Geshe Michael Roach of the Asian Classics Input Project in New York visited Mongolia in November last year in search of Buddhist books. “… my estimate is that there are about 1.4 million titles [at Ganden Tekchenlin Monastic University in Ulaan Baatar], I would guess about 100,000-150,000 different works. They have all the important collected works, like all the Panchen Lamas, all the Dalai Lamas, all the great Tibetan writers, and they are preserving them.” He urges Western Buddhists to get involved there, where the people are struggling to keep their newly re-established and still fragile religious culture. “They really need help, and they want help. They need people to help teach English there, and they need people to help rebuild the monasteries and to help educate the monks.

Genghis Khan created Mongolia. He was born in a country of small warring tribes, and his tribe was wiped out when he was just a boy. He and his mother escaped to the mountains, where he grew up like a guerilla. He developed a great skill for organizing armies, and invented a lot of very effective innovations of warfare, likes special horses, and special bows and arrows, the concept of boiling the water and drinking tea, so that his armies didn’t get sick when they conquered new lands, and of overgrazing their enemies’ territories to deprive them economically.

He was successful beyond his wildest dreams. He conquered to the north as far as Moscow and Korea. He took Moscow, and when you go to Moscow you see a lot of Mongolian people, even now. He took Persia; he took northern India; he took all of Afghanistan, and down into Vietnam. He got to Europe as far as Austria. Outside of Vienna in one day he killed 400,000 Austrian troops. We should have been speaking Mongolian, but he died, and everybody went home. It was a huge, extraordinary empire, so big that it took three years to get a message to the front lines.

When Genghis Khan got to the Tibetan border, they made a deal that he would not attack Tibet if the Tibetans paid an annual tribute. After he died, the Tibetans stopped the tribute, and then Godan Khan, his grandson came to the border of Tibet to demand the tribute back. For some reason he had some interest in Buddhism, and he wrote a letter to the Sakya Pandita, which we still have. It said, “You are supposed to be compassionate to all sentient beings. I am a sentient being, and I am requesting you to come and teach me Buddhism. And if you don’t teach me Buddhism, I will destroy all the monasteries in east Tibet.”

So the Sakya Pandita started to travel to his camp, but it was far, in east Tibet. He was already an old man, and people kept stopping him to teach on the way. He had his two nephews with him, and as a goodwill gesture, he sent them ahead, because they could travel faster.

One of them was named Pakpa, which means arya, someone who’s seen emptiness directly. He was just a teenager, but even as a teenager, he presented Buddhism in such a convincing way that Godan Khan was converted before the Sakya Pandita got there. Pakpa went on to become the court lama of Kublai Khan. When Marco Polo got to Peking, he met Pakpa, who was teaching Kublai Khan.

Pakpa invented a script for the Mongolians to use to write Buddhism, and they started translating their scriptures into Mongolian. And that’s how they became Buddhist. Sakya Pandita got them to stop such practices as sacrificing animals, and taught them Buddhism, and they became very good. Later they became very strong supporters of Je Tsongkhapa, and they were responsible financially for supporting him in his endeavors.

Nearly all of the Buddhist arts and disciplines were introduced to Mongolia from Tibet. The Mongols plunged deeply into each of these arts, and produced temples, statues, and painting of great beauty. They had highly-trained philosophers and practitioners of traditional medicine, and composed high-quality treaties of their own, mostly in Tibetan, on a wide range of subjects including epistemology, logic, grammar, psychology, Sanskrit studies, medicine and the fine arts.

I went to Mongolia in November last year. Although I have lived in a Kalmyk Mongolian (Russian Mongolian) temple all my adult life, I had never been there before and I was curious and excited to see what Mongolia was like. I was very happy to be in a country that was completely Tibetan Buddhist for the first time in my life.

Mongolia consists of a very large land mass between Russia and China, with a sparse population of only about two million. About 400,000 live in the capital city of Ulaan Baatar. Ganden Tekchenlin Monastic University, the traditional center of learning in Mongolia, is located on a prominent hill in the center of the city. Mongolia is just opening up politically and culturally after 70 years of uninspired and culturally repressive Communist rule, and there is a powerful and exciting wave of cultural revival.

Physically the country is incredibly beautiful, pristine. I was there in the early winter and it was quite nice. It was cold, but it was pleasant; it’s very clean, and there wasn’t that much snow. It wasn’t hard to get around; it was quite pleasant.

The Mongolians are extremely healthy. The kids are rosy-cheeked, and the people are healthy. They have lots of dairy products, and they’re well-fed and comfortable. They live simply and they’re happy. They are friendly, quick to learn, and extremely dedicated to reviving their ancient traditions of classical learning and arts.

The main reason I went there was to see if they had Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts and what the condition of them was. We want to help the Mongolians to create an electronic catalog so that people can know what’s in the libraries there, and also to create some sort of infrastructure so that the Mongolians can fill orders for copies. Then they can make a small profit to maintain their collection, which is very important.

We also want to train the monks there to do their own catalogs, to learn how to do the cataloging, and finally to learn how to reassemble the texts, and how to input them into computers for preservation and reprinting. They are very much interested in learning modern technology to preserve their books and to print books.

They were very excited, they were very cooperative and they were very open. To see the excitement of wanting to build there was very encouraging; it’s a real renaissance. It felt wonderful to be there and to feel that they understood the value of what they have. It just felt very good to be there.

The first thing that impressed me was the respect they had for a monk and for a geshe and for someone who was coming to save books. The interest they took was very exciting even from the first moment. I got to the airport and they put me in a VIP lounge. The head of customs came and asked if I needed anything, and then they sent a limousine. It was the only one in the country, I think. They drove me to a very nice hotel and just generally showed a lot of respect and interest in saving their books. I haven’t seen that intense interest anywhere. That was really encouraging.

The Mongolians love books. They are fanatic book collectors, and they have beautiful libraries. I’ve heard that at its peak there were 1,500 monasteries in Mongolia and they were carving 500 books per year. These were all shut down in 1938 when the ruling Communist party began a repression of religious literature and art. At that time, about 800 monasteries were destroyed. The books were collected and warehoused or burned, and tens of thousands of monks were murdered and buried in mass graves.

The books that remain at Ganden Monastery can be divided into basically three groups. One group was manuscripts that were valuable to the Communists because of their commercial value: things written on gold plates, things written in jewel powder, things written with gold powder, very old Sanskrit manuscripts and so forth.

Secondly, they took the very important scriptures. There is one edition of the Kangyur, for example, which is the only copy in the world, called the Teng Pangnik. The Communists apparently took care to identify those books, and stored them in the National Library, although no one used them.

The third category seems to be a lot of personal recitation scriptures that monks were using, as well as an incredible amount of important collected works (sungbums) of Tibetan authors. These were all collected and thrown into a warehouse at Ganden Monastery. There’s row after row of books that were taken out of their cloths and thrown into the warehouse. It would be the same as taking English books and just ripping out the pages and throwing them at random into a big room.

I went through each of those two libraries, and my estimate is that there are about 1.4 million titles there, I would guess about 100,000-150,000 different works. They have all the important collected works, like all the Panchen Lamas, all the Dalai Lamas, all the great Tibetan writers, and they are preserving them.

We made agreements with the libraries’ administrations to send Tibetan monks from India who know how to make electronic catalogs. I think it will take 15 to 20 years to catalog all of them, and it might go out to 30 or 40 years, because the books have not been reassembled, and they don’t know how to.

There are only a handful of the old monks left still alive who can read the books, maybe not more than 10 who can still read at a good level. They are importing geshes from India, and there is an incredible revival, but it will take 20 years to train people to put the books back together. They’re trying. There are two guys there sitting in a small room, with masks because of the dust, and they’ve finished maybe 100 books. At that rate, it will take something like 10,000 years.

The Mongolian people are extremely excited about adapting modern educational methods for training their young people to read and appreciate their traditional literary and philosophical classics. I was repeatedly asked about this subject, particularly about the usage of computers in researching and publishing the traditional classics. One interview was broadcast on national television and led to a great amount of excitement at various educational institutions around the country.

Many of the Mongolian students are struggling to learn English, and they very much appreciated the ACIP translator training materials I brought with me. They believe that using English and computers in the study of the traditional classics will prevent them from being seen as out-of-date or irrelevant. Considering the impressive progress made by these dedicated people over the last five years, we can expect a genuine renaissance of traditional learning in the coming decades.

The lay people are dying to learn Buddhism and they’re dying to learn English. They begged me to send American Buddhists over, and I think it would be a good opportunity for an American Buddhist to contribute something. It’s the last openly Tibetan Buddhist community in the world, and I think we should take an interest in protecting that last opportunity.

Mongolia has a small population and they’re being pressured by outside commercial, cultural, and religious forces. They really want to maintain their culture, they want to maintain their nation, they want to maintain their territory and they want to maintain their religion. They were really hopeful that there could be some way.

Mongolia’s huge and it has a very large and vulnerable border with China. The Russian troops which used to protect Mongolia have pulled out with the fall of the Soviet Union, and I think they are in great danger of being attacked. The country is rich in mineral and forest resources, with oil fields in the south where they border China. The Chinese, as I understand it, although I don’t know, consider it Chinese territory, like Taiwan or Tibet.

You can feel the presence of the Chinese – it’s very oppressive. They have a huge embassy there. It’s one of the largest buildings in Ulaan Baatar and they push the Mongolians around. You can feel it, you can sense it. I think it’s very important that we protect their freedom, that we do what we can to help them. Otherwise this whole Buddhism that’s flowering there will die. It’ll be crushed and it would be very sad for that to happen.

I think Western Tibetan Buddhists have to help them, or else they will be swallowed. They will be swallowed culturally by the Coca Colas, they’ll be swallowed economically by the Exxons, they’ll be swallowed politically by the Chinese, and they’ll be swallowed spiritually by the Christians and other missionaries. They don’t want that. They really need help and they want help. They need people to help teach English there and they need people to help rebuild the monasteries and to help educate the monks.

It’s very time-sensitive. I think it’s important to get in quickly and to get a presence there. It’s much easier to maintain the independence of a country than to try to free it once it’s been taken over by a colonial power. Westerners have to go and see Mongolia; they have to learn the situation there. If you’re a Tibetan Buddhist, I think you have to take an interest in Mongolia, to make sure their freedom is maintained. If they lose it, it will be impossible to get it back, and it’s very fragile right now.

If there was a presence of Western Buddhists there, I think it would be less likely to be taken over. There was nobody in Lhasa when the Chinese tanks rolled in; there were no photographs, there’s no video, there’s no proof of anything. So it’s very important that Westerners help there.

If things went right, Mongolia would the center of Tibetan Buddhism in the world. I don’t know what the relationship is between the Mongolian and Tibetan government, but it’s a huge country. I don’t see why Tibetans couldn’t come here. It’s a really physically beautiful country, and the Mongolians are extremely warm people, very cultured. It’s like finding an ancient civilization which is very cultured, and very much Buddhist, and very, very interested in maintaining and restoring their Buddhism.

They have a very fine Buddhist university there. It’s very impressive. They have a very good children’s school, where they’re reviving the written Mongolian script, and they’re quite good at it. And their Tibetan is quite good. That was another surprise to me – these people are so determined that they’ve learned Tibetan pretty quickly. There are monks there who have gone to India for a year or two and they’re speaking Tibetan fine, and they are reading it quite well.

Ganden Monastery is very aggressively bringing in Tibetan teachers from India. They have a really beautiful program from the old days, and this is very important. They have three philosophical colleges in the monastery, and they study the curricula of all three of the major Gelukpa monasteries, Ganden, Drepung, and Sera, which nobody in India does. They make it a point to learn all three curricula, and that’s extraordinary.

Traditionally a Mongolian monk is a master of all the arts, the five sciences, which include philosophical studies, rhetoric, sacred art and sculpture, medicine, and religious performing arts. Some of the greatest lharampa geshes in Tibet before 1959 were Mongolian. They’re just very serious.

They have special schools for learning ritual; it’s considered part of the program. I saw a mudra class, with a lot of young monks learning mudras. There were mudra pictures on the wall, like how to make the different mudras and what they meant and an explanation of what’s going on in each mudra. That was really nice.

The Mongolians were known for their medical skills. In the old days, a monk was considered a physician almost automatically, and so they had a great medical tradition, which was crushed by the Communists. They feel that medicine is very important for spiritual people to study because you can help people in a direct way.          There’s a very aggressive group of 30- to 35-year-old monks, a little gang of very talented people who used to go to college together and then got ordained together. They split up the responsibilities. Somebody’s trying to restore the medical college and there’s a very talented group of people trying to restore the fine arts.

These monks went all over: Sikkim, Tibet, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and collected knowledge for years. For three or four years they’ve been traveling, sending out missions to learn the various mandalas, or to learn how to paint the different deities. I saw a three-dimensional Yamantaka mandala there, which is better than anything I’ve ever seen anywhere else. They take it very seriously, and the school is very strict. And they have a very good religious program; it’s spiritual development and learning the fine arts together at the same time.

There’s one 90-year-old monk who is teaching sacred dance. He’s really full of spit and vinegar, a really tough guy. He told me there were over 100 sacred dancers in 1935, the last time he danced officially. Once a year they would perform, and they would prepare the whole year for special performances of sacred dance.

There’s an incredible bronze sculpture there of Manjushri, about 150 feet [46 meters] high. It was built before the Communists, and then during the Communist times it was torn down. Now they’ve rebuilt it, and it’s in this incredible temple that they also rebuilt.

The Mongolians are really into their traditional architecture, and there are big construction companies in Mongolia that are building temples in the old style. They are into using modern materials like cement to get the same look of the old days. So everything looks like the old days.

The Indian ambassador to Mongolia, Bakula Rinpoche, is a geshe from Ladakh, and he’s a great man; he’s truly a great man. He is building a new complex for monks in Ulaan Baatar . And he’s doing a lot to restore Buddhism in Mongolia. He’s really working tirelessly, and he’s an old man, in his 80s, I think. He just won’t give up.

There are other great lamas there like Gurudeva Rinpoche, who lived in India for 50 years, and then went back home. He’s just rebuilt the second largest monastery in Mongolia. It’s called Aymar Basa Ling. It took something like 1,000 electrical poles to get it electrified, and he took care of all of that. He’s very dedicated. There are really very dedicated people working there, and what they are doing is impressive. Throughout the country they are rebuilding their monasteries, and it’s a big job.

I was struck by their determination, and I thought it would be a good example for Western Tibetan Buddhists. The courage that they are showing to revive Buddhism in their country is a good example for Westerners. What the Mongolians are doing with no money, no materials, no help, nothing, by far outshines what Western Buddhists have been able to do.

It’s very difficult to get the smallest level of support for very important Dharma centers here in America like Vajrapani or Land of Medicine Buddha. There’s always a constant struggle to do the smallest things for these little buildings here in such an incredibly wealthy country. I think it’s just a lack of determination.

The Mongolians don’t have that problem. They have no resources, but they are really working hard to restore their Buddhism. And it’s beautiful; what they’ve done is extraordinary. A lot of the buildings at Ganden have been rebuilt. They’re broke, but they’re doing it.

We American Tibetan Buddhists whine a lot. We haven’t been able to build many great temples, we haven’t been able to assemble great libraries, we haven’t been able to train dozens of great teachers. I think we’re just wimpy. I really think that. We just don’t seem to have the determination that they have.

Maybe life is too easy for us. They lived without religious freedom for 50 years, and the minute they got it back, in 1991, they exploded.

They have rebuilt Ganden Monastery from the rubble. There was nothing left of it. In Mongolia, when you say nothing, you mean nothing. The sky is huge and blue and the valley of Ulaan Baatar is wide and flat and it’s nothing. There’s rubble on the ground; no trees except up in the mountains. The valley is very flat and desolate. Ganden was destroyed. Every building was reduced to rubble, and they’ve already rebuilt a lot.

I think Western Buddhists should go there; they should see it; they should be aware of the beauty of it. It’s different from Tibet and it’s different from India in that we can do something there. It could be restore to a fully Buddhist country, full of well-educated Buddhists. And that would be a great thing in the world to have a country like that.

It could go either way now – it could either swing into a secular country that doesn’t care much about Buddhism; it could swing to a Chinese colony, or it could become an independent Tibetan Buddhist country and help Buddhism all over the world. I think it’s very important for us to do something. And I think it’s important for us to look at their example and stop being so wimpy.

They’re giving us the example of Buddhists who are taking an interest in every facet of Buddhism. They are learning the scriptures well – that’s the first thing they do. They are learning to debate. They are teaching themselves debate from zero, and they’re doing pretty well. And they’re just like us; they’re debating in Tibetan, and they have trouble with Tibetan and they’re struggling, but they’re getting pretty good. There’s no reason why we can’t do that.

There are some very exciting retreat places that could be rebuilt – and I think it would be cool if some Westerners got into that – in the mountains, that are extremely beautiful. They used to be very, very beautiful retreat centers. There’s one called Manjushri outside of Ulaan Baatar, at the head of a valley, and it’s so clean that you can see for about 30 or 40 miles down the valley. All around is the rubble of the retreat cabins.

It was a large retreat center. There were probably about 200 monks there in retreat. And it was completely destroyed. Now they’ve rebuilt one or two buildings, but there’s nobody in retreat right now. I think that would be another exciting thing for Western Buddhists, to go there and do retreats. Very beautiful, really conducive, quiet, clean, healthy.

You could just get a visa and go there. Ganden Monastery would probably sponsor you. You’d have to rebuild cabins there or get a yurt. The yurts are extraordinary, made of felt; they’re very light. They keep heat wonderfully; they require very little fuel, and they have these open tops where the sunlight comes in and the angle at which they’re built, the sunlight fills the whole room. Everything is naturally lit. It’s just beautiful. It’s really nice. They have one at Ganden, which is their administrative building. It would fit about 100 people, and you go in there and hang out. It’s very nice.

I should say one thing about the monks. The Communists forced a lot of monks to get married, and as they came out of Communism, there was a custom of some monks getting married, and that’s now stopped. Bakula Rinpoche and other people have worked very hard to teach them proper vinaya. They made a rule that those monks who were married before a certain time were allowed to stay married, but they’re not allowed to call themselves monks; they’re not allowed to take formal ordination. They’re allowed to wear robes, but they’re not considered bhikshus or even getsuls. That’s sort of a compromise they made. So if you go to Mongolia you might run into a monk who talks about his family.

There’s sort of a movement to restrict the Christian missionary movement there. I don’t think that’s necessary. I think if Buddhism is presented in a pure and convincing way, a compelling way, I like to say, then people would naturally be attracted to it, and they would stay Buddhist. But there are not enough trained monks and nuns to teach, and I don’t believe there was much custom for the monks to teach the lay people in the past. How could a communist revolution rise up and slaughter all the monks if there had been the proper relationship between the monks and the lay people? I don’t think it could have happened. If a country could rise up and all the religious places could be destroyed by the people of that country, it means that there’s something wrong there.

I think one of the challenges that Mongolian Buddhism faces is preventing Buddhism from becoming a ritualistic and highly theoretical thing which remains in the confines of the monasteries and nunneries, and I smell that that used to be the case. I’m not aware of any ongoing program undertaken by any Mongolian monastery to educate the lay people. The lay people come, they make offerings, they walk around the temple, and they leave. I don’t think that’s healthy for Buddhism or for society.

I also think it’s very important that in the proper way, and only in the proper way, lay people in the modern world need to understand Buddhism. If ordained people or people who understand Buddhism don’t take an interest in them or help them, then quite naturally they’ll be attracted to other things, because people need a spiritual life or they’ll go somewhere else for a spiritual life. And it may not be as good a one.

I think it’s very important in both countries that there doesn’t develop a distance between the ordained people and the lay people, and I could see it happening there. You can feel it; you can sense it. When I went to the university, I was surrounded by 20-year-olds who were dying to learn Buddhism, and when they heard some of the convincing arguments about future lives, and about suffering and renunciation, they were extremely interested. They were all ready to run out and get ordained; they were very attracted to it. It’s in their blood, but they don’t have any opportunities to study normally.

They need people to come and teach them in a compelling way. They need lam-rim presented in a compelling way. They don’t need someone to go there and cover the fine points of Madhyamika. If somebody comes from India and covers some very theoretical stuff with a group of 20 monks or something, it won’t help the country, it won’t help the people.

What they need is Buddhist schools where lay people can come and engage in a regular ongoing course of study and meditation. I’m not suggesting that monks and nuns should live with lay people or mix up with lay people in a social sense, but I’m saying that they should take an interest, and that they should organize places where lay people can study on an ongoing consistent basis and become well-educated Buddhists, and reach nirvana and enlightenment.

You can see in Mongolia the weakness if that doesn’t occur, and it’s not unthinkable that there could be another overturning of the Buddhist hierarchy there. You could see that that could happen, that the public could say: what do we need you for? It could happen with violence or it could just be by neglect. So I think it’s very important for the monks and nuns to take interest in doing that.

ACIP MUST RECORD THE VALUABL CONTENTS OF [MONGOLIA'S] LIBRARIE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

In brief, the window of opportunity for Mongolia may prove to be very short. ACIP must record the valuable contents of her libraries as soon as possible, and we hope that we can also play some small part in alerting the word to the need to preserve the previous cultural heritage of this pristine country, which may prove of some assistance in the event of future difficulties.