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SUSAN C. BYRNE whether or not it was on the physical site and regardless of the fact that number of monks involved and their activities compared to the past were drastically reduced. With the help of the railway, the mine, the prison and local people, the elderly Khögshin khüree practitioners revived their monastery in a small temple they called Yengar Shaddüwdarjaalin after the putative monastery named in 1729 by the Second Jebtstindamba khutagt to whom the original founder, Chin Wan Gombodorj, had offered the temple.'° As mentioned, this temple is actually about 8 km west of the city centre in its Second Khoroo (municipal sub-district).'’? Several young boys became monks in the temple among them a monk I will call Ven. NB. The old monks reinstated the basic cycle of Gelugpa rituals and ceremonies of Khégshin khiiree in particular the ‘rhythm’ (aya dan) of the chanting and ways of doing püjas: “There was special chanting attached to this monastery: there was a siitra especially for this monastery (no detail given).”'* The old men also gave advice and instructions to the young monks about how Khögshin khüree had been run and the details of their practice. It should be noted that Ven. Luwsandamba, the co-leader of the revival was 79 years old in 1990 and it is likely that his fellow revivers were of a similar age. Thus he was 27 at the time of the forced closure of his monastery and had risen to be the rank of Assistant umdsad of the monastery. In the half-century since he left the monastery, he and his fellow monks were unable publicly to practice as Buddhist monks. It could be that he and his fellow monks met in secret during the communist era as many accounts of these meetings emerged after 1990. I interviewed Dambadarjaa, an old monk in his early 70s in the newly revived Gungaachoilin datsan in Gandan Monastery in 1993. He was under 20 when he ceased to be a monk and had never told his wife and children about his background. But he told me “all this time, I kept my prayer books and my ritual objects, like my bell and vajra, hidden in a cupboard in my home. Whenever possible I read the si#tra and remembered the teachings but I had to make sure that no-one in the family told any of our neighbours that I had these things.” He also told me how a classmate had contacted him in 1961 after he came out of prison (because he had refused to renounce his vows) to ask him if he was “still a Buddhist and if I would meet - in secret of course — old friends and classmates from our monastery.” Thereafter he and his classmates would leave the city for a place in the countryside every year in the summer to meet together and perform their temple rituals and recite the prayers. He spoke of the care they had to take not to alert local party agents to their meeting, as had they heard about such events the monks would have been jailed. And he added that he had not even told his wife where he was going, telling her he was “going to drink airag (fermented mare’s milk).” He explained “every Mongolian understand why you want to go to the countryside to drink airag.” I quote this interview to explain that it cannot be assumed the monks who gathered from Khdégshin khiiree in the early months of 1990 had not been in Erdenebileg, B.: Mongolin stim xidin tiixés, pp. 97-101. The temple is in Bayan Awtar sub-district (bag) in the Second Khoroo about 500 m off the main road to Ulaanbaatar. Interview with Informant 3. 30
