Of Yellow Teaching and Black Faith: Entangled Knowledge Cultures And

KaréninaKollmar-Paulenz Of Yellow Teaching and Black Faith: Entangled KnowledgeCulturesand the Creation of Religious Traditions Abstract: The spread of Tibetan Buddhism to the Mongolian regions in the late sixteenth century did not onlyresult in often violent confrontations between Ti- betan Buddhist monks and Mongolian religious specialists, the male and female shamans,but alsoled to areification process of local religious practices and concepts resulting in the creation of asingle tradition on the discourse level. In my paper Iwill show how the ‘teaching of the shamans’ has come to be formedasboth aconcept and apractice in early-modern Inner Asia. By analyz- ing its discursive formation and entangled historical configurations, from late sixteenth century Mongolia to late nineteenth century Buryatia, the paper aims to shedlight on the question how religious traditions are discursively cre- ated and socially affirmed. Keywords: ‘teachingofthe shamans’,Tibetan Buddhism, Mongols, Buryats, šasin, bögemörgöl, Shamanism, globalhistory of religion, entangled history,religious traditions | downloaded: 25.9.2021 1Introduction Sometimeinthe first decades of the seventeenth century, the Mongolian Bud- dhist monk NeyičiToyin¹ traveled in nowadays Eastern Mongolia, using his heal- ing powers and magical abilities to convert the Mongols to the ‘Yellow Teachingʼ, the dGe lugs pa-form of Tibetan Buddhism. His hagiography, entitled Garland of wish-fulfilling jewels (Mo. Čindamani-yin erike), written nearlyacentury later, tells us about the reaction of the indigenous religious specialists, the shamans, when they heard thatNeyičiToyin was approaching their region: The classical Mongolian is rendered accordingtoRachewiltz ,with the exception of the letter j which is givenwithout the haček. Forwell-known Tibetan and Mongolian terms,however, https://doi.org/10.7892/boris.96647 Iuse the popular spellings,thus ‘Dalai Lamaʼ instead of ‘Dalai Blamaʼ.T he Tibetan is trans- literatedaccording to Wylie,Sanskrit is transliterated according to the internationallyaccepted rules. source: DOI 10.1515/9783110450934-013, © 2017 Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz, Published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Bereitgestellt von | Universitätsbibliothek Bern Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 28.12.16 09:28 232 Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz […]these shamans talked to each other: ‘From the western direction avery powerful lama is coming.Upon his arrivaltherewill be no placewhere he can stop and rest,so, when he calls on us,wewill not come’ (Prajñasagara 1739,fol. 53r-53v). The text suggests that in their refusaltomeet the Buddhist monk the shamans acted as aunifiedsocial body. This information is contrary to all historical knowledge about shamans. In historicalMongolian communities male and female shamans wereritual specialists who wereindividuallycalled by the spirits and who acted on their own. We do not have anyhistorical evidence of ‘shamanic associationsʼ or anykind of institutional shamanic organization in the Mongo- lian territories other than the short passageIjust quoted. Why, then, are the shamans treated in our sourceasacompact social body? Another case: In the late seventeenth centurythe Kangxi emperor of the newlyestablished Qing dynasty in China had successfullyintegratedthe Mon- gols of Inner and Outer Mongolia into his empire. Subsequently, the Qing dynasty promoted ‘inner peaceʼ in the outer regions of the Empire by legal measures. The first lawcodetobecommissioned by the Qing was the so called ‘Mongol law code of the Kangxi Eraʼ (1662–1722), published sometime after1694(Heuschert 1998, 46–50). This lawcode, of all in all 152 articles, contains one article on the community of the Buddhist lamas and the community of the male and female shamans (Mo. lam-a-nar-yin ayimaγ.Bögeiduγan-u ayimaγ)(Heuschert 1998, 215–216[fol. 39v-41r]). The article lays down the punishments administered to lamas and shamans who do not follow the socio-religious injunctions (Mo. yosun)oftheir respective communities.The Qing administration thus dealt with the highlyindividual indigenous religious specialists of the Mongols in the sameway as they dealt with the Buddhist monks. They treated bothassocial groups and as juridicalbodies. Actually, it was this lawcode that acouple of years agomade me aware of the rigorous reification process the Mongolian male and female shamans were subjectedtoand which led to the discursive formation of areligious tradition called in translation ‘teaching of the shamansʼ (Mo. böge-ner-ün šasin)or‘vener- ation of the shamansʼ (Mo. bögemörgöl)inseventeenth centuryMongolia, long before the ‘shamanism paradigmʼ was formulated in Enlightenment Europe (Kollmar-Paulenz 2012). Shamanic practices and shamanic imagery have been and are, despite the stronginfluenceofglobal neo-shamanism, not acoherent system, but rather acollection of representations, which can appear at different places and be employed in various ways (Humphrey 1999,192). Their fluidityde- fies standardization. Even today, they are best studied in their particularsocial settingsincontexts of local power relations. Notwithstanding that,inlate sixteenth and earlyseventeenth century Mongolia we can observehow these Bereitgestellt von | Universitätsbibliothek Bern Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 28.12.16 09:28 Of Yellow Teaching and Black Faith 233 local ritual practices that wereperformedbyparticularreligious specialists were graduallyturned into an abstract,homogeneous and ahistorical entity by sub- suming them under ageneric terminologythat discursively identifiedaspecific field of social interaction and was articulated mainlyinantagonistic categories (Kollmar-Paulenz 2013,167– 173). In the following,Iwill explore how this stand- ardized and stable religious tradition of ‘shamanismʼ was established and natu- ralizedinearly-modern Mongolia and shaped people’sperception of social real- ity.Ihope thatacloser look at the discursive formation of Mongolian ‘shamanismʼ will help to shedlight on the general question how religious traditions emerge and are established. To this aim, after some shortremarks on my conceptual approach, Iwill first focus on the events that led to the Buddhist transformation of the Mongolian religious landscape in the late sixteenthcentu- ry.Secondly, Iwill examine the discourse that accompanied and shaped this transformation and led to the construction of areified system of ‘shamanismʼ. The third part of this chapter concentrates on the Buryat-Mongols and analyzes the changes the discourse on the ‘teaching of the shamansʼ underwent under Russian-European influenceinthe nineteenth century. The discursive creation of a ‘teaching of the shamansʼ touches on one partic- ular aspect in recent theoretical debates in Religious Studies, the relation between Non-European and European knowledge systems.Ifone is familiar with the Mongolian configuration of the ‘teachingofthe shamansʼ and earlykey texts likeDorji Banzarov’shighlyinfluential TheBlack Faith or Shamanism amongthe Mongols,first published in 1846 and to this dayone of the classics in shamanism research (Banzarov 1846), it is impossibletoignore that the Euro- pean debate about shamans was influenced by the Mongolian discourse. Up to now,however,this goes mainlyunnoticed in scholarship. Although postcolonial theory explicitlyacknowledges, in the words of Robert Young, ‘thatthe intellec- tual and culturaltraditions developedoutside the west constituteabodyof knowledge that can be deployed to great effect against the political and cultural hegemonyofthe westʼ (Young 2010,65), the debate stillprivileges Western knowledge systems, often to the exclusion of their non-Western counterparts. In- deed, scholarlyopinion has shifted from the assertion of the completesilence of native voices to what Charles Hallisey has called the ‘intercultural mimesisʼ:that is, ‘aspectsofaculture of asubjectified people influenced the investigator to rep- resent thatcultureinacertain mannerʼ (Hallisey 1995,33). And yet, the history of those ‘aspects of acultureʼ in theirown contexts and networks of relations and interactions is still ignored. All too often, non-European knowledge cultures seem to emerge out of their obscurity and come into existenceonlyintheir relation and response to the encounter with Europe, in the process losing theirown historical legacy. In this way, the stereotypes of an active,theory-producing West Bereitgestellt von | Universitätsbibliothek Bern Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 28.12.16 09:28 234 Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz and apassive,theory-consumingnon-West,are continued rather than aban- doned. We mayask ourselveswhether it is still promisingtofollow theoretical mod- els into which unquestioned dichotomies of the European ‘selfʼ and its ‘otherʼ are inscribed. With regard to aglobal history of religion (Kollmar-Paulenz 2010,265 – 268. 274–275; Bergunder2011, 50 –55;Kollmar-Paulenz 2013,185 – 187), it could be more fruitful to undertake aradicallynew positioning,todoanew surveyof the religious landscapes and to draw new maps thatnolonger privilegeEurope as the beginning and end of the history of religions, to explore new spaces and historical entanglements. To realize such an endeavor, Religious Studies could (and indeed has alreadystarted to do so) probe into approaches that are used in Global History Studies, particularlythe concept of history as an ‘ensemble of entanglementsʼ (Conrad, Randeria 2002). Writing history as entanglement en- tails

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