Page 139 [139]
OCR
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, presentday 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 mediation 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 Himalayan 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. 137
