17

Life After Death

Genghis Khan built his empire with lightning speed, and it continued to expand until the death of his grandson Khubilai Khan in 1294. Then it began a prolonged period of decay, like a beached whale slowly rotting in the sun. Khubilai Khan, who united China and founded the Yuan dynasty in 1271, claimed to be the new Great Khan, whose empire extended to Russia and included everything between Korea and modern-day Turkey. Yet in truth he only controlled China and he had to struggle to keep a hold of his Mongolian homeland. He embraced a Confucian style of ancestor worship and honored his grandfather as the founder of the Yuan dynasty. In 1286, Khubilai assigned his grandson Kammala to administer Mongolia and build a temple on Burkhan Khaldun, and in 1292 he gave Kammala the new title of Jinong, or Golden Prince. Kammala assumed responsibility for the sacred area around Burkhan Khaldun and for control of the Keshig. He gathered the old gers of Genghis Khan’s queens and made them into portable shrines. He also built a small brick and tile temple in the Chinese architectural style. He kept one thousand of the old guard, mostly Uriyankhai men, and instructed them to keep everyone out. The area became the official burial grounds for the Yuan emperors.

The Mongol territories in Central Asia fell into chaos as different Mongol clans and factions fought with one another. By the mid-fourteenth century, Mongol rule in Iraq and Iran withered. In 1368, the last Yuan emperor was overthrown by a rebel group led by a Buddhist monk, who formed the new Ming dynasty. Explanations for the Yuan dynasty’s decline vary. Some attribute it to Chinese discontent at foreign rule, or exorbitant taxes, or a breakdown in social order, or floods and other natural catastrophes. But the truth is that a form of rot had penetrated deep into the soul of the imperial court and radiated throughout the country. The later Yuan emperors ignored the nation they were supposed to rule, consumed by political, religious, and sexual dramas inside the Forbidden City. One hundred and fifty-nine years after Genghis Khan had begun his invasion of China, his descendants returned to nomadic herding on the steppe, as if the century and a half had been a mere interlude. They went back to their old ways, but at night they told stories of their former greatness and dreamed that it might return.

Over time, Genghis Khan’s influence began to surface in highly unexpected places. The Italian poet Dante Alighieri, best known for his Divine Comedy, completed in 1320, devoted an earlier masterpiece, De Monarchia, to the argument that all humanity was one and that mankind should thus have a single world ruler with power over religion. “The human race is most one when all are united together, a state which is manifestly impossible unless humanity as a whole becomes subject to one Prince, and consequently comes most into accordance with that divine intention,” he wrote.¹ Dante struggled to bring forth a thoughtful critique of church power. He argued that the power of the ruler would come directly from heaven and not be dependent on intermediary religious leaders such as the pope. “The authority of Empire is not dependent upon the Church,” he opined.² “The authority of the Empire derives from God directly.”

In an era when the Christian church routinely tortured and executed its critics, to challenge the authority of the church was highly risky. Yet Dante prophesied the coming of a future world king who would banish evil and bring peace. This mysterious future conqueror bore marked similarity to the Mongol khans. He would be born “between two felts,” and was referred to by the same term that his fellow Italian Marco Polo had used to designate the Great Khan of the Mongols—Gran Cano. Like Genghis Khan, this future Gran Cano would feed on “wisdom, love, and virtue.”³

Dante was the first to publish a major work of literature in Italian rather than Latin, and his example inspired Geoffrey Chaucer to write in English. Chaucer, who lived farther away from the church in Rome, did not hesitate to name Genghis Khan and praise his religious laws. Chaucer lauded Genghis Khan as a hero, greater even than Alexander. Writing in The Canterbury Tales at the close of the fourteenth century, he proclaimed, apparently in a poorly veiled comparison with European kings of his era, that Genghis Khan was “hardy, wise, rich, pious and just to everyone.”⁴ He then went on to say that “as to the religion to which he was born, he kept his law to which he was sworn.”

After the disintegration of the Mongol Empire, the steppe nomads once again dwelled in a closed and isolated homeland, where they continued to honor the mountains and rivers and to worship Father Sky and Mother Earth. Empires came and went, but the sun still rose each morning over Burkhan Khaldun. Flowers bloomed in the khangai and young people gathered strawberries, mushrooms, and cedar nuts, while the older ones sought out leaves and roots to make medicines and teas. In winter, snow covered the mountains and in summer, edelweiss. Life continued.

Through the centuries, the Keshig vigilantly guarded Genghis Khan’s grave at Burkhan Khaldun. Though their role had diminished as the original members died, their sons and grandsons continued to patrol a vast area around the grave, as if Genghis Khan might return at any moment and wish to hunt in his forest again or graze his horses on the open pastures. Just as the Mongols believed that Genghis Khan’s guards were reincarnated through their descendants, so too, they believed, was his horse. During earlier epochs on the steppe, mourners would sacrifice horses to honor the dead, but for Genghis Khan a new tradition was born. His favorite horse, with each new incarnation, could roam freely and was honored by everyone as the most holy horse in the world. When one horse finally died of old age, another horse matching his description, gait, and temperament was identified, and the nomad into whose herd the horse had chosen to be reborn was richly rewarded for this highest of honors.⁵

Although Ming emperors had ruled China ever since they expelled the Yuan Dynasty in 1368, the Mongols never officially surrendered and the descendents of Genghis Khan stubbornly claimed to be the legitimate emperors. At the end of the fifteenth century, Manduhai Khatun, Mongolia’s greatest queen, decided to invade China. As her new second husband was still a young boy, she packed him up in a basket mounted on the side of a camel and headed off to war. To inspire her people and support her claim to be the heir to Genghis Khan, she removed his portable gers and a few relics and took them with her as she crossed the Gobi. When she returned, she reinstalled them in the Great Loop of the Yellow River, near the place where Genghis Khan had died fighting the Tangut. These gers and relics became the basis for the modern shrine, which can still be found exacty where Manduhai Khatun installed it. The area around the shrine became known as the Ordos, from the Mongolian ordu, or royal court.⁶ Over the coming decades the Mongols under Queen Manduhai and her husband, Dayan Khan, managed to conquer large swaths of Inner Mongolia and parts of the Silk Route. She never really threatened China, but she succeeded in reestablishing control over parts of Genghis Khan’s old trading network.

Custody of the shrine of Genghis Khan became a highly contested prize for any Mongol clan or foreign power who wanted to rule the area. One of the first foreigners to attempt to control the shrine was the fifth Dalai Lama. A large Tibetan entourage attended one of the shrine’s main rituals in the tenth lunar month of the Black Dragon Year of 1652, when more than a thousand Mongol horsemen were present. As the Dalai Lama described in his autobiography, “when we arrived at Olan Bulag, I was received by the leader of the white palace tribe—the descendant of Chinggis Khan ordained by Heaven.”⁷

The Buddhist dignitaries posthumously converted Genghis Khan from a Mongol animist into a Buddhist through an elaborate ritual that involved fastening his spirit to an invisible sacred string known as a machig. Genghis Khan and all of his companions and ministers were invited to sit “on the throne made of incomparable treasures, on the carpet decorated with eight lotus flowers,”⁸ after which he was recognized as a reincarnation of the Bodhisattva Vajrapani, the patron of the martial monks of Shaolin. He acquired in the process a completely new genealogy, connecting him to the kings of Tibet and India.⁹ The White History, a Mongolian chronicle, was the first to identify Genghis as an incarnation of Vajrapani, Lord of the Secret.¹⁰ From that point on Genghis Khan could be worshipped either at the shrine or in a Buddhist temple as Vajrapani. To solidify his position within the Buddhist pantheon, Tibetan lamas, including the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama, composed numerous sutras to him. These contained prayers and praises such as, “You are the best of 84,000 kings, who has the power like that of the universal king. You are the conqueror of the heretical enemies of Buddhism. We praise and prostrate to you, the all-powerful guardian deity.”¹¹

As the Mongols converted to Buddhism, they wrote new chronicles incorporating the life of Genghis Khan into Buddhist history and theology. “When I was born by the Buddha’s decree,” Genghis Khan was quoted as saying, “it transpired that I had a precious jade seal from the place of the dragons in my right hand. Now from the mighty deity Indra a jade cup full of holy liquor has been bestowed. Am I not the divinely destined Lord?”

New rituals were invented that Ghenghis had supposedly practiced with his guardians in the Keshig. One such false ritual instructed worshippers to mix alcohol with the blood of a slain enemy, iron shavings from a bar used to kill a person, flour, butter, milk, and black tea, and to sprinkle the mixture or rub it onto a banner as a sacrifice. Participants were instructed “to stir the enemy’s white brain like sour milk, drink the enemy’s blood, utterly destroy the evil-doers.”¹² Such descriptions were pure fantasy of how life had been prior to the introduction of Buddhism, but in time the identification of Genghis Khan with Vajrapani became so close that blue, the color of Vajrapani, became the sacred color of the Mongols.¹³

Others accepted Genghis Khan as a different deity, the ancient Zoroastrian and Manichaean god Ahura Mazda, known in Mongolian as Khormusta. In one chronicle, Genghis Khan received his divine status when the god Khormusta offered him a sacred drink. In another, he was simply the son of Khormusta.¹⁴ As part of his deification, the stories about him became more heroic and his shortcomings less apparent. The poor boy in the Secret History who had managed to fight his way to the top of the Mongol hierarchy thus became a divine and holy agent sent to enact the Will of Heaven on Earth.