Monday 15 December 2008

horrible buddhists

Was just re-flicking through James Palmer's excellent The Bloody White Baron this morning, and was reminded how much fun it was. It's all about a psychotic Baltic-Russian aristocrat taking over Mongolia and bathing it in blood. His name was Roman Ungern von Sternberg, and when he was a scary child he tried to strangle his neighbour's owl.

Ungern's story is great, but the eye-opening thing for me was the portrayal of Mongolian Buddhism in the first quarter of the twentieth century - its venal, voluptuous monks, whose monasteries were the focus of temporal as well as spiritual power, are not straight out of mediaeval Europe, but the analogies are there for all to see.

We get too used to a fluffy bunnies, spiritual-but-not-religious, modern Western idea of Buddhism. We don't know about Mongolia’s pantheon of vengeful deities, such as Palden Llamo. She had a cup made from the skull of a child born from incest and her horse's saddle was made from the flayed skin of her own child. She gets airbrushed in the West by people claiming that gods with bloody swords stamping on fields of corpses represent the mind’s triumph over materialism. (Funny Palden Llama fact: the Tibetans thought Queen Victoria was one of her incarnations.)

The most enjoyable monkish leader was the Bogd Khan, was a gross, drunken whoremonger who teased pilgrims with a rope wired to a car battery that he hung over the palace walls. He laughed when it shocked pilgrims who thought the shocks were blessings from on high. He was too fat to ride a horse without falling off, so he got soldiers to ride on either side of him to hold him up. Poor horse.

He also had a zoo, with 'giraffes, tigers and chimpanzees preserved in a miserable half-life of teasing and desperate cold.' He had an elephant looked after by a seven foot six inch tall giant. The giant's name was Gongor. He had a collection, which you can still see, of stuffed animals, including puffer-fish, penguins and elephant seals. There were mirrors with 'intricate drawings of a most grossly obscene character,' but these have been removed.

Ungern’s own religion - since you are so interested - was a personal stew, supposedly Lutheran but taking in soothsayers and fuzzy pan-spiritualism. He heeded the Buddhist myths of Shambala - a hidden kingdom from which a king would emerge in the darkest days to usher in a Golden Age, but his chaotic army was more shambles than Shambala. He executed thousands of ‘traitors’ and wanted to exterminate the Jews. He had one man whipped daily for months until his bones showed and he went mad; others were pulled apart by bent trees; some were made to spend naked nights on frozen rivers. One group of such men fought off wolves with their bare hands. Half of them did, anyway.

I've read a lot of books about nutjobs, and the good ones are good because you feel in safe hands with respect to psychological truth. This is one of those - Palmer's Ungern made total sense to me. He was a loner whose parents divorced. He rebelled against authority, and built escapist fantasies about glamorous soldier forebears with nicknames like The Axe and The Brother of Satan. He never learnt what made other people tick. He taught himself esoteric theology and Eastern mysticism. He believed his shallow reading had revealed deep truths, and his success in battle gave him the power to follow through on his whims. Palmer is also very strong on torture and murder - he knows they are common in war, and that ‘extreme violence has a shocking playfulness,’ but he knows that each case has its own precedents. Ungern’s brutality grew out of the corporal discipline of the Russian Army and the graphic hell scrolls of the Mongolian monasteries.

The Bloody White Baron is great. Buy it for your friends.

(In the spirit of Robert McCrumb: I do not know James Palmer.)

(Yes, yes, keen readers of my match reports will have some of this information already, but only some of it. Like I say, they are my best work. And I am very busy this week.)

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