Etigelov at Maidari

Abstract

Chapter 4 describes the summer festival of Maidari, the festival for the Maitreya Buddha held at the Ivolginsky monastery and an opportunity for pilgrims to worship the miraculously preserved body of Dashi-Dorzho Etigelov. Both Etigelov and Maitreya are bodhisattvas who return, bringing enlightenment. The history of Buryatia produced through this genre is a Tibetan Buddhist history with a recursive chronotope. Told as a history of bodies, this history recounts the stories of Etigelov’s life, death, and return; Lenin’s preservation; Soviet medicine; and the effects of these on post-Soviet Buryat bodies. While Maitreya will return in the future, Etigelov has already returned, bringing healing by producing a recursive chronotope, in which the Soviet experience is encompassed by a Buddhist history within which science and scholarship are shown to have been always, already Buddhist and Buryat.