426 klaus sagaster
Mongolian territories of China. Nevertheless, the new freedom still
bears the scars of the past. The harm done to the education of monks,
caused by the interruption of the indigenous educational tradition and
by the failure of communication with the Tibetan centres, still can-
not be fully eradicated. The dif culties that have arisen through the
coerced damage to the vinaya rules in communist times must be added
to this. It goes without saying that married monks cannot leave their
families behind. Because of this, Mongolian Buddhism is reproached
by the Tibetans as no longer “pure”. The reaction to this has been the
concept of a uniquely Mongolian Buddhism.
The problem of the past goes back to precommunist times. The
Lamas still appear not to have completely understood that a religion
also has a social responsibility, and that compassion with living beings
cannot be only theoretical, especially in those cases where one strives
to withstand the competition of foreign missionaries. This is also true
for the transmittance of religious contents to lay people. How long
will lay people be satis ed with reciting o mai padme h , procur-
ing holy water, and buying credit notes for Tibetan texts which are
recited in the temple by monks in order to protect them from all kinds
of dangers? In the meantime, monasteries and lay organisations may
be concerned with providing a deeper understanding of the Buddhist
doctrine through education and publication; however, as long as this
practice predominantly proceeds according to the old traditional forms
and remains without discourse with the new world, the result remains
uncertain.
The contemporary problems hardly form a real danger for Bud-
dhism in Mongolia. The religion is so deeply rooted in the hearts of
the Mongols that neither physical force nor intellectual doubt can seri-
ously harm it. Just as before, the Buddha remains one of the two pillars
on which the Mongolian identity rests. The other pillar, of course, is
inggis Khan.^195
BibliographyAbramowski, Waltraut. 1979. “Die chinesischen Annalen des Möngke. Übersetzung
des 3. Kapitels des Yuan-shih”, Zentralasiatische Studien 13, pp. 7–71.
(^195) About the role of Buddha and inggis Khan as identi cation gures, see Sagaster
1999.