The Buryats

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The Russians who pushed east to the great lake in 1643 found the country around it already held. Buryat clans pastured their herds on both shores of Baikal, in the wooded steppe of the Angara and the grasslands beyond the water, and they did not give the land up easily. It was only with treaties in 1689 and 1727 that the territory was fixed to the Russian state and cut away from the Mongol world to the south. The line drawn on those maps left a Mongol people on the northern side of it — the farthest north the Mongols had reached, settled around a lake so deep and cold it is itself reckoned among the powers that must be honored.

A Mongol people of the Baikal country

The Buryats are a Mongolic people, speaking a central Mongolic language close to the Khalkha tongue of Mongolia proper, and they are counted, with the Sakha to their north, among the principal indigenous peoples of southern Siberia. Today they number something over half a million, the great majority of them in Russia: in the Republic of Buryatia, which wraps the southern and eastern shore of the lake, and in Irkutsk Oblast to the west and Zabaykalsky Krai to the east, with further communities across the border in Mongolia and in Inner Mongolia in China. The land itself is the first fact about them — Lake Baikal, the taiga that runs down to its water, and the open steppe of the Transbaikal.

Their name reaches back into the deep record of the steppe. A people of the Baikal forest, the Buriyat, is named already in the thirteenth-century Mongol chronicle, the Secret History of the Mongols, among the peoples brought under the rising power in the north; the clans that Russian explorers met four centuries later were the heirs of that forest-and-steppe world, herders of cattle, horses, and sheep who moved between summer and winter pasture and reckoned descent by clan and lineage. The lake at the center of their country is no ordinary water. Baikal is the deepest and oldest freshwater lake on earth, a sickle of cold clear water more than six hundred kilometers long, and to the people of its shores it is itself among the great powers — a being to be addressed, not merely a feature of the map.

The decisive division among them is the division the lake itself makes. The western Buryats, on the Cisbaikal side along the upper Angara and the Irkutsk steppe, were drawn earliest into the orbit of Russian settlement; many took up agriculture and the forms of Russian life, and it is among them that the old religion of the sky and the spirits survived most fully and most unmixed. The eastern Buryats, the Transbaikal clans, stayed nearer to the Khalkha Mongols in custom and in herding life, kept the felt tent and the moving camp longer, and it was among them that Tibetan Buddhism, in its Gelug form, struck its deepest roots. The two halves of the people thus carry the two faiths in different proportion, but the line is not a wall. What the eastern Buryats did was not to exchange one religion for another. They laid the imported faith over the indigenous one, and held both.

Cape Burkhan and the Shaman Rock on Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal — among the most sacred places of Buryat shamanism. Photograph by Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Beneath both faiths lies the older stratum the Buryats share with the wider Mongol and steppe world: the worship of the Eternal Blue Sky, Köke Möngke Tengri, the high power above whose order the khans once claimed as their mandate; and below the sky the dense population of nearer powers — the masters of the land and water, the spirit-owners of a given mountain or river or stretch of pasture, and the ancestral spirits of the clan. It is a religion in which the world is full, every locality watched over by its lord, and the human business of living rightly is largely the business of keeping those lords fed and content. The shaman is the man, or the woman, who can deal with them directly. (Tengri the impersonal sky and the personal Altai creator Ülgen belong to the larger Mongol and Turkic horizon the Buryats inhabit.)

The way of the böö

The Buryats call their indigenous religion böö mörgöl — the worship, or the way, of the böö, the shaman. The word böö is the old Mongolian term (from earlier böge) for the male practitioner; the female, who in the philological record may mark the older stratum of the calling, is the udagan. The böö is not a priest in the sense of a man who has chosen and trained for an office. He is chosen by the spirits, and the choosing is not gentle. The vocation announces itself in the long illness, the dreams, the crisis of body and mind that the tradition reads as the spirits’ summons; a candidate who refuses sickens further, and the making of the shaman is finally the work of the spirits upon him rather than of any school. Once made, he is the one who can send his attention, and in the tradition’s own account his soul, across the membrane between the living and the powers, to plead, to bargain, to recover a strayed soul, to escort a dead one, to find by divination the cause of a trouble.

What the böö serves is a layered hierarchy. Highest are the tngri, the sky-powers — in the developed Mongol scheme ninety-nine of them, the white and benevolent ranged against the black and terrible — and beneath them the earth-mothers and the host of ancestral and local spirits, sorted into lord-spirits, protector-spirits, and guardian-spirits, each bound to its place and its people. The shaman’s labor is to keep the right relation with the ones that bear on the clan’s life: to find by divination the spirit that has been offended or the ancestor that has been neglected, to recover the soul of a sick person that has strayed or been taken, to set right what has gone wrong between a family and the masters of its land. The Buryat practice distinguishes, further, between shamans of differing temper and lineage — the so-called white and black shamans, the white serving the bright powers above and the black the darker spirits below, marked apart in dress and instrument and reckoned of different strength. Among the western Buryats this older shamanism survived with least overlay; among the eastern, it took on a Buddhist coloring, the so-called yellow shamanism in which lamaist forms and the shaman’s craft run together.

The shaman is not the only figure who may address the powers. In the older order the head of a clan or a household stood at the family hearth and made the seasonal offerings himself, sprinkling the first of the milk and the tea to the sky and the spirit-owners of the place, so that the ordinary devotion of the steppe — the libation flicked from the cup before drinking, the cloth tied to a tree at a pass, the cairn of stones, the ovoo, heaped at a high place and circled in passing — ran on continuously beneath the shaman’s more specialized work. The böö is summoned when the matter is beyond the household: when there is sickness, a death to be escorted, a persistent run of ill fortune, a need to know what the spirits want. He is, in the tradition’s account, the one who can go where the others cannot.

Two institutions carry the religion in the household and the clan. The first is the ongon. An ongon is a spirit together with the made thing it inhabits — a small figure of felt, hide, wood, metal, or cloth, kept in the home, into which a guardian spirit or an ancestor is brought to dwell by a rite, so that the seat of the power stands physically among the family that honors it. Ongons are reckoned by kind: clan ongons and family ongons, male and female, the ongons of herding or of the forge or of healing. A dead shaman of force may himself become an ongon, and receive his own consecrated image. The household that keeps its ongon keeps the spirit near, and feeds it, and is guarded by it. To call the spirit into presence in the séance the Buryats speak of ongo oruulkha, the introducing of the spirits — the shaman’s own body, in that moment, becoming the receptacle.

Serge — ritual hitching-posts hung with offering-cloths — standing at Cape Burkhan on Olkhon. Photograph by Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The second institution is communal and public: the tailgan. The tailgan is the great clan or village sacrifice, held in the warm season at a fixed sacred place — a hill, a spring, a cape, the seat of a known master-spirit — where the people of a locality come together to feed the lords of the land and the ancestors and to ask in return for rain, for increase of the herds, for health, for the turning-aside of harm. Beasts are offered and shared; milk, kumys — the fermented mare’s milk of the steppe — and vodka are sprinkled to the spirits; the shaman presides over the address to the powers, but the rite belongs to the whole community gathered, and binds it. Where the shaman’s island of Olkhon rises in the lake, the tailgan is held at Cape Burkhan, under the cleft Shaman Rock, where thirteen serge — the carved posts, the “hitching-posts” of the spirits — stand wound with ribbons, and where the master-spirits of the island are reckoned to dwell. Anthropologists who have followed the modern practice on Olkhon describe the tailgan there as the center of the island’s revived shamanic life, a communal offering at which the lords of the land and the ancestral spirits are fed as they have long been.

Two faiths, one people

The arrival of Gelug Buddhism among the eastern Buryats from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward did not abolish any of this. The monasteries — the datsans — were built on Buryat ground, and the lamas took their place in Buryat life beside, not instead of, the böö. The great house of the faith is the Ivolginsky Datsan near Ulan-Ude, which became after the Soviet decades the seat of Buddhism in the region. In the Buddhist settlement the old powers were not denied but rehoused: the underworld king Erlik, the judge of the dead before whom the shaman’s soul-journeys descend, wears in the temple the face of the dharma-protector Yama; the wrathful Vajrapani is invoked as Ochirvani; the white-bearded old man of earth and long life, Tsagaan Övgön, walks into the masked tsam dances of the monastery from the indigenous ground beneath it. The Buryats did not have to decide between the sky-and-spirit religion of their fathers and the Buddhism of the monasteries. They kept the lords of the land and the lamas in the same world, and a family might bring its trouble to the one or the other, or to both.

A Buryat shaman of the Olkhon region in ritual dress. Photograph by Arkadiy Zarubin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This layering is a fact about the religion and not a stage on the way to its replacement. The sky-cult underlies both faiths; Buddhism is the later coat. Where the western Buryats kept the under-stratum bare, the eastern wear both, and the wearing of both is itself the Buryat form of the faith. The connection of this Tibetan-derived Buddhism to its parent — to Tibetan Buddhism and the older religious ground of the Tibetan plateau — runs back through the Gelug lineage to which the datsans belong; what reached Baikal was the school of the Dalai Lamas, carried north across Mongolia.

Suppression and revival

The twentieth century fell hard on both faiths together. Under the Soviet campaigns against religion, intensifying through the 1920s and reaching their cruelest pitch in the 1930s, the böö and the lamas alike were named enemies of the new order — exploiters, class enemies, ranked with the priests and the rich herders. Rites were forbidden; the shaman’s drum and costume were confiscated and burned, some carried off to antireligious museums as trophies; the datsans were closed, their lamas scattered, arrested, in many cases killed; the nomadic life that had framed the whole religion was broken by forced settlement and collectivization. Practitioners who continued did so in silence, quieter rites without the loud drum, the cult driven underground or, in some districts, declared by Soviet observers to have died out altogether. The toll in arrests, deportations, and executions was real and is still incompletely counted. Much of what survives in the documentary record of those decades was written, with the bitter irony common to the whole field, by the same state apparatus that was set on ending the thing it described.

The Ivolginsky Datsan near Ulan-Ude, the principal monastery of Buryat Buddhism, reopened in the Soviet years and the seat of the faith in the region. Photograph by Mayyskiyysergeyy, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

After 1990 the silence ended. Buryatia, like neighboring Tuva and the Sakha Republic, listed shamanism among its traditional religions, and shamanic associations registered openly as religious bodies — among them the organizations in Ulan-Ude, such as Tengeri, that gather practitioners and frame their work as the recovery of Buryat clan culture, language, and ancestry. The tailgan returned to the open air. Olkhon — Cape Burkhan, the Shaman Rock, the standing serge — is worshipped again, and draws shamans from across the Buryat country to its annual rites. Scholars who have studied this return are careful: the institutional, certificate-issuing shamanism of the present carries forms — legal, organizational, national — that were shaped under the very Soviet state that had suppressed it, and the recovery is at once a genuine continuity and a reconstruction. The ethnography of the Ulan-Ude revival describes Buryats finding “their own” through the shaman — tracing the clan back, naming the ancestral spirits, re-entering a relation that had been broken. Whether the present form is unbroken descent or careful rebuilding is a question the scholars hold open; what is not in doubt is that the relation is being lived again.

Among the peoples in whom the religion of the steppe sky and the spirit-masters of place survived the modern centuries, the Buryats hold a particular standing: it is here, around the cold lake, that Mongol shamanism has come through most fully intact as a living faith, carried in the ongon kept in the house and the tailgan held at the sacred place, and held — among the eastern clans — in the same hands as the Buddhism of the datsans. The Sakha to the north and the taiga Evenki keep their own forms of the same wide tradition; the Buryats keep the Mongol one. They are not a people of the past tense. The shaman is called as he was called, the spirits are fed as they were fed, and the lake and its island are still, to the people of its shores, inhabited.

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