While Chinghis Khan looks down from his newly-burnished pedestal, a Buddhist renaissance gains momentum on the steppes of Mongolia.
A gathering of almost 2 percent of a country´s population is large by any standard. In Mongolia, given the near absence of roads and the sparseness of population, it is gigantic. Yet, an estimated 30,000 devotees attended the opening ceremonies of the Kalachakra initiation conducted by the Dalai Lama at the Gandan Hiid Monastery in Ulaan Bataar last August. They poured in from the countryside, many came from as far away as the south-Siberian Russian republic of Buryat.
The Kalachakra initiation is one of the highest tantric rites of Tibetan Buddhism, and this was the first time it was being held in Mongolia since the 1921 Communist Revolution. Before Sovietification, Mongolia had about 300 monasteries and an estimated 110,000 monks, or a third of the male population. By 1990, only Gandan Hiid had survived—primarily as a showpiece. The 200 or so monks there were mostly government appointees, and knowledge of ritual and observances, so important to Tibetan Buddhism, was practically lost.
But, incredibly, Buddhism survived in the minds of Mongolians, and the faith still bums. Today, there is a small temple in every town or rural settlement, many of them housed in gers, the traditional Mongolian octagonal tents.