Binding Buddhas and Demons to Text: The Mongol Invention of the Dorjé Shukden and Trülku Drakpa Gyeltsen Literary Corpus (1913–1919)

Abstract

Abstract This article examines previously unstudied historical sources from seventeenth–twentieth century Khalkha, Mongolia concerning the controversial Dorjé Shukden tradition (Tib. Rdo rje shugs ldan; Kh. Mong. Dorjshüg). In the last quarter-century, the current Dalai Lama has imposed a controversial global ban on the practice that has cleaved Tibetan and Mongolian communities from one another, led to much bloodshed, and the splitting of the institutional base of the transnational Géluk (Tib. Dge lugs) tradition. Anti-Shukden polemicists and the small body of contemporary secondary scholarship on the schism attribute the rise of Shukden traditions to a hyper-conservative faction of monks based in Lhasa during the early twentieth century. They are credited with elevating Shukden, a violent regional spirit, to the high position of an enlightened protector of the Dharma. This article troubles that historical position, showing how developed Shukden traditions existed in Khalkha a century before the Lhasa movement. It then advances a new working hypothesis on the origins and enduring appeal of the Shukden tradition, which is that it is a long-running expression of the trans-Asian (and now, transnational) expansion of Géluk scholasticism far beyond the political dominions of the Dalai Lamas over the course of the Qing and Tsarist empires, the rise of nationalist and socialist government in Inner Asia, the exercise of profound socialist state violence, and the experience of global diaspora.