Institute of Asian Research
Program on Inner Asia

Tibet-Mongolia Links in Religion and Medicine

Jointly organized by:
Julian Dierkes (IAR, UBC), Craig Janes (Health Sciences, SFU), and Tsering Shakya (IAR, UBC)

Sponsored by:
Silkroad Foundation
Program on Inner Asia, IAR
Buddhism and Contemporary Society Program, IAR
Contemporary Tibetan Studies Program, IAR

As Mongolia is emerging from its 70-year isolation as a Soviet satellite, long-standing historical links with Tibet are being revived. Beyond Mongolia itself, Buddhism is experiencing a significant revival throughout Central Asia and global attention has been increasingly focused on Tibetan Buddhism and medical practices. We are proposing a year-long lecture series to be held in Vancouver (on the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Simon Fraser University (SFU) campuses) that will focus on Tibetan-Mongolian links and will investigate the implications of such links especially for contemporary Buddhism and for traditional medicine.

One of the challenges in expanding knowledge about intra-Asian historical connections has been the significant loss of sources over time. Re-emerging links between Mongolia and Tibet offer many possibilities to reconstruct historical information that may exist in one place but not the other and to thus contribute to knowledge of significant importance for contemporary debates.

Two areas of linkages between Mongolia and Tibet are religion and traditional medicine. Mongolia's democratic revolution in 1990 has led to a revival of Buddhism and this revival is marked by a hunger for knowledge that had been destroyed during the Soviet period. Given Mongolia's long-standing religious links with Tibet, Tibet is now looked upon as a source for knowledge to fuel the religious revival in Mongolia.

Medical practices that had originally been based on traditional Tibetan medicine are being re-discovered and re-evaluated for contemporary applications. As religious ties led to the adoption of Tibetan as a lingua franca for scholarly materials, some Mongolian traditional practices that have been lost are being reconstructed using Tibetan sources, and vice versa. Given the PRC government's support for research on indigenous medical knowledge, this is one of the few areas of active collaboration between scholars and educators in Mongolia, Inner Mongolia and Tibet.

Lecture Series Schedule

All events are open and free to the public.

Vesna Wallace (Religious Studies, University of California - Santa Barbara)
April 7, 2008, 5pm, Conference Room, CK Choi Building for the Institute of Asian Research
"Mediating the Power of Dharma: Mongols' and Tibetans' Approaches to Reviving Buddhism in Mongolia"
Western Buddhist scholars in general have tended to equate the essential character of Mongolian Buddhism with Tibetan Buddhism, thereby overlooking the cultural uniqueness of the Mongolian Buddhist tradition. In contrast, contemporary Tibetan missionaries in Mongolia have demonstrated their dissatisfaction with the growing revitalization of old, traditional Mongolian beliefs and customs in the reemerging Mongolian Buddhist tradition. This presentation will discuss various ways in which the Mongols and Tibetan Buddhist missionaries in Mongolia attempt to recreate and envision the Mongolian Buddhist tradition; and it will also address the problems that arise when their re-envisionings of Mongolian Buddhism diverge.

April 8, 2008, 7pm, 1800 Terasen Cinema, SFU Habour Centre
"Revitalisation of Buddhism in Mongolia"

Dr. Vesna Wallace is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on South Asian and Mongolian religions. She has authored the book The Inner Kalacakratantra: A Buddhist Tantric View of the Individual and published several books of translation from Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Mongolian. She also authored a series of articles on esoteric Buddhism and produced four documentary films on Mongolia. Dr. Wallace has been conducting a field research in Mongolia on the revival of Mongolian Buddhism annually since the year 2000, which will result in her new volume on contemporary Buddhism in Mongolia.

Elliot Sperling (Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana University)
March 14, 2008, 5pm, Conference Room, CK Choi Building for the Institute of Asian Research
"The Tibeto-Mongol Treaty of 1913 and its Significance"
Tibet and Mongolia has had a long shared cultural and historical relationship for centuries. In 1911, after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, Tibet and Mongolia declared independence and signed a treaty of friendship and recognition of each other’s independence. Recently, the treaty has come to light with the opening of the archive in Ulan Bator, the talk will explore the significance of the Tibet-Mongol treaty of 1913.

Elliot Sperling is Professor of Tibetan Studies in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. He has written widely on Tibetan history and Sino-Tibetan relations and has received MacArthur and Fulbright fellowships. From 1996 to 1999 he served on the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad.

Manduhai Buyandelgeryin (Anthropology and Society of Fellows, Harvard University)
Thu, Nov 8, 11:30-1:20p, Room, 10081, ASSC I Bldg. SFU
"The Impossibility of Knowing the Past: Muted Ghosts, Mass Graves, and the Neoliberal State in Mongolia"
Since its shift towards democratization in the 1990s, Mongolia has been dealing with the repercussions of the state violence that swept the country in the 1930s. While both the state and the populace agree on the importance of rehabilitating the victims of repression, they expect divergent outcomes. Most individuals search for knowledge about their family's misrepresented past. The state, on the contrary, strives to cast the repressions as a generic tragedy of the nation and to control the in-depth knowledge about the events, but in covert ways that deter accusations.
This paper explores some of the instances of the impossibility of recovering knowledge about the past by looking at the practices of shamanism through which the ethnic Buryats of Mongolia maintain their history. It reveals a conceptual link between the Buryats' search for missing knowledge about their ancestors and the attempts by the historians of the Research Center for the Rehabilitations of the Victims of Political Repression to produce a series of books, films, and other media on the repressed. The Buryats' articulation of their missing knowledge through a metaphor of muted ghosts is neatly related to the difficulties experienced by the historians in the Research Center. As the Center tracks down its mysteriously disappearing publications and responds to the haphazard cremation of rediscovered mass graves from the 1930s, the Buryats' past remains ambiguous, their search for missing knowledge through shamanism proliferates, and the muted ghosts persist. But the state and the populace pretend to collaborate while striving to achieve their respective goals. With permeable boundaries and codependent on each other, the state and populace's overlapping commitments are stretched out between the material interests of neoliberal capitalism, and the memories of the past.

Fri, Nov 9, 5-6:30p, Conference Room, CK Choi Building for the Institute of Asian Research (co-organized with Anthropology, UBC)
"Representation of Buddhism in Arts, Culture, and Cinema during Socialism in Mongolia"
State socialism in Mongolia was a secularizing enterprise with the goal of building a rational modern society. After the religious cleansing in the 1930s and 1940s when tens of thousands of clergy were assassinated, jailed, or forced to become lay people, the state mobilized literature, arts, and cinema to propagandize against religion. The Buddhist lamas were represented as brutal and imprudent enemies of the people. The state was able to instill some atheist sentiments in the population, but these representations had unexpected outcomes as well. Although Buddhist practices were prohibited in everyday life, their presence in the cultural field had perpetuated knowledge about Buddhism, and maintained the populace's touch with the past. This indicates that the cultural production was not contained by the state only, and that both the creators and populace had their own ways of consuming culture beyond the state aim to propagate anti-religious thoughts.

Manduhai Buyandelgeriyn came to Anthropology by searching for a way to comprehend the collapse of socialism and the anxieties of transition in Mongolia in the 1990s as she experienced the democratic revolution while a college student. After getting her degree in literature from the National University of Mongolia, she pursued anthropology in the US in the late 1990s to acquire the tools to explore the devastating changes. For my dissertation research she lived and traveled with ethnic Buryats who migrated from Russia to Mongolia escaping the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and who were brutalized the most of any group during Stalin's purges in the 1930s. She investigated how the Buryats articulated their experiences with the new order and have dealt with their tragic past through the revival of their previously suppressed practices of shamanism in the aftermath of the state engineering of history. After completing her Ph.D. in 2004, she took a position as a Junior Fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows. She will be joining MIT anthropology faculty as an assistant professor in July 2008. Her book manuscript, entitled Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Socialism, and Neolibereal State in Mongolia is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. It tells a story of the collapse of the socialist state and the gendered responses of the marginalized ethnic Buryats to the neoliberal economic policy of shock therapy.

Invited Presenters