A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

The Buddhist Mongols 169
Buddhism.Most important in the long run, however, was the conversion
of the Khalkha in 1588, for it was among them that the incarnation of
the new Dalai Lama was identified among the descendants of Dayan
Khan; the newborn child stayed at Urga, the nomads’ initially peripatetic
headquarters, until the age of thirteen; then the youth was solemnly
installed in Lhassa as the fourth Dalai Lama.Meanwhile another
“Living Buddha,” Maidari Khutukhtu, was installed at Urga as the
Jebtsun-damba-khutukhtu, head of the sect among the Khalkha.His
spiritual descendants eventually also became temporal rulers, like their
senior peers the Dalai Lamas, and their authority embraced all of
Mongolia until the replacement of the theocracy by the republic in 1924
(not 1921; the apparent contradiction will be explained below).
Conversion to Buddhism also occurred, as we have said, among the
Oirats, but not until the seventeenth century, after the major part of their
tribes had migrated to Jungaria and points farther west.Curiously,
embracing this quietist religion did not immediately produce a radical
transformation of their society to the degree that it did among the
Eastern Mongols.Quite to the contrary: the expansiveness of the vigorous
Jungar state in Sinkiang, and the campaigns of the Kalmyks through
the Dasht-i Kipchak, occurred concurrently with or just after their conversion
to Buddhism early in the seventeenth century.
We have already mentioned the first wave of Oirat (Kalmyk) expansion
westward into the Dasht-i Kipchak, more specifically the area of
southernmost Kazakhstan, in the second half of the fifteenth century.
The Oirats then withdrew to territories closer to their original homeland
in southern Siberia, and in the process occupied western Mongolia until
they were thrown back, as we have said, by Altan Khan in 1552.This
repulsion incited some of the turbulent tribes to undertake the second
wave of raids into the aforementioned parts of Kazakhstan, but without
attempting any real conquests; instead, the majority concentrated in
Jungaria.
The most prominent tribes among them were the Choro, Dörböt,
Torghut, and Khoshot, but it was the epithet “Jungar” (also spelled
Dzungar or Zungar) by which they and their new territory, Jungaria,
became known.This special ethnonym (the literal meaning of zungar is
“left hand,” as opposed to barungar, “right hand”; it appeared at an illdefined
moment when they were identified with their position within a
larger tribal confederation) has survived the people themselves in the
name of Jungaria.It was there that the Oirats embraced Buddhism,
about a generation after their cousins the Eastern Mongols had done so.