The Bloody White Baron (11 page)

Ungern latched on to them, attempting to get himself a post with the Russian garrisons in Urga and the western city of Khobdo, both of which contained members of his former regiments. He was refused, but found himself attached to the Khobdo guard as a supernumerary captain. With few actual duties, he spent his time studying the language (he would scribble down new words he came across), practising his riding and talking to the lamas and monks who dominated the Mongolian cities. The other officers found him strange and off-putting, and effectively excluded him from their society. One witness remembered him sitting alone in silence much of the time, and on other occasions being seized by a strange spirit and leading whooping Cossacks in wild charges across the plains.

He may have had some contact with one of the most legendary lamas, Dambijantsan, also known as the Ja Lama. This mysterious figure had been fighting against the Chinese for over thirty years; he claimed to be the great-grandson, and later the reincarnation, of Amursana, a famous eighteenth-century fighter against the Manchus who was in turn a purported incarnation of Mahakala, the Great Black God, a ferocious deity who, like the other ‘dharma protectors', shielded
Buddhists from the enemies of the faith. Popular memory maintained a series of classic ‘hidden king' legends around him, and his eventual return to liberate the Western Mongols (the Oirats) from Chinese domination. In reality Amursana had been, at times, a collaborator of the Manchus, but this was conveniently forgotten. Critically, Amursana's place of magical concealment, from which he would soon emerge, was in Russia - the ever-mystical north, where he had died while under Russian protection in 1757. By making his claims, then, Dambijantsan sought to legitimise himself dynastically, through Amursana's nobility, politically, by assuming the mantle of anti-Chinese resistance, and theologically, by claiming the magical inheritance of Amursana and the incarnated power of Mahakala. As an epic poem written in his voice put it:

These were grand claims for a squat, ugly monk, but his charisma and his military success gathered many followers. Ungern had learnt about him from Russian and Chinese newspapers, and probably from the travelogues of the Russian ethnologist and political agent Aleksei Pozdneiev, who collected stories of him in the 1890s, and hoped to join him to fight against the Chinese, but was forbidden from doing so by his superiors. Khobdo had seen fierce fighting only that year between Mongolian fighters and the Chinese garrison, and the Chinese fortress had fallen in a scene of bloody revenge.

The Ja Lama had been at the forefront, politically and militarily, of these battles; he was, as Ungern aspired to be, a near-legendary figure of militant Buddhism. After he seized western Mongolia, although he
claimed to still be loyal to the Bogd Khan, he ruled autocratically for more than two years. The atrocities at Khobdo were typical of his regime. There were plausible accounts, both from his enemies and, later, from former allies, that he conducted a ritual, upon taking the fortress, in which the hearts of two Chinese victims were literally ripped from their chests, like victims of an Aztec sacrifice.
²⁴
The rumour that his ger was lined with the skins of his enemies was probably false, but other lamas reported that he used terror ruthlessly. If Ungern met the Ja Lama, he found him a disappointment - he had sung his praises before his arrival in Mongolia, but referred to him only in disparaging terms afterwards - though he must also have drawn many lessons from him.

Throughout his later career in Mongolia, Ungern professed nothing but respect for Buddhism and ‘the destiny of the Buddhist peoples'.
²⁵
It was on this trip that he learnt the importance of these beliefs among the Mongolians. It was a strikingly, almost fanatically, Buddhist country, hence the power of the Bogd Khan. No matter what his sins, the Bogd's theological status - and his political clout - were beyond question. What we observe so often, and what seems so strange at first, is the fear and awe that the Mongolian temples created, both in ordinary Mongolians and even in those, like Ungern, raised in an utterly foreign tradition.

Mongolian Buddhism hinged on sacrifice. The Mongolian gods were demanding, and unmoved by anything except offerings. Although the merciful bodhisattvas did feature in Mongolian religion, they could be overshadowed by the more uncaring deities. Offerings were made for the usual reasons: relief of illness, fertility of crops, cursing of enemies. Averting disaster also loomed large as a pious motive. Tibetan Buddhism makes very specific distinctions between offerings for worship, which honour the enlightened gods, and offerings of propitiation, made to keep the unenlightened gods from getting angry. Many Mongolian offerings fell into this second category; pay-offs to various malevolent spirits in a divine protection racket.

A cynic might say that this protection racket benefited corporeal lamas more than spiritual gods. Every year, a significant part of the national income drained into the coffers of monasteries already stuffed with the wealth of centuries. Another goodly portion went,
quite literally, up in smoke, for holocausts were an integral to Mongolian ritual. Animal sacrifice was common, hecatombs of livestock being offered to the blood-hungry gods. The meat, as with most offerings, ended up feeding the monks - or sometimes the poor.

The lamas were greatly concerned with sacrifice themselves. The Bogd Khan's failing eyesight was a particular worry; ten thousand statues of the Buddha were ordered from Poland, and a gigantic statue of the Buddha brought from Inner Mongolia and placed in a newly built temple. Together these two offerings, both made in 1912, cost some 400,000 Chinese silver taels, a vast sum of money. They had no effect on the Bogd's vision.

And behind all this there was always the whiff of something older and perhaps more frightening. Mongolian Buddhism, like Tibetan, drew heavily on older religions, particularly shamanism. The Chinese had their shamanic traditions too, but they were largely corralled and suppressed, surviving only in a few figures such as the ancient Mother Goddess of the West and the shape-shifting heroes of primordial Chinese mythology. They are uncomfortable figures, standing somewhat outside the comfortable domesticity or light bureaucratic satire of most Chinese gods. Even today they have an unnerving power. In Hong Kong I once handled a statue of a snake-god who, in ancient Chinese mythology, shaped the formless chaos of the newly created universe.
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It caught my attention because they are so rarely depicted directly, but it was long and thin and sinuous and seemed to twist oddly in the half-light.

Western writers have been fascinated by shamanism, in Asia and elsewhere, seeing in it the dawn of religion. In Mongolia, it seemed, one barely had to scratch the surface of Buddhism to uncover essentially shamanic beliefs. Indeed, some of the more remote tribal groups still had shamans of their own. In shamanic cosmologies, the spirit world is ever-present, and the rituals and sacrifices needed to deal with it a mainstay of everyday life. The shaman stands between two worlds, pleading or bargaining with the spirits for power for himself and his community. Much of the Mongolian relationship with their gods seemed to be drawn from this worldview, and the gods themselves were, in many cases, of pre-Buddhist origin. The range of gods and spirits was highly varied; broad distinctions could be made between the
lu
or
nagas
, spirits of water, the
savdag
, spirits of land, and
dashgid
, the Wrathful Ones, spirits of air, but within these there were numerous subcategories - nagas, for instance, could be categorised by colour, origin, caste, intention and sex - and only the lama or shaman could be expected to have the nous to deal with them properly.

Tibetan Buddhism made this explicit in its legends, telling of how early Buddhist saints had wrestled, argued, or, in a few notable cases, seduced the demons of the land into becoming good Buddhists. The myths weren't as explicit in Mongolia, but the links were clear. Some gods were even regarded as having not yet found the true path of Buddhism, and so could not be worshipped, but merely propitiated with offerings, kept sated in order to avoid their vengeance. The bloody iconography of Mongolian deities grew out of this ancient legacy. Buddhist theologians, particularly those trying to promote the religion in the West, have manfully tried to co-opt the corpses and skulls and bloodstained weapons into images of peace and salvation. Their efforts - ‘The corpse being trampled beneath his feet represents the death of the material world' - are unconvincing.

Gods were frequently taken from Hinduism and turned into demons, a folk memory of old, and often extremely violent, conflicts between Hinduism and Buddhism in India.
²⁷
The pleasantly domestic elephant-headed Indian deity Ganesha is depicted in Mongolian art as a hook-tusked, ferociously red demon, often shown crushed beneath the feet of Buddhist warrior deities.

Even the enlightened gods had their dark sides. The gentle female deity Tara had her wrathful aspect of Black Tara, benevolent smile turned to gnashing fangs, long fingernails turned to claws. Even more terrible was Palden Llamo, one of the divine protectors of Buddhism but also a devouring mother who sacrificed her own children. She rode upon a lake of entrails and blood, clutching a cup made from the skull of a child born from incest, her thunderbolt staff ready to smash the unbelievers and her teeth gnawing on a corpse. Her horse's saddle was made from the flayed skin of her own child, who had become an enemy of the faith, and snakes wound through her hair. Like many gods, she bore a crown of five skulls and a necklace of severed heads. Her ostensible purpose was to defend Buddhism against its enemies, and in particular to guard the Dalai Lama, but she must have terrified many true believers as well. The Tibetans considered Queen Victoria to be one of her incarnations.

One consequence of this pre-Buddhist legacy was an intense sense of place. Buddhism, in common with most of the major faiths, is a universalist, evangelical religion, intended to be heard and practised worldwide. In Mongolia, however, religious practice was deeply tied to locality, and to a semi-nationalistic, semi-mystical notion of the country. Mongolian rituals were often linked with binding or controlling the spirits of the land, keeping them simultaneously imprisoned and appeased. A typical example could be seen in the scattered
ovoos
, stone cairns which both paid homage to the spirits of a place and signified the Mongolians' connection to their land. Mongolians travelling abroad, particularly those going on pilgrimage to other holy sites in Tibet or Nepal, would tie blue ribbons or scarves to the
ovoos
, remembering themselves to their country before leaving. Certain places were to be avoided altogether, for fear of offending the spirits.
Lu
, the river spirits, were particularly given to entering trespassing swimmers through their urine, poisoning their bodies.

There was a constant sense of the fragility of humanity. The spiritual world was in a state of conflict between malevolent and benevolent spirits, in which humanity played only a small part. Regular intervention with the spirits and gods was necessary in order to ward off catastrophe. The lamas played an intercessory role they had inherited from the shamans, praying to, pleading with, and sometimes commanding other-worldly figures. The difference between the lamas and the beings they interacted with sometimes became blurred; during rituals they could appear to be possessed by the gods themselves, and some of the semi-secret mystical paths involved the merging - or spiritual consumption - of the initiate and his patron deity. In Mongolian popular legend, then, the lamas were sometimes sharpsters and cheats, sometimes wise men, and sometimes threatening, powerful figures in their own right.

In reality, then as now, lamas were equally varied. Mongolian lamas did not reach the same extremes as their Tibetan counterparts, where some monasteries were notorious bandit centres and others famous for their charity and wisdom, but some Mongolian monks were clearly in it for everything they could get, some were just happy to have a relatively secure berth, and some were saintly, generous figures who used their wealth to help the poor.