Abstract
The article invites readers to reconsider the history of Buddhism in Russian Trans-Baikal as a gradual process of negotiation and redefinition that involved different actors: lamas, Russian imperial officials of various levels, Orthodox missionaries, Buriat national activists, Saint Petersburg Orientologists, modern Buddhist reformers and conservatives. The process involved the construction of the centralized and subordinated confessional group out of scattered communities of lamas in the course of the nineteenth century, Irkutsk Orthodox Diocese’s attempts first to downgrade the faith of lamas to idol-worship and then to normalize ‘corrupted Buddhism’, and the 'discovery' of the larger Buddhist world by some Buriat lamas and their attempts to bring it back to ‘authentic forms’. The article shows what exactly had brought Russian officials and then Buriat Buddhists themselves to the idea that their religious tradition, which historically was labeled merely as Lamaistvo, is a part of the emerging conception of global Buddhism.
Highlights
In 1905, a group of Buriat political activists submitted a petition to the prime minister [1] of the Russian government Sergey Vitte
Before I start discussing how, in the course of the eighteenth to nineteenth century, the loose and fragmented groups of lamas5 were organized into a centralized confessional group and how their faith evolved into the peculiar European conception of Buddhism in the eyes of the Russians and of the Buriat followers of this religion themselves, let me outline the theoretical frame of my study
Unlike other researchers of the Buriat Buddhist Renovationism (Gerasimova [40] 1964; Damdinov 1997, 79–91; Aiusheeva 1997, 55–65; Zhukovskaia and Abayeva 1983, 129– 44; Zaiatuev 1992), who attempted to find the roots of this phenomenon in contemporary developments, I argue that the Buriat Buddhist reformism, which began in the early twentieth century and emerged as a full-fledged religious-political movement only after the Bolsheviks took Trans-Baikal under firm control in 1920s, is primarily the outcome of the complex process of colonial reinterpretation of Buddhism described above
Summary
ଈ୪ഌഝଈഝ The article invites readers to reconsider the history of Buddhism in Russian Trans-Baikal as a gradual process of negotiation and redefinition that involved different actors: lamas, Russian imperial officials of various levels, Orthodox missionaries, Buriat national activists, Saint Petersburg Orientologists, modern Buddhist reformers and conservatives. The process involved the construction of the centralized and subordinated confessional group out of scattered communities of lamas in the course of the nineteenth century, Irkutsk Orthodox Diocese’s attempts first to downgrade the faith of lamas to idol-worship and to normalize ‘corrupted Buddhism’, and the ‘discovery’ of the larger Buddhist world by some Buriat lamas and their attempts to bring it back to ‘authentic forms’. The article shows what exactly had brought Russian officials and Buriat Buddhists themselves to the idea that their religious tradition, which historically was labeled merely as Lamaistvo, is a part of the emerging conception of global Buddhism. ౖ൰ൠಧஐഌ Buddhism, Buriats, Russia, Trans-Baikal, tradition, reinterpretation of tradition
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