Buddhism in Mongolia: History, Purge and Revival

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 1 November 2026

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Buddhism in Mongolia is a Tibetan-derived form of Vajrayana with institutions of its own, above all the line of incarnate lamas called the Jebtsundamba Khutughtus. The Mongols themselves took it up from Tibetan teachers in two waves, at the 13th-century imperial court and in a 16th-century reconversion. It was almost destroyed in the purges of the late 1930s and has revived since 1990. Pew Research Center estimates that 51% of Mongolians were Buddhist in 2020.

What kind of Buddhism is practised in Mongolia?

Mongolian Buddhism belongs to the wider world of Tibetan Buddhism, which the Rubin Museum’s glossary defines as, historically, “those Buddhist traditions that use Tibetan as a ritual language”. The Mongolist Zsuzsa Majer wrote in 2009 that “the ceremonial language in almost all Mongolian monasteries is Tibetan”, though there have been attempts, mainly in today’s Inner Mongolia, to chant in Mongolian (The Silk Road 7, p. 54).

The schools came in layers (see the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism). Among the early schools Majer names two from the 13th century: the Sakya, whose leaders “established strong connections with Mongolian khaans”, and the Kagyu, whose Karmapa branch “was widespread until the Manchus came to power in 1644 and until the time of Öndör Gegeen”, that is, Zanabazar. The Gelug, the school of Tsongkhapa, arrived when the Mongol ruler Altan Khan met its hierarch in 1578, and Majer calls it the most widespread school “after the 17th century”; before the purges, she writes, “all big monastic towns were Gelukpa ones” (pp. 53–54).

In Ulaanbaatar, in a survey published in 2009, Majer counted 25 Gelug temples and eleven of the “Red Sect”, mostly Nyingma, the school that looks to Padmasambhava, with only one Kagyu temple in the capital. She cautions that “this categorization is relative”: some temples described to her as Gelug show Nyingma features and “could be called mixed temples” (p. 54).

Shamanism survives beside Buddhism: in the 2020 census, as reported by the US State Department, 4.2% of those with a religion identified as Shamanist, and the department notes that many Mongolians “practice elements of shamanism in combination with other religions, particularly Buddhism.”

The Mongol Empire and the Sakya (13th century)

The lasting tie began at court, in what the Rubin Museum’s glossary says “is characterized as a priest-patron relationship” between the Mongols and the Sakya hierarchs, to whom they gave power over central Tibet. In 1244, the historian Christopher Atwood writes, the Mongol prince Köten summoned Sakya Pandita (1182–1251); his nephew, the boy later called Phagpa (Pakpa; 1235–1280 in Atwood’s dating, born 1234 in a Rubin glossary entry), came with him as a hostage.

Phagpa was ordained in 1255 and became chaplain to Qubilai (Kublai Khan). “One year after Qubilai became great khan in 1260,” Atwood writes, he made Phagpa “State Preceptor” and head of all Buddhists in the empire.

Buddhism, the historian Isabelle Charleux writes, then “steeply declined in Mongolia after the fall of the Mongol Empire”. The Sakya school itself, and its rule in Tibet, is told on our page on the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism.

The second conversion: Altan Khan, the Dalai Lama and Erdene Zuu

Altan Khan (1507/8–1582) ruled the Tümed in Southern Mongolia, today Inner Mongolia in China, not the Khalkha lands of the present state. He met the Gelug hierarch Sonam Gyatso and in 1578, Charleux writes, granted him the title of Dalai Lama (a Rubin glossary entry gives 1577).

For the Khalkha, the Mongols of the present country, the key figure is Abatai Khan (1554–1588), who followed his cousin’s example; in Charleux’s account he met the Dalai Lama, “who entrusted him the mission of founding the first Khalkha monastery.” He built Erdene Zuu (Erdeni Juu, a Mongolian rendering of Jowo Rinpoche, the holiest image in Lhasa) beside the ruins of Qara-Qorum, the Mongol capital from 1235 to 1260. The sources date it differently: the Rubin page gives “founded 1582”, while Charleux has the central temple “erected in 1586–1587”.

Charleux calls it “the oldest extant Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Khalkha Mongolia”; it may first have been Sakya, she writes, becoming Gelug in the late 18th century.

Zanabazar and the Jebtsundamba line

The Khalkha’s own incarnation line begins with Zanabazar (1635–1723), a descendant of Chinggis Khan and of Abatai Khan. In 1639, aged five, he was enthroned before Khalkha nobles as the first Jebtsundamba, recognised as the reincarnation of the Tibetan historian Tāranātha (1575–1634) of the Jonang school (see Kalachakra). Uranchimeg stresses that this was “a Mongol initiative”, “confirmed” afterwards by the Fifth Dalai Lama in a letter of 1645 and by the Fourth Panchen Lama in 1651.

The line’s school is debated. The Rubin glossary ranks the Jebtsundambas below only the Dalai and Panchen Lamas “within the Geluk tradition”, and Uranchimeg notes that Mongolian monks and many scholars see Zanabazar as Gelug; she argues instead that his Gelug affiliation “is a later Qing-Géluk construct” that displaced the first Khalkha view of him as Tāranātha’s rebirth (Cross-Currents 31, 2019, p. 7).

The Qing shaped the line. The Khalkha submitted to the Qing dynasty of China in 1691; Zanabazar died in Beijing. After the Second Jebtsundamba (1724–1758), the National Palace Museum in Taipei notes, the Qianlong emperor ruled that future rebirths would not come from the Khalkha; from the Third to the Eighth, every Jebtsundamba of the Qing period was found in Tibet.

Zanabazar was also a sculptor; his biographers, Uranchimeg writes, describe him making images “with his own hands”. Two gilt bronzes by or attributed to him:

• White Tara, 1680s, Fine Arts Zanabazar Museum, Ulaanbaatar, as captioned by Uranchimeg (on the goddess, see Tara).
• Standing Bodhisattva Maitreya, Harvard Art Museums (1963.5), “attributed to Zanabazar”, second half of the 17th century by the museum’s dating (the 1680s in Uranchimeg’s essay).

He took a particular interest in Maitreya, the coming Buddha: the Maitreya Procession at Erdene Zuu began in 1657, for his twenty-third birthday.

Urga, Gandan and the Bogd Khan

Yekhe Khüriye, the “great encampment” that foreign visitors called Urga, grew from a yurt raised for the five-year-old Zanabazar in 1639 and stayed, in Uranchimeg’s words, “fully portable and mobile” until 1855. Its theological centre, Gandan Tegchinling, named after Maitreya’s Tushita heaven, was built in 1838 by the Fifth Jebtsundamba.

In December 1911 Khalkha monks and nobles met in secret, the scholar Matthew King writes, “to declare autonomy from the failing Qing Empire”, and the Eighth Jebtsundamba (1869–1924) was proclaimed Bogd Khan of Mongolia on 29 December 1911: in Uranchimeg’s words, “both political and religious head of the new state”.

For the early 1920s, Rudolf Trapp’s dissertation puts the lamas at 100,000 to 120,000 in a population of about 650,000, so that “every third man” was a lama (p. 95, our translation), while noting that precise figures are lacking. After the Bogd Khan’s death in 1924, King writes, the country began its transition to “the world’s second socialist state”.

The purges of the late 1930s

Legal and economic pressure had failed: by the mid-1930s, King writes, summarising Christopher Kaplonski, “the monastic population had actually increased.” From 1937 the state turned to mass violence. Trapp names the Interior Ministry, headed from 1936 by Choibalsan and guided by Soviet advisers, as the key institution; mass arrests of lamas began in October 1937, and by the end of 1938 the process was “essentially complete” (pp. 338–339, our translation). The Documentation of Mongolian Monasteries project calls it an extension of Stalin’s Great Purge by “Soviet and Mongolian authorities”; Kaplonski, in King’s account, challenges the view that it simply mirrored Stalin’s terror.

The figures differ by source:

• Monks killed: Trapp gives “over 15,000” lamas executed (p. 9), and elsewhere about 20,000 arrested and about 17,000 executed (p. 17). King, reviewing Kaplonski, writes that at least 40,000 “counterrevolutionaries”, half of them monks, “were tried and shot over eighteen months”. The monasteries project says “thousands of lamas”.
• Monasteries: before the purges, 757 by a 1930s government intelligence count or almost 941 by B. Rinchin’s survey of the 1960s (published 1969), both reported by the monasteries project, which says “more than 1,000” temples and monasteries were destroyed, as do Majer and Krisztina Teleki; Charleux writes “all but five of the thousand”. By 1941, on the Interior Ministry’s figures in Trapp, 1,174 lamas and no monastery remained.

About two-thirds of Erdene Zuu was demolished in 1938. Gandan, Majer and Teleki write, was “partly reopened in 1944” and for decades was “the only operating assembly in the whole country”, though restrictions “gradually became a bit looser after 1970”.

Revival after 1990

Majer and Teleki describe the revival after 1990 as led by elderly ex-lamas who had survived the 1930s because they were then young and low in rank, helped by teachers such as Kushok Bakula (1917–2003), India’s ambassador to Mongolia from 1989. By 2009 they estimated about two hundred monasteries and temples, though several reopened temples, mainly in the countryside, were already closing while new ones were founded, mostly in Ulaanbaatar.

The break left marks: Majer writes that survivors had been forced into secular life, including marriage, for decades (p. 52). Married lamas were not new, though: she notes that it “was not rare for Mongolian lamas of the beginning of the 20th century to have a family”, and that such families, and married lamas, “can be met now even among the highest ranked lamas of the main monastery” (p. 58).

At the time of Majer’s study, Gandan, “the modern center of Mongolian Buddhism”, had “more than 500 lamas”; she estimated “about 2000 (at most 3000)” lamas in the whole country (pp. 56–57). Gandan’s Migjid Janraisig temple was built for an “eighty cubit high statue (c. 26 metres)” of Avalokiteshvara, consecrated on 13 June 1913 after the Bogd Khan declared that it would improve his failing eyesight. The communists destroyed the statue in 1938; the building survived as a barracks and later the State Archive (Majer and Teleki’s 2006 survey).

Erdene Zuu, Charleux writes, now operates as both monastery and museum and “is registered on the heritage list of UNESCO”. Its Gelug community revived after 1990, and a yurt-temple there houses what she calls “the only Sakyapa community of Mongolia”.

The Jebtsundamba line today

By the Central Tibetan Administration’s account, the Ninth Jebtsundamba was born in the northern part of Lhasa in 1932, recognised at four by the regent Reting Rinpoche, and left Tibet for exile in 1959. In 1991 the Dalai Lama recognised him as the spiritual head of Buddhism in Mongolia; he was enthroned on 13 January 1992, as head of the Jonang tradition in 1997, and in Mongolia in 1999. He died in Ulaanbaatar on 1 March 2012, aged 80.

As the Dalai Lama arrived in Mongolia in November 2016, China’s foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said on 18 November that China was “firmly opposed to the anti-China separatist activities by the Dalai Lama in any country, in any name, and in any capacity”, and Mongolia’s foreign minister, Tsendiin Munkh-Orgil, said the same day that the visit had no connection with the government (AFP, 20 November 2016). Ending the visit on 23 November, the Dalai Lama told the press:

A month later the foreign minister told the Mongolian newspaper Unuudur: “Under this current government, the Dalai Lama will not be invited to Mongolia, even for religious reasons” (Christian Science Monitor, 22 December 2016).

On 8 March 2023 in Dharamsala, before a crowd that included 600 Mongolians, the Dalai Lama indicated a small boy beside him:

The US State Department calls this the public announcement and says the boy first appeared publicly in Mongolia in August 2023. We take no side and do not name the child; the wider dispute over who may recognise reincarnations is on our page on the Dalai Lama.

How many Mongolians are Buddhist?

In Mongolia’s 2020 census, as reported by the US State Department, 59.4% of people aged 15 and over had a religion and 87.1% of those were Buddhist: about 51.7% of everyone aged 15 and over (our calculation). Pew Research Center, counting whole populations, puts Mongolia at 51% Buddhist in 2020, one of seven Buddhist-majority countries (see how many Buddhists there are in the world); another is Bhutan, also Vajrayana.

The constitution, the State Department notes, bars the state from religious activity and religious institutions from political activity. The law still gives Buddhism a special place:

For the wider picture, see Buddhism around the world and the branches of Buddhism.