False Lama: The Life and Death of Dambijantsan Ferdinand Ossendowski and I Meet the Tushegoun Lama Even as a college student I was intensely interested in the history of Inner Asia and of Mongolia in particular, and I often spend hours embowered in an isolated carrel deep in the bowels of my college library poring over histories and travel accounts of the area. One day while standing in the front of the stacks dealing with Mongolia I noticed an old and worn tome with a faded dark reddish-brown cover. On the spine in barely legible black letters was the title Beasts, Gods and Gods. Pulling the book from the shelf I discovered that it was written by Ferdinand Ossendowski and published in 1922. Returning to my carrel I was quickly became engrossed in Ossendowski’s account of how in 1920 he, a partisan of the White Russian government of Admiral Kolchak, had fled from the newly installed Bolshevik authorities in Siberia and after various adventures in the wilderness of the upper Yenisei River Basin had arrived in Mongolia. From Mongolia he and other Russian refugees hoped to travel south through Tibet and ultimately seek asylum in British-controlled India. According to Ossendowski his party was turned back somewhere on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau after a gun battle with bandits in which he himself was wounded. Forced to return to Mongolia, eventually ended up in Uliastai, a town in the western part of the country which during the period of domination of Mongolia by China served as one of the headquarters of the Manchu, or Qing, administration. At the time Uliastai was hardly a safe haven. In 1911, when the Qing Dynasty finally collapsed, Mongolia had declared its independence and a monarchy ruled by the Eighth Bogd Gegeen was created. The Bogd Gegeen, the leader of Buddhist in the country, now took the title of Bogd Khan and assumed both spiritual and temporal control of the country. He immediately issued orders expelling Manchu officials and troops from Uliastai and the fortress-city of Khovd farther west. The military governor of Uliastai gave up without a fight (unlike the military governor of Khovd) and along with his troops was given safe passage out of the country. In 1915, however, independent Mongolia, squeezed between the demands of its two immense neighbors, was forced to accept the so-called Tripartite Agreement adopted by Russia and China during a meeting of the three countries at Kyakhta on the Mongolian-Russian border. By the terms of this accord Mongolia would remain an autonomous power, but under the suzerainty of China. The Chinese government stationed four military governors and supporting troops in Urga, Kyakhta, Khovd and Uliastai, and Chinese traders and merchants were allowed to resume their activities, most importantly the collection of the huge debts with which they had saddled the Mongolian people prior to 1911 and on which compound interest was rapidly accruing. Then in the autumn of 1918 more Chinese troops arrived in Mongolia, partly on the pretext of protecting it from the newly organized Bolshevik armies which had appeared to the north in Siberia after the Russian Revolution. Faced with the de facto military occupation of their country, Mongolian leaders, including the Bogd Khan, were pressured into negotiations to once again accept further Chinese authority. Then in late 1919 a still larger Chinese army, led by General Hsü Shu-teng, arrived in Urga. The dictatorial Little Hsü, as he was known, forced the Mongolian leadership to accept the revocation of Mongolian autonomy and declared that the country was once again part of China. During the ceremony to hand over power to the Chinese, which took place in February of 1920, Mongolian officials were made to kowtow to Little Hsü, and the Bogd Khan had to display obeisance to the Chinese flag. The Manchus were gone but the Chinese were back. These then were the unsettled conditions that Ossendowski encountered in Uliastai in 1921. “When we arrived in that town,” Ossendowski wrote, “we were at once in the sea of political passions. The Mongols were protesting in great agitation against the Chinese policy in their country; [and] the Chinese raged and demanded from the Mongolians the payment of taxes for the full period since the autonomy of Mongolia had been forcibly extracted from Peking . . .”3 The situation was further complicated by bands of White Russian desperadoes and Russian Bolshevik spies and provocateurs who swarmed through the countryside terrorizing the populace.
They took refuge for the night in the ger and were having a dinner of boiled mutton with their host when a man suddenly entered and greeted them in “a low, hoarse voice.” Ossendowski continued:
Ossendowski then told the mysterious stranger of his thwarted attempt to reach India via Tibet. Upon hearing the tale the stranger “became attentive and very sympathetic in his bearing toward us and, with evident feeling of regret, expressed himself strongly: ‘Only I could have helped you in this enterprise . . . With my laissez-passer you could have gone anywhere in Tibet. I am Tushegoun Lama.’”
Ossendowski claimed that after he became aware of the identity of the visitor he began to question in his mind whether the man was capable of the so-called miracles with which he was credited. The Tushegoun Lama then, according to Ossendowski, gave an example of the mind-reading abilities for which he was famous:
As was my wont when any book interested me I immediately began background investigations. Beasts, Men and Gods, I learned, had received rave reviews upon its publication in 1922. The New York Times Book Review gushed that it was “a book of astounding, break-taking, enthralling adventure, an odyssey whose narrator encountered more perils and marvels than did Ulysses himself, an account . . . in which the traveler faced danger and death in a greater variety of ways, saw more astounding things, [and] penetrated more mysteries than has any other man who had embarked upon perilous adventure in these days.” In London the reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement found himself at a loss for words: “A book like this makes one regret the vulgarization of adjectives. When one epithet seems inadequate, there is nothing to do but recall some of the rushing crowd of impressions it created.” The English language version of the book went into twenty-two printings in 1922 alone, selling some 300,000 copies, and the book was eventually translated into a dozen or more languages, becoming an international best-seller. Thus it was that at least a segment of the world’s reading public became aware of the existence of a mysterious figure known as Tushegoun Lama who lived somewhere in the wilds of the then-little known country of Mongolia. Given the book’s high profile and sensational content, however, it is not surprising that detractors soon appeared on the scene. The book reviewers may have been bowled off their feet by the book’s sensational tales and florid prose but historians, explorers, and travelers who were more familiar with Mongolia found much in the book that was incorrect or simply unbelievable. Ossendowski’s abysmal ignorance of Mongolian history and of even the most basic tenets of Buddhism were particularly striking. One of his more virulent critics even entertained “the hypothesis that there was no such person as Ferdinand Ossendowski” and that the book was a ghost-written hoax . Others, while granting his existence, doubted that he had ever been Mongolia at all and suggested that the book was a cleverly contrived fabrication. This was not true; actually Ossendowski, who had been trained as mining engineer, had been in Mongolia before the 1920s as part of a geological expedition—a detail he neglects to mention in his book—and his presence in Mongolia in 1920–21 has been confirmed by numerous accounts of others who were there. The most damning attack came from none other than Sven “the Desert Wanderer” Hedin, the Swedish explorer and cartography who at the time was probably the West’s greatest expert on the geography of Central Asia. Ossendowski was intruding on Hedin’s turf and the notoriously prickly explorer was having none of it. He quickly batted off a book entitled Ossendowski und die Wahrheit (Ossendowski and the Truth) in which he heatedly refuted Ossendowski’s claim that he had reached the Tibetan Plateau in his attempt to reach India and called into question other details of the Polish adventurer’s itinerary. Even more telling was Hedin’s accusation that Part V of Beasts, Men and Gods, entitled “Mystery of Mysteries—The King of the World,” was nothing more than a retelling, and in places blatant plagiarism, of an occult fantasy revealed to the light of day by the French occultist Joseph-Alexandre Joseph-Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveidre in his 1886 book Mission de l’Inde en Europe (Mission of India in Europe) In the now-notorious Part V of his book Ossendowski told of an immense network of caverns under the surface of the earth in which no less than 800,000,000 people lived. These caves were all linked together into a subterranean kingdom called Agharti which was ruled a supra-human entity known as the King of the World. By telepathy and other means of mind control this King of the World and his minions sought to influence the development of above-ground mankind. At some time in the future this King would emerge from his underground lair and create a new, supposedly enlightened world order on the surface of the earth. In a nutshell, this was the Aghartian myth propounded by Joseph-Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveidre which Ossendowski retold in his own book, claiming that everyone in Mongolia, from the Bogd Gegeen right on down to common herders, were aware of the existence of Agharti and its ruler the King of the World. According to Ossendowski’s Mongolian informants, the King, in preparation for his final return, had already made brief appearances on the surface of the earth, most notably at Erdene Zuu and Narabachin monasteries in Mongolia. One lama in the entourage of the 8th Bogd Gegeen told him, “The King of the World will appear before all people when the time shall have arrived for him to lead all the good people against the bad, but this time has not yet come. The most evil among mankind has not yet been born.” There were Numerous Portals to this underground realm, many of them in Mongolia and Tibet, and apparently it was possible for select individuals to travel through them and visit Agharti. At one point Ossendowski asked the Tushegoun Lama if he had ever heard of the King of the World in Agharti. Wrote Ossendowski:
The existence of Agharti beneath Mongolia was certainly an amazing assertion, and the inclusion of such sensational material no doubt helped to make Beasts, Men and Gods an international best seller among the hoi-polloi, but more discerning readers, especially those with some actual knowledge of Asian history, geography, myths, legends, and religion soon dismissed Ossendowski’s account of the subterranean kingdom of Agharti with openings in Mongolia and Tibet as utter fantasy. Confronted in Paris by European Tibetologists and other scholars, he finally issued a statement admitting that Men, Beasts and Gods “was not of a scientific order, but a work composed of elements relating to personally gathered impressions.” In this peculiarly ambiguous reply Ossendowski seemed to be hinting that not everything he wrote should be interpreted as literally true; instead, it seems, some parts of the book may have been based on “impressions” enhanced by a liberal sense of literary license. Beasts, Men, and Gods was henceforth dismissed as a serious book in most quarters, although curiously enough the Aghartian Mythologem as propounded by Ossendowski took on a life of itself and is Still With Us Today, as any search of occult literature on the internet or elsewhere will very quickly reveal. (Agharti sometimes appears as Agharta). And of course, the book is still in print, in Numerous Editions, including one French Language Edition. After reading about the Agharti–King of World controversy I could not help but wonder about Ossendowski’s account of the Tushegoun Lama. Did such a person as the Tushegoun Lama actually exist or was he just another figment of Ossendowski’s notoriously fecund imagination? And if such a person did exist, had Ossendowski enhanced his account of him by concocting a sensational tale about how he was hypnotized into believing that the Tushegoun Lama had sliced open the abdomen of a Mongolian herdsman? And what about the Tushegoun Lama’s claim, as related by Ossendowski, that he had visited the apparently non-existent realm of Agharti? Even if the Tushegoun Lama actually existed, surely Ossendowski had fabricated this tantalizing little detail. The whole account of the so-called Tushegoun Lama was highly suspect. I probably would just forgotten the whole matter if few days later I had not picked out another book from the Mongolia section of the library entitled Mongolia and the Mongolians by the Russian ethnologist A. M. Pozdneev. Published in 1896 by the Russian Imperial Russian Geographical Society, the two-volume set is a detailed account of Pozdneev’s thirteen month-long sojourn in Mongolia and China during the years 1992-93. In the first chapter Pozdneev describes a visit to Amarbayasgalant Monastery in northern Mongolia where in the course of conversation with a monk he heard about a man named Dambijantsan, a Russian Kalmyk who the year before had appeared in Mongolia and electrified the populace with his out-spoken anti-Manchu propaganda. From the other details given I soon realized that Pozdneev’s “Dambijantsan” was one and same person as Ossendowski’s “Tushegoun Lama.” As a source, Pozdneev was almost unimpeachable. Precise in his statements and pedantic to a fault, if Pozdneev described such a person then he must actually exist. Thus it seemed that Dambijantsan, the Tushegoun Lama, was in fact an historical personage and not one of Ossendowski’s literary embellishments. I dug the out of the library archives the available maps of Mongolia—there were very few available at the time—and following Pozdneev’s description of his journey tried to locate Amarbayasgalant Monastery. I could not find it on any map. Did it even still exist? I knew even then that most monasteries in Mongolia had been destroyed during the communist anti-religion campaigns of the late 1930s. No matter. As I read more of Pozdneev’s account I began fantasizing about following his itinerary and trying to find Amarbayasgalant Monastery on the ground. Of course I was just day-dreaming. Mongolia at that time was one of the most closed and isolated countries in the world. Only a few select scholars from the West and very-upscale tourist groups were allowed to visit the country and they were kept on a very short leash, largely confined to the capital of Ulaan Baatar and a few select sites like the Terelj Tourism Area north of the capital and the former Erdene Zuu Monastery farther out west, which had been turned into a museum. No foreigners were allowed to wander around by themselves, and a place like Amarbayasgalant Monastery, assuming it still existed, would be strictly off limits. Little did I realize, sitting there day-dreaming in my library carrel, that several decades later I would visit Amarbayasgalant Monastery not once but several times. ©2006 Don Croner |