Book Review: A Monastery in Time

A Monastery in Time is the first ethnography to describe an Inner Mongolian Buddhist monastery. With so few anthropological works detailing Buddhism in the Mongolian cultural region, the book is a welcome addition. Authors Caroline Humphrey and Hurelbaatar Ujeed set out to uncover con-¨ temporary formulations of the “Mergen tradition”: a unique lineage of Inner Mongolian Buddhism translated into the Mongolian language and embedded in the Mongolian landscape. The book explores how a contemporary monastery negotiates its history, the changing expectations of the local laity, individual personalities, and external pressures.

Each chapter anchors itself in the ethnographic present (itself spanning over an impressive 15 years of research) detailing the histories of the monastery, the surrounding areas, and their influence on the present day. The scholarship is dense and occasionally dizzying, as readers are introduced to vast amounts of anthropological, historical, and philosophical material. The authors negotiate this extensive material by sliding between historical reflections and contemporary events, taking the reader backward and forward through time. In doing so, the authors are able to illustrate how the region’s complex histories breathe life into and weigh upon the present.

The book begins by describing a moment in the monastery, an instance effervescing with enthusiasm about the building of a Maitreya (Mong. Maidar) statue. As the ethnography progresses, it becomes clear that this effervescence was indeed a momentary fervor and that in spite of the hard work of the people involved, historically influenced divisions splinter and diffuse the initial enthusiasm that the authors encountered. By the end of the book, we leave the monastery in the process of what the authors call “archivisation”: a deliberate recasting in terms intelligible to outsiders, both through its inclusion in the surrounding municipality and as a “cultural relic.”

Followed closely throughout the many years during which the authors conducted fieldwork, the schism dividing the monastery’s community is personified by the clash between two of their key interlocutors, Sengge Lama and Chorji Lama. For both of these men, the trauma of history weighs heavily on their contemporary differences. Their arguments are set among, and contribute to, the fragmenting community that Humphrey and Ujeed first encountered within the temple walls. For the authors, the older Sengge Lama instantiates learnedness, monastic discipline, and a working-class past. The Chorji Lama, a recognized reincarnation, represents the heritage of position. In Sengge Lama, we find the desire to impart his knowledge coupled with frustration at the difficulties of transmitting it. In Chorji Lama, we find a man struggling with his title and the interruption of his education during the Cultural Revolution, someone reluctant and unable to fulfill his expected role as a high lama, who is drawn to administrative rather than religious roles. Through the stories of these men and their other interlocutors, we discover how and why the monastery struggles to maintain coherence. In learning about their lives (and that of the eighth Mergen Gegen), the authors mobilize firsthand accounts of the havoc wrought by the Cultural Revolution. In documenting this period, the book contains stirring accounts of violence both from the attacked and the attackers, giving shape to the recent history of the monastery and the region and the suffering endured therein.

A Monastery in Time is the result of years of thorough research undertaken by Humphrey and Ujeed. The book is a powerful ethnographic testimony to the contemporary and historical situation of a monastery in Inner Mongolia. As we encounter the histories of the region and those within it, we learn how these histories continue to shape and influence actors in the present. Through their stories, we come to know the monastery, its monks and lay followers, and the unique form of Mongolian Buddhism that it represents. The monastery once housed the renaissance ambitions of the Mergen Gegen for a truly Mongolian Buddhism. By bringing life to the tumultuous histories of a single monastery, Humphrey and Ujeed indicate that a truly Mongolian Buddhism can be discovered, whole and divided both, amid the tangles of events and intentions that constitute its essential form. This dense and rich ethnography suggests ways in which historical and anthropological methods can be employed in highlighting the influence of time, change, and uncertainty on cultures and livelihoods in turbulent times.