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Mongols

Peoples

The Mongols are a people of the eastern steppe whose empire under Chinggis Khan and his successors became the largest contiguous land empire in history. Their older religion honored the eternal blue sky, Tenger, alongside the spirits of place and the ancestors, and it worked through shamans, while the empire itself was notably tolerant of the religions it ruled. From the sixteenth century Tibetan Buddhism became dominant in Mongolia, and it has recovered since the suppression of the socialist period.

Facts
Traditions
Principal Religious Traditions
The eternal blue sky, Tenger, with the powers of place and the ancestors, worked through shamans; Tibetan Buddhism in the Gelug school, adopted by the court in the sixteenth century and now the majority tradition; and the revival of both since 1990 after decades of state suppression. 3
Origins
Origin Region
The eastern steppe, in present Mongolia, Inner Mongolia and Buryatia. 1
Language Family
Mongolian, of the Mongolic family. 2
Practice
Practice Status
Living, and practised in varied local forms 3
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Tenger, the Ovoo and the Specialist's Office

Mongol religion before Buddhism addressed Tenger, the eternal blue sky, alongside Etugen, the earth, and a wide body of spirits of place and of ancestors. The Secret History of the Mongols, the tradition's own thirteenth century chronicle, opens with a descent from a wolf and a doe and shows Temujin climbing Burkhan Khaldun to pray before a campaign, hanging his belt about his neck in the gesture of submission the text records. Heaven's mandate is invoked throughout it as the warrant for the conquests, so the religion is not separable from the political claim.

The ovoo, a cairn of stones raised at a pass or a summit, is the visible institution. Travellers add a stone and circle it, and the spirit of the place is understood to hold that ground. Fire, the threshold of a dwelling, and the milk of the first milking each carry obligations of their own, and the sprinkling of milk or tea to the four directions before drinking is still an ordinary courtesy rather than a self conscious revival.

Chinggis Khan himself became an object of cult after his death, honoured at a shrine whose custodians have maintained the observance for centuries. Dorzhi Banzarov, a Buryat scholar writing in 1846, produced the first study of the tradition by a member of it, and argued against reading it as the worship of demons. The specialist, the boo, is called rather than trained, and works by hosting a spirit. The atlas describes the office and does not set out the procedure, and notes that Mongolian and Buryat practice today is a living tradition with practitioners rather than a reconstruction assembled out of books.

Chinggis, Religious Policy and the Return of Buddhism

The empire assembled under Chinggis Khan from 1206 became the largest contiguous land empire in history, and Christopher Atwood's encyclopedia sets out the machinery that held it together: a decimal army organisation that broke up older tribal loyalties, a postal relay system, a script adapted from Uyghur, and a body of law.

Its religious policy was unusually consistent. Clergy of every religion were exempted from tax and from labour service, and Buddhist, Christian, Muslim and Daoist specialists were kept at court together and set to debate in front of the khan. The result was not tolerance in the modern sense but a wide procurement of blessing, and it made the empire the most religiously mixed political structure of its age. The individual khanates then converted separately. Devin DeWeese's study of the Golden Horde traces the Islamisation of the western khanate through its own narrative traditions rather than through outside chronicles.

Tibetan Buddhism entered through the Yuan court and returned decisively in the sixteenth century, when Altan Khan met Sonam Gyatso in 1578 and conferred the title Dalai Lama. Monasteries multiplied until the twentieth century, when the purges of the 1930s destroyed most of them and killed thousands of monks. Both Buddhism and the older practice have revived since 1990.

Connections

Associated With

Balkh, Cities

This source names Mongols directly: "Balkh, in ancient Bactria in what is now northern Afghanistan, is among the oldest cities of Central and South Asia and was traditionally called Umm al-Bilad, the Mother of Cities, in Islamic-era..."

Source A History of ZoroastrianismMary Boyce

This source names Mongols directly: "decades, this time reaching ordinary Mongols rather than remaining a court religion alone, and became the dominant faith of the Mongol lands, a position it held for more than three centuries until..."

Source Buddhism in Mongolia (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Mongols directly: "lamas serving them among the Buryat Mongols east of Lake Baikal in Siberia."

Source Buddhism in Russia

This source names Mongols directly: "Christopher P."

Source Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol EmpireChristopher P. Atwood

This source names Mongols directly: "James A."

Source Divinity Atlas Original Articles, Second Edition

This source names Mongols directly: "Berke, khan of the Golden Horde, personally converted to Islam at Bukhara in 1252, the first Mongol ruler to do so."

Source Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tukles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic TraditionDevin DeWeese

This source names Mongols directly: "Devin DeWeese's Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde is a scholarly study, published by Pennsylvania State University Press, of how Islam was received, narrated and remembered on the..."

Source Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tukles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic TraditionDevin DeWeese

This source names Mongols directly: "La Religion des Turcs et des Mongols, Jean-Paul Roux's 1984 study from Payot, is a standard scholarly French language reference on the pre-conversion religion of the Turkic and Mongolic peoples by a..."

Source La Religion des Turcs et des MongolsJean-Paul Roux

This source names Mongols directly: "Mona Hassan is a scholar of Islamic history, and this Princeton University Press book is her transregional history of Muslim mourning for and memory of the abolished caliphate, tracing responses..."

Source Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional HistoryMona Hassan

This source names Mongols directly: "The Maragheh Observatory was built in 1259 in northwestern Iran under the patronage of the Mongol Ilkhanid ruler Hulagu and directed by the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, who had persuaded..."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Mazar-i-Sharif, Cities

This source names Mongols directly: "Mazar-i-Sharif ("noble shrine") in northern Afghanistan takes its name from the Blue Mosque at its center, the Shrine of Hazrat Ali, reputed by local and Shia tradition to hold the tomb of Ali ibn..."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

This source names Mongols directly: "Led by the future King Edward I of England, then still Lord Edward, the Ninth Crusade arrived at Acre in 1271 as the last major crusading expedition to the Crusader states of the medieval period."

Source God's War: A New History of the CrusadesChristopher Tyerman
Pochayiv, Cities

This source names Mongols directly: "Pochayiv, in western Ukraine's Ternopil region, grew up around the Dormition Pochayiv Lavra, ranked as the second most significant monastery in Ukrainian Orthodox Christianity after the Kyiv..."

Source The Orthodox ChurchTimothy Ware (Kallistos Ware)
Tengrism, Religions

This source names Mongols directly: "the Secret History of the Mongols, the Irk Bitig), a continuously revised, community edited tertiary encyclopedia entry with no named author, hence the lower tier, though useful for these documented..."

Source Tengrism (Wikipedia)

This source names Mongols directly: "Black Faith, or Shamanism among the Mongols, his 1846 dissertation at Kazan University, is the earliest scholarly study of Mongol shamanic religion written by a scholar raised within the Buryat..."

Source The Black Faith, or Shamanism among the Mongols (Chernaya vera, ili shamanstvo u mongolov)Dorzhi Banzarov

This source names Mongols directly: "The Dai Honzon of 1274, also called the Mannen Kugo Honzon, is a calligraphic mandala inscribed by Nichiren Shonin himself on the first day of December 1274, shortly after word reached Japan of the..."

Source The Dai Honzon of 1274 (Gohonzon Shu catalogue, cross-referenced)Gohonzon Shu catalogue project contributors

This source names Mongols directly: "A ruling by the Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya, issued in answer to a question about the legal status of Mardin, a town in what is now southeastern Turkey that remained under Mongol Ilkhanate rule with..."

Source Ibn Taymiyya (Makers of the Muslim World)Jon Hoover

This source names Mongols directly: "second introduction among the Mongols."

Source Buddhism in Mongolia (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Mongols directly: "Hulegu Khan's Mongol army besieged and took Baghdad between late January and 10 February 1258, ending five centuries of Abbasid rule as the caliphate's own political center."

Source Siege of Baghdad (1258) (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Mongols directly: "The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, in Igor de Rachewiltz's annotated English translation published by Brill in 2004, is the standard scholarly..."

Source The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth CenturyIgor de Rachewiltz (translator and commentator)

This source names Mongols directly: "The Tibetan Buddhist canon read in classical Tibetan rather than through Mongol or Chinese intermediary translation, founded by Alexander Csoma de Koros's 1834 grammar and dictionary built from..."

Source Frascati Manual 2015: Guidelines for Collecting and Reporting Data on Research and Experimental DevelopmentOECD

This source names Mongols directly: "By the end of the thirteenth century, the Church of the East was the most geographically extensive Christian communion in the world, with roughly two hundred bishoprics stretching from the..."

Source The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian ChristianityChristoph Baumer

This source names Mongols directly: "A reference entry on Umai, the Turkic and Mongol guardian deity of birth and infants named in the Old Turkic inscriptions of Mongolia."

Source Umai (Encyclopedia of Religion, via Encyclopedia.com)Denis Sinor

Originated In

Originates in Language

Regions Where This Is Principal

Buddhism, Religions
Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
In the Other Atlases

In Branch

Also in Language Atlas: the branch this subject belongs to.

Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. Ethnologue: Languages of the World
David M. Eberhard, Gary F. Simons and Charles D. Fennig (eds.), SIL International, 2024View the Source
3. Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire
Christopher P. Atwood, Facts on File, 2004View the Source
The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century
Igor de Rachewiltz (translator and commentator), Brill, 2004
The Black Faith, or Shamanism among the Mongols (Chernaya vera, ili shamanstvo u mongolov)
Dorzhi Banzarov, Kazan University, 1846
Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tukles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition
Devin DeWeese, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994
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