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MongoliaUses of Buddhism
Since at least the early 1970s, one monastery, the Gandan
Monastery, with a community of 100 monks, was open in
Ulaanbaatar. It was the country's sole functioning monastery. A
few of the old monasteries survived as museums, and the Gandan
Monastery served as a living museum and a tourist attraction. Its
monks included a few young men who had undergone a five-year
training period, but whose motives and mode of selection were
unknown to Western observers. The party apparently thought that
Buddhism no longer posed a challenge to its dominance and that--
because Buddhism had played so large a part in the country's
history, traditional arts, and culture, total extirpation of
knowledge about the religion and its practices would cut modern
Mongols off from much of their past, to the detriment of their
national identity. A few aged former monks were employed to
translate Tibetan-language handbooks on herbs and traditional
medicine. Government spokesmen described the monks of the Gandan
Monastery as doing useful work.
Buddhism, furthermore played a role in Mongolia's foreign
policy by linking Mongolia with the communist and the noncommunist states of East and Southeast Asia. Ulaanbaatar was the
headquarters of the Asian Buddhist Conference for Peace, which
has held conferences for Buddhists from such countries as Japan,
Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan; published a journal for
international circulation; and maintained contacts with such
groups as the Christian Peace Conference, the Afro-Asian People's
Solidarity Organization, and the Russian Orthodox Church. It
sponsored the visits of the Dalai Lama to Mongolia in 1979 and
1982. The organization, headed by the abbot of the Gandan
Monastery, advances the foreign policy goals of the Mongolian
government, which are in accord with those of the Soviet Union.
Data as of June 1989
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