Rebuilding After 1937 and the Return of the Shamans

What was destroyed in 1937 was not only buildings but transmission. Buddhist teaching in Mongolia was carried by lineage, and killing a generation of teachers severed lines that texts alone could not restore, which is why the revival since 1990 has depended so heavily on Tibetan and Indian institutions and on monks trained in exile communities in India. Gandantegchinlen in Ulaanbaatar was permitted to reopen in 1944 as a showpiece for foreign visitors, with a token number of monks, and became the seed of the recovery; its Migjid Janraisig statue, melted down during the Soviet period, was rebuilt and reconsecrated in 1996.

The recognition of the tenth Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, announced in 2023 as a boy born in the United States, brought the Mongolian lineage directly into the dispute between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government over who may identify reincarnations, a question with obvious consequences for a country between Russia and China. Alongside the Buddhist recovery there has been a striking shamanic one. Practitioners now number in the thousands where they were officially non existent, serving urban clients as often as rural ones, and the revival is entangled with national identity and with the rehabilitation of Chinggis Khan as a state symbol. Whether it is continuity or reconstruction is genuinely disputed among scholars.