Suchergebnisse

The paper examines the causes and circumstances of the establish- ment of a Buddhist theocratic state by Lubsan-Samdan Tsydenov, an outstanding figure of Buriat Buddhism. Drawing upon some hitherto unedited Tibetan, Mongolian and Russian sources, the paper undertakes a detailed reconstruction of the events in Siberian Transbaikalia in the period of the Russian Civil War. An analysis of personal notes by Tsydenov and the text of the constitution of the Kudun Buddhist state shows that "Kudun theocracy" was a syncretic fusion of the traditional Buddhist understanding of the Buddhist "Dharmic state" and modernist conceptions of republicanism and constitutional democracy. The Kudun theocracy should also be interpreted as a response of Buddhist circles to attempts by Buriat secular nationalists to build Buriat statehood based upon the idea of national self-determination. The Kudun project shows that Buddhism could serve as a foundation for state-building at the time of the early twentieth-century Russian political crisis.

Tibetan Buddhism, in the eyes of Orthodox Christian polemicists, was always seen as a harmful paganism, and fighting against this 'superstition' was a high priority. Based on analysis of nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox missionary articles, this paper examines the stereotyped portrayal of Tibetan Buddhism as a civilisational opponent to Christianity, and the ways Russian scholars, ethnographers, philosophers, and officials either supported or challenged this view. In this paper, I argue that, in Russia, the Orientalist paradigm is common to a greater degree among Christian clergy than in academic circles due to the status of a dominating religion the Orthodoxу enjoyed in Russia. The Russian missionaries' support of imperial power was the essential factor. The clerics viewed themselves as carriers not only of Christian values, but also of the idea of Russian statehood and European civilisation in general. Russian Christian intellectuals repeatedly attempted to comprehend Buddhism rationally, but these attempts were highly formalistic. For them, academic study was never an end in itself, but, I argue, a convenient tool to achieve ideological domination and establish moral authority. However, their intellectual and psychological inability to view other religions as different, rather than false, was, and still is, an obstacle to mutual understanding and respect between Christianity and Buddhism in today's Russia.

This article analyses the Russian policy towards foreign Buddhist clergy who penetrated into the Russian Empire from Mongolia and Tibet between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on archive materials, the origins of this policy are identified. The attitude of the official Buddhist administration of East Siberia led by Khambo Lama to the so- called alien lamas is discussed.

AbstractThis article focuses on the project Sacred Geography of Kazakhstan, launched in 2017 in Kazakhstan as part of the nationwide program Ruqani Zhangyru (Modernization of Spirituality). The officially stated goal of the project is to cultivate a sense of patriotism in the country's residents related to places and geographic sites that are important for the historical memory of independent Kazakhstan. The authors assume that the real goal of the project is national territorialization, or recoding of the semantics of space, by selecting, codifying, and articulating some symbols and practices, while leveling and "forgetting" others. The analysis, which is based on expert interviews and official documents, shows that this postcolonial process fits into the tendency toward ethnonationalization of Kazakhstan, in which discourse on the civil nation continues to be reproduced at the official level, while real activity is more focused on reinforcing the idea of Kazakhstan as the state of the Kazakh nation. The institutionalization of organizing and recoding the sacred landscape involves a wide variety of groups and actors. These factors may explain the success of the project in comparison to other projects being implemented under the Ruqani Zhangyru program.