Barhan Uula

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Just below the summit the slope levels for a moment into a small plateau, and on the plateau stands a heap of stones. It is a little over a meter high — roughly 1.1 meters — and about 2.7 across, and it has been built the slow way, one stone laid on the last, by more hands than anyone climbing can name. The Buryat call the plateau Tepteekhey and the cairn an obo, and it is the reason people come up the mountain. A shamanist reaching it adds a stone and speaks to the owner of the place. A Buddhist looks at the same cairn and sees it crowned with a crossed sign that means the eternity and boundlessness of the world. And by the custom of the valley neither climbs at all without first going to a lama of the Kurumkan datsan and asking leave. One cairn, two liturgies, on the western wall of the Barguzin valley — that is Barhan Uula, and the arrangement is older than the argument about who it belongs to.

The mountain and how it reaches the record

Barhan Uula — in Buryat Барагхан, also written Бархан-Уула, “Barkhan Mountain” — is a peak in the Barguzin Range, the long wall of mountains that runs some 280 kilometers along the northeastern shore of Lake Baikal and rises at its crest to 2,840 meters at Pik Baikal (Barguzin Range, Wikipedia). The mountain stands on the western side of the Barguzin valley, in the Kurumkan district of the Republic of Buryatia, and it is not the tallest thing on that wall — Russian sources put its height at about 2,514 meters, the mountaineering database PeakVisor lists 2,495, and one local reckoning ranks it only the fourth-highest summit of the range. What sets it apart is its shape. Where the higher peaks crowd together, Barhan Uula stands massive and apart, and the shelf of level ground just under its crown gives it, from the valley floor, the look of a throne — a seat, the tradition says, for a lord who came down out of the sky.

It rises above two villages, Baragkhan and Yarikta, about twenty kilometers apart on the right bank of the Barguzin River, and the nearer of them takes its name from the peak. The Russian record places the village of Baragkhan at 54°09′N, 110°09′E, a settlement of about eleven hundred people with a school and a clinic, “1 kilometer west of the Murgun channel,” and it notes, in a single line, that the mountain to the southwest “gave its name to the settlement” (Барагхан, Russian Wikipedia). At the foot of the slope a mineral spring rises — the Baragkhan arshan, the “holy mountain water,” placed at about 54.096°N, 110.104°E — and it draws its own pilgrims, who drink and wash where the water comes out of the sacred ground.

The holiness is older than the present population, and the record says so more or less openly. Before the western Buryats and, behind them, the Russian Cossacks reached the Barguzin valley — the Russian conquest of the Baikal region falls in the seventeenth century — the valley belonged to others: the Barguts, a Mongol-speaking people counted among the ancestors of the Buryats, and the Evenki, the Tungus reindeer-herders and hunters whose own word saman would travel out of Siberia and into every European language as “shaman.” Both, the tradition and the regional record agree, already worshiped the peak. A study of the sacred sites of the Buryats and Evenki of the Barguzin valley by the Buryat Scientific Center of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences reads the mountain as exactly that kind of layered ground — a holy place inherited across peoples, each generation finding the last one’s offerings already on the cairn (Священные места бурят и эвенков Баргузинской долины, BNC SB RAS). Much of what the outside world knows of the mountain was set down later, by Russian and Soviet regional ethnographers and geographers, and it is read here at that distance — the outsider’s lens marked, the living voice of the Barguzin and Kurumkan Buryat, for whom the mountain’s owner is a present fact, given the first word.

The stone obo on the shelf below the summit of Barhan Uula, in the Kurumkan district of Buryatia, honoring the owner-spirit of the mountain. Arkady Zarubin, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

A guard against confusion is worth setting down at the outset, because the names in this country rhyme. Barhan Uula — Barkhan, Baragkhan — is not the sound-alike Burkhan Baabai sanctuary in the Eastern Sayan, a different mountain far to the west; it is not Cape Burkhan and the Shaman Rock on the island of Olkhon out in Lake Baikal; and it is not Burkhan Khaldun, the holy mountain of Genghis Khan in Mongolia. It is the peak of the Barguzin, on Baikal’s northeastern shore. And its owner-spirit, Barkhan Baabai, must be kept distinct from the mountain that carries his throne: the lord is not the rock, though the two share the name.

One mountain, two liturgies

The distinctive thing about Barhan Uula is that it is holy twice over, and to two different priesthoods at once, without either one displacing the other. This is unusual enough to be the whole point of the place. It is a mountain revered by shamanists and Buddhists together — the shamans of boo murgel, the Buryat way, and the lamas of the Tibetan Dharma standing on the same slope, offering to the same summit, and reading its sanctity in two different grammars that turn out to agree.

In the shamanic frame the mountain is a throne, and the one who sits on it is its ezhin — the master-spirit, the owner of the land. The Barguzin Buryat name that owner Barkhan Baabai, “Father Barkhan” (he is also rendered Burkhan Baabai), and beside him Khazhar Sagaan-noyon, “the White Lord Khazhar,” and the two are held to be the masters of the whole Barguzin valley, heavenly rulers who came down from the sky-world of the tengri to own the earth beneath them. This is the same cosmology that orders the Baikal shamanic world: an upper heaven of the sky-powers, a middle earth crowded with the owner-spirits of its lakes and capes and mountains, an underworld beneath. Barkhan Baabai is that middle world’s lord of this valley, and the plateau below the summit is where the valley comes to keep faith with him. In the older Lamaist texts the same figure surfaces under a longer ritual name, Barkhan-Baabai-Balgan-Soshyo — the shaman-lord absorbed, name and all, into the Buddhist register.

For the manner of that faith-keeping the record is plain, and it is set down here at the public-record distance rather than as an instruction. The pilgrim climbs; on the Tepteekhey shelf he adds a stone to the obo and leaves an offering; and the offering is made to the owner, not to the mountain as scenery. The obo itself is the meeting point of the two liturgies. In the Buddhist re-reading the ancient shamanic cairn is topped with a crossed emblem — the Buddhist sign of the world’s eternity and its boundlessness — so that the same stones that answer to Barkhan Baabai also carry the mark of the Dharma. Nothing is thrown down to make room; the new sign sits on the old heap.

When Tibetan Buddhism spread among the Buryat through the datsans, from the eighteenth century onward, it drew Barhan Uula onto its own map of the world without erasing the owner underneath. The mountain became, in the Buddhist reckoning, a guardian — and specifically a guardian of the north. The tradition counts a small number of chief sabdak seats, the abodes of the great protector-spirits, across the Buryat and Mongol lands, and holds Barhan Uula the northernmost of them: the snow-capped peak that guards the Buddhist world along its northern edge. A Tibetan legend the tradition preserves numbers it among those protector-abodes, and the local belief adds a promise — that a person who lives rightly may look up at the cliffs and see, in the rock, a great image of the Buddha, and that one who reaches the top is joined for a moment to the hidden power of the place. What the shamanist reads as the master of the valley, the Buddhist reads as a defender of the Dharma; it is one sacred power under two descriptions, and the tradition holds the two as coherent rather than as a muddle.

The climb is governed, and the governance too belongs to both liturgies. By the custom of the valley one does not simply walk up: the person who means to ascend is expected first to go to a lama of the Kurumkan datsan and ask permission — a leave-taking that reads at once as Buddhist etiquette and as the older courtesy owed to the owner of any sacred ground. And by a taboo the tradition keeps to this day, women are not taken to the summit. These are recorded as the living rule of the mountain, described and not prescribed; their meaning, from within, is that Barhan Uula is a lord’s own house, entered on the lord’s terms and not the visitor’s.

Barhan Uula rising above the Barguzin valley in the Kurumkan district of Buryatia — the massive, throne-shaped peak the tradition holds a seat descended from the sky. Godevuit, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The mountain is woven, too, into the wider fabric of the tradition’s stories. Local legend attaches to Barhan Uula the names of heroes and khans — the epic hero Geser, whom the sky sends down to clear the middle world of monsters; Genghis Khan and a Tibetan king; and Bargu-bator, the leader of the ancient Bargut people and a reputed forefather of the Buryats. One old story holds that in the time of Mongol rule a noble of the golden Borjigin line was buried on the mountain, escorted to his rest by Barguts of the khan’s own guard. Whether these are memory or invention the tradition does not finally settle, and it does not need to; they are the marks of a peak important enough that the great names of the country gather to it. Beside it in that country stand the other owners of the Baikal world — Khan Khoto Baabai, the sky-son who owns the Shaman Rock at Cape Burkhan; Esege Malaan Tengri, the bright father of the western heavens; Sagaan Ubgen, the white grandfather who owns the life of the earth; and the ongon, the ancestral spirits housed in their felt and wooden figures. Barkhan Baabai is the owner of one valley in that peopled and ordered world, and his mountain is his seat in it.

The Buddhist encounter, the Soviet rupture, and the return

The afterlife of Barhan Uula is, in miniature, the afterlife of Buryat religion itself. The Buddhist encounter, first: it came to the mountain as an overlay, not a conquest. In 1916 the Barguzin datsan — the region’s Buddhist monastery — was moved to the foot of Barhan Uula, and though the temple itself is now a ruin, the sacred use of its ground continued and has been renewed. At the mountain’s foot today stands a temple where Yanzhima is venerated — the Buddhist deity of art, learning, and fertility, the Buryat form of the goddess Sarasvati — and monks, including from the Ivolginsky datsan, the seat of the Buryat sangha, climb the peak in season to read a prayer-service in the sacred language and honor its sanctity; a stupa has been raised at the site. The owner-spirit was never expelled to make room for any of this. The datsan came to the mountain that already had a lord, and the lamas offered to the north-guardian on the same shelf where the shamanists offered to Barkhan Baabai.

Then came the rupture the record names plainly. The Soviet repression of the 1930s fell on both liturgies at once: shamans and lamas were arrested, exiled, and killed; the datsans across Buryatia were closed and pulled down, the Barguzin monastery among the casualties of the era; and the herding people were driven into the collectives. The state justified the wreckage with a single word — that this was “backwardness,” “superstition,” an ignorance to be cured. That framing is set down here as a historical fact about what was done to the religion and its people, and it is refused as any account of what the religion is. An ordered cosmology of the three worlds, a called and initiated priesthood, a liturgy of offering and cairn, a mountain kept holy across the turnover of whole peoples — the label of “superstition” was a weapon of a state set against a faith, not a description of the faith, and the fuller story of that assault, including the trial of the Geser epic itself, belongs to the account of Geser. On the mountain it is enough to say that for a generation the Barguzin was a dangerous place to keep the old faith openly, and that the offerings on the Tepteekhey cairn did not entirely stop.

From about 1990 the recovery came, and it came to both liturgies together. The post-Soviet revival of boo murgel shamanism and of Tibetan Buddhism — the same revival that has re-consecrated the capes of Baikal and made Cape Burkhan again a center of the shamans’ gathering — restored Barhan Uula to open pilgrimage. The datsan ground was reconsecrated, the Yanzhima temple raised, the annual ascents resumed, the monks’ prayer-service and the shamanists’ stone-offering both returning to the plateau. And in the autumn of 2009 the mountain received a modern kind of homage: in a republican contest to name the “Seven Wonders of Nature of Buryatia,” the Barguzin Buryat carried Barhan Uula to first place, more than thirty thousand votes making the sacred peak the foremost natural wonder of the republic (Гора Бархан-Уула — главное чудо природы Бурятии, visit.kurumkan.info). The vote was cast by the people whose valley the mountain owns, and it named, in the language of a public poll, what the tradition had held from the start.

The documentary record for the mountain runs, as it does for so much of the Baikal world, through regional Buryat ethnography and geography — read critically where it descends from Russian and Soviet outsiders, and checked against the living practice of the people of the valley (Загадки священной горы Бархан-Уула, volkov.irkutsk.ru). What that record and that practice agree on is a mountain that has never needed to choose. For the Barguzin and Kurumkan Buryat, and for the Evenki and Bargut memory older than either, Barkhan Baabai is the master of the valley in the present tense, his throne the massive peak on its western wall; for the lamas of Kurumkan and Ivolgin the same peak guards the Dharma from the north; and the single cairn on the Tepteekhey shelf carries, without contradiction, a stone for the owner and a crossed sign for the eternity of the world. A neighboring people of the two worlds, the Khamnigan, carry a comparable double inheritance in their own valleys; on Barhan Uula the doubling is stacked on one plateau, a meter of stones under an open sky, and the two who keep it have long since stopped asking the mountain to be only one thing.

→ Related: Geser · Sagaan Ubgen · Khan Khoto Baabai · Esege Malaan Tengri · Ongon · Lake Baikal · Olkhon · Cape Burkhan · The Soyot · The Tofalar · The Khamnigan