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TEMPLE AND MUSEUM. AN AMBIVALENT RELATION
emotionally claimed that the monks have no opportunity to venerate Gombo gur, the
main protector deity of Erdene Dsuu and other important deities.
“The first original stone Gombo gur is kept in the museum. We want to display
and worship it. But it is locked away. We do not have the right to enter. It cannot
be like this. We are a monastery, aren’t we? [...] We have our sacred deities locked
away. I have been in the museum depository only once in my life. There were
seven locked cases full of deity figures. Thank to the President’s visit, I followed
and entered there. They are preserved in the dark. There is no life, no butter lamp
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offering for the deity.
In various museums, be it in the capital or in the provinces, we observed traces of
objects" worship or believers venerating sacred places and artefacts. Sometimes it
is as If museum spaces turn back into temple spaces. Visitors are at the same time
believers and circulate in the rooms clockwise, leaving offerings, burning incense,
praying and donating money in front of sacred statues or objects. Visitors are meant
to be guided by homogenous underlying museum concepts, the halls are laid out ac¬
cordingly, but they move and circumambulate sacred spaces as believers. It seems
that believers make no great difference between a museum and a temple — or they
do not perceive the difference at all. The museum returns to a temple-museum where
the Buddhist believer finds a way to practice.
Erdene Dsuu Monastery, for example, is understood as a Buddhist religious centre
as it has been historically since the 16" century. Believers come to Erdene Dsuu from
all over the country to worship and donate offerings. For the museum workers it is
hard to prevent believers offering milk and grain inside the temple buildings, dedi¬
cated as museum buildings. Apparently, believers hardly mind if deities are museum
objects with inventory numbers. Believers touch or beat against the glass cabinets
while venerating the deities displayed inside — as if there were no glass between them
and the venerated objects, which in their view embody the deities.”
Open Conclusion
When we staged a project exhibition in Vienna’s Theseus Temple, a miniature rep¬
lica of the Greek Theseion Temple, which serves as an exhibition hall, in September
2016, we invited Khamba Lama Kh. Baasansiiren to give a lecture on Erdene Dsuu
Monastery in the exhibition. Seeing the objects or burkhans exhibited in the glass
vitrines, the abbot Baasansiiren immediately reacted: “They have not heard chantings
for a long time. I will chant for them.” And so he did.
The strict separation of religion and museum or sacred and profane does not work
in practice in the museum-temples mentioned above and in many other museums we
?! Khamba Lama Kh. Baasanstiren, Erdene Dsuu Monastery, 17 June 2015.
2 Cf. Baatarnarany, Ts. — Lang, M.: Temple and / or Museum, pp. 277-287.
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