Surviving Modernity in Mongolia

Editor’s introduction: This succinct presentation by one of the world’s great scholars of Mongolian Buddhism summarizes the challenges that Buddhism has faced and continues to face in Mongolia. Amid historical reconsideration and revisionism – and continuing propaganda – it is important to acknowledge and understand, as Dr. Wallace conveys, the enormity of repression faced by Buddhism, as Mongolia’s longstanding religion and cultural tradition, during seven decades of Soviet socialist control. This included the summary execution of many thousands of monks and lamas, the closing and also the physical destruction of all but a tiny handful of the country’s 3,000 temples, and virulent public vilification of Buddhist religious practices. Now awash in a boom of free market economic development, Mongolia faces, as Dr. Wallace describes it, two complementary forms of modern influence: one historically communist, with a significant continuing influence in the present, and the other capitalist. In the mix, Mongolian Buddhism struggles to assert and reinvent itself amid official ambivalence (and heavy taxation) and zealous Christian prosyletization that continues to borrow from anti-Buddhist communist propaganda. Despite these challenges, echoing a statement by Buddha himself that is referred to by Dr. Wallace in her conclusion, the Buddhist legacy continues to vibrantly reassert itself, and to redefine itself with resilience, in contemporary Mongolia.