The Life of Zanabazar: The First Bogd Gegen of Mongolia

Chapter 6

Zanabazar's Second Trip to Tibet

(Unedited: Work in Progress. Last Updated September 26, 2003)

Page 15 |  Page16 | to be continued

There is one event which supposedly took place in Lhasa while Zanabazar was there that is not mentioned in any other traditional accounts but is nevertheless become a part of the oral history of the Bogd Gegen which has survived down to the present day. This is his alleged meeting in the Tibetan capital with Galdan, the son of Baatar Khongtaiji, the chieftain of the Choros Oirat.

The people known as the Oirat, or Western Mongols, consisted of four main tribes, the Choros, Dörböt, Torgut, and Khoshot. As mentioned earlier, Boibeghus Baatar, head of the Khoshot, had converted to Buddhism in 1620 and other Oirat rulers soon followed. It was Boibeghus Baatar’s brother Gushri Khan who had defeated the King of Tsang and helped the 5th Dalai Lama assume both spiritual and temporal power in Tibet. Although the Khoshot retained great influence because of their role as “Protectors of Tibet“, in the political realm they were soon out shadowed by the Choros, who in the 1620 and early 1630s were led by the charismatic warlord Khara Khula. Based just west of the Altai in the upper Irtysh River-Lake Zaisan-Tarbagatai Mountains region, Khara Khula attempted to rally around him the Western Mongol tribes who had earlier followed the Oirat khan Esen (r.1439-1455) and like Esen entertained dreams of reuniting all the tradition Mongol peoples, including the Khalkh, or Eastern Mongols.

Following the death of Khara Khula in 1634 his son Baatar Khongtaiji organized what would become known as the Zungarian Khanate (The name derives from the Mongol zuungar, or “left hand“, or “eastern side”; although the Oirat dwelt in the west end of the Mongol lands, the Choros tribe was the easternmost tribe of the confederation and thus on the “left hand“ looking southward, as the Mongols always oriented themselves.) Setting out on an ambition campaign of nation-building activities, he established a permanent capital city called Kubakserai on the Imil River and encouraged trade, agriculture, and small-scale industries like metal-crafting. He defeated the Kazakh tribesmen to his west and instituted extensive diplomatic and trade relations with the Russians to his north in Siberia. He had every intention of building a permanent, lasting nation which would transcend the ephemeral groupings and temporary alliances typical of nomadic peoples.

In 1640 Baatar Khongtaiji convoked an assembly of most of the Mongol peoples of Asia and proposed a pan-Mongolian confederation which would form a united front against all external enemies such as the Chinese, Manchus, and Russians and settle all internal differences in a peaceful manner. The meeting was held in early August at a place called Ulaan Buraa, near the Tarbagatai Mountains on the border between what is now the Xinjiang province of China and Kyrgyzstan. Present were representatives of the various tribes of the Zungarian confederation, including Gushri Khan of the Khoshot Mongols, whose daughter Baatar Khongtaiji had married. From the eastern end of the Mongol world came the Tüsheet Khan Gombodorj—Zanabazar’s father—the Zasagt Khan Subadai, various princes of the house of Setsen Khan, and other Khalkh leaders. Zanabazar, who had been named the Bogd Gegen a year earlier, would have been almost five years old at the time. There is no indication that he himself attended the meeting. From the western reaches of the Mongol world came the Torgut from the steppes of the lower Volga River. The attendees, under the leadership of Baatar Khongtaiji, attempted to draft a code or treaty which would provide mutual protection to both the Zungarians and the Khalkh, guarantee the free movement of peoples between the various Mongol lands, and defend the smaller tribes against foreign aggression.

Buddhism, under the auspices of the Dalai Lama, was to be the unifying thread in this new coalition. That is why it was so important to put the Dalai Lama on the throne of Tibet with the Mongols nominally in charge. It was in this context that Baatar Khongtaiji had sponsored the earlier Mongol incursions into Tibet under the leadership of Gushri Khan. As we have seen, two years later in 1642, Gushri Khan finally deposed the last king of Tibet and installed the Dalai Lama as both the spiritual and secular leader of the country.

The 1640 convocation was perhaps the last viable attempt to create a Pan-Buddhist world stretching from the Siberian taiga in the north to the crest of the Himalayas in the south, and from the Khingan Mountain in the east to the Volga River in the west. It was also perhaps the last chance to unite the Mongols into one great nation. As it turned out, long-standing disagreements among the various Mongol factions prevented the coalescence of the proposed union. For starters, the Zungarians felt that they themselves, as a rising power in Central Asia and the sponsors of Buddhism under the Dalai Lama, should play the leading role in the coalition, while the Khalkh still claimed that as the legitimate Chingisids, the descendants of Chingis Khan, they were the rightful leaders of the Mongol world. As for religion, they had their own little five-year old boy, Zanabazar, who they hoped would become the leader of Buddhism in country of the Khalkh.

Galdan, one of Baatar Khongtaiji’s twelve sons, and the grandson of Gushri Khan on his mother’s side, was born in 1644 or 1645. By then it had become a custom among the Oirat nobility to send some of their sons to Tibet to study and perhaps became monks. Galdan, who his father had marked out for a religious vocation, was dispatched to Tibet when he was six or seven. As a contribution to the Dalai Lama, Galdan’s father had sent along a gift of 110,000 taels (one tael equals roughly one ounce) of silver and a hefty amount of gold which was intended to be used for gilding ganjirs, the stupa-shaped ornaments found on the roofs of temples. According to the Rosary of White Lotuses Galdan was soon recognized as an incarnate lama of Wensa Monastery, which it places about twenty miles east of Shigatse.

Galdan was accompanied by a Oirat named Namkhaijantsan, who was apparently nineteen at the time. Namkhaijantsan was ordained by the Dalai Lama himself and ended up staying in Tibet for 18 years. He eventually became better-known by his title Zaya Pandita. A formidable polymathic scholar, he became famous for inventing the so-called “Clear Script” (tod bichig), a modification on the Uighur script already in use by the Mongols. Over 2000 manuscripts on religious subjects written in Clear Script still exist in the libraries in Ulaan Baatar, including forty-seven by Zaya Pandita himself composed between 1652 and 1662. His most famous work is the four-volume Clear Mirror of Teachings. He is probably the best known of Oirat Buddhists scholars

Details of Galdan’s early life in Lhasa and his training in Buddhism are lacking. Given the uncertainty about Galdan’s birth date it is unclear if he would have been in the Tibetan capital when Zanabazar made his first trip there in 1650-51. He would have been eleven or twelve in 1655 when Zanabazar made is second trip to Lhasa. As noted, the Mongolian novices and monks who came to Lhasa tended to stay at Drepung, where a special college would eventually be set up for their studies. It would have only when natural that these two scions of the most prominent families in the Mongol world, whose fathers had in fact met at the 1640 congress held at Ulaan Burgaa, would come to know each other. Zanabazar, the Sixteenth Jebtsun Dampa and first Bogd Gegen of Mongolia, was already an acknowledged leader of Buddhism in Mongolia. Galdan was the son of perhaps the most powerful Mongol of the time and the only one who entertained visions of a Pan-Mongol world stretching from the Khingan Mountains of Manchuria to the Volga River in Europe. While Zanabazar would seem to have been the dominant figure in religion, Galdan, as his birthright, might well have thought himself as Zanabazar’s superior in the secular realm. Did some jealousy or animosity between the two seed itself at this time? Was personal animosity the root cause of the vicious war which eventually broke out between the eastern and western Mongols, in which Zanabazar and Galdan would play the leading roles, and which would result in the almost total destruction of the Zungarians and the subjugation of the Khalkh by the Qing Dynasty of China? We can only speculate, but as we will see many of Galdan’s later actions bore the mark of a personal vendetta against Zanabazar. In any case, none of the tradition histories nor the Rosary of White Lotuses mention a meeting between Zanabazar and Galdan in Lhasa, but many Mongolians to this day believe they did met, and that this encounter marked the beginning of the conflict between the two which was to have such tragic consequences for the people of Mongolia.

The repertoire of miracles apparently exhausted, the accounts offer no details of Zanabazar’s return to Mongolia other than the fact that he arrived back in late autumn of 1656. The trip had been a success, however, in large part due to the miraculous events which supposedly took place. These stories, Pozdneev tells us, “had in their time an enormous influence on the minds of the superstitious Mongols and thus we are inclined to trust the biography of the Ondür-gegen which states that the Khalkhas, on hearing about the circumstances of this trip made by their hutukhtu to Tibet, began to venerate the hutukhtu and pray to him far more than they had before.”