The famous "living" hambo-lama Itigelov is located in the Ivolginsky datsan "Hamben Khure". And in the heat, sweat appears on his forehead.
He sits in a lotus position and is draped in yellow and cherry fabric. He is sitting behind the glass, the door to his glass chamber is open on the side, and air flows to him along the upper edge.
The face looks powdered, and the eyelids are blushed. Sometimes, they say, he opens one eye - and this is supposedly a sign that the one to whom he opens his eye would return here. With me, he did not open his eyes. True, the operator Sashka said that he seemed to move his mouth, but I did not see this.
According to legend, Itigelov (he was already 75 years old), collecting students, sat on June 15, 1927 in the lotus position and said: "You will visit and see my body in 75 years." Then he began to read the prayer and went into nirvana.
He was buried in a cedar cube in the same lotus position.
On September 10, 2002, hambo-lama XXIV Dyamb Ayusheev with the monks raised the sarcophagus with Itigelov and transferred his body to the Ivolginsky datsan. Since then, Lama Itigelov has been available to visitors.
After we were received by the supreme lama of all Buddhists of Russia, hambo-lama Ayusheev (there is a photo on the Internet - it is interesting that Ayusheev was the first to post it), I also went to look at the famous holy Buddhism. It is there, in the datsan, on the diagonal, Itigelov’s palace stands.
I probably believe that Itigelov is half-dead. But why? To exhibit a museum exhibit the limit of the human race? To sit in a damaged state 92 years after death behind glass? A sad and unnecessary feat.
I have always, not hiding for years, said that the Western civilization of production and consumption is not pleasant to me. But Buddhism didn’t suit me either. It’s sad.
Buddhism is Indian import to the Mongols, to which they belong and Buryats.
Meanwhile, the head of all Buddhists of Russia accepted me and my companions as my father. An ironic man of about sixty came to us, in a silk robe of a thick cherry color and light socks with sandals. For more than an hour we talked thoughtfully, looking into each other's eyes. Several times he called me a wise and intelligent person. The poet Amarsan Ulzituev, who was present during the conversation, noticed after the conversation that the hambo-lama Ayusheev showed me such signs of respect as anyone else.
During the conversation, I put the humbo llama at least once into a dead end: I asked why, when the National Bolsheviks * carried my mother's body from the fourth floor to the street where she was waiting for the coffin, she became heavy, like a cement slab? The hambo lama maneuvered from the answer. I think he could answer insincerely, but did not want to.
We walked around the datsan for a long time, it started to rain. We went to temples (dugans). In one, under the name “Paradise of Buddhists”, something like this, for commoners, a sugary model of paradise was presented - artificial flowers and trees were stuck in the sand, and humanity was represented by three male dolls and three female dolls. I asked why it was so primitive, I was told that this is a paradise for the simple, for the layman, that for the Buddhist intelligentsia there are bright and gloomy hosts of bright gods, thousands of them. It was at that moment that I became aware of the acrimonious characteristic of Buddhism, "Indian import."
The next day, the incorrigible omnivorous Muscovites in search of exotic, we went to the shamans, let these two, let's call them religions, and are at enmity: Buddhists and shamanists.
We were welcomed by the shamanists as a small man with a long sharp beard, like a gnome, everyone called him “teacher”, or “teacher Darzhin”. Took in the office - less warm than Ayusheev. I asked if it was possible to see which rite. The teacher said that it is possible.
The shaman turned out to be a shaman.
After a special vestment, breathing smoldering thyme, the shaman turned into a frighteningly roaring beast. The animal beat a driftwood in a tambourine, rushed about, and I thought - it would tear us apart, but it would not tear us apart.
I was also present at the sacrifice. A sheep was sacrificed. He was killed by the performing sacrifice, with his hand thrust into the incision in the abdomen and jerked behind the aorta in the back of the ram's body. The ram died as cute, without making a sound.
A woman of about fifty was half-buried in the ground and held a ceremony over her. They thumped a log with two handles on the ground next to the woman's head.
Now about my companion Husky. Husky is a Russian guy, a rapper living in Ulan-Ude, he is 25 years old. Silent usually. In Husky there is a depth that manifested itself for me twice at two dawn already in Mongolia, later. His questions to me were simple. Once they sounded on the banks of the Orkhon River, in the noise of ancient water flying behind me, and the second time on the crest of a dune in cold sand. Husky is a young man. Like all young people, he apparently knows little; in it, however, one feels the same depth as in the seemingly crude shamanism.
I? What am I? I am traveling around the world in search of truth, and the fact that shamanism is rude and did not create lurid gypsy-Indian pictures does not bother me. Shamanism managed to scare me with the hoarse voice of a shaman and victims, and - this ancient authenticity does not scare me.
Link to the present?
And here you are: on May 8, mayoral elections will be held in Ulan-Ude. They have not had a mayoral election since 2007. Six candidates registered. I was even suspected that I had come to disrupt the elections for them.
But this is not so.
Actually, I was heading to Mongolia, but I flew to Ulan-Ude at first (six hours in the air), and from there I traveled across the border with my comrades to Mongolia.
Pandito Khambo Lama XXIV Ayusheev - Member of the Council for Cooperation with Religious Associations under the President of the Russian Federation. In rank, he is equal to Patriarch Kirill, he is the head of all Buddhists in Russia.
Buryat, if anyone does not know, quite a lot, from 800 thousand to a million. They are the most northern Mongolian people.
435 thousand people live in Ulan-Ude - this is the third most populated city in the Far East after Vladivostok and Khabarovsk. The city has an outstanding monumental center with the largest head of Ilyich Lenin in the world on the Council Square.
The rest of Ulan-Ude consists of a quaint okroshka of private sector houses - usually wooden - and four- and six-story residential areas.
* "National Bolshevik Party" - the organization was recognized as extremist and banned in Russia by a decision of the Moscow City Court of April 19, 2007
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.