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CZECHOSLOVAK ACADEMIC STUDY OF BUDDHISM IN THE 1950s AND 1960s: FIELD RESEARCH IN ASIA
in the English and German versions of the monograph intended for export (which was
not sold in Czechoslovakia; the Czech edition was reduced by forty photographs, its
text was substantially different and the description of the ceremony was not included).
This also applies to the published photographs — the foreign-language mutations con¬
tain five black and white full-page pictures of the consecration**, while there is none
in the Czech version. The only mention of the ceremony in Czech was broadcast in
the Czech radio and there was nothing in the printed form, apart from the mention of
the ceremony in the context of Mongolian stupas:
“Suburgans have various functions. The walls of Erdene Zuu Monastery are crowned
with 108 of them. Inside are hundreds of small clay offerings with depictions of dei¬
ties: here, they have the protective function. Elsewhere, they serve as burial chambers
or mausolea of distinguished dignitaries, in other places they commemorate the life
and deeds of the Buddha, such as the large suburgan erected in Ulaanbaatar in 1958.”°°
Lumir Jis] took the pains and documented the ritual both in the form of photographs
and films (he shot by an 8 mm camera on black and white as well as color films; fifty
black and white negatives were found in his archive, which captured the consecra¬
tion ceremony and Buddhist monks and attending lay people). The official expedition
photographer Alois Kleibl recorded a part of the ceremony on color film, and Emanuel
Vléek, the physician and anthropologist of the expedition, took a number of pictures
and together with Jisl prepared a radio documentary, in which they used an extract of
“Lamaist music" that had been recorded on a tape-recorder. The documentary should
have been broadcast by the Czechoslovak radio in Prague" and it had to be submit¬
ted for approval in line with the then regulations; this resulted in the text having been
typed and thus it has been preserved until today. The description in the documentary
together with scarce notes in the travelogue had become the basis for the text covering
the ceremony that was published in the English and German mutations of Jisl’s book in
1960. The mentioned authors described the consecration ceremony for radio listeners
in the following words:
“Sisk:
We have just come across a rare spectacle at the local Lamaist temple Gandantegchin¬
ling: they consecrate the new suburgan, that is a pagoda, built to commemorate the
38 See Jisl, L.: Mongolian Journey and Mongolei. Kunst und Tradition. Praha 1960, Fig. 8-9 and 26.
» Jisl, L.: Umeni stareho Mongolska [The Art of Old Mongolia], 1961, p. 19.
“General public was briefly informed about the expedition, its equipment and mission by radio and TV
broadcast and in the press before we departed to Mongolia. Based on the agreement with the Czecho¬
slovak Radio we recorded three coverages accompanied by ethnographic audio recordings directly on
the spot. We sent them to the radio, however, none of these documentaries has ever been on air.” (Mar¬
tinovsky, M.: Ceskoslovensko-mongolskä archeologickä expedice. Praha 2000, p. 423).
421