A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

40 A history of Inner Asia
of the doctrine, liberation from the passions and desires of this world,
fostered monastic withdrawal to a degree unequaled by any other religion.Ideally,
such withdrawal should have been embraced by the entire
human community, an obviously impossible goal; this in turn contributed
to a paradoxical and total inversion of the originally idealistic religion
in Lamaism, where extreme monasticism arrogated to itself the right
to speak also for the lay segment of society, eventually assuming temporal
power and establishing a theocratic state.
In Inner Asia, Buddhism – both its two principal denominations, but
especially the Mahayana form – appeared in the early centuries of our
era.Sinkiang became one of its avenues and intellectual strongholds,
especially the city kingdom of Khotan, but soon also other centers such
as Qocho (Turfan).Later on, however, several major changes occurred.
In India itself, Buddhism was by the twelfth century partly extinct, partly
absorbed into Hinduism, a latter-day form of Brahmanism.In Sinkiang,
Islam drove out Buddhism by the end of the fifteenth century.In
Mongolia, on the other hand, the formerly shamanistic Mongols converted
to Lamaism toward the end of the sixteenth century, and their
kinsmen the Oirats followed suit in the seventeenth.
(c) Shamanism
Shamanism held the place of religion among the hunters and herders of
Inner Asia, thus also among the Turks and Mongols before Islam and
Buddhism substituted themselves for it.The word “shaman” itself is
believed to be of Tungusic origin – the Tungus or Tunguz being several
peoples of eastern Siberia, and the languages they speak forming part
of the Altaic family, as do Turkic and Mongolian.The hesitancy to consider
shamanism a religion stems from the fact that it has never had an
established and codified doctrine, scriptures, or “church,” and that it has
concerned itself little with questions of an afterlife.Its central feature is
the shaman (qam in Turkic languages), a person endowed with special
faculties to communicate with supernatural forces, good and evil spirits
whom he or she can propitiate or manipulate for various goals.Among
these goals, success in hunting held the foremost place; healing was
another important function.The method used by the shaman included
trance or ecstasy, a special psycho-somatic state in which he could communicate
with these spirits and affect their behavior.
The fact that ensuring success in hunting was the foremost task of the
shaman may explain why among the Turks and Mongols of the period
we are dealing with, the system seems to have lost some of its earlier