Along the sloping brown hillside just behind lama-town stands a row of whitewashed brick dagobas, the tombs of saints so holy that their bodies were not disposed of in the customary Mongol fashion. On the ledges of these, as on any projecting place inside the prayer-cylinder sheds, and indeed anywhere on holy edifices where there is room for them and it is permitted, worshipers have laid heaps of loose stones, each representing some appeal to supposedly supernatural forces. Of many another strange device in and about the mammoth temple compounds, there are the prostrating-boards, slightly inclined planks on short legs for the use of the pious during their extraordinary genuflexions before venerated shrines. With that indifference to soiling themselves for which the Mongols are conspicuous, however, the bare ground suffices most worshipers, and the boards do no great amount of service. The orthodox prostration so closely resembles one of the movements in great favor among our gymnasium instructors that the sight of a group of devotees, women fully as often as men, repeating it time after time in their ponderous boots and heavy garments threatens to convulse the American, at least, with laughter. Though there is no unison among the worshipers, each one performs the ceremony with a fixed rhythm which could not be more exact if a maltreated piano were pounding out the periods, so that the effect is of individual perfection of movement but utter inability to synchronize the group. The worshiper first stands at attention with his face to the shrine, as nearly like a soldier as “the conformation of the body”—not to mention the abundance of clothing—“will permit,” murmurs a prayer several times over, then bows his trunk to the horizontal, places his hands on the ground, straightens his legs to the rear, and lowers himself to the prostrate, even his nose touching the earth. There he remains a moment, then, flexing his arms until his rigid body rests on hands and toes, he regains the original position by performing the same movements in reverse order, repeating the exercise as long as piety, the weight of his sins, or his dread of evil spirits suggests. I know from experience that it is a genuine exercise even in gymnasium garb; what it is in full Mongol attire, sometimes including even the feminine head-dress, any vivid imagination can picture. No wonder the Mongols are big and strong; and what call is there for our famous gymnastico-religious organization ever to establish one of its Oriental branches in Urga? It may be just as well, perhaps, for us dilettante gymnasts of the West never to challenge a red-robed lama to bodily combat; for I have seen more than one of them make a complete circuit of some holy section of the city performing this prostration at every other step forward, leaving off at the point where night overtook them, and returning to start there again at dawn.
Except in Lhasa, and perhaps Rome, the worshiper in Urga has an advantage seldom to be found on this earth; he may perform his pious antics, not merely before silent shrines and motionless statues, but before a living god in flesh and blood. It is a pleasant tramp for any one with unatrophied legs across the valley to the dwelling-place of the “Living Buddha.” A few small streams block his way, unless he can hit upon the stepping-stone fords of the horseless lower classes. But if he is a Westerner, one of the mounted lamas who are constantly jogging back and forth between the palace and the city may, out of mere curiosity to see him at close range, or because all the native benevolence of the nomad herdsman has not yet been steeped out of him by superstition and the misbehavior of other outlanders, carry him across on his crupper. Or, if the stroller is not in a mood for petty adventures, he may take the causeway. This is a road wide as a Western boulevard and perhaps half a mile long, raised on wooden trestles which carry it across the slightly lower part of the valley; but it runs, not from the section where foreigners lodge and carry on such business as is possible under present conditions, but, being designed merely for the use of the “Living Buddha” and his courtiers, it connects his palaces with those of his late sainted brother, and with the shrine topped by that most coveted golden superstructure to which he sometimes comes to be worshiped. Apparently there is nothing sacred about this roadway, however, for any one may use it, and a gang of Chinese was engaged in replacing the logs covered with earth—which spells bridge to the Oriental—of a section that had collapsed. For that matter, it is Chinese workmen who repair, as they probably originally built, the fantastic gates and the flaring tile roofs even within the sacred palace precinct, but for which concession by his holiness and the jealous preservers of his sanctity nothing probably would ever get mended.
The low chaos of roofs within his principal compound, green, yellow, blue, golden, a jumble of Chinese, Tibetan, Russian and hybrid architecture, stands out against the little lines of trees along the foot of the sacred mountains,—evergreen, white birch, and other species, now red or yellow, like the omnipresent lamas, with early autumn. A few guard-houses with a ragged armed Mongol or two lounging before them surround the place, but these picturesque sentinels do not interfere with the movements even of foreigners so long as they do not attempt to enter the sacred precincts. On special occasions non-Mongols have been permitted to pass the gates, but very, very few have ever entered the presence or even the actual dwelling of the “Living Buddha” himself, to whom even the highest of Mongols do not have free access. The elaborate gates have the same demon guards, the same isolated wall as a screen against evil spirits, and all the rest of the flummery common to such structures in China and Korea. Some of the buildings within the compound, however, might have been taken bodily from some cheap European, or at least Russian, town, while the confusion of the whole scheme of structures would not awaken delight in the heart of any real architect.
The “summer palace” of the human deity, a furlong away, being more fully Tibetan, is less unpleasing to the eye. At about the same distance from the main palace in the opposite direction is almost a town of mainly modern buildings, housing the non-religious belongings and the servants of the Mongol god. His stables contain many horses; his garages have automobiles of a dozen different makes, European as well as American, not to mention the usual proportion of Fords; a Delco system lights his establishment; and most modern inventions are represented in one form or another. The “Living Buddha” buys every new contrivance the West has to offer, merely as playthings, in a vain attempt to make a noticeable inroad in a burdensome income. A foreign business man of Urga who has furnished much of it assured me that he purchases on the average ten thousand dollars “Mex” worth of assorted junk a day, things of every conceivable kind, which are petulantly tossed aside when the owner and his swarms of satellites tire of them. Many of the motor-cars rust away unused, though this modern god does all his traveling to and from his various thrones by automobile, and his chauffeur, a khaki-and-legging-clad Buriat, may frequently be seen speeding about town on the only motor-cycle in Urga.
In striking contrast to this modernity of his surroundings is the attitude of the Mongols toward their living god. It is something which we of the West can scarcely conceive, and which probably has no precedent among even the most pietistic creeds of the Occident. Second only to the Dalai-Lama of Lhasa in the hierarchy of lamaism, Bogda-Han, to give him one of the many titles by which he is known among Mongols, is worshiped by millions throughout a vast space of central Asia. The attribution of deity with which they invest him is due to the belief that he is a reincarnation of the original Buddha. When a “Living Buddha” dies—of which more anon—the high council of lamaism, by the consultation of certain sacred books and a deal of hocus-pocus which saner mortals would not have the interest to follow, determine where the body into which his soul has been reborn will be found. At first blush it would seem that this must be a new-born babe; but perhaps there is no nursery in the sacred palace, or no lamas of sufficient experience in that line to take charge of a puling infant. Therefore, by something corresponding to poetic license, the signs point to a boy of about nine years of age, who will be found, say, on such a corner of such streets in this or that city, doing so and so at a specified hour. A cavalcade of high lamas travel to the place indicated, which is more likely to be in Tibet than in Mongolia, capture the new and unsuspecting Buddha, and carry him off to a life of deification. It is commonly reputed in the outside world that each Buddha is quietly done away with by what we might call his cardinals at the age of eighteen, his body embalmed, and a new find installed in his place. A Russian professor long resident in Urga has been to some pains to prove that this is not true, that it is in fact mere nonsense; but he admits the curious coincidence that all the “Living Buddhas” up to the present one seem to have died at about eighteen years of age.
The market in front of Hansen’s house. The structure on the extreme left is not what it looks like, for they have no such in Urga but it houses a prayer-cylinder
A youthful lama turning one of the myriad prayer-cylinders of Urga. Many written prayers are pasted inside, and each turn is equivalent to saying all of them
