Anyone who consults medieval Mongolian sources about the relationship between the Mongols and Buddhism, or rather Lamaism, sometimes gets the impression that the Mongols have always been deeply religious Lamaists. After all, the chronicles of Mongolian princely houses go back to legendary Indian royal houses or Buddha himself. However, anyone familiar with Mongolian historiography also knows that most of the chronicles in the 16th century were written as works of family and church historiography[1] with the conversion of the Mongols to Lamaism. Historiography thus also had to take into account the political intentions of the nobility and the religious leaders of the time.

The actual conversion of the Mongols took place over centuries and with varying intensity. It was closely connected with the formation of Tibetan Buddhism. In this process, the Mongols gave the Tibetans important political and the Tibetans gave the Mongols religious and spiritual impulses.

When the Mongols originally lived in their tribal homeland around the Onon and Kherlen rivers, i.e. in the area that later became geographical Mongolia, they were nomadic cattle breeders whose lives were based on extensive nomadic cattle farming with year-round grazing. Their social development showed only a low degree of social stratification. Their world view was essentially shaped by shamanism, which was a nature religion. 

It is quite difficult to define shamanism unambiguously if one wants to get to the very essence of things. The attempts of various scholars to approach a definition have led to very different interpretations. Ohlmarks, for example, defined shamanism as a psychopathological phenomenon based on “the so-called Arctic hysteria, caused by the extreme living conditions at the edge of the ecumene: loneliness, darkness, cold, and a diet low in vitamins.”[2] Ohlmarks believed that genuine shamanism existed only among northern peoples. In the Central Asian steppes, on the other hand, including Mongolia, shamans “do not really go into ecstasy, but stimulate themselves with the help of intoxicating substances... or simply only play their condition...”[3] Father Wilhelm Schmidt, one of the founders of the culture circle doctrine and the original monotheism theory, differentiated in his work ‘The Origin of the Idea of God’ between black shamanism, which maintains contact with the powers of the underworld, and white shamanism as “the adaptation of the old sky religion of the Central Asian pastoral peoples to the new faith penetrating from the south.” He assumed that shamanism was actually of southern origin.[4]

Marxist works, on the other hand, viewed shamanism from the perspective of social evolution in connection “with the decline of primeval communist-egalitarian structures and the development of social inequality... According to this line of research, shamans are considered to be the typologically earliest representatives of a priesthood: in the democratically organised matriarchal clan, there were healers and hunting magic was practised, but not by special religious functionaries; the shamans took over these activities, enriched them with the ecstatic soul journey and the idea of a differentiated world of spirits and gods, and increasingly represented the interests of the emerging ruling class.”[5] “Methodically correct,” says Alfred Stolz in his work ‘Shamans - Ecstasy and Symbolism of the Otherworld’, ”however, the reference to the significance of the socio-economic context appears.”[6]

The central figure in Mongolian nature religion was undoubtedly the shaman, whose main task was to mediate between the world of the living nomad and the otherworldly realm of good and evil spirits. The main objects of shamanistic worship were ‘Mother Earth’ and ‘Eternal Heaven’. Genghis Khan (1162-1227), who united the Mongolian tribes and founded the Great Mongolian Empire, had grown up in the shamanistic tradition, as had his contemporaries. He firmly believed that his mandate to rule the world had been given to him by ‘eternal heaven’. In his Secret History, he says, “I was designated by the mighty Heaven and brought here by Mother Earth.”[7]

However, the campaigns against the Uighurs and Tanguts, waged ‘by the power of eternal Heaven,’ also brought Chinggis Khan and the Mongols into direct and indirect contact with Buddhism, which was hitherto unknown to them. The Uighur Emperor, ‘Idi-qut, submitted to Chinggis Khan in 1206.[8] Chinggis led campaigns against the Tangut Xi Xia Empire (960-1226) in 1206, 1207 and 1209-1210, which eventually led to the submission of the Tangut Emperor, Li Anquan. The Uighur and Tangut empires had long been centres of Buddhism. The campaigns thus provided the first points of contact with Buddhism. 

But a few years earlier, a meeting had already taken place for Chingis that brought him closer to other religions and indirectly to Buddhism. When Chingis met with the Chinese Daoist scholar Changchun in the south of the Hindu Kush in the spring of 1222, he even intervened directly in the smouldering dispute in China between Daoists, the followers of an ancient Chinese philosophical tradition, and Buddhists. Genghis was getting on in years, the time when people begin to think about death. He had heard from Changchun, who lived in the distant Haotian monastery in the city of Laizhou, that Changchun had the key to ‘eternal life’. When he first met Changchun in 1222, his first question was about eternal life: “Since you have come from such a far-off place, what healing herb for long life have you brought us?”[9] However, Changchun had to disappoint him. He replied, “I may have a way of protecting life, but I have no elixir of life.”[10] Nevertheless, Chingis was impressed by the scholar's profound wisdom. As a farewell gift, he presented Changchun with a document that read: “The monasteries under the divine immortal... are houses where the holy books are recited all day and prayers are said to heaven. They shall pray for a long life for the emperor. In return, they shall be exempt from all services, taxes and duties, large and small, that affect them...”[11] 

The granted tax exemption deepened the dispute between Daoists and Buddhists in China and led to conflicts that intensified over the years to such an extent that Mönkh Khan, the 4th Mongol Khan (reigned from 1251 to 1259), felt compelled to intervene in the dispute. 

Mönkh Khan took an unusual measure. He had the representatives of the religions dispute at his court. One is involuntarily reminded of the ring parable in Lessing's ‘Nathan the Wise’. In a private audience with the Franciscan friar William of Rubruk, who travelled to the Mongols between 1253 and 1255, he declared: “We Mongols believe in one God, in whom we live and in whom we die, and in him our hearts are fixed... But just as God has given the hand different fingers, so he has also given people different paths to salvation.”[12] These statements by the Khan reveal an astonishing degree of religious tolerance in an otherwise intolerant Mongolian ruler. The disputations that took place in the years 1254 and 1255 in the imperial capital Karakorum in the Mongolian heartland resulted in an edict in which, in statesman-like wisdom, “the production of forged of writing was made a punishable offence and the guilty Daoists or, if necessary, Buddhists were ordered to rebuild the destroyed statues.”[13] In a disputation scheduled for 1256, the Daoists refrained from participating. “According to the Buddhist pamphlet Pien-wei lu, Mönkh Khan is said to have declared that neither the teachings of the Daoists nor those of the Confucians, nor those of the Christians or the Mohammedans, came close to Buddhism. And in reference to his earlier comparison, he added: ‘Just as the five fingers all extend from the palm, so Buddhism is like the palm and all other religions are like the fingers.”[14]

It is difficult to determine to what extent Mönkh Khan himself was a Buddhist. However, we learn from the travel notes of the aforementioned Franciscan Wilhelm von Rubruk that there was apparently a Buddhist temple at the court in Karakorum. It is noteworthy that Rubruk described the Buddhist monks as wearing saffron-coloured robes and yellow caps, who used the prayer formula ‘On mani battam’ (O mani padme hum / O Jewel in the Lotus / sacred formula in honour of the Bodhisatva Padmapâni or Avalokiteshvara).

With the enthronement of Kublai Khan (1215-1294) as Great Khan of the Mongols in 1260, a ruler succeeded who stood in the tradition of both Mongolian wisdom and Chinese education. This may have particularly enabled him to develop a statesmanlike view of the role and function of the Buddhist religion. 

Khubilai had spent his youth in the imperial capital Karakorum. Life there brought him into contact with representatives of various religions, including Buddhists. We learn from the sources that he met with the Chinese master of Dhyāna, Haiyün, in Karakorum in 1242 for a first detailed discussion of Buddhist doctrine. This conversation and other events apparently awakened a strong interest in Buddhism in him. Far away from the court in Karakorum, in the independence of his fiefdom south of the Gobi in the Gansu region, he began to seek more intensive contact with Buddhists, especially Tibetan Buddhists. 

Since the reign of Srong-btsan-sGam-pos (died 699), Tibetan Buddhism had undergone a very special genesis. Under the heir to the throne, Srong-btsan-sgam-pos, Khri-srong lde'u-btsan (755-797), Buddhism, which came from India, received special support. There may have been various reasons for this. Schulemann writes: “Perhaps the king, who tended towards authoritarian rule, was keen to favour the Buddhist clergy and grant them privileges in order to weaken the often insubordinate nobility.”[15] However, he found that the Buddhist doctrine, with its high degree of abstraction compared to the claims of the Bon religion of the Tibetans, was hardly able to be accepted in his time. Therefore, Buddhist monks recommended that he invite the famous magician Padmasambhava from India to Tibet.

Padmasambhava was indeed able to provide important spiritual impulses. This magician was a representative of Tantrism, a religious-philosophical movement that focused on magical practices and, to some extent, orgiastic rites. Tantrism worshipped many-limbed and many-headed monsters, involved in its cult sacrificial rites and magic tricks, things that were not so far removed from the Tibetan Bon religion. Padmasambhava aimed his efforts at achieving a synthesis of his practices with those of the Bon religion, with local animism and shamanism. He addressed the laity in a broader sense by giving advice, expressing wishes and creating prayer formulas that addressed the soul of the deceased for forty-nine days. In 770, Padmasambhava founded the temple city of bSam-yas, 80 km southeast of Lhasa, where he gathered twenty-seven monks and translators from India and Tibet in the main monastery. He organised them into a hierarchy that, in addition to the novices (dGe-ts'ul) and fully ordained monks (dGe-slong/virtue beggars) who were also common in India, also recognised the dignitaries of Bla-ma (superior), sNgags-rams-pa (magician) and Lo-tsa-ba (translator). The words ‘Lama’ and ‘Lamaism’ are derived from the word ‘bla-ma’. Schulemann describes the teachings synthesised by Padmasambhava and writes: “In Lamaism, however, the following now go hand in hand: purely mental immersion with natural, colourful symbolism, quiet contemplation with a violent will to fight, renunciation and a sense of death with phallic assertion and an affirmation of life, ascent to the divine and familiarity with animal, in short, an encounter of the foreground and background in man, of the most conscious concentration and the opening up of all the abysses of the subconscious.”[16] Padmasambhava was unable to assert himself as a person (he eventually went to China), but his influence on “the first introduction of the doctrine” (sNga-dar) in Tibet remained noticeable for decades. 

Nevertheless, there were repeated efforts to curb the considerable dominance of magic. The phase of ‘the first introduction of the teachings’ was still largely characterised by the patronage of the Tibetan kings, but the centralised kingship came to an end in the mid-9th century. Power and property passed to the local nobility. However, the latter remained interested in the spread of Buddhism. In 1015, the monastery of mTho-gling gSer-khang (Gold Temple of the High Island) was founded in mNga-ris in western Tibet. The monastery invited representatives of the orthodox Mahâyâna, including Atica, a Buddhist teacher from India who focused his work on maintaining Buddhist morals, monastic discipline, a regulated cult and meditation, and reduced the cult of magic. At that time, the sects, which usually took the name of their main monastery, represented the various Buddhist schools of Tibet. The Sa-skya school (Sa-skya/Grey Earth) was particularly influential. Its abbots were regarded as reincarnations of the Bodhisattva Manjusri (tib. ‘Jam-dbyangs) and were thus ranked higher than the abbots of other monasteries. The abbot of the monastery, Sa-skya Pandita, had made a name for himself as a profound scholar and author of works on moral theology. 

It was no coincidence that Khubilai now became particularly interested in Tibetan Buddhism. He had heard from Prince Godan, who was a son of Ögödei Khan and had his fief in the Khökh-Nuur area neighbouring Gansu, that despite his military capabilities, he had not succeeded in establishing Mongolian control over Tibet, which was difficult to access. Godan therefore used the practice that was common among the Mongols at the time, ‘to assume the existence of a central power in the case of larger, contiguous political entities and to use this power after its subordination as a guarantor and mediator’[17] of Mongolian rule. Godan selected the abbot of the Sa-skya monastery, Sa-skya Pandita, who had already been mentioned, and invited him to his residence in Liang-chou. Sa-skya Pandita, who was also a member of the royal family ‘K'on, in which the dignity of the Sa-skya monastery, founded in 1073, was hereditary, obeyed the order. As a result of the meeting, Tibet was reorganised as a Mongolian vassal state with the help of Sa-skya Pandita. The Tibetan princes now needed to be appointed by Godan. They were under the administration of Sa-skya Pandita. Although Tibet was obliged to pay tribute and taxes, Mongolian suzerainty remained nominal. Sa-skya Pandita himself was possibly the one who benefited most from the agreements made with the Mongols. He was able to strengthen his power in the struggle between the Tibetan ‘church states’ by referring to the support of the Mongols throughout Tibet. Apparently Sa-skya Pandita's personality had also made a deep impression on Godan. His erudition, his impeccable reputation, his ‘strong sense of mission with a high level of spirituality and deep knowledge of tantric-magical ritual technique’[18] seemed to have made a strong impression on Godan. 

Khubilai must have heard about this, because he too now sought a meeting with Sa-skya Pandita. This was also because Godan had since lost his reputation and authority and the ‘Tibetan Affairs’ had been transferred to Khubilai. But instead of the Pandita, who died in 1251, his nephew ‘Phags-pa Blo-gros-rgyal-mts'an arrived at Khubilai's residence in 1253. When the 38-year-old Khubilai met the noble monk ‘Phags-pa, he was apparently surprised by the self-confidence and mental agility of the 18-year-old. Although the sources report differences of opinion between them, they also point out that both repeatedly continued their conversations. ‘Phags-pa was visibly keen not only to introduce Khubilai to the Buddhist faith, but also to use him to achieve his own political goals in Tibet. When he gave Khubilai a tantric consecration in 1253, he also secured tax exemption for the Sa skya pa monasteries in gTsan. In the same year, Khubilai also transferred supreme authority in Tibet to him. The power and influence of the Sa-sky pa sect increased considerably in Tibet. ‘Phags-pa purposefully expanded his political position at the court of Prince Khubilai. He knew how to drive religious-political rivals such as the well-known tantric magician Karma pagshi from the court with scheming manoeuvres. When Mönkh Khan commissioned Khubilai in 1259 to settle a dispute between Buddhists and Daoists at his residence in Shangdu, the Buddhists, with the active help of ‘Phags-pa, emerged victorious. In Khubilai, the insight strengthened that not Chinese Buddhism, but Tibetan Buddhism could be of the greatest importance for the unity of the Mongols. Sagaster writes: “The Tibetan form of Buddhism, which was a mixture of late Indian-Kashmiri Buddhism with strong Tantric influences and the native Tibetan Bon religion, was much more in line with the Mongolian mentality. This in turn was similar to the shamanistic folk religion of the Mongols.”[19]A meditative Buddhism, as was widespread among the Chinese, did not correspond to the Mongolian policy of conquest and was therefore unsuitable for the warriors of the Great Khan. ‘Phags-pa and Khubilai came to the conclusion of their years of discussions that with the abbreviated formula “spiritual teacher and benefactor” a system could be created in which the spiritual teacher shows the path to salvation and the secular ruler protects and promotes the faith.[20] On the one hand, the principle provided for a separation of state and religion. The lama was to represent the highest spiritual authority and the great khan the highest secular authority, but according to Sagaster this also meant that the khan submitted to the lama in spiritual matters and the lama recognised the secular authority of the great khan.[21] The functioning of this principle thus depended on ‘a balance achieved through a mutual subordination and superordination in spiritual and secular matters’ and on a corresponding ‘separation of the competences of religion and state’. 

Khubilai himself apparently saw in the formula of the ‘spiritual teacher and benefactor’ an optimal method of rule, “to hold the empire together not only by the secular authority of the Great Khan, but by the spiritual authority of that Buddhist community whose teachings corresponded most closely to the Mongolian mentality most closely corresponded.”[22] Since Khubilai considered Tibetan Buddhism for this purpose rather than Chinese Buddhism, and since ‘Phags-pa also called for a spiritual universal rule, the principle seemed to strive for universal rule overall. That Khubilai himself was thinking of taking power in the Mongol Empire became apparent after the death of Mönkh Khan in 1259. Khubilai had apparently prepared himself purposefully for the takeover. In 1260, he was enthroned as Great Khan in a princes' assembly attended only by princes loyal to him. Usually, only a council of all the important Chingisids and dignitaries of the empire decided on the succession of the Great Khan. 

As soon as Khubilai had seized power as Great Khan in 1260, he appointed ‘Phags-pa as “Teacher of the State” (Kuo-shih). A year later, he granted him supreme authority over the empire's Buddhist clergy. In 1264, Khubilai also transferred the leadership of the Tsung-chih yuan, the supreme administrative body for Tibet, which comprised only five people, to ‘Phags-pa. On 26 June 1264, the Great Khan awarded ‘Phags-pa the “Pearl Diploma”, in which he declared ’Phags-pa to be the highest authority of the Lamaist clergy and confirmed the clergy's privileges and immunities throughout Tibet. In the same year, the Great Khan sent ‘Phags-pa and his brother Phyag-na rdo-rje to Tibet to strengthen Mongolian influence there. He had even given Phyag-na rdo-rje the title of ‘Head of all Tibet’. However, due to the early death of Phyag-na rdo-rje in 1267, Khubilai's intention was not fulfilled. In 1268, Khubilai had to send a punitive expedition to Tibet. Rossabi emphasises that with this action, Khubilai began to establish Mongolian sovereignty over Tibet.[23] The Bri-gun-pa sect, which until then had opposed the rule of the Mongols and the prominent position of the Sa-skya-pa sect, lost much of its influence, while the Sa-skya-pa sect was able to secure and stabilise its rule for decades. 

The relationship between the Great Khan and his Lama had suffered little or not at all from this development. Around 1268, Khubilai commissioned ‘Phags-pa to develop a new script based on the Tibetan script that could be used for both Mongolian and Chinese. On March 17, 1269, the so-called square script was confirmed as the official state script.[24]

‘Phags-pa and his Tibetan contemporaries honoured Khubilai by equating him with a Cakravartin ruler with universal claims, in accordance with Buddhist tradition. Veit points out the special significance of this Cakravartin ideology, which provided the Mongolian rulers with the legitimation “to rule the world, far more convincingly than the, let's call it ‘Chinese ideology’, of a son of heaven, would have been able to.”[25] In 1270, Khubilai granted ‘Phags-pa the title of ‘Imperial Preceptor’ (ti-shih). 

The relationship between Khubilai and ‘Phags-pa was one between two political strategists. While Khubilai, as Great Khan, pursued the interests of the Mongols and Mongolian power, ’Ph'ags-pa represented the interests of Tibetan Buddhism, to which he granted a universal and thus also missionary claim, and the interests of the Sa skya pa and Tibet. The original common point of intersection of interests arose from the fact that Tibet was difficult for the Mongols to conquer by military means due to its climatic conditions and rugged mountain terrain, and that ‘Phags-pa wanted to use the Mongols to decide the struggle between the Tibetan ‘church states’ in favour of the Sa skya pa. Since the Tibetan nobility was the mainstay of the resistance against the Mongols, Khubilai, with the help of ‘Phags-pa, had the Tibetan monasteries transformed from originally purely religious centres into religious-secular centres. Tax exemption and the transfer of large estates into the ownership of the monasteries considerably accelerated this process. He granted the Sa-skya monastery the rank of a Buddhist provincial government. The temporal nobility in Tibet increasingly lost its power. Khubilai concluded a concordat with ‘Phags-pa. Tibet was divided into thirteen provinces, which were controlled by secular imperial officials based in Khams and Amdo, but over which the Sa-skya-bla-ma had been set. However, the core of the concordat was the understanding of the aforementioned balance between ‘the spiritual teacher and the donor’. Khubilai granted ‘Phags-pa, as successor to Sa-skya-Pandita, a number of privileges, including the titles ‘King of the Law in the Three Lands, Venerable Lama’ and ‘King of the Great and Precious Law’ (Ta-pao-ta-wang). 

Khubilai's real relationship to Lamaism as a religion is difficult to comprehend today. This is all the more difficult because we know so little about the way of thinking of the representatives of Chinggis Khan's ‘golden clan’ at that time. It is certain that Khubilai was greatly impressed by the magic of the Lamaist priests and the Buddhist liturgy. It is possible that Lamaism, with its shamanistic elements, did not seem so foreign to him. After all, he had grown up in a world that had been shaped by shamanism. Marco Polo, who stayed at Khubilai's court, was impressed by the magical arts of the lamas: “Now, through their supernatural art, they cause the bottles of wine, milk, or other drinks to fill the cups by themselves, without a servant touching them, and the cups fly through the air to the hand of the Great Khan at a distance of ten paces. As soon as he has emptied them, they return to the place from which they came, and this happens in the presence of the persons invited to witness such art.”[26] The Lamaistic cult was established at the court of Khubilai, but this undoubtedly did not mean the conversion of all Mongols, not even of all Mongols of the royal household. 

In 1275, ‘Phags-pa returned to Tibet, where he died in 1280 at the age of only 45. He is said to have left behind 321 works. Particularly important was his work ‘Ses bya rab-gsal’, written in 1278, an introduction to Buddhism that he compiled for Khubilai's heir to the throne, Jingim. From the Tibetan point of view, the results of his political activities are particularly valuable. Tibet enjoyed a special status that was more like a fiefdom that had become prosperous. It was therefore able to easily separate from the Ming Empire after 1368 and to emerge as ‘a separate, centrally governed state’.[27]

During the Yuan period, Buddhist influence remained limited to the court of the Great Khan in Beijing. It had no significance for the Mongolian motherland.[28] Only the Yuan emperors' inner connection to Buddhism underwent a certain transformation. Under the conditions of the strongly sinicised court, Buddhism occasionally gained too much influence. This occasionally led even the weak Yuan heirs to the throne to take action against Buddhist institutions. Thus, Buyant Khan (*1285 / reign: 1312-1320) ordered the dissolution of all religious administrative organs. He restricted religious jurisdiction and took action against the clergy's interference in civil jurisdiction.[29] Nevertheless, the desire to promote Buddhism remained unmistakable, although it is difficult for us today to determine whether this was due to their own religious beliefs or political calculations. 

Later chronicles such as the ‘Erdenijn tovch’[30] (compiled by Sagang Secen in 1662) report that the khans had important Buddhist sutras translated into Mongolian. Thus, for example, Esön Tömör Khan (*1293/reign: 1324-1328) had a Mongolian scribe named Bagsh Shirav Senge prepare appropriate translations. The abbots of the aforementioned Sa-skya monastery were accorded special importance, apparently acting as the Khans' ‘personal’ lamas. At least, the ‘History of the Eastern Mongols’, in addition to the personal data of the Khan, always gives us the name of the Sa-skya-bla-ma, whom the Khan, as it says, ‘raised to the object of worship’.[31]

With the decline of the Yuan Dynasty in 1368, crowds of Mongols returned to the previously heavily depopulated Mongolian homeland. The return of the Khan and his 60,000-100,000 subjects was associated with a multitude of conflicts. Power struggles with local princes broke out, and the Khan's authority was insufficient to re-establish power and re-establish a centrally governed khanate. Nevertheless, the Chingisid claim to power and the dignity of the Mongol Khan continued to exist. It was only with the reign of Batmönkh Dayan Khan, who was enthroned in 1470 as a child ‘as a direct descendant of the ruler’, that the khanate regained relative political stability. He ruled for many decades, ruled over approximately 60,000 subjects (only the men were certainly counted) and an empire stretching from the Ordos region in what later became Inner Mongolia to the Kherlen River in northern or later Outer Mongolia. 

Contact with the Buddhist religion was lost after 1368. It is said that ‘Phags-pa had already prophesied to Kublai Khan: “Neither in your time nor in mine, but nine or ten generations after us, a Khan named Togon will be born and at that time our religion will perish...”[32] This is the wording of the ‘Erdeniin tovch’, which was written under the influence of Lamaist historiography. The real causes were not only the flight of the Mongolian Khan and his subjects to Mongolia, but also the fact that the Buddhist religion in Tibet itself had fallen into a crisis due to its one-sided concentration on the magical cult and a general decline in morals in the monasteries.

It was only through the work of bTsong-kha-pa (1357-1419) that the Buddhist religion in Tibet was reformed. bTsong-kha-pa restored monastic discipline. He purged the religion of magical practices (black magic and oracles) without, however, calling magic into question altogether. bTsong-kha-pa introduced joint cult exercises for monks and re-enforced the rule of celibacy. He issued orders to standardise the temple furnishings and the liturgy, although he left the figures of the pantheon and all folk festivals, such as the ‘C'am dance, untouched.

bTsong-kha-pa was above all a moral theologian and as such founded the school of dGe-lugs-pa (Virtue School), which has become known to us as the ‘Yellow Religion’ because of its yellow caps (zva-ser) and saffron-coloured robes. The dGe-lugs-pa gained great influence and Lamaism itself regained its ability to proselytise through this school.

© 2024 Udo B. Barkmann

Notes

[1] W. Heissig, Die Familien- und Kirchengeschichtsschreibung der Mongolen, Teil I: 16.-18. Jahrhundert, Wiesbaden 1959.

[2] A. Stolz, Schamanen - Ekstase und Jenseitssymbolik, Köln 1988, p. 13.

[3] Ibid, p. 13.

[4] W. Schmidt, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee, Bd. III, IX-XII, Münster 1931/1949/1952/1954/1955.

[5] S. A. Tokarev, Die Religion in der Geschichte der Völker, Berlin 1978, pp. 216-239.

[6] A. Stolz, Schamanen - Ekstase und Jenseitssymbolik, Köln 1988, p. 14.

[7] W. Heissig, Die Geheime Geschichte der Mongolen, Düsseldorf, Köln 1981, p. 42

[8] А. Г. Малявкин, Уйгурские государства в IX-XII вв., Новосибирск 1983.

[9] E. Haenisch, Die Kulturpolitik des mongolischen Weltreiches, = Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vorträge und Schriften, Heft 17, Berlin 1943, p. 21.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid, p. 24

[12] Wilhelm von Rubruk, Reise zu den Mongolen 1253-1255, übers. u. erläut. v. F. Risch, = Veröffentlichungen des Forschungsinstituts für vergleichende Religionsgeschichte an der Universität Leipzig, II. Reihe, Heft 13, Leipzig 1934, p. 275.

[13] O. Franke, Geschichte des Chinesischen Reiches, IV, Der Konfuzianische Staat II, Krisen und Fremdvölker, Berlin 1948, p. 309.

[14] Ibid, p. 309.

[15] Ibid, p. 72.

[16] Ibid, p. 74. 

[17] Dieter Schuh, Tibet unter der Mongolenherrschaft, in Michael Weiers, Die Mongolen. Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte und Kultur, Darmstadt 1986, p. 284.

[18] Ibid, p. 286.

[19] Klaus Sagaster, Die Weiße Geschichte. Eine mongolische Quelle zur Lehre von den Beiden Ordnungen. Religion und Staat in Tibet und der Mongolei, =Asiatische Forschungen, Bd. 41, Wiesbaden 1976, p. 26.

[20] Ibid, p. 27.

[21] Ibid, pp. 27-29.

[22] Ibid, p. 33. 

[23] Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan. His Life and Times, University of California Press 1988, p. 144.

[24] Д. Чойжилсүрэн, Монголын Дөрвөлжин Үсэг, Улаанбаатар 1974.

[25] Veronika Veit, „In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree”. Das mongolische Erbe des ersten Yüan-Herrschers Chubilaj, in Saeculum 65(II)2015, p. 256.

[26] Reisen des Venezianers Marco Polo, bearb. v. H. Lemke, = Bibliothek wertvoller Memoiren, Hamburg 1908, p. 203.

[27] Dieter Schuh, Tibet unter der Mongolenherrschaft, in Michael Weiers, Die Mongolen. Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte und Kultur, Darmstadt 1986, p. 288.

[28] Ч. Далай, Монголия в XIII-XIV веках, Москва 1983, p. 166.

[29] P. Ratchnevsky, Die mongolischen Großkhane und die buddhistische Kirche, in Asiatica, Festschrift Friedrich Weller, Leipzig 1954, p. 503. 

[30] Ssanang Ssetsen Chungtaidschi der Ordus, Geschichte der Ost-Mongolen und ihres Fürstenhauses, übers. v. I. J. Schmidt, St. Petersburg 1829.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid, p. 130.