SUMMARY:

When Buddhist missionaries entered the Trans-Baikal region in the seventeenth century, they already had elaborate ideas of empire, the emperor and their status vis-a-vis the Buddhist sangha. According to Qing practices, they saw the monarch as sacred, the top of the hierarchy of religious officials regulating different aspects of communal life. In other words, the Buddhist missionaries transfered their pre-existing image of a sacral “civilized empire” onto absolutely different realities. At the same time, many of their expectations and projections were met with understanding in the Russian Empire, where, beginning from the time of Peter the Great, even the Orthodox Church was subsumed by the state. Buddhists saw the empire as a place of opportunities and, at the same time, as an alien land. Their existence there depended on strictly following laws, no matter how demanding and harsh the laws were. Yet, this did not imply a readiness of the Buddhists to accept the status of a peripheral religion. The author of this article finds in Buriat Buddhist historiography direct expressions of a desire to spread their influence beyond the niche assigned to them by the imperial state and the Orthodox Church. The article addresses in detail the following issues: what were the points of agreement and disagreement between the Empire and Buddhism? What was the essence of the state policy toward the Buriat Buddhists? And how did Buriats perceive themselves within a multi-confessional empire? In looking for answers, the author addresses a broad range of historical sources in Tibetan, Mongol and Russian languages.