Agvan Dorjiev

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Rahula

Agvan Dorjiev (1853/54–1938) was an ethnic Buriat who trained as a Buddhist monk in Tibet.He was one of the tutors of the 13th Dalai Lama and was his representative at the Russian court. He played a great role in the international political life, establishing various relations between Tibet and Russia.

Dorjiev and some prominent Buryat scholars initiated a modernization movement among Buddhist clergy and intellectuals, proclaiming the necessity of combining the Buddhist philosophy with the best achievements of Western culture and civilization. The movementhas gained a wide scope in Buryatia. It was due to the fact of mutual interest of both: the Buddhist clergy wanted to preserve somehow the church by means of modification, whereas local intelligentsia regarded Buddhist ideas as a cultural and social basis for the further national development after being freed from pagan elements. Though “modernists” played an important role in national liberation movement of Buryats and promoted national and cultural autonomy of Buryats within the Russian Federation and establishing of the Buryat-Mongolian Autonomous Republic after the revolution, still the movement was doomed to failure because it was unrealistic to expect gaining self-administration for Buryat people by means of religious reforms and revival of national culture neither before the revolution nor after it. The attempt of “modernists” to emphasize similarity of ideas in Marxism and early Buddhism also failed.

1 Drepung Monastery
2 The Kalachakra temple in St. Petersburg
3 See also
4 References

[edit] Drepung Monastery

After preparation at home in the 1860's, Agvan Dorjiev attended the Drepung Monastery, one of the most important Buddhist centres in Tibet. In the mid-1880s, soon after completing fifteen years of study and achieving honour as a scholar, he was named as one of the new 13th Dalai Lama's 1876 teachers and as his and as his spiritual adviser. Their relationship, however, went beyond that of student-teacher. Dorjiev most certainly played a role in saving the life of the young Dalai Lama in the mid- and late-1890s. Whatever the agendas, hidden or otherwise, in 1898 Dorjiev was sent to Europe by the Dalai Lama to learn more about European affairs. On this trip Dorjiev met Tsar Nicholas II for the first time, unofficially.In the spring of 1900 Dorjiev returned with six other representatives of the Dalai Lama who travelled through India on their way to meet with the Tsar in Odessa in July at the Livadia Palace. Japanese Buddhist monk, Ekai Kawaguchi, who had visited Lhasa incognito, because of his status as a foreigner, for eighteen months, expended an enormous amount of effort telling the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland/British about Dorjiev's activities. Kawaguchi sent reports on Dorjiev's activities to his Tibetan tutor, the Bengali, Sarat Chandra Das (1849-1917), a British agent. Buriat lama, doctor of Buddhist theology, Agvan Dorjiev in the summers of 1900 and 1901 led embassies from the Dalai Lama to Russia expressing official greetings. His presence at the embassies was to spark a particularly interesting example of ~ "The Great Game" between Great Britain and Russia. United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland British perceptions of Dorjiev's role and connections to the Russian government eventually led to the British invasion of Tibet, the Younghusband Mission of 1904. In these letters, Kawaguchi did not make vague statements, based on a general assumption that a citizen of the Russian empire might be a source of future trouble in the region, but instead made very specific allegations.Waddell reiterated Kawaguchi's accusations saying that Dorjiev had created the Shambala Russian myth, that he (Dorjiev) poisoned his the young Dalai Lama's mind against the English and was even supervising the war preparations in the Lhasa Arsenal. British officials firmly established Agvan Dorjiev as a source of danger, and even as a spy, in the minds of the British public. Dorjiev's presence in Mongolia in 1911 and 1912 was enough even to fuel a rumour that the Dalai Lama was about to take Russian citizenship and live in St Petersburg in a Buddhist temple being constructed at Dorjiev's instigation. At the time, and even now, almost everyone has been wrong about Agvan Dorjiev of the Transbaikal. He was no one's puppet. He certainly was not the "Russian master spy" that he was depicted to be. Dorjiev may have worked for closer relations between the Russian empire and Tibet, but he was not interested in serving the Russian empire

[edit] The Kalachakra temple in St. Petersburg

In 1901 the Buriat had received initiations into the Time Tantra from the Ninth Panchen Lama which were supposed to have been of central significance for his future vision. Ekai Kawaguchi, a Buddhist monk from Japan who visited Tibet at the turn of the last century, claims to have heard of a pamphlet in which Dorjiev wrote “Shambhala was Russia. The Emperor, moreover, was an incarnation of Tsongkhapa, and would sooner or later subdue the whole world and found a gigantic Buddhist empire”

It is not certain whether the lama really did write this document, it fits in with his religious-political ideas. Additionally, the historians are agreed: “In my opinion,” W.A. Unkrig writes, “the religiously-based purpose of Agvan Dorjiev was the foundation of a Lamaist-oriented kingdom of the Tibetans and Mongols as a theocracy under the Dalai Lama ... [and] under the protection of Tsarist Russia ... In addition, among the Lamaists there existed the religiously grounded hope for help from a ‘Messianic Kingdom’ in the North ... called 'Northern Shambhala’” (quoted by Snelling, 1993, p. 79).

At the center of Dorjiev’s activities in Russia stood the construction of a three-dimensional mandala — the Buddhist temple in St. Petersburg. Regarding the décor, it is perhaps also of interest that there was a swastika motif which the Bolsheviks knocked out during the Second World War. Buddhist temple in St. Petersburg there was sufficient room for several lamas, who looked after the ritual life, to live on the grounds. Dorjiev had originally intended to triple the staffing and to construct not just a temple but also a whole monastery. This was prevented, however, by the intervention of the Russian Orthodox Church . Officially, the buddhist shrine was declared to be a place for the needs of the Buriat, Tuva, mongol ,and Kalmyk minorities in the capital.

With regard to its occult functions it was undoubtedly a tantric mandala with which the Kalachakra system was to be transplanted into the West. Then, as we have already explained, from the lamas’ traditional point of view, founding a temple is seen as an act of spiritual occupation of a territory. The legends about the construction of first Buddhist monastery (Samye) on Tibetan soil show that it is a matter of a symbolic deed with which the victory of Buddhism over the native gods (or demons) is celebrated. Such sacred buildings as the Kalachakra temple in St. Petersburg are cosmograms which are — in their own way of seeing things — employed by the lamas as magic seals in order to spiritually subjugate countries and peoples. It is in this sense that the Italian, Fosco Maraini, has also described the monasteries in his poetic travelogue about Tibet as “factories of a holy technology or laboratories of spiritual science” (Maraini, 1952, p. 172). In our opinion this approximates very closely the Lamaist self-concept. Perhaps it is also the reason why the Bolsheviks later housed an evolutionary technology laboratory in the confiscated Kalachakra shrine of St. Petersburg and performed genetic experiments before the eyes of the tantric terror gods.

Some years later Dorjiev was arrested as a counterrevolutionary and then put on trial for treason and terrorism. On January 29, 1938 the Agvan Dorjiev died in a prison hospital in Ulan-Ude.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

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