for dissidents.

ng developments like these, as the Anarchistsl• – arguably the true if impractical custodians of that spirit of freedom that is elemental to authentic revolution _ were not slow to point out, proved that the Bolshevik Communists, for all their revolutionary rhetoric, were in I’\uJl5 f� constructing a new and even more repressive autocracy on the of the old one; in this sense they were themselves the real COunter-revolunonanes.

His sojourn in Buryrki was an cxuemdy dark period for Dorzhiev:
his pasc.age through the Valley of the Shadow. He knew nDe in

friends 

Moscow and there was no way he could get a message out to his 
        in PtUograd. As for the food, that amounted to little more 
than 

hill'lKlf 

     starvation rations, with virtually no water, while ironically he was

eaten alive by lice. “Even the mere sight of the metal windows and doors were enough to give one extraordinary mental anguish’, he wrote later; and the jailers reminded him forcibly of the dread guardians of the Buddhist bd.ls, who heap cxauciating (and, it must be added, highly imaginative) tortW’CS upon their �pless “!aims without cease over vast aeons of time. ‘«Torsr of all, from arne to bIDe someone in his cell would be called away. This usually happened at night and the pretext tended to be “for questioning’, but in fact everyone was aware what was going to Stranad happen.

y, howevCf, imprisonment in such conditions is sometimes DOt without spiritual benebts. The thought that he is to be hanged, Dr Johnson informs us, concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; so too in issues his Butyrki cell Dorzhiev meditated deeply upon the most profound of life and death, of this world and the beyond:
Upon derpcr rdIcction.. [freedom from this plaa] sccmcd as good as freedom from the prison of samsan [the endless cyck of birth and drath]; yet it would be possible to leave that prison but turd to leav� the prison of samsara. If one pve ODe of thole jailers just a small gift, it was crrtain that they would be 180ft pouib&r ptk with ODe; but if one pv� such a ph to the guarcha.ns of hdl. it is that ODe would contiaur to iUffcr. AJtboup ODe P no [deant] food and 1W’Ycd, at kast one was givm a lattle each day; but If one were born at.

hungry &host. for many tbouunds of yean one would 1M)( cvm hear the word
‘food . . . ‘ In that pUce thctt was noc any cmamty of bftnc sent somcwhcn and dispatched DO( being killed; [likcwuc) it is the very naNn of thinp that one day one wiU be to Yama [the LonI of Death) and cmainly killed. In prison one Lives qWrdy and is fru to do as one lika; but in samura one wanders without allY
faeedom at aU. By thinking of things in this way, I then undchtood how “«fY
foolish It was to be unafraid of samsara., [and] the thou&ht arose Wt I had to try by cvery means to fru m”af from satnsara.Z9

"Then one night - he docs not say so himseU, but about one o'dock ill 
the morning was usual for such things - the door was flung open aad 
the 

Dorzhicy 

    of6c.cn 

          himself

             who entered the cell stared long and hard at one pcnoo:

. Dazed, he was probably marched outside, either into confirmed: he the corridor or to an interrogation room. There his wont fear .as too was about to be shot.

Fellow Traveller 1918 – 1920

Sometimes those with power of life and death play cruel hoaxes upon their victims. It happened to the 28-year-old Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Semenovsky Square, St Petersburg on a bitterly cold day in December 1849. Having heard the sentence of death read out, he was blindfolded and bound to a wooden stake alongside twO others. The detail of soldiers present raised their rifles … but nothing happened. A few moments later he was told that he had actually been sentenced to exile and penal labour in Siberia.

Though the details may have been different, psychologically and spiritually Dorzhiev must have gone through much the same kind of ordeal in Buryrki, for though told he would be shot his life too was spared

ed that Dorzhiev had ‘betrayed neither Buddhism nor the [BolsheVik]
government’. With additional help from Y. D. Yanson – and perhaps
�en, through him, from even more exalted officials in the coUegium of Narkomindel – both Dorzhiev and his attendants were released .

DorzJuev was unable to return immediately to Buryatia after regaining his liberty because, as he puts It, ‘the eastern road … was disrupted’.

This is an understatement. Because of the Czech uprising. all of Russia east of the Urals was now out of Bolshevik control. Independent governments had been set up at Samara, Omsk and Vladivostok. which quickly united in a Provisional All Russian Government with its seat at Omsk. Though this was overthrown by the Reds in November. in that same month. with foreign suppon and finance. Admiral Aleksandr Vasilyevich Kolchak (1873-1920). the former commander of the Black Sea FIect. was declared Supreme Ruler and began his struggle for control of the area between the Urals and lake Baikal. Further cast, meanwhile.

Ataman Semenov. still vinual master of Trans-Baikalia. refused to submit to Kolchak, but there was little the admiral could do since Scmenov thousands of enjoyed the pr trOOpS
orection of the powerful Japanese. who by now had in eastern Siberia.

thcrefore had little alternative but to beat a retreat to Dorzhiev even though the Civil War continued to rage in the south.

A.sttakhan, growing Monasaeries had been destroyed, he repom. and lamas had taken to their hair. wearing laymens’ dorhes and drifting back into lay life. 1he people were understandably unhappy; but before he would listen to any complaints, he distributed to each monastery – there were about seventy of them. with a lama population of around 1.600 – a strict ordinance forbidding looting and desuuaion of any people’ kind. lben he actUally visited each in the company of ‘fine working and ‘proclaimed the kinds of laws that would operate in the new country’.

Dorzhiev’s view of monastic life in the Kalmyk region was broadly similar to his view of monastic life in Buryatia: that it was in a decadent state. Because of the complacency and indulgence of the majority of lamas, monastmes tended to impovmsh the localities in which they were situated rather than enrich them; as a result, it had become impossible to maintain all the monasteries. so they had all been contracted into a single foundation. which was situated at a place rosether called ‘KhetseboIak’. Dorzhiev advocated that lamas and laity ger

        to build new monasteriu, and there were many who felt that 
in the prevailing situation this was the best they could do. but othen 
danurrN.1 
  NaturaUy Dorzhiev took the opponunlty to propound his new vietrS 
to the Kalmyks. 'In fonner and in later times'. he told � 'if one 
asked 

mona.sterin or 

     either lamas or their students about the customs of study in smaU

larJu monasteries, about the need for the noble wisdom to be studied in the because things have remained [as they were I from the pur until the present, they would say that then was no need for varioUS
innovations.’ 1 Clearly there was need for such innovation, however, because ‘the Dharma traditions of the Doctrine were declining’, and Whatever ap�ars in the mind of [a monk these days) becomes a condition householders for increasing attachment to wealth and enjoyment. Some even exceed worldly in accumulating dothing and property … Through their shamelcss and inconsiderate behaviour, some monks do not reserve even a comer of their minds for thinking about the vows laid down by the Buddha. When non-Buddhisa sec such monks, they assume that the Buddha’s Doctrine is ddiled. Moreover, the teachings of lamas who are sympathetic to the BOn
(shanwtiShC) b’adltions are particularly confusing for benefactors. The monks now have nuny detractors, who say that they JUSt collect the offerings made to the monasteries and then do nothing but enjoy themselves)
Such views antagonized many older and poorly motivated lamas and a split between conservatives and reformers, between old lamas and young, began to open up. Dorzhiev was particularly critical of the Shachin Lama, though whether the person fulfilling this role in 1918 was the same as in 1 90 I, when he previously had a disagreement with a lama of that name, is not clear. The present incumbent had, it appears, taken to the peripatetic life, wandering from place to place, no doubt relieving the faithful of munificent offerings while dispensing little substantial in return. In other words, he had become the typical parasitic priest leeching the blood of the toiling masses that the Bolsheviks singled OUt for their most scathing criticism.

With his keenly practical outlook, Dorzhiev would have been fully aware that in the new Russia Buddhism would not survive long if lamas COntinued to behave like this. The two dhorampa geshes whom Dorzhiev bad brought in to run his choira, both of whom were ‘motivated by the best of intentions’, had some words with the Shachin Lama on behalf of
.� �nks and lay people’. One would imagine, however, that this high religiOUS dignitary, used so long to uncritical veneration and obedience,
“ould not have been pleased to have had his behaviour criticized – and one would somehow doubt that he mended his ways.

The Civil War stranded Dorzhiev in Kalmykia for the winter of 1918 / 19 as well as for pan of the following year. It would be enti�ly
“rong, however, to imagine that he spent this time of forced exile embroiled in parochial church affairs or even that he made good the I’aolution forged in Butyrki to apply himself more wholeheanedly to hanna practice. Quite the contrary: he began dabbling again in bcal affairs – and ones of a kind one would least have expected IIIIIl to favour.

In March 1920 (NS), having bad spent much of the Civil War in a retreat high among the dark mountains of the Caucasus, Karlis Tcnnison.s determined to cmcrgc from solitude and return to Pctrograd even undernouri if it shment, meant facing a 6ring “luad. Still weak and giddy from he falteringly took the downward path that brought him at length to a tiny IDOUIItain village of Bat-roofed hovels. Here he was told that the Bolsheviks bad begun their final Trans-Caucasian offensive and were infficting aippling defeats on Dcnikin’s Whites.

At the end of April he arrived in Sravropol to find the annospherc of this once prosperous trading city �isoned by suspicion. Its citizens had been reduced to abject poverty, while the efficient troops of General O.

I.

cverywbcre.

Gorodovikov, the local Kalmyk military commander, strutted about Naturally, Tcnnisons sought out the local Buddhists, who told him that their loyalty to the imperial regime had brought the full wrath of the Reds down upon them:
The Communist agitators abused the Buddhisa of the lower Don and Suvropol until they w� hoarse. Hard-working and simple, the Buddhists of those parts tried to When liv� up to Buddhist ideas and learn to forebear and acc.cpf Iif� as it came.

the Communists �vcntuaUy became nustcn of the region, they ordered the mas.sacft of the Buddhist monks. The land was rav� with unpruNmlal sav�. In an OI’JY of spoliation and incmdiarism, the monasmics Wft’C mtuad to asha, and the 0Da fIourishilll villages were dcsoIa�. 4 mon.asrerics is, characteristically, something of an exaggeration: some Kalmyk were destroyed during the Civil War, though in 1921 the This majority were srilJ standing; some monks also suffered, but only Lustig speaks of aaual massacres. Whatever the truth of the matter, Tcnnisons was ovcrwhdmcd with grief and subsequcndy wandered about the city in a state of disorienta� convinced that the end of the world had come. It was thus, as be was entering a tea-house in a side street nC2I’
the market place, that he was arrested by two Chckists, marched to a large building in the centre of the city and handed over to a 25 ycar-old Red Army officer for intcrroption.

'PmpIc say you're a IXwcomer here m Stavropol, atiun. All ncwcomen hav� to 
- qucstioned', he said, motionin& TmniIons to a dWr. 'Now tdI me your 5tDI1 
-bndty.' Tauusons was no( far into his story, how�ver, when a conunocioIl 
was 

imponant BoIshtvtk 
           raisrd in an an�

                                                  modr 

                                                   room and. after a flurry of ncilal whispcr'l. an olmouII1 
                                                                  into the room. 
     'Comndr Amw-Sanan!' wei thc Red Army man., Iapma to his fm ....... 
CUI I do for you?' 
     'I'w a f�w manen of put WJmCY,' Amw-Sanan repbcd. h.andana over Kverai 

of 

type-written 
   astonishment 

             pqes. 
                 came 

                    'These arc deciphcmf telegrams . . .' Seeing Tennisons, a look over his fa�: 'What's this man here for?' 

  'We're chcck.ing his story.' 
  'I kno� him; Amur-Sanan said, frowning pensively. 
Gorodovlkov

‘He’s a friend of and a student of Kham�uma Agvan Dorzhiev, who’s now a member of TsIK. Plea� issue him the necessary identity papers.’
The Red Army offi�r blushed. ‘Arm’t you making some mistake, comrade?’ he asked politely, wiping his brow.

‘No, no, there’s no mistake,’ Amur-Sanan morted without hesitation,look.ing across at the �wildrred Tennisons with a shrewd twinkle in his eye. ‘Please stop the intcTrogation and write out an identity ard . . .’5 Tennisons later discovered that this enlightened Kalmyk Bolshevik ‘had the gih of popular eloquence’; he had also succeeded in saving the lives of many Buddhist monks. But who was he?

‘Amur-Sanan’ is in fact a Kalmyk variant of ‘Amursana’, the name of an ambitious Dzungarian nobleman of the eighteenth century who Passed into Mongolian legend as a hero of the struggle to throw off the Chinese yoke. Later a renegade lama named Danbi-Dzhaltsan, also known as Ja-Lama, who was possibly of Kalmyk origin, claimed that he was the grandson and aherwards the reincarnation of Amursana. Though for political reasons Ja-Lama has more or less been written OUt of Mongolian history, he played a considerable pan in the modem freedom struggle. Combining fighting prowess with ruthless cruelty (he had a penchant for ripping out the living hearts of his enemies) and quasi-occult manipulative talents, he arrived in Mongolia ‘with only two taJnels’ but won financial suppon from Mongol princes, who sent their SOns to fight with him. In 1912 he helped liberate the city of Kobdo from the Chinese and then established himself as a major power in the western
�on until 1914, when he was arrested by the Russians. Aher having been imprisoned in Tomsk and Yakutsk, he was, as the orienta list B. Y. Vladintinsov recorded in a letter dated 2 September 1916, transferred at his own request back to Astrakhan province: ‘to the Kalmyks, to his alleged homeland … ‘ Moreover, Vladiminsov wrote:
I am ccnain that Agvan Dorzhlev was somehow involved in this … He was about hen 313m not long ago and came to ICC me and pcnistmdy questioned me Then Ja-uma – where he 15 now, what the official attitude is to him, etc.?

about Alvan went to Trans-Ba.ikalia via lrku.u, and now yestrrday 1 Icarn

� 

 Ja-u.na's tranlier. Isn't It curious? 1 wouldn't � surprised if Ja-uma 
  apln IOInewhere m Tibet or Mongolia.6

�lie did indeed spirit himself back to Mongolia by 1918, and soon lllasaina blished himself as a freelance warlord until he was treacherously ted at the behest of the new Urga government, with Russian suppon, in his lair in the Gobi late in 1922. His head was then cut off, smoked according to a ‘Mongolian method’ and brought to Leningrad in 1925 by V. A. Kazakievich. It is still preserved in a glass jar in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (Kunsthammer) – accession number When 3394.’

I staned to make inquiries about the Kalmyk Amur-Sanan in Leningrad, my Russian friends. for all their dedication to rigorous
‘scientific’ invcstigatio� at once exclaimed ‘Ja-Lama!’ Actually, this is not rmlOtely feasible. There was, however, a prominent Kalmyk Bolshevik named Anton Mudrenovich Amur-Sanan (1880-1939), who participated in the srrugIe to establ�h a Soviet regime in Kalmykia. He was born in the Bagaburulovsky almak (now Gorodovikovsk rayon),
studied between 1915 and 1917 at Shanyavsky Public University in Moscow, Around and became a member of the Communist Pany in 1918.

1919 he was the chairman of the Kalmyk section of Narkomnats
(the Commissariat for Nationalities). In later years he distinguished himself in letters., writing (in Russian) the autobiographical Mud,eshkin S”. rSorr of Mud,esh’, 1928), which ‘shows a man’s path from herdsman to state figure’, and the novella A,,,,,zal (1932), which prcsct1ts a portrait of a Kalmyk village of pre-Revolutionary times. I
On the available evidence, it would seem that this was the man whom Tennisons met in Stavropol in 1919, though Aleksandr Andreyev, who has read So” of Mud,esh, says that he does not show any great sympathies for lamas in the book.

As for TslK., this was the Central Executive Committee (of the Sovim), a governmental body consisting of five or six hundred members elected from the All Russia Congress of SoviC’ts and divided into two councils: the Union Council and the Council of Nationalities.

As it was more like a parliament than a committee and met only rarely, however, it elected from among its members a more compact presidium. Lustig’s contention that Dorzhiev was elected to TslK
by the Buddhists of Trans-Baikalia is not corroborated elsewhere.

though the implication that he had become a fellow traveller is indeed trUe.

It would appear then that Dorzhiev began to collaborate with the corrobo Bolsheviks while he was in Kalmykia in 1918 and 1919. Further ration of this comes from a docummt published by Amur-Saun in 1919 under the title, ‘The Imponance of Buddhist Mongolia to World Revolution’. 9 Basically a foreign policy docummt ad�
to 8uddhisu Narkomindel, it urges that usc be mack of Kalmyk (and also Buryat}
to transmit ‘the whole icka of the IOviet government’ to their other Mongol kinsmen, and through them to bnng Tibet ‘Into the sphaC
Fellow Traveller 1918-1920 193 of Soviet influence’. Mention is made of Norzunov and Dambo UJ also of Tsybikov; then: yanov;
� K.1lmuk [sic) intelligentsia has a particularly imponant task to o ‘ tho . �I m �
Eastrm tmnmdous undertaking, a task which can be made easier by such wdl-kno sp«ialists as Agwan Dorji [sicl, the founder of the Buddhist tem I � Petersburg [some years back) which grrady displ� England, and a su�� of Kmnuk a rapp steppes rochcmmt between Mongoha and RUSSIa . . . He is at present in the carrying on agitation in favour of soviets among the Kalmuks. IV is rudy to proceed to me east any time. Btitain once offered large sums of gold for the head of this cbngerous revolutionary. The temple mentioned above was actually built for political reasons, namely to distract me attention of Mongolia and Tibet from Britain’s advances.lo One would certainly have thought that after his experiences at the hands of the Chekists and the agony of imprisonment in Butyrki Dorzhiev would have become thoroughly disenchanted with the Bolsheviks; but evidently not so. What, however, had brought this astonishing conversion about? Had something crucial happened in Moscow during the summer of 1918 – something he was not prepared to divulge in his memoirs? Did he make some kind of a deal with the Bolsheviks, agreeing to work for them in exchange for his life and liberty? Or was he somehow persuaded that they were genuine idealists with every intention of creating a more just society – and that moreover they were actually sympathetic towards Buddhism and the just aspirations of national
�norities like the Buryats and Kalmyks? Aleksandr Andreyev believes dement this to hne been the case, though, as usual with Dorzhiev, a pragmatic was not lacking either:
Sn-angr as it may semi, Dorzhiev showed genuine loyalty to me Bolshevik rqime, taking the pompous declarations of the new ideologues of Communism
�

In aU good faith. It was m mls post-October period mat he came up ‘Vim me statement that ‘the Buddhist doctrine is largely compatible wim current Comm unist mlnklng’, which later became one of the corner-stones of the new rdigious ‘Obnovknc:hestvo’ (Revival of Faim) Movement, of which he was one of the primary Inspirations. Today it is very difficuJt even to imagine me euphoric atJnospheu of the days when such statements were loudly proclaimed. let alone
� able to offer some kind of rvahuaon. Some of the first decrees of me Soviets after

�

they came to power, especially the one issuN on 23 January 1918 (The of Frttdom of Conscience and Creed) were indeed warmly acclaimed by
�

lllany, Including DorzhJev himself, who stiU earnesdy believed mat Buddhism ftounsh m Russia in the no( too distant future. Harsh realities would Yery lOOn dmdlUiJOn him. thouBh for pragmatic reasons. working for ‘essia’ [?),
tar arned on hll ‘fbrtaaon’ wim the atheistical Soviet authorities until me late 19205. Was thnr, however, any ahrrnativr if Buddhlstn was to survive under
!he brutal BolsheVik rule? I I

Srchcrbatsky is another protagonist in our story who initially welcomed 
the 

minded 

   Bolsheviks. He had become deeply prejudiced against the narrow-

wmeassa bureaucrats of the old regime, believing that they had placed therefore ry obstacles in the path of his plans to visit Tibet. He had high hopes that the new breed of official would adopt a different attitude. Indeed, almost the first thing he did after the October Revolution was re-present his proposal for a Tibetan expedition., and be received a positive response from the suave Deputy Commissar at Narlcomindd, Lev Mikhailovich Karakhan (1 889 -1937), a Bolshevik of Armenian origin who was very interested in Oriental affairs (he served as Soviet Ambassador to China in the years 1 924-27).12 There was a condition, however: the professor should take a radio transmitter to Tibet

�
with him. Stcherbatsky does not seem to have been averse to this being colIecud, and preparations went ahead to the extent of ammunition but ultimately the expedition never came off because the Civil War blocked aU overland routes to Tibet.1l Later Stc:herbatsky helped Narkomindel by translating reports from an agent they managed to insinuate into one of the great monasteries of lJIasa. “These were written on very small pieces of paper in Tibetan cursive script and contained lists of imponant lamas, socio-cconomic conditions and suchlike.

After spending .about 6ve days in Stavropol, Tmnisons resumed his journey, travelling on to Moscow by way of T saritsyn. He had hoped to meet Agvan Dorzhiev in the new capital but, as the lama was in Trans·Ba.ik.alia, he telegraphed him there. Three days later an answer came back:

IUDDHIST MONK nNN1SQNS: OVIJlJOYED IY SIln FROM YOU STOP HE..IlEWITH
YOU A.IlI API’OII’Io”TED AUOT OF OUR nMPU u-.; PETROGIlAD AS FROM 17 JUlY

KHAMBO 
1920 ; STOP: Pl..f..ASE PIl<XHD TO YOUR POST AS SOON AS POSSIBLE (STOP) 
       OORZHlEVI4

Getting out of the train at last in PetlOgrad, Tennisons found the people business looking out emptily on a completely new and alien world. But he had to do; so, the sun burning low in the sky. he made his way to Staraya Derevnya. At the temple pte, which was slighdy ajar, he paused, sensing that something was amiss. No sound came from the building. He waited a moment and listmed; then he walked up and saw with a uckming chill that the saaed place had been ransacked and abandoned.

been Shonly afterwards he went to see Stcherbatsky, who had I t I put in charge of the building. It was a hot summer day a e �
the professor was taking a bath. Despite the desperate condition a�
Pctrograd, he did not seem to have lost any weight over the winter :��
was looking ‘supine’ .

   . 

'You are looking very well, sir,' the Baltic bhikshu said icily. 'When did you last visit the Buddhist temple?' Stcherbatsky became highly emba

can

rrassed. ‘I’m sorry’, he confessed. ‘I’m afraid to go there. What � do? They’d dismiss me from the Academy of Sciences . . . Yes,l’m afraid of losing my job! You know, people are so cruel these days.’
Tennisons, horrified to find that self-interest loomed so large in the gr”cat scholar’s thinking, rebuked him soundly. Stc:hcrbatsky, stridcen with contrition, humbly begged his pardon, which was magnanimously given. IS
Later, when militant communists broke into the temple and smashed the large figure of the Buddha in the main shrine, the intrepid Tennisons risked being shot by going directly to confront the well-known Bolshevik, Grigori Yevcscyevich Zinov’iev (1 883-1936). This man, who had once shared exile with Lenin himself in Poland and Switzerland, was now president of the Petrograd Soviet. He listened to Tennisons with a ‘look of mute submissive inquiry’. Subsequently the Buddha-rupa was rebuilt by ‘the best Soviet sculptors at the expense of the Communists’.l6 One source!7 maintains that Dorzhiev was invited to attend a special SCSsion of the Politburo – Lenin, Stalin and Bukharin also took pan

�
the Wnn. Stcherbankv the Sansknt professor. was entrusted with the t 01 die tcmpk.

·

III library and the temple propcny. However, 10

IaIIpIe, the 
1919, a unit 
             commander 

               01 the Red Army was quarttml in the houses attached to the

01 which, havinJ assured Mr Stchcrbatsky that the was nor in any danter, scaled its doors and eviaed StchcTbauky from his apartmmL In this way, [raponsibility forI the security 01 the temple and IanpIc eviaed ia property was a.s&uJDed by the said military unit or its commander, who tw:I
Mr Stcherbatsky and [thcfd,y I replaced him as rna.uger and keeper 01 the subjected mnple. Soon aftrr the eviction of Mr Stcberbatsky, the temple was to unpm::cdenred profanity, pogrom and looting. This was made dear by the Exarnininl Emerpcy Committee [a.eul, which arrested seven Red Army soIdien and rdirwd them of their duties. The head was ripped off the main pIasIu … 01 the BuddIu, which was one sazhm high, and a great hoAr smashed in � char duouP which sacred scrolls Wft’e extracted and later told 011 � black aaarket as � papers.

He then goes on to enumerate the items looted from the temple.18 They 
included 

copper;

large and small 6gures of Buddhist deities in bronze. gilt or silvCT offering VaKs; temple drapes and decorations of Chinese brocade; a quantity of sacred mirrors of gilded copper; the mcul stand for a sacred timepiece; two gilded metal volutes for the sacred cylinders
(gyeltsen) on the temple roof; a number of thangka paintings; fox furs, lynx furs, bearskins and quantities of various fine fabrics. including silks; chairs, beds, cupboards, ottomans and vessels of porcelain and copper; and a sizeable quantity of wood and anthracite designated for heating purposes. Furthermore, all mnal door and window handles and the decorations of the locks had gone, while the doors and shutters had been smashed to pieces or otherwise damaged. Also, because all the panes of glass were taken from the roof. rain was gming in and damaging the interior of the temple. Donhiev goes on:
The library, in which w� Iodted valuabk and D� boob in European as well European the Tibetan and MOftIOIian I� was completdy destroyed. Books in Ianguaca � Iooud, while those an TIbetan and Mongolian weft tom to peeas and usai for domestic and toikt purpoIft. Abo oared in this as

concrrnuII 
way were eJiueu.dy ratt archives 0I1eC1ft and non-KCn't docummcs and Iencn 
          the rcbtions bmwftn Russia, Enpnd, TIbet and Ouna over the pall 
duny yean.

Even his own personal belongings had not been respected. European.

Tibetan taken; and Mongolian fur clothing and non-fur clothing had been
‘also all my underwear. as a result of which I remain completdy without dodIcs and have no means of acquiring new ones’.

Such ‘profanation and looting’ was ‘completely and absolutely insupportable from every point of view ‘ , he dcdami, because:
fInd” the InIIpIr IS the only C”UIIIJ* of Indo-TIbetan an and arduIecIIIfC
Fellow Traveller 1918-1920 197 in Russia and Eur<>pC; secondly, at this time when Soviet Russia is try’ to forge more or less close links with the Buddhist East … through :;:: Buryat-Mongols, the Kalmyks, the pure Mongols and even the Tibcta this pillage and profanation of the Petersburg Temple, which is wirru:; doubt regarded as a holy place by all Buddhists and falls under the special supervision of the Dalai uma, will be especially detrimental … especially taking into account their backward views and lack of political culture, as well as their domination by religious hierarchs . . . This plunder of the Buddhist temple in Petrograd. the hean of revolutionary Russia, makes the situation even more sensitive, especially as representatives from Buddhist countries, who now often come to Russia, watch the political situation closely [and) oftm stil1 with distrust. Thirdly, according to the dccrcc passed by the Pcoples’ Congress at Gusinoye Oz.cro Danan in July 1917,19 the temple has become the property of the Buryat-Mongol people and its houses and communal stipendia dwdlinp WIll proVIde accommodation for Buryat-Mongol students and the ries of all nations attending PetCl’Sburg educational establishments.

Attached to the PeteBburg temple are two houses belonging to the BuryatMongol people.10 In these houses a military unit is at present quancrcd.

and it is for some reason mercilessly destroying the wooden fence around the temple and its houses, as well as the wooden parts around the building right up to the very dooB, for the purpose of obtaining fire-wood, thereby rnalc.ing these buildings unfit for usc. Moreover, in connection with the opening of the Eastern Institutcll in pcrrograd and the decision to accept Buryat-Mongol, Tibetan, Mongol and Kalmyk students for instruction there
[they would pUBue two-year COUBO in elcmmtary Russian), the above-IDaltioncd house WIll be nccdcd. There is, on the IlC’ighbouring plot owned by lsayev, whose whereabouts are prcscntiy unknown, a house which was transferred to the ownership of the state and rcmporarily occupied as a shelter, and on the rear side of the trmple there is an empty, unused plot which might be tumed into a garden in which a crctnatorium could be built.

[On the basis of the foregoing) I ask and insISt in the common intereSts of Soviet luui.a and the peoples of the Buddhist East:
1

. “That funds be made available both for the restoration of the PctrOP’ad T

IbanaJanm emple and for its upItccp until such a time as it may be braucht under the t of conc.crncd Buddhist peoples, such as the Buryat-Mongols, the MOiIpMs and the Kalmyks, etc. and tuJ’Md into a revolutionary centre for SUch peoples.

‘

2.. The liberatIOn of the aforanmtioncd houses from the military unit so that tbc-y can be 5pUdily repaired and returned to raidmtiaJ UK.

  1. The transfer of me vacant plot of land at me rear of the tctnpIc so that i� can be hImed into a prdcn for the hostd and UICd for the building of a crcrnatonum,
8Qddh

and that the former luyev house and its garden be made available to serve as a 
     iR hostd.ll

On .. October this letter was handed to Zinov’iev; Yanson and Karakhan supplied a covering letter in which they not only called Zinov’iev’s anmtion to the ‘terrible desttucrion of the Buddhist Temple’ but reiterated Dorzhiev’s argument that if news of it leaked to the Buddhist world it might undermine trUst in the Soviet Union. Subsequently, the Senior Inspector at the Bureau of Complaints and Declarations of the
�rkcrs’ registered and pcasants’1nspcctorate in Pctrograd, G. L Pinkus, formally the fact of the looting and desecration of the temple, noting in addition that the ClIek.a bad also investigated the matter but with no results.2J

The looting and gutting of buildings – even splendid baroque palaces

. Rozcnberg
.

[sic I described Buddhism as a �&ion of the OPPressed; it �d establashcd the pnnoples of the equality of aU Iavmg things . . . F. I. Shcherbatskoi even ventured to claim that the baSIC Idea behind the Buddhist rdigio exttaordirurily close to the modem, scientifically-based Weltmuchtllllmg

��e Dorzhiev’s letter had some effect. The Red Army unit was withdrawn from the temple precincts and Narkomindel agreed both to take the temple ‘under its management and protection’ and to repair it as quickly as possible. But when he arrived in Petrograd in May 1 921

. . . a few locks on doors have been rcplacrd., the cellar has been cleaned, in some places the re-painting of the walls has been begun, and the upper lantern, by which the temple is lit. instead of being glazed is covered with some kind of boarding so that when there is heavy rain, water freely penetrates the interior
. . . Although the central statue of the Buddha is repaired. because of the lack of knowlcdgr and an of the workmen., it has been done very unskilfully, so the head of the Statue must be done again.

According to the local Narkomindel man in Petrograd, Dorzhiev directiv

�ntinued, the poorness of the work was due to the lack of a proper e from the centre, scarcity of building materials and the fact that supervision of the work had not been delegated to someone with a proper knowledge of oriental architecture. He then resorted to a little more diplomatic arm-twisting, reiterating almost verbatim his previous argument that the looting and profanation of the temple could only have a detrimental effect on Soviet Russia’s image in the Buddhist East. This
–as a pity, he suggested, because at that moment those efforts seemed to be meeting with success: the Red Army, in alliance with the Army of
� People’s Republic of Mongolia, had just retaken Urga from �aron u�.ln-Stemberg – this happened on
.

6 July 1 921 – .and a Tibetan
·”lQIl()n was expected the following spnng.29 In these arcumstances:
It COUld lad to distrust In my words and . .

. show them that the Govmunmt of Sovlft Ruuaa II qwre IndiHermr to the faa of the attack on the temple and me deaauaioo of a ……… holy pIace .•• � it is “””””Y before next May to briai me IaDpk imo order. boch inRmaUy and c:xtanaIJy. and to
&II ill iIIIaior wich me appropri.aw acues. piaura, brocades. silken decorations ad d&as. For this purpoK I haft ordered from Tibet aU the neassary IWUa and IIIJRIf piawa wRhour for bochcrin&
the immor of _ taapIe. I could haft ta.km the repair upon the CUb yiuariat for Forap Affain if up to this rime Iinb wich Tabet had 110( been broken. At this panicuIar rime, [ho�vcr.l it is DO(
poaiblc for me to reaM fundi. 110( only for the repair of the tcrnpk but also for my own prnooaI fuNK upkeep. &om the Tibetan Govmunmt. On the basis of me forqoin& I haft the honour to ask in the &mcral intrrab of the strmgthmin&
01 rdations betwaD _ Sarin Union and the peoples of the East:

  1. That firm iaIaucI:iom be livca to the executive of the Peoples’ Commissariat aIInIIr for Forap Affain ia Peuop-ad that the Buddhist Tanpk be repaired. and ID
    KridUaIky.

the work to che cap.eer of the PmpIcs’ Commiu.a.Nt for Fomp Affain.

To help KrichiDsky. they IhouId appoint the avil cnpnur Benen.

who cIdaiIs and CODIUUCIioD
as _ an:hiIca who built Ibis � is a man who knows aU about i1I
…

  1. To supply the archilUt with every ncauity for the speedy unpIementatioa 01_ work., wich fund.. marcriaIs and labour.
  2. To allow 882 anbins of broc.adc for the interior dccor.JO

under the Ia coadusioo, be ventured to insinuate that if Stolyp� a prime minister benighted impcriaI rqime, had � the imponance 01 Governmen the tcmpl£ in the face of C’DOI1IIOUS public ouray. the new Soviet t would be showing itself bighly remiss if it failed to fulfil his ftqueslS in full.

architca This Iertcr also had some limited effect. Krichinsky. who was me work, which of the Pmograd mosque, was engaged to supervise the repair was carried out around 1 921 under the auspices of me branch of the Board for Museums and the Preservation 01 Pcttograd t Monuments with funds colJeaed by Dorzhiev himself. A full arion was DO( completed until 1926. however. and for much 01 the iDopcrativc interVening period the tmIpIc was unoccupied by monks and henCe Ancien raror Sodnom Zhiphi as a working monastery. It also lost its former abhor.

tov. having returned to Trans-Baikalia, died tbcrc 01 typhus in 1 921.

By 1920. Amur-Sanan’s propouI that Dorzhicv’s good of6ca 1rida the Tibetans be used by Narkomindcl had been fully tUm up. tie was Karakhan and then known to the highest of6cials in the conuniuariar: L �
his superior. Commi’Nr Gicqy VuiI’acYidl ClI�
( 1112-1936), a man of aristocratic birth who had JOined rhr §ociaI
Fellow Traveller 1918-1920 201 Democratic party shortly after graduating from St Petersburg Unive “ty and a�erwards spent many years in exile. These officials recogn�
�rzhlev

“

as the official reprcsen�tive of Ti.bet and accorded him diplo beca manc privileges. The Buddhist temple In Petrograd moreover me an unofficial Tibetan mission, with the St Petersburg-educatcd Buryat, Galan Nindakov, as its secretary.

l I

Dorzhiev himself records in a letter to Chicherin of 24 April 1925 that he had worked for the Soviet cause from the time of his release from Butyrki Prison:
Dunng th� y�ars thtr� was hardly a singl� caravan and not a single pilgrim

� 

travdhng to Tibet and certam comers of Mongolia by whom I did not forward 
  and mfonnation about the situation in Soviet Russia. By doing so I 

Buddh

connnualiv mdlcatN to the Dalai Lama and other exaitN officials in the

Ist tuerarchy that Russia, by proclaiming the principles of liberty in the

freedom 

new life, not only put them into practicr at horne but carried the banner of 
        to all the oppressed nations of the world, especially to the peoples 
of the Ust.J!

I

t

.was almost as though the Great Game had started all over again –
…. th one of its key players, Agvan Dorzhiev, restored to his old role as shadowy go-bnween. Perhaps a key to the enigma of the man lies � .. Did he have such an irrepressible penchant for dabbling in power PGlincs and mixing with the high and mighty that, when the opportunity arOSe again, he just could not let it pass ? Since his political connections gave him considerable levera� with the Soviet Government – his letters, after all, are not weak or truckJing by any means – was he from h�s sic:k

��ps also hoping to exploit this to further �e cause of .

                                  Buddhlsm In

Ia? Or was he at this time so infatuated wnh the new Id�logy that
‘Nas convinced that whatever appeared good for BolsheVism must also be good for Buddhism?

.� is usual with human beings, his real motivation was probably a ftbxture of these and other elements of which he himself was probably � f
:::a �ly aware. Perhaps too, trying to find his bea�ngs in a chao�c no�, he was more than a little confused. as he mdeed suggests m dosing pau.1ges of his memoirs:
COIllusion As for my own angle on wiut the futun will briJl&, beause of the mental of my COIUCIOUSneU, I do no« know what good and bad will ensue. I � (only] offer the followUlI homily: ·Don’t be a monkey; think things out or Youndf:J1 tirttelt But· ‘Nas an extrrmrly dangerous game that he was playing – and as
“ern on it was to become more rather than less tortuous.

Reform And Renaissance 1 920 – 1924

As the Civil War began to wind do� the political situation in Siberia became considerably more favourable for the Bolsheviks. In himself 1920 Admiral KoIchak’s forces disintegrated. and the Supreme Ruler
. having formally relinquished power in January, was shot on 7 February. “The Czech legion was also evacuated, and the interventionist British and French forces pulled out as well. leaving the Japanese and the Red Army confronting each omer. But the mood of the Japanese had become considerably less bellicose too. The result was that they abandoned Ataman Scmcnov and began to withdraw as well – though slowly and with incidents.

Tbis superficial success was mirrored elsewhere, though what by 1 921 the BoIsbeviks had mastered was a blackened and bloodied remnant of an empire. Six years of war, revolution and civil war had kiUcd millio� divided the people, smashed the economy, and brought chaos and suHcrin& on an unprcccdcntcd scale. ‘War Communism’ whereby they had attempted to forcibly impose their ideological programme on the people, had provoked cxtrcmc resistance and rcscnoncnt. Then in 1921 the sailon at Kronstadt, who had been some of the most ardent supporterS of the original revolution. rose up, this time against the Bolsheviks that they had helped install in power. ‘Soviets Without Communists’ was their slogan. In the same year a terrible famine swcpl the Volga region.

I..cmn and his colleagues were sufficimdy astute to realize that if they wen ro suy in pown and rebuild the country they would have to �y their Policy mattg)’. “They therefore mrcatcd and inaugurated a New EconolJllC
(NEPl which permitted a measure of private propmy holding and individual trading enterprise. This wu, howevn. a tactical retreat SO II
to make a more effective advance lam 011.

The Kalmyks, for whom an autonomous oblast was created within �e RSFSR in 1 920, suffered particularly during the Civil War and m the great famine that had followed it. Responding to this with a characteristically good hean, Agvan Dorzhiev ‘devoted his exceptional energy and organizational initiative to the collection of donations for the Kalmyks, and the dispatch of food and money, both of which were of considerable help to them ‘.1 He was also, as we have noted, in Petrograd during the summer of 1921, and again for two months in 1 922, when he officiated at the ordination in September of Mikhail Ivanovich Popov-Loeffler, the son of a Pnrograd property millionaire who had lost everything in the Revolution; Popov-Loeffler took the Tibetan Buddhist name Sonam Namgyal. According to Lustig, Dorzhiev also sent a letter to the Dalai Lam� requesting him to confer the status of Buddhist archbishop on
�rlis Tennisons with respect to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, then mdcpendent states.

While waiting for confirmation to arrive – it took a year – Tennisons moved to a sovkhoz (soviet farm) near Moscow managed by Vladimir Dntitrievich Bonch-Bruevich ( 1 873-1 955), a prominent Bolshevik with a deep interest in religious sects. Towards the end of 1923, however, Donhiev summoned him back to Petrograd as the anticipated letter
�

from Lhasa had arrived. Duly elevated, Archbishop Tennisons now out of our story. He spent some time in the Baltic States during the twenties, but eventually left for Western Europe and, later, � .East. He was in China in the mid-thirties, and latterly Ii�ed.

in at

.

land and Burma, dying in Rangoon on 9 May 1962. Fnedrich Lustig, who inherited his preceptor’s titles, continued to live at the
�nh gate of the Shwedagon Pagoda, Rangoon, until his death in y 1 99 1.

�ou.s other distinguished characters who have graced our �ge Prlncc . ned permanently into the wings around the tum of the twennes.

Ukhtomsky died peacefully after a speD of iU health in �92.

  1. He bact survived the Bolshevik Revolution better than many, connnwng to pU

Eastern rsue his scholarly-aesthetic interests as Assistant Curator of the Far Depanment of the Russian Museum and as a fellow worker of other Dl’-Urns and academies. Both his great collections of oriental lit had long since bem donated to the state: the original Lamaist one to passed the Ethnographical Department of the Russian Museum in 1 905 (it to the Hermitage in 1 933), and a later one, consisting of some 2,000 picas Peoples of Chinese art, to the Museum of the Ethnography of the of the World. After the October Revolution he was allowed to Pushkin cusrodianship of the latter in his flat at Oranzhreinoia 5/34 in
(formerly Tsarskoye Sdo), as it could not be accommodated at the mu.seum.2 His � D. E. Ukhtomsky, followed his interest in Oriental ethnography as a worker at the Russian Museum until his untimely death in 19 1 8.1 Ukhtomsky’s one time political ally, Dr Piotr Sadmayev, had passed away in Peaocrad some two years earlier. Shortly before his death, he called at the hom in Tashkent at which the British agent, Colonel F.

M. Bailey, was staying. Bailey was out at the time but later wrote that he medicine, was sorry 10 have rnis.Kd meeting the famous doctor of Tibetan about whose nxdical skills he was sceptical. ‘Later when I
was in I..basa I made inquiries about Badmaiev’, Bailey records. ‘but no one had heard of him there’.” Subsequently, Badmayev’s lucrative Tibetan medical practice was successfully continued by his nephew, N. N. Badmayev, whose patients included the writer, Alek.sey Tolstoy, and prominent Bolsheviks like N. I. Bukharin and A. I. Rykov. He was
�
also held in high regard by G. N. Kaminsky, the Commissar for a grut enthusiast who opened a short-lived dcpamncnt of Tibetan medicine at the All-Union Institute for Experimental Medicine.

main occasions, N. N. Badmayev which is even said to have anended Stalin on several may ultimately have been a bad thing for him, for he was liquidated in the late thirtin.s Another relative continued to Petersburg practise in Warsaw; dcscmdants of the family still live in St today.

Despite their recent successes, the Bolsheviks were not confident of their ability to take on and hold the vast territories of eastern Siberia while the Japanese prcsmcc there continued, so they agreed to the establishment of a fellow-travelling buffer state, known as the Far Eastern RcpubJic
(FE
Bolshe R): ‘a charaamsbc attmlJK to build a half-way house bctwecfI
modrn�
vism and the bourgeois world’.’ Under the premiership of –
indepcdmdcn BoLshevik named A. M. Krunoshchckov, this omnsibIJ
t democracy was formally recognized by the RSFSR 011 14 May 1920.

The authority of the FER started east of Lake Salul and mcomp.-d the Buryau of Trans-Baiulia, whose RabOfUl asplranoM It tried to placate by establishing an autonomous Buryat oblast. It also adopted a liberal policy towards Buddhism. Against all the auguries, then Trans-Baikalian Buddhism began to flourish as never before. Old monasteries were repaired, new ones were built and many new lamas were ordained. In 1916, there had been 1 6,000 lamas and 36 datsans but both

.

th� fi�res increased substantially.7. Unfortu�tely, the Bu’;’ats of Cls-Balkaha, who fell under the aegis of Sovler Russia, fared rather less well.

Despite visits elsewhere, Dorzhiev was primarily based in Buryatia during the twenties. During this period he and fellow intellectuals like Baradin, Zhamtsarano and Rinchino attempted to engineer a reconcilia-tion between Buddhism and Bolshevism. Incorporating and expanding progressive ideas that they had been developing for some time, this SOon blossomed into a full-blown reform movement (obnovlencheskoye)
Ytithin the Russian Buddhist Church. Dorzhiev himself argued that the ‘Buddhist doctrine is largely compatible with current communist tradition’ because

[bom maintain] that mr wrak should not be oppressed but ared for; that rvrryonr should be rcpnkd as though they WCTr a [clOKj rdativr; that non-virtun, such as strahng, should be avoided; that thr various kinds of avaricr and magic should not be allowed; [and] mat ont should mgagr in a truthful and upright hvdihood.8
�e also ingeniously proposed the consonance of Buddhism with dialectical materialism on the grounds that it did not doctrinally assert the existence of God and so was a ‘religion of atheism’. He
“‘as concerned to rebut the criticism that Buddhism was ‘unscientific’ too. Cenainly Buddhism does not dt’mand a leap of faith (except in the. case of the Pure Land school); rather it encourages practitioners to

.1Ilvestigate phenomena thoroughly and accept as true only that Yihlch they have satisfactorily proven for themselves. Some of the more thus.iastic devotees of the reform movement went even further than
�rzhlev. They declared that the ideals of Bolshevism were prefigured an Buddhism – so Shakyamuni Buddha was in fact a proto-Bolshevik
. . . and indeed his spirit was alive in V.I. Lenin!’
�rzhiev was also a great enthusiast for Tibetan medicine, whi� as a
‘PIntually based system is not separate from Buddhism. He estabhs�ed a Central Council for Tibetan Medicine which ran a manba or medical
�I

aaainst at the Atsagat Datsan. He theref�re defended this form of healing the arucks of its detractors:

So.nc of our physacuns, In reTUrn for rnn-t food and dodting. arry with them lOme ‘UpMI rnaiaClnn mat mat [ptopIc] wlm both posativr and nqativr rauhs. Our to dUs, catain European doaon., either out of jealousy Ot

com

harming people. 
   petitiveness, have tried to prohibit than by claiming that they arc 
             But sma it is evident that � arc lIWly illnesses which 
these docton cannot cure, it is amazing that they should say [our physicians) 
cause harm. Moreover, to prohibit we followen of the supreme teacher 
[from praaising) these [medical) tcaehinp, which are expressly given for 
the benefit of othen, is equivalent to prohibiting the practicr of Buddhism 
itJdf

   . IO

Central to the practical programme of the rdorm movement was that lamas should brinl their Wesryle into harmony with that of the
‘toiling masws’ by renouncing wealth and privilege, and returning

Similar 

to the a

        argumen
        ustcriry and simplicity of a kind of idealiud early Buddhism.

Orthodo ts were at the same time being enunciated within the x Olurch by the followers of the living Church movement, in its journal castigated ‘the idleness, self-interest, mendacity and glunony of the clergy’, called for the communization of clerical We on the lines of the early Christian communities, and advocated that the clergy cease avoiding physical labour, a thing declared to be
‘a joyful manifestation of the fullness of life and a guarantee of social weD-being’ .

11 Dorzhiev’s hope then, as he expressed it in his memoirs, was that the Buddhist monastic way of life, ‘which will not tyrannize the people’,
should continue. Indeed., allowing himself a supreme flourish of the imagination, he went so far as to envisage that, under the benign pauonage of the Bolshevik regime, Russia would become a land worthy of the noble tide ‘Supreme Place’ – that is, one in which the Buddhist which religion thrives. 12 Though there was no doubt an element of sincerity in Dorzhiev’s reforming zeal, there was also a pragmatic one too. As he had travelled beyond the confines of Buryatia and moved within Bolshevik circl�
he knew only too well how hostile the new ideology was to religion and what happened to conservative religious who refused to mend their ways. In the Volga region, for instance, a metropolitan and several archbishops had been shot for opposing the use of church assetS for
.the popoms relief of famine victims; and all over the country anti-religioUS
were going on -great bells and crosses were being cast down, spires and cupolas toppled, churches and monasrmes dynami� holy icons and other religious obi«n desecrated., and clergy subjected to humilation and harassment. I ] The l..amaist Church therefore had to rdorm irsdf radically and work with the new regime; the alternativc was dcsaua:ion.

Of course there were many conservative Buryat lamas and laymen wh thought otherwise. Dorzhiev and his colleagues were to clash with the 0 at the v

.

ery fi�t All-Buryat Buddhist Congress, which was convene�
under hIS chatnnanship at the Atsagat Datsan on 15 October 1 922 shonly before the absorption of the Far Eastern Republic into th; RSFSR. The purpose of this congress, which was attended by both Trans-Baikal and Cis-Baikal Buryats, was to discuss new regulations proposed by the reformists; these dealt with the general administration of the Buryat Lamaist Church, the administration of the various datsans and the monastic code by which lamas and khuvarak (novices)
should live. Apparently, the way in which the reformers presented these proposals suggested that they were acting on behalf of the authorities of the FER; those authorities, for their pan, stood back and allowed the clergy a free hand to define their relationship vis-i-vis the new system.

Essentially what the proposed new regulations and rules did was to enlarge upon the democratic reforms of the Kotlaryev Commission of 1917. It was proposed, for instance, to curtail the powers of the khambo Lama and instead make the elected Congress of Clergy the SUpreme organ of church government. The Central Clerical Council, presided over bv the Khambo Lama would at the same time become the supreme ex�tive organ, while �e running of datsans was to be entrusted to datsan councils presided over by shireruis (abbots). Thus the Khambo Lama and the shiretuis would become subject to the central and monastic councils, and had no right to make independent decisions except in minor day-to-day matters.

These .

new reforms were passed without much demur; �ut passIonate quarrels broke out when the functions of parish counals and datsan COuncils came up for discussion. The conservatives violently opposed
!:he proposal that monastic councils be subordinated to parish councils, Ill. Which lay delegates would be in the majority; also that lay people IIli ght call lamas to account, override their decisions and subject them to ticism. Aher ‘stormy disagreements’, a compromise was reached

--mas 

  Ich toned down the powers of the parish councils and so made the 
      less susceptible to lay domination. 
  Even more heat was generated when the congress went o� to discuss

�onns designed to bring the way of life of the lamas more In harmony
� that of the tOlhng masses. In this connection, the reformers had l1.. �Y published their programme in the newspaper, Shene BaU:£J/ .

based na:asities on the rules of the commune. and livinc-quamn., food, dodUng and other Disciplinr must be used stricdy in accordance with the Vinaya [Monastic Code of
). The norms set out in the Vinaya must be observed. The accumulation by lamas of donalionl soIiciud on their personal initiative is smcdy forbidden.

doaab0D5 k is aprcia11y imponaat 10 pay anmtion 10 the continuing practicr of collecting under die pretat of COIIlIIIissiorl the making of BucIdha-rupas and
(CIIIhu) cuk ob;eca. by meaDI of which the lamas appropriatr a pomon of these fund5 or __ collective fundi.

11Us situaIion mUll be Slopped at root. Monovcr. the rcaiving of a gebzhi or pbzhi lJcsW] dqree involves the collection of donations and the establishment of COIIUDUIIC.

a proadure for !he distribution of dotutiOll5 of property to the lanu·khuvarak This situation must [also) be stopped. In the holy book., A G..uu to the �·s W.., of Li(e,14 it is written. ‘Our grat teacher did not permit
!he donation of property for the attainment of the highest paths.’ The lamas’ pt� for raisinB funds for the BuddhiSl conununiry must be csaablished with the sanction of the existing organs of authority. Rehg;ous serYtcrS for the laity, such as fomme-cdling, the swearing of oaths, halmg, gwYmg radinp for prophcaa the gaiDinI of mataial happiness, prayen for the dead, and the readmg of and ptea:pti must be carried out [only) by such penons who have bun especially appouned for 5UCb puI’pOIa; the arblrary performance of rilCS
by individual lamas aain& on their own account is not to lakr pUce; propertY
comm received for the celebration of 5UCh rites must be Iw1ded over to the monasDc conpqation une. “Then must be csaablished a proadun for the exclusion from the of lamas those who brnk the gmenl ruin of the Vinaya and abo [offend apinsr) the accepted conventions of the Buryat-Mongol people.

propertY

  1. � must be established a procecIun for kecp1nc and maintaining tht of I…amaisr communities that is not oppoted to the intensa of the income IDilinI masses and the policy of the IUtr, and dctatled accourm of aublUh and expenditun must aha be 1ft up. It II funhcrrnon neassary ..,
    dut aU the properry of a IIIOIIaIbC commurury II to be COIIIidaCd c:Lanfied the IOQaI
    wheIher ptoperry of the Buryar-Montoi people. It must [as well) be or DO( !he properry of a monasoc commUDIry II lubk ..,
    tall aUCMlDC’llL
    .-nl 3. l..amaI abldm& by the afomnmtioned rules of life must [abo) follow die rules of iOCiery In confonniry with other atiuns.1 5 It is impossil* noI to detect heft the antiseptic odour of an unappealial puriunilm. SomedUIII similar is present in early �V1SID toO-EYidendy spiritual and political idealisa – and perhaps omn sotII
    as wdl – have this tmdmcy. as though their aspiration for hi�
    Reform and Renaissance 1920-1924 209 more perfect forms induces a concomitant contempt for worldly th.

���

and especially anything that gives comfon and pleasure to the �y ‘
Two special repons were read at the congress: ‘On Putting th Clergy’s Way of Life into Good Order According to the Rules of th e Dulva-Vinaya’ by Lharamba Nimbo, and ‘On Procedures for Ordainin; Young People in Monasteries’ by Zhigzhitzh�p Batotsirenov. These were then handed over to four special sub-committees �harged with the duty of worlung out detailed proposals on matters relanng to administration, regulations, religious education and Tibetan medicine. Dorzhiev sat on th� sub-committee for regulations with Khambo ltigelov, Ayurzana sd)enov and Zhigzhitzhap Batotsirenov. Gombozhab Tsybikov, the Buryat scholar who had been in Lhasa in 1900 and 1 901, sat on the sub-committee for administrative matters .

.

Batotsirenov’s repon reproached the lamas in hell-fire terms for a lifestyle which had become so brazen that, if it was not radically and Speedily reformed the authorities would be compelled to step in and ‘call things to ord:r by force’. As the root of the lamas’ corruption lay in their ‘unbridled thirst for private propeny’, Batotsirenov sugge�ted that When all money, possessions and income be transferred to monastic communes.

new regulations to this effect were proposed and debated, what p rovoked particular controversy, however, was the censure of luxury Implicit in proposed Article 13, which forbade lamas from owning gold and silver articles, silk and carpeted bed-furnishings, and clothing
�de of expensive materials like silk, sable and otter fur. ” The ‘endless dispUtes’ that this generated forced the congress into an impasse and
�Used Baradin, Tsybikov, Rinchino, Batotsirenov and a few other lJlteUecruals to walk out of the conference hall, leaving behind a written declaration that again warned the lamas that, if they were not prepared
�o abandon the ·insatiable desire for the ownership of propeny’, then the end is unforeseen and hope is lost’. Far from bringing the congress to its senses, disagreement su�uently became even more intense· so in an effon to hasten a deCISion, the those chairman, Agvan Dorzhiev: re’;’inded those present of the sad fate of Orthodox hierarchs in the Volga region who had not been prepared to allow church treasures to be used for famine relief. When this stem “‘arning also fell on deaf ears, he too walked out, declaring that he
�

COuld not preside over such a gathering. In his absence he was promptly by Budazhap Dorzhiev of insulting the Soviet authorities and the munist Pany. ‘In the Soviet Union there exists reli�ous freedom’,
� red thiS other Dorzhiev, no doubt With some passion – and then too Idt the hall.

�
After � deliberation, the remaining delegates went out to persuade those who had left the hall to rerum. It was then agreed that Agvan Dorz.hiev had not in faa insulted the authorities or the party, and Amele 13 personal was passed in an amended form that allowed lamas to retain any enactmen property (including livestock) in their possession prior to the afterwards t of the new regulations, but not any that they might acquire
. It was also agreed that fences around individual lamas’ plots of land be replaced by a common fence around the whole monastery, which and that ttaders should be forbidden from entering monastic precincts, would be closed at sunset, by which time women should also have speculation, left. FurthermoR, for infractions of the monastic code, such as trading, misconduct smugling, drunk enness., playing games of chance, sexual and fomenting sttife and discord, lamas would be sub;ea to punishments ranging from a rebuke to disrobemcnt.

Baroa.irenov was also concerned about the quality of lamas. Due to the almost practices of ordaining very young boys as khuvarak and accepting anyone who wanted to join it, the sangha had become flooded with people who were simply not up to the ethical, intellectual and spiritual demands of the religious life. He wanted to restria khuvarak ordination to boys of 6ftcen and over, but the combined su�mmittees on monastic rules and education preferred an age limit of seven or eight ye2l’S, government regulations permitting. This was because there were plans in hand to set up combined elementary schools for both khuvarak and lay children in the monasteries, and entry into schools of higher religious ttaining would only be possible after graduation from one of these. Furthermore, it was agreed mat teachers trained in Europe would be employed in the new elementary schools, and European methods would be used, but teaching would be conduaed through the medium of the local language. The ‘precious teaching on religion’, meanwhile, would become ‘the property of the national culture’.

It was also planned to reorganiu colleges of tsenyi and schools of methods.

medicine (manba). Enay to the former would be more selective; programmes and resources would be reviewed; and II1()ft candidateS

rigorous examination requirements would be set, so that in fu�
would not be able to acquire degrees through bribery and omer forms of corruption. The manba, meanwhile, would seek to com

�
bUx the Tibetan and European medical systems by introducing the of anatomy, physiology and European diagnostic techniques..

and in future only those qualified in this new programme would be allowed to practise. Enay to manba would also be open to barb monks and lay people – even women misht apply! – and healing would be given flft of ch.argr (some lamas obJCCted to mas) and only by meaDI
Reform and Renaissance 1920-1924 211 of pharmaceutical medicines. There woul� however. be no att edi · f I· · F” II .

,
-ra empt to ate m

.. Cln� rom re 19aon. IDa y, m order to raise the ‘CUltural level of religaon, It was agreed to ban the cults of incarnate lamas (T”
tuUcu) b and oracles. I .

For �II the passion spent in the conference hall, this 6rst All-Buryat Buddhist Congress did not have any great effect. The situation in eastern Siberia was still very unclear, so the rank and file of lamas were able to go on soliciting donations and generally behaving much as before. It was not, however, an isolated phenomenon. As Gerasimova points out, discusSed

‘throughout the land there was a wave of legal clerical conferences that the matter of loyalty to the powers-that-be and the forms that religious life would take under the new conditions'” 7 The absorption of the FER into the RSFSR took place shonly after the ceased congress, on 10 November 1922, for its usefulness as a buffer state had with the 6nal withdrawal of the Japanese from Siberia. The move added a sizeable swathe of territory to the RSFS� for, once its forces had crushed those of Ataman Semenov, the FER extended all the way to the Paci6c.

Almost at once the Soviet authorities had to decide what to do about the Buryats. Naturally, the Buryats themselves wished the Soviet Go beat vernment to grant them the same kind of autonomy that had granted to the Kalmyks and other national minorities. In this, �wever, they were strongly opposed by the Russian communists living Within their national homeland. The 6nal decision rested with Stalin (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, 1 879-1953), the Soviet Commissar for Nationalities. In uncharacteristically enlightened mood, the dark Georgian ruled that both the Trans-Baikalian and the Cis-Baikalian Burrats be united in a single Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Soviet Soclalist Republic (BMASSR), though, as elsewhere, it was clear that autonomy did not imply freedom to secede from the RSFSR or to deviate substantially from its ideology and policies. Despite their ideological aversion to religion, the policy �akers at
. �
the were at this stage undecided as to how to treat Buddhism. OffiCIals
::.� BMASSR were therefore initially allowed to adopt a reiativ�
ly policy, and as a result the Buddhist revival that had begun dunng the li
�
fetime of the FER continued for a few shon years. This was by no a benign aberration on the pan of the Soviet Government; as we ve noted, they wanted to � ‘progressive’ Buryat Buddhists to carry �oIutionary ideas to the ‘oppressed peoples’ of Buddhist Asia. I S
oaucral And of course no one was more useful to them in this respect than

during 
Agvan Dorzhiev, who continued to work closely with Narkomindcl 
      the twenties. Around 1921, for instance, he was involved in the 
formulation of a sinister plot to send weapons and foment revolution 
in Tibet. An exploratory expedition masquerading as a pilgrim group 
would 

resonances 

       be sent first; this would carry a radio transmitter (there are

of Karakhan’s proposal to Stchcrbatsky here). If it was ful, a second and highly secret expedition – every effon would have to be made to ensure that the British did not catch wind of it –
SUCC’CSS

again posing as a pilgrim �p, would ta
                                     .

                                      ke in the weapons. According

to Russian sources, Dorzhiev even supplied the names of Buryats and Mongols who could taU pan: one was Dashi Sampilon. 19 That Dorzhicv was prepared to go so far as to connive in fomenting revolu racarch tion in Tibet was one of the most surprising discoveries during the for this book – and one of the most difficult to explain. On the Thirteen face of it, it looks like exbeiile disloyalty to his old friend and pupil, the th Dalai Lama. After all, Dorzhiev had seen what the Bolsheviks had done to an unreconstructed autocrat like Nicholas Romanov; did he wish a similar fate on Tubtm Gyatso?

British intelligence, which at this period at least was highly efficient, was quickly alerted to what the Bolsheviks and Dorzhiev were up to.

Sir Charles Bell, in Utasa on an official vi5it between November 1 920 and October 1921, reponed to the Government of India in a lmer dated 6 February 192 1 that, while there were no signs of serious Bolshevik activity in Tibet, an agent of Dorzhiev was living at Drepung. 1hc man, a Mongol who was masquerading as an anti-Bolshevik, was in Utasa ostensibly to sdJ watches, gold and so forth.IO
Dorzhiev also helped organize the secret delegation that arrived in Utasa disguised as a pilgrim party in 1921. One of its principal members

was Sergey Stcpanovich Borisov, an Oint from the Altai region - he was 
in fact ethnically T urkic - who at the time held an imponant post in 
the Peoples' Commissariat of Internal affairs.11 According to Robert 
Rupert, he also worked as a Comintern agent in Mongolia in the early 
twenties, later going on to deal with Narkomindel's Mongolian, Tibetan 
and 

Eastern 

    Tann

       Section 

         u-Tuvan business, and winding up as deputy head of the Far 
               in 1928. Borisov's colleague was a Buryat lawyer named 
VampiJon. 1hc delegation achieved nothing. according to N. P� 
bccaUK it had nothing acaptablc to offer the Tibetans - aside from

an offer of hdp against the British.

. This last assertion sounds a little strange, for the Brinsh were at thiS
juncture on very cordial terms with the Tibetans. Among other t:hinp.

they were 1PYlft8 the much-needed military and trchnical assisrance po to �cure Ti�’s precarious in�epend�ce. from the Chinese. British Be hncal officers were also paying penodic visits to Lhasa Res·d �I, �olonel F. M. B�
iley we�
t there in ! 924, and one of his offi l ci� obleCt1v� was to �
dvl� the Tibetans ?

n

,

the ex�
lusion from Tibet of Bolshevist and ann-Bnnsh propagandists ,21 which indicates that th Gove Bolshev rnr:nent of India was by this time aware of and concerned abou� ik activities in the Land of the Snows .

.

In 1923, the Narkomindel official, Lev Efimovich Berlin, published his article on Dorzhiev in Novy Vostok, a journal set up in 1 922 by the Peoples’ Commissariat for Nationalities through the All-Russian Scientific Association of Oriental Studies to promote Soviet political aspirations in the East.H Berlin’s unconcealed intention was to pose Russia as the benefactor of Ti�, and to show how the diplomatic efforts of Agvan Dorzhiev, who was now fully converted to the Bolshevik cause, had significantly helped the Tibetans to liberate themselves from centuries of Chinese overlordship and at the same time had foiled the schemes of the British to undermine that hard-won independence. He concluded that, though at that juncture the British might have managed to achieve their aims in Ti� by resorting to military machinations and secret imperialist deals, the day of reckoning was at hand when the growth of class conflict and the national liberation movements would dea reverse the apparent ‘victories’ of British policy, just as it would ring the th knell on world imperialism in general.14
. In the following year, when he was seventy, Dorzhiev wrote his own Tibetan memoirs. It is tempting to think, because these were produced so SOon after the Berlin article, which also contains much biographical data, that there was a link between the two – perhaps even that the memoirs
“‘ere produced for propaganda purposes. Both these speculations do not hold up on deeper consideration, however. In the first place, Dorzhiev sta�es quite clearly In the colophon that he was persuaded to record the rnaln events of his life by a rabjampa geshe named Tubten Dondrup, who had made the obligatory offerings. Furthermore, though h� does Ia� SOme positive things about Lenin, he is quite frank about hiS I
.ow OPinion of many elements within the Bolshevik Party. CommuDlsm
�as a fine syst�m, he concedes, but few Bolsheviks lived up to Its high ideals· Indeed within their ranks there were ‘a number of nil-intentioned l�pl�J, who had stolen from or subdued the weak’,
and the system moreover gave power to many ‘bad people or sexual
�ms who thought only of their own well-being’; thus both Bolsheviks and Communism gainN a bad reputation world-wide … 25 Hardly the -ords of a propagandist.

Friedrich Lustig maintains that he did, and that his ‘prodigious strength of character, even in i� tr:ivial aspects’ impressed many of them, including AleksaDdra Mikhailovna Koliontai ( 1872-1952), a lady of noble origins who play� a prominent pan in the revolution and later went on to become a diplomat and campaigner for womms’ rights. Anatoly I.unacharsky also came to have a deep respect for the Buryat lama’s iDtdIcctual acumen.

pouescion
‘When we talk to the Khambo Lama, we Bolsheviks require the full

            of our intdligence to do justice to ourselves', he declared 
with 'loud theatrical emphasis and gesticulation' at a meeting of 
intdlectnals..16

incidentally, More intereStingly, though, did Dorzhiev meet Lenin? – who, had a Kalmyk grandmoc:her on his father’s side of the family. \VhiJe there arc oral reports that he did, solid, documentary proof is entirely lacking. The only person within the wider Buddhist ambit who certainly did meet the Bolshevik leader was S. F. Ol’denburg.

who had once been in the same student group at St Petersburg University as AIeksandr U1yanov, Lenin’s elder brother, who was executed in the PetrOpavlovsk Fomcss in 1 887 at the tender age of twenty-one for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Alexander Ill. Ol’denburg and Lenin met for the 6rst time before the Revolution and spoke about A1eksandr.

who had been a gifted student of zoology;27 they met again in January recons 1918 when Ol’denburg was with a pany of scholars involved in the titution of the Academy of Sciences. By then, like Stcherbatsky and many other orientalists, he was prepared to go along with the new regime and put his knowledge of the East at its disposal for revolutionary purposes.

‘Go to the masses’, Lenin allegedly told Ol’denburg. ‘and tell thaD
about the history of India, about the � sufferings of the vast masses who have been enslaved and oppressed by the British. You will find yourself surprised by the response of our proletarian masses – and you will draw inspiration from it . . . ‘ 2. 01’ denburg was apparendy deeply impraaed.

Lenin is also reported as bavinl inquired of lunachanky aboul Src:hcrbatsky. ‘He is a wonderful Kholar’, replied the Commissar for Buddhism Education, ‘who has written a splendid brochure in which he ueaD
from the SOCIalist point of view (1’C’JCCtion of individualislll Reform and Renaissance 1920 1924 215 and private property, acquisition of peace of mind and attai f joy through social harmony)’.19 nment 0 Lunacharsky, who was himself very interested in Buddhist philoso senh t Stcherbatsky to the West in 1921 to buy books for the AcademP Sci Yi ences. The Sanskritist visited France, Germany and Czechoslovat o. also Britain, where he developed an extensive network of contacts wi�
,,:hom he later corresponded. These included the writer. H. G. WeDs· the pioneer of Pali studies, T. W. Rhys-Davids; E. Denison Ross, the di�or of the School of Oriental Studies; E. D. McLaggan, the president of the Royal Asiatic Society; the Buddhist scholar, F. W. Thomas; and many others.30 He also, towards the end of the decade, corresponded with the philosopher, Benrand Russell, in the hope of persuading him that as Indian philosophy was an independent living tradition and the equai of European philosophy, both could fruitfully interact with each other. His arguments fell on stony ground. Russell could hardly believe that Indian philosophy had not been to some extent influenced by Greek philosophy. j I
Despite his political entanglements, the 1920s were Stcherbatsky’s anOSt prolific period. It was then that he produced his most imponant works, including Buddhist Logic. The first volume appeared in 1 929, but the appearance of the second was initially frustrated by the authorities and only finally came out due to pressure from Sergey Ol’denburg, who Was then still Secretary of the Academy of Sciences .

In Mongolia, following the defeat of the White forces of Baron Ungem Sternberg, a constitutional monarchy with cunailed powers was restored u nder the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu. The land was now very much in the Soviet ambit – where else could it look for suppon against the Chinese? – but the communists, though they had a role in the new government, were unable to assume power because they were just one faction among many in a society in which the Buddhist church was still protected and enormously influential, where the broad masses were educationally extremely backward, and where economic development w� at an extremely primitive stage. What was needed therefore wa� time
-ta�e to build up party organization and lay the necessary economic and SOcial foundations for a communist revolution that could take place at a later date.

Many Buryats and Kalmyks came to Mongolia during the Civil War and aherwards, either as refugees or to act as intermediaries between the Comintem and the Mongolians. Among them was Dorzhiev’s friend, ZJwntsarano, who had alre2dy done much useful educational work in Mongolia in the period 191 1 to 1919. In 1921 he put together two imponant documents articulating the Mongolian People’s Party’s platform for W First Party CongRss held in Kyakhta; in W same year � became the Deputy M.inister of Internal Affairs in the new gov Following ernment.

the traJISIDi8ratio 01 the dissoIUR jebbundamba Khutukhtu to determine his next life 011 20 May 1924, a Great Khural was wmmoned to the futuft constitution of the recmdy declared Mongolian People’s R£public. It convened in Urga on 8 November and was attended by
� Baradin Agvan �y as me representative of Tibet; also by Rinchino, and P. K. Kozloy.12 NanualIy, a great deal of Pan-Mongol sentiment was expressed at the khunl: ‘We must be the cultural cenae of our race; we must attract ID ouneIves me Inner Mongolians, the Barga Mongolians [and so on)
•.. ‘, declared Rinchino. Agvan Dorzhiey, meanwhile, when greeting the khural on behalf 01 Tibet, welcomed w new independent Mongolian Slate and m:alled the times � under Gmghis Khan, the Mongols bad hope ruled a great empire. ‘I DOle this with satisfaction’, he said, ‘and that Mongolia grows and thriyes’. He then went on to recall how Moogolia and Tibet had been united for centuries by bonds of true friendship based on their devotion to me Gclug school of Tibetan Buddhism:
We [will] SOlve to lUke our cmtuna-� reboons soU IlIOn firm and deep.

We wish to help the Mongol people in thor aUK of hbcraoon. Evm thouIh tMy uy that the Tibetan nation IS small and backward, we also dwcmina� ill our own country the idaJ of liberation from fomen opprnuon. lL1 the ca'”
of libcnoon and the � of thr Mongol and Tibetan peoples triumph!

Let thr tadunp of ShakyamlDU UUnc [forth] bke thr raY’ of thr sun! Ler our pcopIa be IU’OIII and mV10lablc from [bub] mncr and 0U1ft mania like Mount Swncru!}}

On 10 December he presided over an evening session of the khural. III
a friendly and genuine atmosphere, the problems of national minoritieS
and oudying regions wen discussed. Dorzhiev himself declared thaI
he devoudy hoped that W Tibetans would some day be able �
rid themsdves of foreign oppression and become masters in their own land. J4 In the same vear Dorz.hicv also began nqorianons with the Mongoliall Govmunmt �th a view to making the Peuograd Buddhist Temple a joi8I
Tibero-Mongolian responsibility. This proccu, in which Zhamrsaraao must han bftn Involved, would KCU� the rrmple by bringing it …….

Reform and Renaissanu 1 920-1 924 217 the protection of diplomatic privilege. The arrangement was not finalized until 1 926, however.

lenin died on 24 January 1924. He had been ill for some time, and had also showed signs (as well he might) of dissatisfaction with the way the new State he had brought into being was going. His departure, of course, left a huge vacuum at the hean of the Soviet power structure, and dUring the next few years there was a contest to 611 it. On the face of things, Trotsky looked like the obvious successor; but there were also Zinov’ev and Kamanev, and, on the right wing of the pany, Bukharin.

!hings were going to change, then – but in 1924 no one could have laid precisely how.

Gathering Clouds 1 925 – 1 929

It Soviet was leadership none of the obvious candidates who won the struggle for the but the hitheno unfancied losif Stalin, the mediocrity of the party. He alone had the stomach for the necessary intrigue and ruthless manoeuvring; as General Secretary of the Communist Party, which had grown immensely in membership and influence in recent years. he moreover had a viable power base. It took him several years to overcome his opponents and consolidate his own power, however, so the draconian historical phenomenon known as Stalinism did not come fully into being until the end of the decade. In any case, it was not the decision of Stalin alone to create Stalinism; like many if not all other political leaders, he basicaUy expressed tendencies that were already gestating at the grass roots level, in his case among the rank and 61e party members. who, now that Lenin’s New Economic Policy had to a large extent ful6lled its object of righting the economy and restoring social stability, wanted to sec the implementation of a full communist programme. The period under examination in this chaprei’ could therefore be called the prelude to Stalinism.

As we have noted. Dorzhiev was showing signs of disillusionment with the Bolsheviks as early as 1924, when he was writing his memoirsHe expressed them more forcibly in a lmer of 24 April 1925 to G. V.

Oticherin, which was written in Moscow.’ In this he complains that current Soviet legislation prohibiting anyone under the age of eightceD
from embarking upon a religious cal’UT was radically undermining the foundation of Buddhism. which depended upon its monastic sangtaa, entry to which was elsewhere open to boys of between eight and ten Y�
of solemn age. ‘With this law in force’, he declared. ‘the Soviet Government I
declaration of religious freedom [i.e. the decree of 23 Jan”‘”
1918) becomn. with respect to Buddhism, a mere fiction’. .

This Iqjslation was further aggravated. he contends. by systemaD’
Ko anti-religious propaganda conducted by pany organizations in I di �somol, the �viet youth .

Ie�gu�
, which were not only a� uwi’:: the theses of militant matenahs� �ut also enjoyed official suppo”. It was a further mockery, he mamtams, for the authorities to decl full

. �
e�igious freedom on the one hand and to condone anti-religi:’::
acnvlbes on the other.

He then drew Chicherin’s attention to the fact that, alongside the P��Soviet propaganda that he was transmitting, Buryat and Kalmyk VISitOrs to

.�asa. were relayin.g another and.

very different message about condlbons m Soviet Russia: one concernmg what he calls ‘funeral of the gods’:
Although this infonnation is not transmitted around the world by radio waves or through mt wires of mt tdtgraph and does not apptar in the Mwspapns, it still in a quiet and invisiblt way performs its tvil work by raising doubts in
� minds and consciousness of tht massn and tht upper tthdons about tht corr� of my infonnation conurning mt situation in Russia.l The paltry advantages to be derived from anti-religious propaganda among the Buryats and Kalmyks would therefore be more than offset by damage inflicted to the Soviet image in Tibet and Mongolia. It Was furthermore his experience that Komsomol activities in the villages tended to strengthen rather than diminish faith in religion.

He then played his strongest card:
In the past four or 6vt vtars I havt tritd, to mt best of my ability, to hdp you Yt’idt your work as far �s this relates to Tibet; and, if in future there will be a IleQ:I for my partiopation, I would always be pleased to offn you my humblt Iftvica. But I must alcn you to the fact dut I no longer havt the mthusiasm, lnspiranon and ardmt f3lm I ona had for this work bccaUSt all my petitions to
� SoVIn goVft1unmt conaming mt principal issues buring upon tht religious lift of my Buryat and IUlmyk co-rdlgionistS havt gone by unnoticed and [havtJ
not hem put mto pracna. Unckr such conditions [my dforuJ lost thar mtaning and PUI’pOK, for I am not a politician but a man of religion.

lie concludes by aslting Chicherin to lay four proposals before the
:r�oPriate official bodies, requesting .them: to allow. young males
,– eighteen and under to be a��ed mto the Buddhi� Sangha; to
�

q the practice of Tibetan medione from legal sanctions (except
�practitioners committed crimes through the application of their
); to exempt Kalmyk and Buryat lamas from military service; to change the substance of anti-religi
.

ous propaganda among �e and Kalmyks, if for any reason It could not be temporanly
�tI

� is no record that this letter either prompted the authorities to action or even evinced a reply. � most of his private letters of prOlCSt during the twenties feU on stony ground. though for the moment he stiU enjoyed a protected existence, carrying special Narkomindd papers that required that the bearer ‘shall not be subjected to search or detention without prior nori6cation of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs·.J Later, however, when he began to voice his complaints more openly, things would get difficuJt for him.’

There are few records of Soviet missions to Lhasa in the mid-twenties 

an outcome, perhaps, of the loss of enthusiasm to which Oorzhiev alludes 
above; also, when one composed of 'Mongolians' (which may mean 
Buryaa) did arrive in 1 927, though it carried a letter of commendation 
from 

Governmen
      Dorzhiev, the Tibetan authorities informed their friends in the 
           t of India that he had at the same time wrinen privately 
to the Dalai Lama advising him to have nothing to do with the group. 
This suggests that by this juncture Dorzhiev may have been playing a 
double 

sccredy 
       game: outwardly appearing to help Narkomindel but at the same

These warning the Dalai Lama of Narkomindel machinations.

‘Mongolians’, who according to British records, left Lhasa in Dcamber 1927, after having had an audience with His Holiness,”
may be idaltical to a similar group mentioned by T sepon W. D.

Shakabpa: it was, he says, composed of Buryat lamas led by a certain Zangpo, and its aim was to promote Tibcto-Soviet friendship and spread propaganda. Shakabpa also mentions a ‘Soviet-Mongol’ mission arriving the following year, 1928,S whik British sources talk of a mysterioUS
6gure, believed to be a ‘high military official of the Soviet’, living in considerable style in the holy city for over a year. He was a large.

rubicund man, perhaps a Buryat, whose name was Po-Io-te; he was on intimate terms with a number of important Tibetan officials and was also received by the Dalai Lama. In March 1930, though initiaUr reponed to be travelling towards India, he disappeared in the directioft of lhcre Nagdlukha.6 is every reason to believe that all these missions went away as empry-handed as the Borisov-V ampilon mission, for by the middk of the abundandy decade, with or without Dorzhiev’s help, it must have �
dear to the Dalal Lama that Bolshevik ideology .as toraUy inimical to hiS political and spiritual order. not to mcnOoll his own position. Cmainly w� shordy bdore his death in 19.

33•

he WI’OIe ius so-called Final Testament, he issued the strongest possabk warning aplnst the dangers of ‘the barbanc red communim’, trbo Gathering Clouds 1 925-1929 221 by that time had robbed and destroyed the monasteries of M I. d . h f _..J h I r . th an ongo la, elt e� them or’-CU t e am as to en 1St In eir armies or else killed outnght:
And It will not be long before we find the red onslaught at our own front doo when that happens., we must be ready to defend ourselves. � . .

.

spiritual and cultural traditions will be completely eradicated. Even the naa:: of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas will be era� as �I as those of other lamas, Iineagr holden and holy beings. The monastenes will be
.

I� and destroyed.

and the monks and nuns killed or chased away . . .

. The blrthnghts and pl’Opaty of the people will be stolen; we will become like slaves to our COI1qUeron, and will be made to wander helplessly like beggars. Everyone will be forced to live in misery, and the days and nights will pass slowly, and with great suffering and terror. �

Uncannily accurate prophecies – though in fact it was the Communists of China rather than those of Soviet Russia that in the end brought them to pass.

Towards the end of 1 924 the reform movement had gathered momentum . ,
ID the BMASSR with attempts to elect darsan councils and implement the Statutes and regulations promulgated in 1922. These efforts were strongly opposed by those rich abbots who objected to the limitation of private property.

Further contention was set off in 1 925 and 1926 by the publication of new Buryat republic laws concerning the separation of church and stare, which at the same time invalidated all existing Buddhist statutes and

.

regulations on the grounds that they were ‘not �ponsible to SoYiet jurisdiction’. To settle matters, the reformers deaded to call offici a Second AJI-Buryat Buddhist Congress in 1 926, and accordingly als were sent out to the darsans to supervise the election of delegates. The conservatives chose largely to ignore these elections: the lamas of the Egi tue v, Tsongol and Tsugol datsans, for instance, declared that they ‘had need of neither the TsDS [Central Datsan Council ?], nor the congress, nor the Khambo-Lama’ . .

As a result, only founeen conservative delegates were elected as against fihy-two Ierious rtf�nntts. uter, however, realizing that they had put themselves at a
�t disadvantage, they tried to ‘unite their forces, reach a level of and work out a united platform’; if this failed, they planned !O disrupt the congress. Aher conspiratorial meetings in private quaners tandidat III V�neudinsk, they finally came up with two hundred unofficial es drawn mainly from Khorinsk aimak. These were headed by Zhigzhit Galsanov, Erdenyi Shoirodov, Tsibik-Dorzhi Badmayev, Nima Darmayev, BaI’zhir Naidanov and Erdenyi Vambotsirenov.

The conservative platform, for which popular suppon was claimed, was based on objections to the separation of church and state, the call up of lamas for military service, the raising of age limits for entry into the monastic � the opening of secular schools in the datsans, and to all the resolutions of the 1922 congress. They were suoogly against the socialization of property and income, the doing away with lamas’ private plots of land, and the organization of agricultural COI1IJIIUDCS. As �er had furthermore decided to push thei SIMa!’
r own candidaus for the poslbon of Khambo lama, they began a campaign against Khambos Munkuzhapov and Agvan Dorzhiev:
during the decrions for the presidency of the congress, Guru-Darma TUrcmpiIov Walt so far as to accuse Munkuzhapov of being a speculator and philosophy.

smuglcr. as weU as a man completely ignorant of Buddhist 1be reformers, meanwhile, held their own private meetings in Agvan Donhiev’s quarters, when they discussed the problems that were likely to arise at the congress and the various candidates for the position of president. “Those who took pan in these discussions included Khambo lama Munkuzhapov, Tsiren Sosorov, Bachar Baradin, Gombozhab T sybikov When and B. H. Badmazhapov.

the congress opened on 22 December 1925, the reformers were able to engineer the disqualification of the conservative candidates who had DOt been properly elected; then, after various minor matters had been discussed, the main business of the meeting was broached:
the revision of the starutes and regulations of 1922. This began with addresses by Agvan Dorzhiev; Khambo lama Munkuzhapov; Lubsan Shirab Ticpkin, the head of the Don Kalmyks, who had taken refuge at the Leningrad temple; and Bato-Dalai Ochirov, the representative of the Leningrad temple. “They called upon congtcsl members to ‘create a religious union based on the pure teachings of the Buddha and in harmony with the laws of the Soviet Socialise republic’ .-
According to CiC’rasimova, ‘Agvan Dorzhiev delivered a fiery [and)
cxbcn.dy expressive speech on how religion would be destroyed by me dcdinc in morality among the clergy’. Discipline in the datsaJII
was � he said, and the lamas failed to follow the holy teachings of the Buddha, which taught them ‘who&ehurudly to listen, think and contemplatc; instead they amassed money, cartle and other valu�
built houses and mansions for themselves, and busied themselVei .. th ttadc and speculation, all of which impovmshcd the laity. Moreover:
Gathering Clouds 1 925-1929 223 Many depraved persons now hold high officz in the khids arcwnstanas. (datsans). In these OM wonden: to whom does the religion belong? Sipi6 depraved and criminal dements, with the object of � their
. c:ant falsely slander those who keep the precepts properly before the rna::rx;:; faJthfuJ in an attempt to transfer their sins to others . . . Such lamas
�ghdy caJJed parasites; they are like ticks which. though appearing to be �
Insects. increase themselves twentyfold by drinking the blood of other animals Understand what we have come to! Is it not time to put aside the past and refo� OUr lives in line with the holy teachings of the Buddha? Only by acapring the new situation and establishing strict discipliM among the novices, the pupils of the Buddha. can we reach the point where Buddhism will shine (forth) lib the sun. Only in this way can we save the religion from seU-annihilation, which is inrvitable in five to fifteen yean it the dergy do no« adopt measures (to save it).’
When th� anicl� in th� stanJtes concerning mon�y-grubbing by th� lamas
“‘as discussed, Dorzhi�v told th�m baldly: ‘Th�r� has been enough riding on th� backs of th� population … The time has come for lamas to Iiv�
a

.communal Iif� [and] to try and tum to farming. This is not at odds
\VIth th� Buddha ‘s t�achings. ‘ In other words, he was advocating that the datsans transform themselves into kolkhoz: agricultural communes. To this Zhambo Zhalayev, the abbot of Kizhinga Datsan, replied that it
“‘ould tak� th� lives of a thousand buddhas – that is, an inconceivable length of tim� – to establish lamaist life in full conformity with the BUddha ‘s t�achings.

The delegates th�n argued over whether the lamas. should hold property and becom� involv�d in farming. The conservanves were abl�
to quot� the Vinaya to show that it was permissible for them to accept donations and to buy clothing and buildings with them (existing Russian la”, also allowed this), but not to occupy themselves with man�al l�bour, for digging th� ground would lead to the killing of numerous nny ansects an� so would transgress th� first precept: that against ki�ling sentient beings. Zhambo Zhalay�v added that to involve th� lamas an communal agricultural activities would anyway signify the end of their ‘happy I�fe’. Dorzhiev, th� r�alist replied that und�r socialism it was not expedient to liv� by th� labou� of others, for th� stat� would not give land to non

-laboUring d�ments.

�
Ba..een 1 926 and 1 929 the controversy between the reformist and ative I�mas within the Buryat Buddh�t �urch reached.

its deepest 5 of acnmony. Two mod�rn Buryat hlstonans have wntten:
It II probably dtHicuh tor the reader to ImagiM the struggle bnwem the sttugIc typical rdanners and the COIlIa’Vatives, so we will bridly explain that this was a of church schisms. In its cowv the dinicst methods were muruaI cxpolUft mutual murders. diftl’Sions. profanation of temples and all possible of all differmt kinds of vias. Besides the publication of artides in the pcriodia.Is from one side or anomer. then were also many complaints of the most litigious kind 01 partY. soviet and law enforcement Organs..10 anpIoycd:
Standing in the centre of it all, Dorzhiev himself inevitably came in for specia1 personal aaack. In 1 926, for instance, lamas of the Arsagat, Egiruev and Kizhinp dauans composed a scurrilous traer entitled accused him of
·Some Words About considering Lamas’,
himself in which, among other things, they the S«ond Buddha, of propagating reformist ideas and of fomenting division between the sangha and irs lay devoua. “The mer was circulated to Chita, Verkhneudinsk and Moscow newspapeR-II
which 1Den further in the summer of 1 926 came an event of the highest signi6cance, exacerbated the struggle. This was the nationalization of the Buryat darsans, which in dfeer meant the transfer of their administration into the hands of groups of lay devotees. The con.ierVatives showed rhemselves utterly unable to handle this siruation, whereas the reformers were actually able to lend a hand in the reorganization process and 50 to advance their cause still further. It was nor easy for them, however. because many darsans had a preponderance of conservatives.

In the Egiruev Darsan, for instance, Dorzhiev had a hard struggle to save the monastery from acruaUy being dosed down due to the intransigence of the opposition. He was finally able to do 50 by setting up a special group named Tasak-Bugulmi.

Aher nationalization, the conservative lamas held religious assemblies in ad hoc places like barns, under awnings, granaries and private hoUSCS.12 In Leningrad – [0 which the old capital’s name was changed froID
Perrograd after Lenin’s death in 1 924 – Dorzhiev’s temple languished, still neither fully repaired nor fully functional as a religious shrine. Many of irs problems were temporarily resolved, however, by an agreement that Dorzhiev signed in Moscow on 1 June 1 926 with BoIgan-Chul�
the rcprcscntative of the Mongolian People’s Republic in the USSR. Thi5 made the temple and irs ancillary buildings the joint property of Tiber and Mongolia. The Mongolian plenipotentiary furthermore unc;lertoOk to ·rake upon himself the management, upkeep. repair and care of die said buildings’.

Gathering Clouds 1925-1929 225 Bearing in mind that ‘the function of the temple is to furthe I I relations between the Buddhis� East and the l!SSR’, it was al:a c: tu� that the temple should be available to Buddhists wishing to Stud gr th teachings or �
o perform services and .rites, an� that there should a� � accomm�abon for monics. The maIn dwelling ho� in the precincts, me�nwhde, was to be put to the use of the Mongolian plenipotentia �hile the rest of the building would be at the disposal of Mongolian aZi M

Tibetan officials, and would also provide accommodation for Tibetans ongols, Kalmyks and Buryats visiting the city. Dorzhiev was designated manager of the temple complex. JJ
So, in effect, the temple became an official Tibeto-Mongolian Mission which is what Dorzhiev afterwards called it. As such, it enjoyed �
measure of diplomatic immunity, which was useful a few years later when the situation began to deteriorate and it could serve as a sanctuary for lamas from Buryatia and Kalmykia. The new arrangement also prompted the Mongolians to stump up funds from the treasury of the late Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu for the full restoration of the building, thereby enabling it to discharge its spiritual function again. Lamas th�. began studying and practising there again, and, �ntil.

the early thlmes, Mongolian and Tibetan lamas came every year In mid-August to celebrate religious rites; there is record too of a Cham dance being performed by lamas from the Aga Datsan in June 1930. 1″ The impression is therefore of the temple being relatively active during the late twenties. In addition to its religious and diplomatic activities, it Provided accommodation for students and visitors as well as serving as a haven for scholars and a metropolitan headquarters for �embers of the Buddhist reform movement. It was also a Tibetan medical centre and dispensary; the two rabzhi (doctors of Tibetan medicine), Balzheer certain Zodboyev and Shchoyshee Dhaba T amirgonov, based there won a fame in the locality for their ability to perfo� �res. !wo
�rnall shops in the adjacent buildings moreover did trade In nce, Spices, Incense sticks, religious images and cult objecrs. 1s Connections were also kept up with Stcherbatsky and the other leningrad orientalists, and indeed it was one of Dorzhiev’s aspirations to

.tum the temple into an imponant East-West cultural centre – ‘culture’ bring something that the communists could tolerate, as opposed to rel igion, which they loathed. Having tried and failed to hold the BUddhist Exhibition of 1919 there, he planned another for 1 926, to be grandly called the First International Buddhist Exhibition, and got
�
Ba.:adin to help him draft the main theses of his opening address. The obJect of ‘Buddhism as an Oriental Culture’ is quite dearly to II
IIpress the 3uthonbes, for he not only stresseS (or restresses) the cultural aspect of Buddhism but also its atheistical basis (actually non-theistical would be better: the Buddha maintained the proverbial noble silence on the matter of God and gods, or declared it to be a useless field of inquiry),
its consonance with the discoveries of modem European science and its origins in Indian national culmrc (� communists were very anxious to ingratiatt themselves with the Indians).

Having surveyed the enormous extent of the Buddhist penetration of Indian Asia and argued that Buddhism brilliandy reflects the genius of the people ‘nor only with respect �o rcligon but, to an even greater degree, to philosophy. psychology, c:PlStcmology. general methodology, linguistics and the others � ll:”d sacnces’, Dorzhicv’s theses single out four key humanistic ideas ongmatcd by the Buddha that, he maintains.

are highly relevant to modem European man:

7(i) Shakyamuni Buddha was the first in human history to proclaim me notion 
of the vital unity of life. not only of human life by itself but of all living creanun 
011 

notion 

   earth and also in the other inhabited worlds of infinite space. The trum of mis

Darwin.

011 the global level was scientificalJy proved by the great English scientist Shakyamuni Buddha [lIIOm)ver) taught mat all living creatures have the same aspiration [0 life and life’s bmdiu. and mat servia to living creatures is the highest duty of every man. tv also taught that. among living creatuJU, man is the most able to attain the supreme good. this being his sole prcropbve.

c:kmon5ttatcs 7(ii) Shakyamuni’s second great notion is his atheistical taching. [in which he)
that then is no creator god. Instead he advances the concepc of an infinite chain of c.ause-and�cct [Skt pratiya-samutpada). from which it follows mat the world is infinite in time and space. [that it) ius neither beginning nor end. that noming can arise from nodUng, and mat something existent c,anno( be utterly destroyed. Everything is in a constant state of Aox – something mat exists became in a given mommt ceases to be the same in the next moment. In Europe it scienas.

poss which ible emerged
[0 speak of such things only aftrr the development of the exact as the result of a continuous strugle waged against the theistic ideologies by the European peoples. who still are, 011 the whole. unc:kr the inRucncr of Biblical-Ouistia.n theism.

7 (iii) The mlrd great idea of Buddhism is the search for superior �
for [dealtng Wlm) the mental activity of marLin this sphen Buddhism contributed a pat deal to the AU-lndiao theory of concmtrabOn and meditation.. as wdI as to the self control of thought that is required for any human mental activity. To the same area … one sbouId also attribute the most profound copitive theories developed by the great Buddhist philosophcn of India … TheK theories led [0 differmt methock of rusoning: to dassicaJ didactic fonnuIM . . . as well as [0
�pIa Europe of syIIosisrns . . . H�ver. thae theories a� still unknown in civilized but should crnainly be inheritEd by world scimcr.

7 (jy) Finally. the fount. pat notion proclaimed by Shakyamuni Buddha is the rdabYlty of all aisutIa: the idea chat theft is no absolute, independent and uncondiboned bet.. . .. He taopt chat our wffmnp and nusfOf’tUll£l

                 Gathering Clouds 1925-1929 227 

are 

  .L 

   produced by ignorance of this great universal law of being, d h " d" h" h I" th "f I � 

                                                        an t at In 

The 

unucrstan I�g t IS trut Ie e meanmg 0 ile and OUr [anainment of) bli Buddha S teaching on the rdanvlty of all being has hem proy . 
                                                               SS. 

" b h i " ' h f h G h en In our own time y t e re anvlty t eory 0 t e erman p ysicist Einstein . . . The onl difference i.s that the
                 . 

Buddh� discovered hiS theory by the speculative meth� and made It the baSIS for hiS regular everyday world-meditation, where the German scientist came to his conclusions as an ordinary modem man of : 
[working) through sciCTltific experimentation. 1 6 CTlce

Concluding, Dorzhiev points to the possibility of a genuine and egalitarian rapprochement between the peoples of this magnificent Indo-Buddhist culture and those of the scientific West_

Strangely, this is the only text that it has been possible to locate in which Dorzhiey deals with Buddhist philosophy (of which, of course, he was an accredited master), aside from the more homespun remarks that he infiltrates into his memoirs. Whether he in fact wrote philosophical works is uncenain: in Leningrad someone remarked that they had seen two yolumes listed under his name in a Tibetan-language catalogue of such works in Ulan-Bator, but subsequent anempts to clarify this proved futile.

The main question, however, is to what extent these views are his own. We know Baradin helped him draft them, but the style of presentation is not at all Asiatic but almost entirely European, with sophisticated allusions to modern Western science and philosophy, so the temptation is to wonder whether the Leningrad orienta lists may also have been directly or indirectly influential. Indeed, it is very possible to see, if one ‘is looking for them, the lineaments of many of Stcherbatsky’s principal preoccupations – with Buddhist logic, for Instance, epistemology, psychology, theories of cognition and causality, and so fonh. Not entirely coincidentally, perhaps, the great Sanskritist was working on hIS Buddhist Logic at this time and was also about to publish his Conception of Buddhist Nirvana (1927), which deals precisely with relativirv as conceived within the Madhyamaka or Central” Way school of Mahavana Buddhist philosophy: the school of Nagarju�a and hIS follower”-s. The main body of Conception is a translation of selected ponions of Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka-Shastra, which Stcherbatsh translates as Treatise on Relativity, alongside a translation of Cha�drakini’s commentary. Dorzhiey, as a good Gelugpa
�he, would cenainly have hem well schooled in these works.

” It would be as wr�ng to systematize Nagarjuna and Chandrakini’s VIews on relativity as it would those of the modern Western philosopher, ludWIg Wingen�tein. All are concerned with philosophy as therapy rather than dISCOUrse: that is, with helping the mind escape from the

snares and traps created by its own thought processes by showing the 
ultimate 

notion

absurdity of all propositions. In basic Buddhism we find the of pratityla-samutpa� dependent origination, which is in essence a theory of creation by auscs; also the notion that the elements of the phenomenal world are real. Naprjuna and his followers demolished all this. According to them, all that pratitya-samutpada an mean is that every object in the phenomenal world appears to exist only in relation to all the other objects, but without possessing any inherent reality. To see this is be to sec shunyau, emptiness: the lade of inherent being or self-nature – a liberating experience that summarily terminates analytic thought and induces the bli� post-conccptual state of nirvana – the
‘quic:scence of Plurality’ (Nagal’)�). ln ultimate terms, though, it should nor viewed su be thought that samsara and rurvana are separate: nirvana is samsara b specie aetemitatis.

It is beyond my competence to say in what way the relativity theory of CUJ’l’m Nagarjuna and Chandrakirri resembles that of Einstein, though it is dy fashionable to look for parallels between Buddhist philosophy and the findings of modem theorerial physics. Stcherbatsky sought parallels too, but mainly in the sphere of Western philosophy ( Zeno, Bradley, Spinoza, Hegel); he nowhere mentions Einstein (or Darwin for that matter) in any of his principal works, which argues against the notion that he directly helped Dorzhiev to draft these theses, as is the fact that the drafting was done in Verkhneudinsk, not Leningrad.

Even so, it is hard to discount completely the possibility that he and some of the other Leningrad orientalists did not exert at least a strong indirect influence.

As the projected Buddhist exhibition of 1 926 never took place, this important speech was never delivered. Clearly, the backing of the Soviet authorities, to which Dorzhiev alludes in the final paragra�
was withdrawn at some 5taIe. This reflects a change in the of6cial attitude towards Buddhism that had taken place since 1919 – and is a portent of things to come.

While Dorzhiev was in Moscow in Jun�
1 926 for the signing of the on the Leningrad temple with the Mongolian representative, he may have met Nikolai Roerich, who was secretly in the Russian apiGI
at the sa.mt time with his wife Helem Ivanovna and son Yuri.

After 6nt mcfting Dorzhiev in the early days of the St PcunbutI
temple, Romch had left Russia in 1916 and for a shan time Ii.�
jusr across the border in Finland, from where he made periodic viIdI
agncment Gathering Clouds 1 925-1 929 229 to the Russian capital. His attitude to the revolution seems to h been ambivalent: on one hand he welcomed a (theoretically) prnares:.

ve

..J_ b h i ” b b” -&- Ive new orUC”r, ut e was a so patnClan y up nngrng and temperament_
special son of person. So, while he temporarily headed a corrur: v�
ry f th . f . h’ th SSlon or e protecnon 0 an treasures, a post grven 1m rough the good offices of the writer Maxim Gorky, he finally left Russia around th tum �f 1918 and headed for England, which he intended to use as :
step�lng-stone for India. Things did not w?

rk out to plan, however, and Instead he was lured across the Atlannc to the land of milk and money. He spent the years 1920 to 1923 in the United States, where his guru-like appearance (Gurdjieffian shaven head, achetypal sage’s beard) and grandiose ideas perhaps impressed people as much as his often striking paintings and theatrical designs, for he was able to attract suppon, financial and otherwise, both for himself and for the amstic projects that he spawned, like the Master Institute, the Corona Mundi and the Roerich Museum.

His wife accompanied him to the USA; also his sons Yuri (1 902-60)
and Svietoslav. Yuri had already begun his career in oriental scholarship by enrolling at the Indo-Iranian Depanment of the School of Oriental Studies at London University; in the USA, he enrolled at Harvard; later h� went on to study in Paris. Svietoslav, on the other hand, followed in his father’s footsteps and became an amst.

In 1923 the Roerich family visited India. Roerich then returned briefly necess to Europe and the United States, and in 1924, having mustered the ary funds for an ambitious Central Asian expedition, he set off for Berlin to obtain official pennission to enter Soviet territory. This docs not appear to have been categorically given, but he nevertheless
�rned to India and organized a caravan. Finally in March 1 925, with his family, acolytes and entourage, Roerich began a slow pr�ess up through Ladakh and Chinese Sinkiang. They crossed the SoViet border Dear Chuguchak at the end of May 1926, and then proceeded directly to Moscow.

An air of great secrecy surrounds Roerich’s Moscow venture of june 1926. Indeed all mention of it was suppressed in the accounts subsequently published bv himself and by Yuri; but then there was always something mysterious about the man – Igor Stravinsky once remarked that ‘He looked as though he ought to have been either a lIIystic or a spy’. J7 Perhaps he was a bit of both; many indeed thought 10. He does, however, seem to have been cordially received by Soviet officials like Chicherin whom he knew from his university days, and lunacharsky.

‘

According to one source, Roerich presented Lunacharsky with a number of paintings and discussed with him the possibility of holding an exhibition of his work in MOSCOW.11 Another maintains that Roerich broached the notion of his returning to Russia and establishing the kind of artistic institutions he bad set up in the USA; these proposals were sympathetically received, but no guarantee could be given of freedom to enter and exit the Soviet Union at will, wbich Roerich regarded as an essential precondition; in fact, Lunacharsky advised him to leave while he was still able to do so – advice which Roerich heeded.19 At hanc:Ied his meeting with Chicberin on 13 June, on the other hand. he Himalayan the Commissar for Foreign Affairs a casket containing sacred soil for Lenin’s to�b and a IDCS5age to the Soviet people from the Mabaaaas, the Theosophical masters of wisdom who are reputed to live in a Kquestlficd valley in Tibet. After a string of high-flown eulogies, the mesugr cooduded:
You brouPt children the full pown of the Cosmos. You saw the urgency 01 buildins new homes for the Common Good! Wt stopptd an uprising in India when it was prcmaru�; lihwisc, Wt recognised the timdtsSntsS of your IIIOYtmmt and send you all our hdp, in affirmation of the Uniry of Asia!20 Roerich obtained permission from Chicherin for his expedition to proceed discussed through Soviet territory to Mongolia. They may also have religion; in which case, if Roerich did indeed meet Dorzhiev either in Moscow at that time or later in Verkhncudinsk, he may have communicated the (misleading) impression that Chicherin was sympathetic to Buddhism.21 The indications are that at this point Roerich had come to believe in his highly imaginative way that Buddhism might flourish in Russia under the new order; indeed, that its advent might be a ponent that the predictions concerning Shambhala were about to be realized – and if Lenin was not the Shambhala Kalki incarnate, he at least might be a ‘fiery bodhisattVa’ come to pave the way for the inauguration of the new age. Certainly, a shon while later, he was putting it about that Buddhism and communisaD

were 'one thing'. His thinking was therdore not so far removed from 
that of Dorzhiev and associates. It would in any case SCft1l quite likdy 
that Roerich, through the underground channels of communication thai 
Russians seem to be able to keep open even during the mOil difficult of 
times, 
  Having 
      would 

          left 

             have 

              Mosco

                  been 

                    w, 
                       aware 

                       Roerich 

                             of 

                                made 

                                what they 
                                      a side 

                                          were thinking 
                                            trip to the Altai � 
                                                        and doinI-

after which his expedition proceeded eastwards via Omsk to (rkullk and Verkhneudinsk, where it turned southwards for Mongolia. Here.’
politically pragmatic line was continuing. for the local communisa 5Ii1I
found tbemJdVe5 obliged to work with class enemies like the lamaI and Gathering Clouds 1 925 1929 23 1 the nobility, and to countenance a measure of foreign capitalist .. . reform movement similar to that led by Dorzhiev and his friend acnvlty l

‘ a
. I ·ded b s was a so actIve. t was only after 1928, gul Y the steel hand of the Comi that a hard Marxist-Leninist line was adopted.

ntern,
. During the few months that he was in Urga, Roerich spent much nm� with Zhamrsarano, who was then head of the Mongolian Sci ennfic Committee. They would certainly have spent many absorb· ho�rs discussing Buddhism, �an�
Buddh.ism, Shambhala, the coming l
:,
Maltrey� and other such fascmanng tOpiCS. Later,.

the expedition crossed Mongolia br the classic route through Yum-belSC: Khuree, visiting en route the lair of the r��ntly murdered Ja-Lama m the G�bi. Having passed through An-hsl, It then proceeded across the Tsaldam region to the Tibetan uplands, where it was delayed in often bitterly cold conditions for many months, awaiting permission to proceed to Lhasa.

This was finally denied, but the expedition was allowed to cross Tibet by a circuitous route that took it to the west of the holy city, and to
�ake its exit through Sikkim in 1928. There is a story that while in Tibet Roerich masqueraded as the ‘Prince of Shambhala’, and wore a Suitably sumptuous suit of oriental-style clothing that he had had run up in Uega tor the purpose.

In 1 929, Roerich promulgated the Roerich Banner of Peace and the Peace Pact. which were concerned with the protection of cultural treasures during wartime. Again, he managed to attract a fair amount of support in high places, for in 1935 the Roerich Pact was signed at the White House by delegates from various American countries, in the presence of President F. D. Roosevelt. Since about 1929 Roerich had also been the guru of Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture, Henry W�
lIace, whose department financed his second expediti�n to Central
�Ia m 1934. Officially this was to search for drought-resistant grasses; U1 fact Roerich was more preoccupied with auguries that the new age of enlightenment and universal brotherhood was at hand. Needless to say, Wallace’s involvement with what at the time would commonly be regarded as screwball ideas, though later repudiated. ca�sed a great t�rore when news of it was eventually leaked in the press m 1948, and his career was effectively finished .

.

Roerich, on the other hand, stiU awaiting the realization of his visions, died in 1947 m Kulu in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, which had been his base for many years. There, at Urusvati, �oerich ha� in 1
�

30 Set up his Himalayan Research Institute, where his son Yun, as director, conducted his scholarly and teaching activities until his eventual return to the land of his forefathers in 1957.

The First All-Russian Buddhist Congress was held in Moscow between 20 and 29 January 1 927. One piece of encouraging news that the congress received during its session was that an Institute of Buddhist Culture – the first such scholarly foundation in the West – was to be created under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences and that Stcherbatsky was to be its director. The presidium of the academy was prompdy telegraphed:
The 6rsr AU Union Buddhist Council expresses profound gratitude to the Academy and to oricntalists Stcbcrbatsky, Ol’dmburg and Vladimimov for their initiative in oaring the lostitute of Buddhist Studies and cherish the hope that the stUdy of Buddhism will signify a beginning of the right understanding of the Iattu by the Watem cultural world and be a pkdgc of the future flourishing of our most precious religion.22 The news would no doubt have particularly gratified Dorzhiev, who, as we have seen, cherished hopes of East-West cultural cross fertilization through Buddhism. The congress also sent a message of devotion to the Dalai Lama.2l In 1 928, a major debate was held in Verkhneudinsk between Buddhists and Bolshevik anti-religionists. Dorzhiev took pan along with Baradin and others, and was probably more adept than most of his co-religionists, being able, as Walter Kolan says, to ‘quote in his suppon various learned Soviet authorities’.24 He had also been schooled in Buddhist logic and debate as pan of his geshe training.

The debate in Verkhneudinsk was not, however, the kind of stylized affair conducted according to time-honoured rules and procedures as would have taken place in the hallowed courtyards of Gomang College.

The anti-religionists waded in forcefully, blasting the Buddhists with raw Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, and it seems likely that proceedings would have become heated or even disorderly, for Dorzhiev afterwards complained that both he and his religion had been insulted.ll announced In the same year, 1928, the Leningrad atheistical journal, AntireJigitn:rd, the disturbing news that the orientalist, Vladimirtsov, had been converted to Buddhism: ‘In the dimly-lit pagoda on Novaya Dnevnya, this scholarly academician took Buddhist vows, for which he rcaived a diploma from the Dalai Lama in Lhasa, to the accompaniment of howling lamas and the wild music of ritual instruments’.26

Writing from Moscow on 12 May 1 928, Dorzhiev informed G. V Chicherin about a high lama named Danzan Norboyev, who wa�
regarded as an incarnation of Ganzhirva-Gegen. As ‘Ganzhirva’ is the Buryat-Mongol equivalent of the Tibetan ‘Kangyur’, the local canon of Buddhist scriptures, the tide signifies one who knows this whole body of works by hean and can bestow initiations.

The tradition of Ganzhirva-Gegen was associated with the Tsugol Datsan in Trans-Baikalia. It was there that the founh khubilgan, a Mongol, predicted his next incarnation would take place. Accordingly, when he died, the lamas of Tsugol sent representatives to Tibet to consult the Dalai Lama and receive directions. The fifth incarnation was duly found in the Buryat Sumayev family in 1 854. He spent many years studying abroad but returned to Trans-Baikalia in 1 877, entered the Tsugol Datsan as a gelong and was quickly made abbot; he died in 1 887. Norboyev was discovered as the next, the sixth, khubilgan and confirmed by the Dalai Lama and Agvan Dorzhiev in Urga in 1 905, when on his way to Labrang. As the climate of Amdo did not suit him, he returned to his homeland in 1 907, but two years later followed the Dalai Lama to Tibet via Peking and Kum-Bum in order to continue his spiritual education. He gained a Iharamba geshe degree in Lhasa in 1 916, and in 1918 returned to Trans-Baikalia with the Dalai Lama’s blessings and a document instructing him to dedicate himself completely to the benefit of others and to the propagation of Buddhism in his homeland, and wherever else he might find himself. He then lived at the Tsugol Datsan until 1 929.27 In 1 922, his position was discussed by the First AII-Buryat Buddhist Congress, panicularly what should be done about his propeny and how to protect him from people of ‘vicious behaviour’ in his entourage.28 Dorzhiev wrote that it was the Dalai Lama’s wish that Norboyev come to Leningrad to learn Russian, and he begged Chicherin to help make this possible. He also expressed the hope that Norboyev would assist the cause of Russo-Tibetan friendship and, in view of his advancing old age, soon replace him as the representative of Tibet.

For the next few years Norboyev indeed effectively acted as Dorzhiev’s deputy, co-ordinating the affairs of the Tibet-Mongolia Mission and, according to one source, serving as an unofficial spiritual representative of the Dalai Lama (Dorzhiev being the diplomatic representative) .

During the years up to 1 929, thanks largely to the efforts of Dorzhiev and his friends, Buddhism had enjoyed a special status among the religions of the Soviet Union. True, it bad been subjected to a certain amount of anti-religious propaganda that had undoubtedly had a deleterious effea:
in Buddhist particular, many young men were induced to feel that the life of a monk was nor a socially very useful or laudable one, and this had a considerable effect on the lama population – by 1 929 there were unckr 7,000 as opposed to 16,� at the height of the recent renaissance.

being Datsans denied also began to be heaVIly taxed and penalized in petty ways, like access to suppl.

ies of buil�ng materials (in practice this was easily circumvental). But still, Buddhism had been mercifully spared the awful pogroms wreaked upon Orthodox Christianity.

All Ibis was to change drastically in 1 928/9. Having exiled Trotsky and pined ascmdancy over Bukharin and other rivals, Stalin at last had the ram reasons of the Russian tarantass firmly in his hands and decided, for best know to himself, to release the heU hounds of class war once again. What lay ahead for the Buddhists of the Soviet Union was dearly announad in the party press, which began to publish diatribes in which the dangerous reformist (or nco-Buddhist) notions of Dorzhiev and his friends were singled out for special attack. Buddhist atheism had nothing at all to do with militant atheism based on the Marxist appraisal of the laws of nature and society, it was grimly declared, while Stalin himself denounced ·the absurd theory of the identity of the Communist enemies and Buddhist doctrines’.19 l.amas meanwhile were stigmatized as ·sworn of socialist reconstruction’, and datsans as ‘strongholds of the old regime’, which made it inevitable that they would soon be closed: the first, the Alar (founded 18 14), a smaU monastic house in Irkutsk province accommodating less than a dozen lamas, was in faa dosed in 1 929.

The regime’s anti-Buddhist operation in the BMASSR was initiaUy spearheaded by the Society of the Militant Godless, the anti-religiOUS
arm of the party, which established a local branch in 1929. Its cadres ananpttd to discredit Buddhism and to undermine the authority of the lamas by creating a negative image of them as money-grubberS.

reactionaries and sabomus. They were lampooned in the press and even in little plays staged in clubs. The anti-religionists also attempted to disrupt festivals and to bring about the formal closure of the datsaJIS
and Tibetan medical schools.

In January 1 929, Bllryat-MoPlgolslulYtI Pravd4 informed its readers that

                    Gathering Clouds 1 925-1 929 235 

it had received a cable from Dorzhiev confirming that he w Id be taking up the challenge of the Militanr Godless to panicipa�
                                                              u 

                                                                . 

debate scheduled to take place in Verkhneudinsk in late Febru: an a 
the subjeer of the 'class essence of religion'. He was at the time in ';: I

                                                                  ?
                                                                   n

having gone to Germany to organize the casting in bronze of the � an, Buddha-ru�
a in th� main shrine of the Leningrad temple at a foundry e
��
Hamburg (If had hItherto been made of alabaster). Despite his previous unhappy experiences, he made good his promise and took pan in the debate, which was duly reported in the same newspaper. 3D
Dorzhiev was now, at seventy-five, an old, ill and disillusioned man.

For most of his life he had worked tirelessly for the cause of Buddhism, yet all his achievements seemed to be slipping away like sand between
�is wizened fingers. His complaints to the authorities fell on deaf ears; mdeed, far from getting better, matters were taking a disturbing tum for the worse, and the current anti-religious drive not only descredited his reform initiative and all his efforts to reconcile Buddhism and Bolshevism, but de faero gave the vierory to his conservative opponents.

As for his diplomatic services, since world revolution had been officially supplanred by Stalin’s doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’, they hardly COunted for much. Clearly his star was waning.

It is completely improbable, however, as was later a�leged by his detraerors, that he abandoned all notion of reform m favour of anti-Soviet counter-revol.Jtionary activity; rather, he is more likely to have hoped that the lay devoteeS themselves wo�ld carry on the struggle to save Buddhism at the grass-roots level. But I

t must have been with a heavy heart and a sense of great apprehension – perhaps even of impending cataclysm _ that, after in August blessing the spot where the lamas of the Aga Datsan planned to erect a Ka�achakra subufP:
n

(Stupa), he left Buryatia to pay another visit to Lenmgrad. Perhaps In extrnnis he hoped that by speaking directly to officials there he could salvage something; Danzan Norboyev went with him.

The Destruction Of Buddhism In The Ussr And The Death Of Agvan Dorzhiev 1 930 – 1 938

Lenin’s Stalin did in the 1 9305 was to abandon the soft approach of What New Economic Policy for something like the hard line of War unism. Centralized control and full collectivization again became the order of the day, whether the people agreed or not, and a remorseless drive was set in motion to transfonn industry and agriculture and to push them to ever higher levels of productivity. It was hoped in this way that the Soviet economy would quickly catch up with those of the decadent bourgeois democracies of the West. There was also a power-political su�text: to forge the economic muscle to withstand blockade if the USSR
ever necessary again found itself encirded by hostile powen; also to create the annaments industry to secure its defence from actual anack.

The propaganda of the period portrayed Stalin not only as wise Comm patriarchal leader but as great builder and. though adminedly the statistics were cooked, Soviet industry undeniably made amazing leaps forward. But the achievements of the Fint Five-Year Plan ( 1 928-32) and its suCCCSSOB. like the consuuction of the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical plant in the southern Urals and the great hydro-clectric plant (Europe’s largat) on the Dneiper, were bought at great cost in human terms-In the atmOSphere of escalating state pressure and paranoia that Stalin orchestrated with the aid of the GPU (later renamed NKVO).

failu� to meet sometimes impossibly high production targets, nor to mention any upset or disaster, laid managen, workers, designers
_ whoever – vulnerable to charges of wrecking and sabotage. At the same time, class and ideological enemies were persecuted and/or liquidated. In his ruthless drive to collectivize agriculture, for instan�
Stalin singled out the more prosperous peasantry as his ideological �
noir. ‘liquidate the kulaks; he declared; but all the peasantrY, nc:t’ and poor, were opposed to collectivization and all suffered both 1ft Destruction of Buddhism &- Duth of Dorzhiev 1 930-8 237 the brutal dispossession process that accompanied it and th “bl famines that followed. e tern e Western intellectuals, who were sensitive to the deficiencies of capitalis and so had high hopes that the Soviet Union would evolve somethin m better, were encouraged by the positive propaganda, and were often a
�
a consequence prepared to overlook or explain away the dark side of the communist utopia. In performing radical surgery, one argument ran one has to be prepared to shed a Iinle blood. ‘
One such positive spirit was G. D. R. Phillips, who in 1943 published a small book in English on the Buryats. Writing with all the enthusiasm of the conven, Phillips waxed rhapsodic about the socialist achievements he found in abundance in U1an-Ude (‘Red Ude’), as Verkhneudinsk was renamed in 1 934. Giant factories had been built – a great railway repair works; a meat combinat that ‘uses everything excep t the beasts’s last breath’; a mechanized glass factory; a milling combinat; two mechanized
�akeries. Large numbers of Buryats had poured into the city to work 10 these delightful places. l One day Phillips caught sight of a group of them: healthy and happy young men and women who, having completely forsaken their old nomadic ways, now wore Western-style clothing. They stopped at a kiosk to buy an ice-cream while they waited for a bus.

Nearby stood some diny and decrepit wooden houses of the old son; on the other side, however, shone a clean white concrete block with gleaming glass windows – a resplendent symbol of the new U1an-Ude that was endowed with all the assets of modem science and culture:
schools, hospitals and clinics, clubs, theatres, cinemas, radio and a public library where, now that illiteracy was being overcome, ‘one could see young Buryats taking from the shelves books in Russian or Buryat on agronomy, mathematics, genetics, sociology, �eography, Othello in Russian or Buryat; other works of Shakespeare, Dickens and Galswonhy in Russian’. 2 The streets of this socialist elysium, meanwhile, Were by day merry with motor traffic and illuminated at night by the wonder of electric light.

In the rural areas efforts were under way to facilitate the ‘transition to more cultural forms of life’ – that is, to settle the nomads and
&ani-nomads, to break up old clan relationships and to collectivize the land. The basic aim here was to neutralize the class divisions and abuses that had been re-cstablished during the era of the New EconomIC Policy. Phillips maintains that mistakes were made during the collectlVlzanon process: instead of urging the local peasantry to displace the rich men of the ulus encampment and village themselves, some Buryat Bolsheviks used what Stalin called the ‘cavalry raid’: ‘The
“propagandist” called a meeting of the ulus or village, slammed his revolver on the table and announced that the village or ulus was now
“coliectivised”:J But such mistakes were really the work of ‘enemies within the Party and Soviet Apparatus’ (the party leadership itself was, of course, infallible), and anyway they did not much affect the process, for the collectivized rural population rose from 4.2 per cent in 1 929 to 19.5 per cent in 1930 and stooc:’ at over 60 per cent by 1932 – and this was mostly achieVed, according to Phillips. by positive inducement rather than coercion. When those still anached to the old nomadic ways saw with their own eyes how good things were on the collective farms –
wben they saw the tax relief benefits, the housing subsidies and the health

care facilities, not to mention the bright new tractors, lorries, combine 
barv

agrono
    esrers 

       mists, 
           and other machines, and the technical advice available from

veterinary surgeons and other experts – they could only
� ‘Why should I not join the collective . . . ?’ They could even have a little land and a few animals of their own. Phillips concludes:
ly, smkmmt for the nomads meant imlMdiate reduction in the winter death-roll [sic) of animals. Culturally, it meant that the Buryats themsdvn learnt the use of soap, of newspapers. of dubs, of music, in Nt order. 4 E.conomicaI

In 1 930 the campaign against religion was initially stepped up in Buryatia. In February, for instance, measures were taken against the New Year festival, Tsagaansar, and subsequcndy a decision was made to close twenty datsans within one month. These zealous efforts were ultimately counter-productive, however: local protest thwaned the closing of the darsans. and the Buryat branch of the Militant Godless was disbanded

In the same year, the pioneer Tibetan traveller, Gombozhab Tsybikov, passed peacefully away in his native Aga steppe. He had spent the Iasr yean of his life simply: getting up early and walking in the countryside with the local herdsmen. His final illness came on suddenly. ‘I know that I will die,’ be told his wife when she came to sec him in the Aga hospi�
‘but boob the Soviet Government will, I think, preserve my manuscripts and
.’ He then asked for a clock to be put at the head of his death-bed and bravdy awaited his final hour.’
Agvan Dorzhiev returned to the same area (the Aga Steppe) for a Destruction of Buddhism &- Death of Dorzhiev 1 930-8 239 Kalachakra Festival that was held in May 1 930 at the Aga Dat h largest Buddhist foundation in the r
.

egion, built between 18 11 a:�i 8 t 1 �
on the lower reaches of the Aga nver. In those days it consisted of central dukhang and six smaller ones, four of which were devoted a philosophical, medical, tantric and Kalachakra studies; of the remain�
o one housed a gigantic brass image of Maidari (Maitreya, the Cornin r, Buddha) and the other, the Temple of Amitabha, two models (devazhin�
of the T ushita and Sukhavati heavens.7 It also seems to have been one of the strongholds of the reform movement, and one source maintains that Dorzhiev built an ‘obnovlenchesky dugan’ (reformist temple) there.8 As the Kalachakra stupa had now been completed, Dorzhiev was able to co�secrate it himself besides giving Kalachakra initiations to a group of Agmsky lamas, whom he then invited to return to Leningrad with him in order to receive commentarial teachings on Kalachakra. In order to obtain the necessary authorizations to travel, he registered them as a troupe of Mongolian Cham dancers. Most of them stayed in the old capital for about a month before returning home, during which rime, besides their studies, they did in fact put on a performance of a Kalachakra Cham dance. A few did elect to stay on, however.9 The Aga Datsan visit was Dorzhiev’s last to Trans-Baikalia for some years. In 1931 he was ‘invited’ to Moscow by Narkomindel and ‘shown’ that he was ‘exceeding the limits set for diplomatists’ by ‘stirring up the population of Buryaria against the Soviet state’ .

10 It was then ‘proposed’ that he take up a ‘steady place of residence’ in Leningrad. In other words, he was being politely placed in a kind of internal exile. Clearly he had no option but to accede.

. For the next few years he shared a pleasant wooden house in Ol’gino, Just beyond the outer suburbs of Leningrad, with Norboyev. It can be reached by following Primorsky Prospekt westwards past the Buddhist temple. For a few kilometres the road runs through the marshlands of dark

. water and rustling sedge that flank the northern �
hore of the

. Gulf of Fmland; then it turns inland. Ol’gino itself is a qUiet, dusty village of wooden houses, all individually different but rather run down now, set among the obligatory birches. The house that Dorzhiev shared wi�
�anzan Norboyev, No. 7 Konolakhtinskaya Prospekt, had been built In 1 908 by a Finnish jeweller named Andrey Seppenem; he had also built a laundry and workshop in the garden. I I It is unclear whether the two-storey building that now stands on the site is this original one, though it may well be.

There is little evidence of how Dorzhiev passed his time at Ol’gino. He bad visitors, no doubt, and he still kept in touch with what was going on in monastic circles in Buryatia -� one would assume, in Kalmykia too. But one would hope that he also at last enjoyed periods of relative tranquillity when he could apply bimseU to his Buddhist practices and so prq:wcd himself for death. After all, he was now a very old man and could only get about with the aid of sticks.

He also mntinued 10 � Ieaas of protest to Narlcomindel -and quite ohm in blunr rams -about what was happening to Buddhism in the Soviet Union. Not only did these have no effect but, now that his amazing run of good tmdai luck wiIh the � w� well and truly over., they almost cmainly 10 harden the of6ciaI attitude towards him. and in faa in 1934, a 6nr serious IIIOft apinsr him was made. A cmain ‘0. N.’, with whom he had had vague contaets the previous year, alleged to the GPU that under the CIJUDIIT
guile 01
-rnol orpnizing utionary the I…amaist reform movement he was in fact creating a organization. Some forty other people were named at the same time, including D. Sampilon, E. D. Rinchino, Daman Norboyev, and acadrmics like Srcbcrbatsky, OI’dmburg, Vostrikov and Obmniller who were alleged to be pan of his intdligcnce network. O.N. also alleged that in 1924 Dorzhiev had sent a letter to a Tibetan lama at the Tsugol Datsan named Donir Lama, whom he used as a courier. The contents of the letter were not known to o. N. But this did not prevent him from forming the opinion that they were intdligence materials. This imaginitive man also denounced Dorzhiev and his associates as Japanese agents and dangaom Pan-MongoIists.

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