Place · oldest Buddhist monastery · Mongolia

Erdene Zuu, Karakorum

Function

Religious institution & practice

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

47.202, 102.843

Worth knowing

Of more than sixty temples on the site, three survived the purges of 1937–38, in which some eighteen thousand lamas were killed and almost every Mongolian monastery was destroyed; Erdene Zuu was kept as a museum, which is why it is still standing. The conversion it marks also put Sanskrit into Mongolian names, by way of Tibetan: Ochir is vajra, Badma is padma, Garid is Garuḍa, and those names went on being given straight through fifty years of suppression after the monasteries themselves were gone.

Connections (5)

• Institutional successionThiksey Monastery, Ladakh

  Mongolia took its Buddhism from the Gelug order, and Thiksey is the same order's architecture at the Indian end of it. The lineage runs from the Indian scholastic tradition through Tsongkhapa's fifteenth-century reform in Tibet, and then outward in both directions — south into Ladakh and Spiti, north into Mongolia after Altan Khan's meeting with the third Dalai Lama in 1578. Erdene Zuu was founded seven years later. So a monastery on the Indus and one built from the stones of Karakorum belong to the same order and study the same translated Indian texts.

• TransmissionGilgit

  The Indian Buddhism that reached Mongolia came the long way round. Gilgit's birch-bark manuscripts are the oldest Buddhist books in the subcontinent and sat on the road between Gandhara and the Tarim; from the Tarim the texts passed into Chinese and Tibetan, and the Tibetans translated the Indian scholastic corpus wholesale. Mongolia took its Buddhism from Tibetan Gelug teachers after Altan Khan met the third Dalai Lama in 1578, and Erdene Zuu was founded seven years later — so Nāgārjuna was read at Karakorum in Tibetan, two translation cultures and a thousand years from the manuscripts at Gilgit.

• Patronage networkTenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

  The office exists because of Mongol patronage. Altan Khan conferred the title on Sönam Gyatso in 1578 in exchange for the legitimacy a Buddhist hierarch could confer, and Erdene Zuu was raised seven years later out of the stones of Karakorum as that conversion took hold. The priest-and-patron relation between Gelug Lhasa and the Mongol khans made the Dalai Lamas temporal rulers, so a monastery in Mongolia stands at the head of the lineage.

• Present atGelug — the Yellow Hat school

  Erdene Zuu at Karakorum, built from 1585 by Abtai Sain Khan on the ruins of the Mongol imperial capital, became the mother house of Mongolian Gelug Buddhism after Altan Khan of the Tümed received Gelug initiation and conferred the Dalai Lama title ('Oceanic Teacher') on Sonam Gyatso in 1578. 10,000 monks at its 17th-century peak; the 1937 Stalinist purges destroyed most of it.

• Historical linkTenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

  The 14th Dalai Lama has conferred Kālacakra initiations at Erdene Zuu and other Mongolian monasteries.

On these journeys

• Tibetan Buddhism — India, Tibet, Mongolia

Sources

Wikipedia, “Erdene Zuu Monastery”. Mongolian Academy of Sciences records; Christopher Kaplonski on the 1937–38 repressions.

• Wikipedia — Erdene Zuu Monastery