An Afterlife for the Khan by Dr. Jonathan Z. Brack;

Author:Dr. Jonathan Z. Brack;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520392908
Publisher: University of California Press

CHANGING BURIAL PRACTICES: FROM DIVINIZED ABSENCE TO MONUMENTAL SHRINES

The Chinggisid successors legitimized their rule by maintaining a ritualized connection with Chinggis Khan. Correct reverence for the imperial founder conferred the right to imperial domination.2 As part of the Mongols’ immanentist-divinized model of kingship, this ritualized commemoration guaranteed the continuous flow of Heaven’s blessing to the Chinggisid line. From the theoretical perspective, the dynastic veneration of the imperial founder reflected the Chinggisids’ transition from the heroic mode of kingship to the “more passive cosmic mode in which the king was not himself a being stretching for divinity but an interlocutor with Heaven, a stationary ritual pivot.”3 In the cosmic mode, this veneration also served to unite the community, as it connected the “ritual expressions of communal sanctity” with the participation in rites that evoked the universal sanctity of the Chinggisid line.4

Chinggis Khan’s successors, especially China’s Yuan and post-Yuan Mongol rulers, cultivated their ritualized connection with the imperial founder by expanding the devotional cult. During the 1260s, Qubilai established an eight-chambered complex where the remains of Chinggis Khan and his offspring were housed, and rituals were performed four times annually, probably in a seasonal routine.5 The Mongols were keen on appropriating not only the technological, intellectual, and material resources of their subjects but also their spiritual and ritual assets. In turn, their subjects offered their own and even others’ ritual resources to advance their own agendas and gain royal patronage. Confucian and Buddhist rituals and traditions were appropriated to buttress the Chinggisid cult and the dynasty’s funerary tablets and portraits were placed in Confucian ancestor temples in the capital, in the Hanlin academy, and in ancestral halls in Beijing’s main Tibetan Buddhist monastic centers.6

The Ilkhans also practiced the Chinggisid ancestor cult. Öljeitü’s itinerary, for example, included repeated visits to his brother’s tomb in Sham-i Ghazan, west of Tabriz, where “memorial feasts” of milk, alcohol, and sacrificial meat were possibly offered to Ghazan’s remains or to his effigy.7 Yet, Mongol burial customs also changed considerably in the Ilkhanate with the transition from unmarked gravesites to monumental tomb structures. The practice of burying the Chinggisid khans in undisclosed and forbidden gravesites, known as qoruq, stood in contrast to Muslim practices of burying the royal dead under monumental domed structures.8 Peter Jackson suggests that this difference, alongside other cultural-religious distinctions, might have initially hindered the Mongols’ conversion to Islam.9

After Ghazan’s conversion, however, the Ilkhans transitioned almost immediately to the construction of monumental tomb structures. The practice of burying the Mongol elite in monumental structures seems to have been likewise adopted by Mongols who were not converts, further suggesting that the gap between the two practices might not have been so great.10 Both burial practices, in fact, ultimately had the similar function of sanctifying the ruler’s grave, though they also carried different implications: the overstated absence of the qoruq, through its inaccessibility, secrecy, or “unknowability,” bolstered the supernatural, divinized power of the buried remains of the Chinggisid king; whereas the monumental, visually rich presence of the

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