Tsagaan Ebugen

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In the masked dances of the Mongol monasteries, after the wrathful guardians have stamped and circled in their towering brocade, an old man shuffles into the dance ground. He is dressed in white from cap to boot, bent and unsteady, leaning on a staff whose head is carved into a dragon. He stumbles, he peers about, he begs a coin or a pinch of snuff from the crowd; the children laugh. Then he straightens, raises the staff, and blesses the ground and the people standing on it. The fierce gods on either side of him belong to the imported faith. He does not. He is older than any of them — the spirit of the soil itself, brought on stage in borrowed robes.

The lord of the land

Tsagaan Ebugen — Tsagaan Övgön in the Khalkha speech of Mongolia, Sagaan Übgen among the Buryats north of the Gobi, written Cagán Ebügen in the older orthography — is “the White Old Man.” The name is plain and exact. He is white-bearded, white-clad, advanced in years past counting, and he is a god of the earth.

Before any monastery rose on the Mongol grasslands, the White Old Man was the master of the land and of what grows and breeds upon it. He is the deity of longevity, of wealth, and of fertility — of the increase of the herds and the people, of long life granted and renewed. He is the lord of the soil and its waters, and the keeper of the wild animals, who are his herd and his charge as the domestic flocks are the herdsman’s. The deer that often stands beside him in his images is not decoration but his creature; the wild beasts of the steppe and the forest range under his eye. One epithet preserved in the tradition calls him the great heaven of the earth that grants long life — a god of the ground set beneath the sky, where the impersonal Eternal Heaven, Köke Möngke Tengri, arches over all. If Tengri orders the world from above and decrees the span of khans, the White Old Man tends the world’s surface — its grass, its game, its long-living old.

His place among the powers of the older Mongol world is that of an earth-spirit close to the household and the pasture, not a remote cosmic agent. In some tellings he is paired with Etügen Eke, Mother Earth — Itügen, the Earth-Mother of the steppe — as the male face of the fertile ground beside her female one. He is not a creator after the manner of the Altai upper-world maker Ülgen, who shapes the earth from the primordial waters; nor a judge of the dead like Erlik in his underworld; nor a guardian of the newborn like Umai. His office is narrower and warmer: the gift of years, the swelling of the womb and the flock, the safekeeping of the creatures of the open country. He is the god a herder prays to for a long old age and a full pen.

How old the figure is, and what his pre-Buddhist worship looked like in detail, cannot be read straight off any ancient document. The deepest layer of the Mongol religious world is known chiefly from inscriptions and from the chronicles of outsiders, and the White Old Man is not named among the few gods the early steppe carved into stone. What survives of him in the written record is largely the work of later observers — Buddhist texts that had already absorbed him, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century travelers and ethnographers who described his images and his dances. That an earth- and longevity-god of this kind belonged to the indigenous religion before the lamas came is not in serious doubt; the precise shape of his old cult, before the Buddhist overlay, is reconstruction more than report. The figure who stands clearly in the light is the one the absorbed tradition made.

His likeness is fixed and recognizable across the whole Mongol world. He is a bald-headed old man with a flowing white beard, his brow domed and high — a sign, in this iconography, of great age and the long life he himself bestows. He leans on a staff, and the staff is crowned with the head of a dragon. In his hands or near him are the marks of his gifts: a scroll or book that is sometimes called the book of destiny, the register of lifespans; a deer; a peach, the old emblem of immortality that the iconography shares with the longevity-figures of the Chinese world to the south. The whole image reads at a glance as benevolence and endurance — a kindly, white-bearded grandfather of the land.

Tsagaan Övgön (Tsagaan Uvgun), the White Old Man of Mongolian tradition, lord of earth, sky, and livestock, with his characteristic white beard and dragon-staff. Image by Zazaa Mongolia, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

A steppe god taken into the dharma

The distinctive thing about the White Old Man is not what he is but what happened to him. When Tibetan Buddhism spread across Mongolia — carried in waves from the thirteenth century and decisively from the late sixteenth, when the Gelug order took root and built its monasteries on the grassland — it met an old country already full of gods. The Eternal Sky, the earth-spirits, the masters of the mountains and the rivers, the lord of the soil: these were not swept away. Many of them were drawn in. The incoming faith found the steppe’s own powers a place within its order rather than abolishing them, much as it had done in Tibet itself, where the indigenous mountain-gods and the deities of the pre-Buddhist Tibetan religion and of Bön were bound by oath and set to guard the dharma rather than driven out. The White Old Man is among the clearest Mongol cases of this absorption.

The mechanism is plain in the record. As the encyclopedic account of the deity notes, “to account for his continued veneration as part of Buddhist practice, narratives have been added to his existing mythology, providing tales of how he was converted to Buddhism, and making him a patron of the latter religion, at the same time that he continues in his previous, more worldly, religious functions.” The old earth-god kept his offices — longevity, fertility, the herds, the wild creatures — and acquired, on top of them, a Buddhist pedigree. He was furnished with a legend explaining how an indigenous nature-spirit came to belong inside the new faith.

There is more than one such legend. In one, the Buddha and his disciples are walking and meet the White Old Man, who so impresses the Buddha with his wisdom that the Buddha declares him a saint — the steppe elder authenticated by the founder of the imported religion in a single encounter. In another, told further west and reaching toward Tibet, the White Old Man is one of two hunters — the other called Hara Ubgen, the Black Old Man — who come upon the great Tibetan yogi Milarepa in his cave; Milarepa persuades them to give up the hunt and take up the teaching. The second story is doubly telling. It converts the very lord of the wild animals into a man who renounces killing them, folding his old identity as master of the beasts into the Buddhist ethic of harmlessness toward living things. The earth-god is not contradicted; he is reread.

Scholars place this layered figure within what has been called “white shamanism” — a current of practice that, in the words of the standard account, “incorporate[s] Buddhist rituals and beliefs” and stands as a subdivision of the so-called Buryat “yellow shamanism,” the strand of Buryat religion shaped by Tibetan Buddhism. The White Old Man sits exactly on the seam: a god the shaman’s world knew, recast for the lama’s. The modern Mongol and Buryat Buddhist pantheons include him, as they include many older figures, “as a result of syncretism with the indigenous shamanism of the region.”

The White Old Man in the dance

Where the absorbed god is most vividly visible is the tsam — the masked sacred dance of the Mongol monasteries, the cham of the Tibetan world from which it descends. The tsam is a danced liturgy: monks in immense carved masks and stiff brocade enact the subjugation of hostile forces, the dance of the wrathful protectors, the dispelling of the year’s evil. Into this solemn pageant of fierce divinities the White Old Man enters as a figure of an entirely different temper — benevolent, comic, beloved.

His turn is a set piece. Dressed all in white, a snuff bottle at his belt, he hobbles in weak and staggering, an old man barely able to walk. He plays the fool: he begs from the spectators, he tumbles, his movements obey none of the strict choreography that governs the other dancers. Britannica’s account of Central Asian Buddhist ritual describes just such a buffoon among the masked players, “armed with a staff with a handle or finial in the shape of a dragon,” moving freely where the rest of the dance is fixed. Then the register turns. In the version associated with the new year, the White Old Man confronts and overcomes a tiger; having mastered the beast — he is, after all, the lord of the wild animals — he gathers his strength, and in his recovered vigor he blesses the dance ground and the watching crowd, scattering long life and increase over them. The comedy and the benediction are one performance. The clown is the god; the laughter is part of the blessing.

This double role — buffoon and bestower of long life — has a close Tibetan and Himalayan cousin in the cham character of the Old Man Mi-tshe-ring, the “Long-Life Man,” a balding, white-bearded figure who plays the buffoon with pratfalls and farce and yet carries the dignity of longevity; in the study of his appearances at one Himalayan monastery he too moves outside the dance’s rules and confers his blessing on the people. The line between the Mongol White Old Man and the Tibetan Long-Life Man is not always sharp, and the two have plainly informed one another across the Inner-Asian Buddhist world. Tradition holds that the figure entered Tibetan cham itself through Mongol channels — by one account introduced into the Lhasa performances after a Dalai Lama’s dream during a sojourn among the Mongols. Whatever the exact route, the white-bearded old man dancing his comic blessing belongs to the shared liturgical theater of the whole region.

The Tsam ceremony at the Gusinoozersk datsan, Buryatia, photographed in the 1890s — the masked monastery dance into which the White Old Man steps as comic blessing-bringer. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The reach of the old man

The White Old Man spread as widely as the dance and the faith that carried him. He is painted on the walls of temples and unrolled in thangka images; he is carved and modeled; he steps out in the tsam from Mongolia proper across the Buryat lands north toward Lake Baikal and west among the Kalmyks on the lower Volga, the Mongols who carried the deity into Europe. In the Tibetan world he merges with the Long-Life Man of the cham. He is, in short, a god of the whole Mongol-Tibetan Buddhist sphere, recognized everywhere by his beard and his dragon-staff.

His image rewards a second look because it carries his whole history in a single frame. The dragon-headed staff, the deer, the peach of immortality, the high domed brow, the scroll of lifespans: these are the attributes of a god of the earth and of long life, and they would have meant what they mean whether or not a Buddha ever blessed him. What the painted and carved figure adds is the quiet evidence of his adoption — the longevity emblems shared with the Chinese and Tibetan iconographies, the saintly composure of a hermit, the placement of his image within temple programs alongside the imported deities. The art holds the two strata together without strain. The viewer sees at once the old lord of the soil and the Buddhist holy man he was made into, and the picture insists on no seam between them.

A carved White Old Man in the National Museum of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar. Photograph by Gary Todd, via Wikimedia Commons, released CC0.

He is the textbook instance, on the grassland, of how the steppe’s own gods endured: not by resisting the incoming faith but by being taken into it. The same pattern absorbed indigenous mountain- and earth-spirits across Inner Asia — the local lords of place bound into the Buddhist order as protectors and patrons rather than condemned and erased. The sacred mountains of the Mongol world, the founder’s refuge-mountain at Burkhan Khaldun, the protected forest of Bogd Khan Uul, kept their old sanctity even as monasteries rose on or beneath them; the White Old Man kept his old offices even as a Buddhist legend was hung upon him. The earth-god and the dharma did not fight to the finish. They settled into a single religious world in which the lama’s prayer and the lord of the soil could stand in the same dance.

That coexistence has carried the White Old Man into the present as a thoroughly living and well-loved figure. He remains a deity of long life and increase, invoked for prosperity and for the welfare of the herds. He is bound especially to the turning of the year: at Tsagaan Sar, the Mongol lunar new year — the festival named, like him, for whiteness — offerings are made to the White Old Man and prayers said for a prosperous year, and it is at the new year that his tiger-mastering, blessing-bearing turn in the tsam belongs. Through the long suppression of religion under the twentieth-century socialist state, when monasteries were closed and the dances stilled, and through the revival that followed after 1990, when the tsam was danced again and the old observances returned, the white-bearded grandfather of the land has kept his hold on the affection of the Mongol world. The herders’ god of long life outlasted the faith that adopted him, and the politics that tried to end them both.

He is still, as he was before any temple, the lord of the soil and its creatures — only now he leans his dragon-staff against a monastery wall, and the children who laugh at his stumbling in the dance are, by the same gesture, asking him for their own long lives.

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