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AGWANGKHAIDUB ON PsycHic HEAT, MOUNTAIN
Dirt, AND VIRTUOUS SUBJECTS
Matthew William King
University of California, Department of Religious Studies, Riverside
This article is a preliminary effort to draw attention to the profoundly influential life
and work of Agwangkhaidub' (or Agwänxaidaw, 1779-1837), an abbot of the great
monastic city of Yeke-yin Kiiriy-e on the Khalkha steppe.? Most Mongolists familiar
with the scholastic history of that Khalkha city (otherwise known as Urga, present¬
day Ulaanbaatar), and Tibetologists familiar with late-imperial intellectual history of
the Géluk tradition, will already know Agwangkhaidub.* An influential philosopher,
physician, ritual innovator, and tantric master, this abbot profoundly shaped the knotted
monastic, scholastic, and tantric landscape of Yeke-yin Küriy-e during its final century
as a major monastic enclave.
Until the socialist purges that came in the late 1930s, three or four generations of
his monastic students studied, debated, ritually generated, and interacted with laity and
pilgrims in spaces he helped map and define according to a Khalkha particular media¬
tion of late Qing-era Géluk orthopraxy. These came in compositions and projects as
diverse as charting new pilgrimage routes through the city, authorizing new charters
for organizing monastic life on Central Tibetan models, and technical guides for seeing
and interacting with holy objects. All this seems to have been aimed at standardizing
the social position of monastics and laity, and even more fundamentally, at an aesthetics
of self-and community formation that would be generative of the Qing-Géluk subject.*
Unfortunately, there is no room here for an in depth biographical examination of
this great master. Such a study will hopefully become available in the near future. Here
! The spelling of Tibetan words in this article follows the phonetic transcription of the Tibetan and Himala¬
yan Library (THL)’s Simplified Phonetic Transcription of Standard Tibetan. When transliterating vertical
and Cyrillic script I follow Christopher Atwood’s simplified Mongolian transcription system: Atwood,
Christopher: “The Transliteration and Transcription of Mongolian,” accessed June 28, 2017, http://www.
thlib.org/reference/transliteration/sitewiki/26a34 146-33a6-48ce-00 1 e-f1 6ce7908a6a/mongolian%20
transliteration%20|amp|20transcription.html.
The fullest version of his personal name that I have seen is, in Tibetan Ngag dbang blo bzang mkhas grub
dpal bzang po, and in Mongolian Agwanglubsangkhaidubbalsangbuu. Other Tibetan authorial names
include simply Mkhas grub and Wa gindra pa tu siddhi.
Tib. dge lugs or dga’ Idan; known in Mongolian sources more commonly as Sir-a-yin Sasin, the “Yellow
Religion.”
Elverskog, Johan: Mongol Time Enters a Qing World. In: Time, Temporality, and Imperial Transition:
East Asia from Ming to Qing, ed. Lynn A. Struve. Association for Asian Studies and University of Hawai’i
Press, Honolulu 2006.
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