Exorcising the Body Politic: The Lion’s Roar, Köten Ejen’s Two Bodies and the Question of Conversion at the Tibet-Mongol Interface

Abstract

This study examines thirteenth to twentieth century Tibetan and Mongolian monastic memorializations of the bodily violence enacted upon Koten Ejen at the center of the “Buddhist conversion of the Mongols.” Koten Ejen (Tib. Lha sras go tan rgyal po, 1206–1251) was Chinggis Khan’s grandson and a military leader involved in Mongol campaigns against the Song Dynasty and against Buddhist monasteries in eastern Tibet. In 1240, Koten famously summoned the Central Tibetan Buddhist polymath Sakya Paṇḍita, by then already an old man, to his court at Liangzhou. Examining Tibetan and Mongolian accounts about their meeting from the last seven centuries, this study shows that it was neither compelling philosophy nor some turn of faith that converted the Mongols. It was, rather, Sakya Paṇḍita’s violent therapeutic intervention into the space of Koten’s ill body that wrenched the Mongol body politic into the Dharmic fold.