Buddhism Is Revived in Mongolia After Communism

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Mongolia's 1990 democratic revolution ended seven decades of one party communist rule and, with it, the state suppression of religion that had crushed Buddhism in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Monasteries closed or destroyed since that earlier repression began reopening or being rebuilt across the country, and ordination resumed openly for the first time in two generations, as a new generation of Mongolians began training as monks and nuns without having to hide the fact.

The recovery proved striking given how recently and how nearly the tradition had been wiped out. By 2010, more than half of Mongolians surveyed identified as Buddhist, and roughly 200 temples with several hundred monks and nuns were active nationwide, figures that would have been unthinkable only two decades earlier, when open religious practice remained illegal and monastic life survived, where it survived at all, only under close state supervision.

What this changed for Buddhism's spread was a demonstration of how far a suppressed tradition can recover once state pressure lifts, rather than proof that the earlier suppression had failed to do lasting damage. Fifty years after Mongolia's Buddhist institutions had been reduced to almost nothing, more than half the country's people again named the faith as their own, and a new generation of monks and nuns was training openly to carry it forward.