Sagaan Ubgen

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The masks do not speak. In the datsan courtyard the wrathful protectors wheel and stamp behind their towering carved faces, and the whole liturgy is danced in silence broken only by the horns and the drum; the powers moving through the monks have no need of words. Then the crowd hears a voice. A stooped old man in white, bent nearly double, has tottered onto the ground — carried, in some performances, because he is too weak to walk — and he alone among the figures is permitted to talk. He grumbles, he jokes, he shuffles up to the spectators and begs a coin or holds out his snuff bottle for a pinch. The fierce guardians on every side belong to the imported faith and keep their vow of silence. The old man answers to no such rule. He is older than the temple that houses him, and older than the dance, and he says so.

The names of the White Old Man

He reaches the record under a spread of names, all of them meaning the same plain thing. Among the Buryats north and east of Lake Baikal he is Sagaan Ubgen — Сагаан үбгэн, the White Old Man. In the Khalkha speech of Mongolia proper he is Tsagaan Ovgon, older orthography Tsagaan Ebugen, Цагаан өвгөн. Russian ethnography, which recorded much of what is written of him, calls him Belyi Starets, the White Elder. Among the Kalmyks who carried the Mongol gods west to the lower Volga he is Tsagan Aav or Tsagan Avga, the white grandfather. And once the Buddhist monasteries had taken him in, he acquired a Tibetan name as well: rgan po dkar po, again simply “white old man.” The name is never a riddle. It describes what stands before the eye — an aged man, white of hair and beard and robe — and behind the description sits a very old idea of who he is.

Within the tradition he is understood as a power far older than any of these words. He is the ezen of the earth, in the Mongol idiom the master and owner of the ground and everything that lives on it: the land itself, the waters that run through it, the grasses, the wild beasts, the fish. To own, here, is not to possess as property but to hold in charge, as a herdsman holds his flock; the earth’s life-force is his to tend and to grant. The Russian ethnographer Natalia Zhukovskaya — an outside observer of the Buryat world, working in the Soviet decades and to be read with that lens in view — placed his cult among the deepest strata of the region’s religion, tying it to the veneration of nature itself and to the nomadic herder’s whole picture of the world, and reading the White Old Man as the mythological partner of the earth. In some tellings that partnership is spelled out: he stands beside Etugen Eke, also called Itugen, the Mongol Mother Earth, the male owner beside the female ground.

Two layers must be kept apart here, because the figure carries both and the tradition does not blur them. The first is the pre-Buddhist earth-spirit of the shamanic religion — an owner-of-the-ground close kin to the local masters of land and water honored at the ovoo cairn and at the serge, the carved hitching-post that fixes a spirit to a place. Before Buddhism reached Mongolia and Buryatia he was already the deity of longevity, of wealth, and of fertility, rooted in that cult of the earth-spirits. The second layer is later: the same figure as folded into Tibetan Buddhism from the eighteenth century onward, the era in which the datsans — the Buryat Buddhist monasteries — spread across the land and the earth-owner was issued a conversion-story and admitted to the lay pantheon. Scholars have a vocabulary for the seam. In the terms used by the anthropologist Ippei Shimamura, the White Old Man belongs to a “white shamanism” that has taken on Buddhist ritual and belief, itself a wing of the Buryat “yellow shamanism” shaped by the Tibetan clergy — shamanism worn on one side, the dharma on the other, in a single practice. He sits exactly on that line: a god the shaman’s world already knew, recast for the lama’s.

He is not to be confused with the other great powers of this world, though he shares a landscape with them. He is not Esege Malaan Tengri, the bright father of the western heavens who presides over the celestial council from above; the White Old Man’s domain is the earth’s surface, not the sky. He is not Geser, the heaven-sent hero of the great epic who comes down to clear the world of monsters. And he is not Khan Khoto Baabai, the sky-son who came down to own the sacred rock of Olkhon; the two are both owners, but of very different holdings — one of a single holy island in the sea of Baikal, the other of the living ground itself, wherever grass grows.

The grandfather who owns the earth’s life

Because he owns the earth’s fertility, the White Old Man is the one whose goodwill underwrites the continuing of life: long years, children, fat herds, grass and game and running water. He is the god a herder prays to for a full pen and an unhurried old age. To slight the ground or foul its water is, in this world, to answer to him. And his signature among the powers is gentleness. Where the guardian deities terrify — where the wrathful protectors of the temple exist precisely to be dreadful — he blesses. He is imagined and painted as a benign, unhurried elder: bald, high of brow, with a long white beard, leaning on a staff whose head is carved into a dragon.

The attributes he carries are the emblems of his gifts. In one hand or near him is the book of destiny, the register in which lifespans are set down. He may hold a rosary, the mark of his later Buddhist office, or a peach — the old fruit of long life, an emblem his iconography shares with the longevity figures of the Chinese world to the south. Around him are the wild creatures he owns: a deer stands at his side, not as ornament but as his own beast; cranes, themselves birds of long life, pass overhead; and he is often shown seated beneath a peach tree beside a spring, the whole scene reading at a glance as endurance and increase. Studies of his image in Mongolian art trace how fixed this iconography became across the whole Mongol-speaking world, and how legible each attribute is — the dragon-staff, the deer, the peach, the scroll of years — as the sign of a god of the earth and of long life, whether or not a Buddha was ever added to his story.

The costume of Sagaan Ubgen, the White Old Man, from the tsam repertoire of the Mongolian National Theater, exhibited in Ulaanbaatar — the stooped, white-bearded elder who alone among the masked figures may speak. Photograph by Pierre André Leclercq, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Because he is the owner of the ground, his reach is wide but never remote. Tengri, the eternal sky, arches impersonally over all and decrees the spans of khans; the White Old Man tends the world’s surface underneath it — its pasture, its game, its long-living old. His place is close to the household and the pasture rather than at the top of any cosmic order. That closeness is exactly what makes his one great ritual appearance so striking, and it is in the dance that the whole of him is on view at once.

In the tsam — the Buryat and Mongol form of the Tibetan cham, the masked temple dance in which monks in immense carved masks and stiff brocade enact the subjugation of hostile forces and the driving-out of the year’s evil — the White Old Man enters in a register entirely his own. Into a solemn pageant of silent, fierce divinities he comes as a benevolent clown, and he alone is licensed to break the rules that bind every other dancer. He totters in weak, or is carried on; he plays the fool, begging from the spectators, tumbling, moving where the others are fixed. His set piece is a mastery of the wild that belongs to the owner of the beasts: he confronts a tiger and symbolically slays it by striking the tiger’s skin with his stick, and in the killing his strength floods back. Restored, he passes among the crowd seeking donations of money, and offers a pinch of snuff from his bottle in return. Then he blesses the ground and the people on it, scattering long life and increase. The comedy and the benediction are a single act; the laughter is part of the blessing, and the closeness of the crowd to the god is the whole point of the turn. The Mongol dance tradition gives his part a name that renders as “the great heaven of the earth of long life,” and holds that the role exists nowhere else — a spirit, its keepers say, that lived in the shamanic religion long before Buddhism reached the steppe and was carried whole into the temple.

The iconographers and the ethnographers set him, in this office, beside two neighbors. One is the Chinese Old Man of the South Pole, Shoulao, the star-god of longevity, whom the White Old Man resembles in his high domed brow and his peach and his patronage of family long life. The other, more distant, is the Tibetan Gyalpo Pehar, a great protector of the Buddhist order. The parallels are the kind that mark him as the Inner Asian face of a very old wish — that the earth and its people should endure — without collapsing him into either.

The earth-owner taken into the dharma

The afterlife of the White Old Man is a case study in how the Buryat world holds shamanism and Buddhism together rather than flattening one into the other. When Tibetan Buddhism spread among the Buryats through the eighteenth-century datsans, the earth-owner was not suppressed. He was adopted. The mechanism is plain in the record: to account for the continued veneration of an indigenous nature-spirit inside Buddhist practice, narratives were supplied to convert him, furnishing tales of how he came into the faith and making him a patron of it, while he went on discharging his older, worldlier offices of long life and fertility unchanged.

There is more than one such conversion story. In one, the Buddha and his disciples encounter the White Old Man, who so impresses the Buddha with his wisdom that the Buddha declares him a saint and a protector — the steppe elder authenticated by the founder of the incoming religion in a single meeting. In another, told further toward Tibet, the White Old Man is one of two hunters, the other named Hara Ubgen, the Black Old Man; out hunting, the pair come upon the great yogi Milarepa in his cave, and Milarepa turns them from the hunt to the teaching. The second legend is doubly telling. It takes the very lord of the wild animals and makes him a man who gives up killing them, folding his old identity as master of the beasts into the Buddhist ethic of harmlessness. The earth-god is not contradicted by his adoption; he is reread. He kept his ancient offices and acquired, on top of them, a Buddhist pedigree and a place as a lay dharma-protector.

He entered the temple visually and choreographically as well as in story. He became a favored subject of the datsans’ art — painted on thangka and worked in the bright cut-cloth appliqué of the Buryat and Mongol tradition — and the beloved comic sage of the tsam. His arrival in the strictly Tibetan cham came late and by a Mongol road: the role is credited to the early twentieth century and to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who is said to have brought it into Tibet after a dream during his exile in Mongolia, introducing the White Old Man first into the New Year’s dance at the Potala in Lhasa, from where the part spread to cham in other monasteries. The direction of travel matters. The old man went from the steppe into Tibet, not the other way; the figure the Buryats and Mongols knew was carried into the heart of the Tibetan liturgy, still recognizably himself.

A statue of Tsagan Aav — the Kalmyk name for the White Old Man — in Kalmykia, on the lower Volga, the westernmost reach of a deity honored from Buryatia to Europe. Photograph by Atami, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

Like every religious figure of the region, the White Old Man passed through the catastrophe of the Soviet 1930s. The datsans were closed and destroyed, and shamans and lamas alike were repressed and, in large numbers, killed; the masked dances fell silent along with the monasteries that staged them. The rupture is a fact of the record, named here as such. What followed it is the more remarkable half of the story. Since the post-Soviet revival that began around 1990, the White Old Man has returned vividly across Buryatia, Mongolia, and Kalmykia. He is honored anew in reopened and rebuilt datsans and in living shamanic practice; his roadside statues stand again by springs and mineral sources in the Buryat highlands; the restored tsam dances his tiger-slaying, snuff-begging turn once more; and he is a familiar presence at the White Month new-year festivals, the lunar new year named, like him, for whiteness, when offerings and prayers for a prosperous year are made to the white grandfather of the land. This is the same coexistence that runs through the whole Baikal world, held rather than resolved — the shamanic center of the revival worked out most fully at the great Shaman Rock of Cape Burkhan on Olkhon, and the double inheritance of shamanism and Buddhism visible on a single peak at Barhan Uula in the Barguzin valley. The White Old Man carries that doubleness in his own person.

He remains, too, a live scholarly problem. Zhukovskaya read him back into the earliest nature-cult, the earth-spirit at the root of the whole system; other scholars — the folklorist Eleazar Meletinsky, the students of Tibetan and Mongol ritual René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz and Richard Kohn, and Shimamura on the Buryat shamanic revival — have variously mapped his shamanic origins and his Buddhist adoption. Where his layers begin and end is genuinely debated: how much of the figure is pre-Buddhist earth-owner and how much is the Buddhist protector built over him is not a thing the sources settle. What is not in dispute is that both strata are present, and that the tradition itself keeps them legible. He is at once the owner of the ground the ovoo cairns are heaped upon, kin to the ancestral spirits housed in the felt figures of the ongon, and a lay protector of the dharma with a Buddha’s own word of sainthood behind him.

So the voice that breaks the silence of the masks is the oldest voice in the courtyard. The wrathful guardians glare and stamp and say nothing because their power is dreadful and needs no speech. The white-bearded elder speaks because his power is the opposite kind — the goodwill that lets the grass return and the herds fill out and the old live to be older still — and because he was here, owning the earth’s life, long before any monastery was raised on the ground he owns. When the children laugh at his stumbling and drop a coin in his hand, they are asking the master of the land for their own long years, and he, leaning on his dragon-staff, is granting them.

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