Gandan Monastery

Photos 1,2,and 7 from my Thursday 13 last week were taken at the Gandan Monastery in Ulaanbaatar. In case you missed it, Ulaanbaatar (pronounced like lawn bought-er) is the national capital of Mongolia. I know of at least two Buddhist monasteries there. We visited one.

This was our first official stop on the tour. When we first arrived I was toying with the idea of moving the setting for one of my books from Tibet to Mongolia, but I wasn’t too serious about it. I really didn’t think it would work well, and had gone on this trip more as a regular tourist than someone researching a book. Gandan Monastery changed my mind. Yep, Ode for Joy will be set in Mongolia.

Gandan is one of the few monasteries that survived through Soviet rule. It is a regular, working monastery with a reasonable tolerance for tourists. We were asked not to take pictures inside the buildings, but were allowed to go in and see the monks and worshipers while sutras were read out loud.

Out of respect for the religion, our group moved through the compound in ever-clock-ward spirals. We saw the main building where sutras are read, then worked our way around through where sutras could be purchased along with juniper powder for purification burning, to where children are taught the sutras, past the big feet from Fiction Friday 55, into a building that housed an enormous Buddha of the standing variety.

The woman above is a worker there who makes sure all the prayer wheels are spun at least once a cay. There are prayer wheels that have engraved plaques attached to them. Each time one of these is spun, a bit of the power goes to the family who hired the making of the plaque.

Prayer wheels come in all sizes. Most of them are pretty easy to turn. I really liked these smaller ones.

Some were large enough for you to go around like an ox in a mill.

Often they have designs or lettering on them describing things one might pray for, such as happiness and health. Often people will tie scarves around a wheel or on a fence or statue. Each color represents a different focus. The color most often used is blue, which represents the sky and power.

The form of Buddhism worshiped there originated in Tibet. This is the “Yellow Head” sect, which focuses on education. It’s the primary sect of Buddhism to be found in Mongolia, flowed by the “Red Head” sect, which focuses on self actualization and enlightenment.

Before the Russians came along, Buddhism was the primary religion in Mongolia, followed closely by shamanism and Islam as a distant third. Under Communist rule all of them were discouraged and are only now beginning to make a comeback.