Mongolian Eschatology

Mongolia's end-time material is mostly received. When Tibetan Buddhism became the religion of the Mongol courts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it carried the Kālacakra literature with it: the prophecy of a final war between the forces of Shambhala and the barbarian armies of the age, a battle that ends in the victory of the dharma and the inauguration of a golden time. The Mongolian chronicles, above all the Altan Tobči and the chronicles of the Qing-period historians, embed this eschatology inside a national history in which the Chinggisid line is bound to a cosmic schedule.

The indigenous layer is older and harder to recover. Before the Buddhist reception, the Mongolic peoples held a sky-and-earth cosmology in which the weather, the ancestors and the ongoing health of the land mattered more than a terminal event. The shamanic world is renewed continuously rather than concluded: the ot (fire) and the tngri (sky powers) sustain an order that can be offended and restored, not a creation moving toward a verdict. As with so many of the traditions the comparative essays treat, the absence of a built apocalypse is itself the finding.

What Mongolia adds is a clear instance of transmission across the steppe. The Shambhala war, an Indian Buddhist construction read as an inner war in its Tibetan form, becomes in Mongolia a political eschatology attached to a ruling house. The older Mongolian chronicles, including the Erdeniin Tobči and the reconstruction of the lost "Secret History" material, place the Chinggisid house inside a cosmic timeline in which the dharma's victory and the khan's fortune are the same event.

The Inner Asian reception of that prophecy is one of the clearer cases of an imported eschatology being retooled to legitimate a state. The end, here as elsewhere in the comparative survey, takes the shape of the society that receives it. The tradition is treated in Mongolian Eschatology, beside Kalachakra and the War of Shambhala and Buddhist Eschatology.