Page 57 [57]
OCR
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 9921 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 accordingly, 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, dedicated 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 replica 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. 55
