Chapter 3

The Early Life of Zanabazar

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Little is known about Zanabazar's life in the immediate years after his enthronement in 1639. As the Russsian ethnographer Pozdneev noted:

The next news we have of him is in 1647 (Fire Pig Year of the 11th sixty-year cycle) when at the age of twelve or thirteen he founded a new monastery on the Shariyn Gol about 12 miles southeast of Erdene Zuu and the current town of Kharkhorin. He took part in the consecration of this new monastery and gave it the name Braibun-gaji-gandan-shat-dublin, according to Pozdneev. Here Zanabazar lived and studied as a young man.

The monastery became more commonly known as Baruun Khuree (West Monastery) and later as Ondür Gegen's Old Lamasery. (Ondür Gegen was another name for Zanabazer, ondür meaning "high", or "big"). Apparently begun as a tent camp, the monastery changed locations several times before settling at its current site on slightly higher ground a mile or so from the river in 1787, during the reign of the Fourth Bodg Gegen. At its new location the monastery took on yet another name, Shankh Monastery, although the other names continued to be used. According to monks now living at the monastery, the word shankh refers to a mountain or group of high hills located about halfway between the current site of the monastery and Erdene Zuu. The exact meaning of the word shankh is unclear, but one monk opines that it refers to "a group of objects arranged in a particular order." The monks there also relate a legend about the why this particular site was chosen. They say that a man riding by here accidentally spilled a pail of milk. Upon seeing the milk splattered on the ground a lama declared that this was sign that the ten white virtues would flourish on this spot.

Several large stone and brick temples were eventually constructed on the site but the monastery retained its roots as a traveling tent camp at least up until the late nineteenth-century. When Pozdneev visited here in 1892 he found five huge gers each holding from 150 to 200 people which were still being used as temples. These white felt gers were "decorated very beautifully on the outside," according to Pozdneev, and he noted that the number of monks here was greater than at the more well-known Erdene Zuu monastery nearby.

The ger temples are long gone, and now only the main temple and a smaller side temple which also serves as a museum remain. The famous statue, known as the Ochirpani, which had been given to Avtai Khan by the Third Dalai Lama could be found here until recent times, but monks now say that it has dissappeared, although no one can how or exactly when. The robes worn by the Zanabazar when he was a young student here are still in the possession of the monastery, but usually not out on public display

Monks also tell legend about a seven-foot long horn which Zanabazar made while living at this monastery. They say that monks from a monastery at what is now Ulaan Baatar came and asked Zanabazar for the horn, but he refused to part with it, telling them, "If you want to take the horn you will have to also have to move the entire monastery." Zanabazar became ill after this, which he believed was a result of refusing the monks' request. Still, when they came to ask for the horn again he again refused. They came a third time and he finally agreed to give them the horn. But when they tied the horn onto a camel to carry it to their monastery it suddenly began sounding by itself a low, plaintive note, as if saddened to be leaving Zanabazar's monastery. Shaken by this occurrence, the monks unloaded the horn and left it where they had found it. Although this story may be apochryphal, the horn can still be found at Shankh and is brought out one day a year for public display.

In addition, the main temple at Shankh contains seven very rare, if not unique, free-hanging thangkas showing the 722 dieties of the Kalachakra Tantra. (It will be remembered that the appearance of the Bogd Gegens, of whom Zanabazar was the first, had, according to the Rosary of White Lotuses, been predicted in the Kalachakra Tantra.) These are the same depictions shown on the wall paintings of the famous Kalachakra Temple, part of the Namgyal Monastery at the current Dalai Lama's residence in Dharamsala, India. One monk at Shankh claims that in the early 1990s a Tibetan artist from Dharamsala came here to Shankh to study these thangkas, and since construction of the Kalachakra Temple at Dharamsala began in 1992 and was not finished until 1994 it is possible that the wall paintiings there were modelled at least in part on the Shankh thangkas, although of course purely Tibetan prototypes also exist. These valuable thangkas were hidden away by monks during the communist era, when they probably would have been destroyed, and were only once again put on display in the late 1980s. Along with the Kalachakra thangkas is a rare thangka depicting the legendary kingdom of Shambhala, where the Kalachakra Tantra was taught before being introducted into India in late tenth century.