Surviving Mongol Khel

Before we get to the title subject, Palzang and I want to show you one of our first Dharma accomplishments here in Mongolia. One of the most bitter episodes of the intense religious persecution of the late 20’s and 30’s for Mongolian Buddhists was the wholesale destruction of the Buddhist texts in the country. Mongolia was a land renowned for its scholarship – its lamas were regularly invited to teach in Tibet and sometimes even serve as monastic abbots there – and its monasteries had vast, extraordinary libraries. I’ve read about texts being carted away to be burned by a line of dumptrucks that stretched beyond the horizon. Lama Munkhdaivan just told us about what happened during the sacking of just one monastery. It was situated in a lovely, broad valley. The attackers emptied the library and scattered the texts in the valley. There were so many books that the pages filled the whole valley to such a depth that people and livestock could not move through. Even now, the State Library boasts some two million volumes, but what was lost is incalculable.

From the 17th c. onward the Gelugpa (“yellow”) tradition of Tibetan Buddhism dominated in Mongolia, actively supported by the Manchus. The so-called “red traditions” were practiced more quietly, mostly by those who sought the benefit of their powerful inner tantric yogas. We’ve found that even the most basic collections of these texts are completely absent in Mongolia, at a time when interest in these traditions seems to be on the increase. So, our first act was to have our most fundamental prayer, simply called the “Seven Line Prayer” to Guru Rinpoche, translated into Mongolian, along with transliteration of the Tibetan, and printed on the opposite side of an image of Guru Rinpoche. Lama Munkhdaivan and Khajiidma did the translation. We’ve printed 1000, to be distributed during Jetsunma’s visit. It seems like a simple prayer, but it’s actually got a vast and profound meaning. Here it is:

While this effort is modest, we will be overseeing the printing of two collections of Nyingma scriptures, the Nyingma Kama and the Rinchen Terdzöd, which total 169 volumes. These collections are not extant in Mongolia and will be critical for any Nyingma lama who comes wishing to teach or give practice transmissions. We will offer these collections to monasteries and temples here, with Khamariin Khiid receiving the first one. The folks back home are busy sewing lovely cloth covers for them.

Mongol Khel

I want to introduce this as an irregular feature of DODR (like what isn’t?). You’ll recall that the “kh” in Mongolian isn’t pronounced like the hard “k” we usually use in “Genghis Khan”. The Mongolians say “Chingghis Khan” and the “kh” is pronounced like the “ch” in the Scottish “loch”.

OK. So. The word khel means “language” with the “kh” pronounced the same way. “Mongolian”, as in “Mongolian language”, is mongol khel, the same way angil khel is English. Now I’m afraid I’ve telegraphed the joke, but Mongolian is proving pretty difficult to learn. So whenever Palzang or I are struggling to say something in Mongolian and failing (not a rare event), we’ll say to each other, “Oy. I’m in mongol khel.” Or, on those intermittent occasions when we actually communicate our thoughts, we smugly say, “Yeah man. I survived mongol khel.”

But it’s usually the former. I was with a few Mongols recently and someone needed a piece of paper. Trying to say that I had paper, I proudly announced, "Bi tsas bain!" Everyone stopped talking and squinted at me a sec before bursting out laughing. I had just blurted, “I am paper!” or, possibly, if you heard tsaas instead of tsas, “I am snow!” Now, in my defense, it was in the next lesson in our textbook that we learned the ding-dang reflexive pronouns, and I saw I should have used the unlikely nadad instead of bi.

I also just realized I’d been mangling that most simple of questions, “What is your name?” This is said, “Tany ner khen be?” (literally “your name who is?”) But somehow in my mind I’d switched khen (who) for khaan (where), saying, “Tany ner khaan bain wey?” Yes, your friendly linguistic genius has been asking everyone, “Where is your name?” I’m a source of constant amusement to Tumee, who oversees our mongol khel.

I’ve also got some funny ways of remembering phrases, often using songs as a mnemonic. For example, idekh is the infinitive “to eat”. It stuck right away because it sounded like Weird Al Yankovich’s Michael Jackson parody song, “Eat It”. In the same way I remember naiman zuu, “eight hundred”, because it sounds like David Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs”. And Palzang and I will always remember the word for “in”, dotor, with the phrase “the dotor is in”.

As an end note, we finally solved a bizarre Mongolian naming phenomenon that Gerlee told us about during our last Dornogov trip. She said that sometimes children were given names like Bi Bish, "I Am Not", or Bas Bish, “Also Not” or, most alarmingly, Khuun Bish, “Not Human”, but she couldn’t explain why. We discovered that this occurs after a child dies prematurely in a family. It’s thought that naming is so powerful that is the demonic force that snatched the previous child is still looking for human lives to steal, giving the child a name that indicates they aren’t human will cause the demon to overlook the child. Pretty dopey demons, if you ask me. Vesna says this happens in rural India as well, with children having to endure a lifetime with a name like “Cow Dung”. I swear.

Comments

[Maura]

Sherpas do a variation of this--Kami Tsering--Kami means member of the Hindu lower caste (so they'll think this is not a Buddhist human) then they throw in the Tsering to make sure the child lives a long time.

They also go back to the Lama if a child is not well-sometimes a new name will fix him or her right up.

[Christian]

Thanks for the link to the deep explanation of the Seven Lines prayer.