Buddhism in Mongolia
[citation needed] Traditionally, the Mongolian ethnic religions involved worship of Heaven (the "eternal blue sky") and ancestors and the ancient North Asian practices of shamanism, in which human intermediaries went into trance and spoke to and for some of the numberless infinities of spirits responsible for human luck or misfortune.
The Khitans aristocracy regarded Buddhism as the culture of the Uyghur Khaganate that dominated the Mongolian steppes before the rise of the Liao dynasty.
[11]: 12 Buddhist monkhood played significant political roles in Central and Southeast Asia, and the sangha in Mongolia was no exception.
They formed an alliance that gave Altan Khan legitimacy and religious sanction for his imperial pretensions and that provided the Buddhist school with protection and patronage.
[14][citation needed] Thus, Altan added legitimacy to the title "khan" that he had assumed, while Sonam Gyatso received support for the supremacy he sought over the Tibetan sangha.
Viharas (Mongolian datsan) were built across Mongolia, often sited at the juncture of trade and migration routes or at summer pastures where large numbers of herders would congregate for shamanistic rituals and sacrifices.
Reincarnations of living Buddhas were often discovered in the families of Mongolian nobility until this practice was outlawed by the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing dynasty.
During the Qing's founding emperor Hong Taiji's (1592–1643) campaign against the last Northern Yuan ruler Ligdan Khan, he started the sponsorship of Tibetan Buddhism to gain support.
[19] By the beginning of the twentieth century, Outer Mongolia had 583 monasteries and temple complexes, which controlled an estimated 20 percent of the country's wealth.
In the 1920s, there were about 110,000 monks, including children, who made up about one-third of the male population, although many of these lived outside the monasteries and did not observe their vows.
By the twentieth century, Buddhism had penetrated deeply into the culture of Mongolia, and the populace willingly supported the lamas and the monasteries.
When the revolutionaries took power and formed the Mongolian People's Republic, determined to modernize and reform Mongolian society, they confronted a massive ecclesiastical structure that enrolled a large part of the population, monopolized education and medical services, administered justice in a part of the country, and controlled a great deal of the national wealth.
The result was a protracted political struggle that absorbed the energies and attention of the party and its Soviet advisers for nearly twenty years.
As late as 1934, the party counted 843 major Buddhist centers, about 3,000 temples of various sizes, and nearly 6000 associated buildings, which usually were the only fixed structures in a world of yurts.
In a campaign marked by shifts of tactics, alternating between conciliation and persecution, and a few reported uprisings led by monks and abbots, the Buddhist church was removed progressively from public administration, was subjected to confiscatory taxes, was forbidden to teach children, and was prohibited from recruiting new monks or replacing living Buddhas.
Only then was the ruling party, which since 1921 gradually had built a cadre of politically reliable and secularly educated administrators, able to destroy the church and to mobilize the country's wealth and population for its program of modernization and social change.
Its monks included a few young men who had undergone a five-year training period, but whose motives and mode of selection were unknown to Western observers.
The organization, headed by the abbot of then-Gandan Monastery, advanced the foreign policy goals of the Mongolian government, which were in accord with those of the Soviet Union.
After the 1990 overthrow of communism, there has been a resurgence of Buddhism in the country, with about 200 temples now in existence and a monastic sangha of around 300 to 500 Mongolian monks and nuns.
[20] According to Vesna Wallace, a professor of religious studies at UC Santa Barbara: "Now more people are coming to temples and visiting monasteries.
