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Browsing Articles by Author "Tsyrempilov, Nikolay"

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    ‘Alien’ Lamas: Russian Policy toward Foreign Buddhist Clergy in the Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries
    (Inner Asia, 2012) Tsyrempilov, Nikolay
    This article analyses the Russian policy towards foreign Buddhist clergy who penetrated into the Russian Empire from Mongolia and Tibet between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on archive materials, the origins of this policy are identified. The attitude of the official Buddhist administration of East Siberia led by Khambo Lama to the so- called alien lamas is discussed.
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    Introduction
    (Etudes Mongoles et Siberiennes, Centrasiatiques et Tibetaines, 2016) Tsyrempilov, Nikolay
    Present-day scholarship on the Buryats, or Buryat-Mongols, consciously or otherwise considers the people in question and the areas they inhabit as a marginal part or periphery of the Mongolian or Russian worlds ; the logic of this marginality is determined by the history of this ethno-cultural group formation at the civilizational juncture between Asia and Europe, and furthermore acquires its historical and cultural identity from this marginality. Indeed, most of the few Western Buryatologists approach their area specialization from one of two dominant perspectives. The majority of them initially had, and still have, an established basic interest in Russian studies or, to be precise, studies in Russian Siberia. In this perspective the Buryats are viewed as the largest indigenous people of Siberia, culturally and historically one of the most curious minorities of Asiatic Russia.
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    Noble Paganism. Orientalist Discourse on Tibetan Buddhism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Polemic Literature
    (Inner Asia, 2016) Tsyrempilov, Nikolay
    Tibetan Buddhism, in the eyes of Orthodox Christian polemicists, was always seen as a harmful paganism, and fifighting against this ‘superstition’ was a high priority. Based on analysis of nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox missionary articles, this paper examines the stereotyped portrayal of Tibetan Buddhism as a civilisational opponent to Christianity, and the ways Russian scholars, ethnographers, philosophers, and offiffcials either supported or challenged this view. In this paper, I argue that, in Russia, the Orientalist paradigm is common to a greater degree among Christian clergy than in academic circles due to the status of a dominating religion the Orthodoxу enjoyed in Russia. The Russian missionaries’ support of imperial power was the essential fac-tor. The clerics viewed themselves as carriers not only of Christian values, but also of the idea of Russian statehood and European civilisation in general. Russian Christian intellectuals repeatedly attempted to comprehend Buddhism rationally, but these attempts were highly formalistic. For them, academic study was never an end in itself, but, I argue, a convenient tool to achieve ideological domination and establish moral authority. However, their intellectual and psychological inability to view other reli-gions as different, rather than false, was, and still is, an obstacle to mutual understand-ing and respect between Christianity and Buddhism in today’s Russia.
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    The Constitutional Theocracy of Lubsan- Samdan Tsydenov: An Attempt to Establish a Buddhist State in Transbaikalia (1918–22)
    (State, Religion and Church, 2016) Tsyrempilov, Nikolay
    The paper examines the causes and circumstances of the establish- ment of a Buddhist theocratic state by Lubsan-Samdan Tsydenov, an outstanding figure of Buriat Buddhism. Drawing upon some hitherto unedited Tibetan, Mongolian and Russian sources, the paper undertakes a detailed reconstruction of the events in Siberian Transbaikalia in the period of the Russian Civil War. An analysis of personal notes by Tsydenov and the text of the constitution of the Kudun Buddhist state shows that “Kudun theocracy” was a syncretic fusion of the traditional Buddhist understanding of the Buddhist “Dharmic state” and modernist conceptions of republicanism and constitutional democracy. The Kudun theocracy should also be interpreted as a response of Buddhist circles to attempts by Buriat secular nationalists to build Buriat statehood based upon the idea of national self-determination. The Kudun project shows that Buddhism could serve as a foundation for state-building at the time of the early twentieth-century Russian political crisis.
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    Ulan-Ude Manuscript Kanjur: An Overview, Analysis and Brief Catalogue
    (Buddhist Studies Review, 2017-01) Tsyrempilov, Nikolay
    This study investigates the Mongolian manuscript Kanjur preserved at the Center of Oriental Manuscripts and Xylographs of the Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan studies of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The manuscript previously be- longed to the Chesan Buddhist monastery of Central Transbaikalia and was brought to the Buruchkom, a rst academic institute of the Republic of Buryat-Mongolia (Ulan-Ude) by the eminent Buryat writer Khotsa Namsaraev. The manuscript is an almost complete copy of the Ligdan Khan’s Kanjur presumably made in the late sev- enteenth to early eighteenth century in Beijing. The article presents a description, analysis and brief catalogue of Ulan-Ude manuscript Kanjur.