Dambo Ul’ianov’s Prophecies of Buddha and His Interpretation of Russian Monarchs as Buddhist Emperors

This article examines the Kalmyk Buddhists' attempt to accommodate themselves to Russia's imperial setting, where the state religion comprised the Russian Orthodox Church. I address the role of Dambo Ul'ianov, a Buddhist monk from the Don Kalmyk community, and his publication entitled Predskazaniia Buddy o Dome Romanovykh i kratkii ocherk moi puteshestvii v Tibet v 1904-1905 gg (The Prophecies of Buddha on the House of Romanov and a short essay of my journey toward Tibet in 1904-1905) (St. Petersburg, 1913). The Don Kalmyks, one of a number of small groups of Kalmyks in the Caucasian foreland steppe, belonged to the province of the Don Cossack Host. Here, I explore Ul'ianov's interpretation of a Russian tsar as a Buddhist comparable to a Qing emperor, whom the Buddhists in Tibet, Mongolia, and Manchuria regarded as a Chakravartin, an incarnation of the Bodhisattva, particularly of Manjusri. Although recent works have revealed the multi-confessional nature of the Russian Empire, Buddhism has not been taken seriously as one among the official religions of the empire. When mentioned, Russia's Buddhism is often seen as a monolithic entity across the country. Scholars tend to ignore regional diversities within Russia's Buddhism and to presume a uniformity in religious practice between the Buriats in Siberia and the Kalmyk Buddhist followers in the Caucasian foreland. Moreover, they have not paid attention to differences between the Don Kalmyks and the Volga Kalmyks in Astrakhan Province. All these gaps have prevented previous studies from properly contextualizing Ul'ianov's Prophecies of Buddha within contemporaneous Don Kalmyk society and thus from grasping the message of the writing. The re-initiation of pilgrimages to Mongolia and Tibet was a critical turning point in the process of writing the Prophecies of Buddha. The last pilgrimage of the Kalmyks to Lhasa was in the 1750s. The resurgence of pilgrimages after a century's interval had a dramatic impact on various aspects of the entire Kalmyk society. Above all, there was a huge intellectual impact, as the Kalmyks had been deprived of the Tibetan Buddhist canon (Kangyur and Tengyur) until this time. In 1877, Don Kalmyk monks first re-attempted a pilgrimage to Tibet: these monks were Roman Manzhikov, Prin Tsedenov, Sharab Lubsan, and Dambo Ul'ianov, the hero of this article. The Russian border control's blockade of their departure through Kyakhta led their first attempt to end in failure. In their second attempt in 1878, Ul'ianov successfully reached Ikh Kh?ree (or Urga in Russian) in Mongolia, which became possible as the Don Kalmyks began to flourish in breeding war-horses and had considerable connections with the Russian military. In subsequent years, the isolation of the Kalmyk Buddhist community from the Tibetan Buddhist world remarkably diminished owing to increasing Kalmyk pilgrimages to Ikh Kh?ree. The pilgrimage movement spread among both the Don and the Volga Kalmyks. Dambo Ul'ianov's text, Prophecies of Buddha, was a product of his pilgrimage to Lhasa. In 1904, Naran Ulanov, a Don Kalmyk Cosssack captain, along with Ul'ianov, conducted a military mission to open new routes to Lhasa through Russian Central Asia. Although Ul'ianov successfully completed this difficult task, this was also accompanied by Ulanov's tragic death. In Lhasa Ul'ianov attempted to retrieve numerous valuable Buddhist texts, among which he "discovered" four incredible prophecies of the Buddha and Padmasambhava related to the House of Romanov. The key to interpreting Ul'ianov's book is the story of two merchant brothers, Tapussa and Bhallika, as noted in the biography of Buddha. The story goes that Tapussa and Bhallika met Buddha under the Rajayatana tree after his Enlightenment. These two merchant brothers became the first lay followers (up?saka) of Buddhism. As a result of his discovery of the four prophecies, Ul'ianov was convinced that the legendary state of Shambhala was located in the European part of the Russian Empire. According to Ul'ianov, previous Russian tsars were incarnations of Bodhisattva and Chakravartin, ideal universal rulers from the lineage of the King of Shambhala. The Russian emperor and Qing emperor were thus fraternal incarnations of the Bodhisattva. Ul'ianov's Prophecies of Buddha indicates the difficulties and needs that the Don Kalmyk Buddhists tackled in the Russian Orthodox state. Compared with Buddhist ideology in the Buriat community, it also attests to diversity in Russian Buddhist thinking. Thus, in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the re-initiation of pilgrimages shaped numerous Russian Buddhist reformist movements in a decisive way, as represented by the writings of Dambo Ul'ianov