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21 reviews for:
Genghis Khan and the Quest for God: How the World's Greatest Conqueror Gave Us Religious Freedom
Jack Weatherford
3.95 AVERAGE
21 reviews for:
Genghis Khan and the Quest for God: How the World's Greatest Conqueror Gave Us Religious Freedom
Jack Weatherford
3.95 AVERAGE
adventurous
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
A bit more disjointed than Weatherford's other work, but still endlessly entertaining as long as one isn't looking for an entirely objective source.
I enjoyed this because it synced with the way I always taught the Mongols in World History class--unable to directly rule their vast conquests, and possessed of a religion that didn't translate well to their new subjects, it made a lot more sense to take advantage of existing religions (especially those which preached, like the Orthodox Church, obedience to authority) for literacy, law codes and bureaucratic know-how, while not giving people additional reasons to resist. This is also a solid recap of the state of the world's faiths as of the 13th century, and the ways in which knowledge of the Mongol's religious tolerance trickled into 18th century enlightenment consciousness via Gibbon and Prester John novels in Jefferson's stack of reading material.
I’m really glad I read this. I really knew nothing about Genghis Khan and I certainly never would have attributed freedom of religion to him. I had no idea some much history exhibited about Genghis and I appreciated the way this was presented.
The Mongols believed that everyone had an innate inclination to self-preservation and comfort, but each person also had an innate attraction to honor and correct behavior. They were free to decide for themselves which of these instincts they would allow to dominate.
This quote by the author sets the tone for the book. I never expected I would admire Genghis Khan, the so called barbaric monster. Jack Weatherford narrates the journey of Genghis Khan beautifully. The book is not a chronicle of his life, but a highlight on the impact Genghis Khan has had on our world.
The Great Khan is one of the most controversial figure in medieval history. Some people admire his military courage whereas others scorn by the sound of his name. What no one denies is his conquest of the then known world. Apart from that, there are many aspects of Genghis's life that people are unaware about and author tries to shed light on that.
When medieval world was fighting the war of religion on every front, Genghis Khan was managing Buddhism, Taoism, Islam , Christianity among the few. He made sure there was no conflict in his administration by employing religious of masters of opposing religions. He was extremely rational and questioned Holy Men on their religion regularly. He understood importance of all and forged alliances by marrying his family in followers of varied religions. Author effortlessly ends up convincing reader on foundations of secularism propounded by The Great Khan.
This book has left me wanting more and I am going to explore more on Temujin's story and his legacy in the world.
This quote by the author sets the tone for the book. I never expected I would admire Genghis Khan, the so called barbaric monster. Jack Weatherford narrates the journey of Genghis Khan beautifully. The book is not a chronicle of his life, but a highlight on the impact Genghis Khan has had on our world.
The Great Khan is one of the most controversial figure in medieval history. Some people admire his military courage whereas others scorn by the sound of his name. What no one denies is his conquest of the then known world. Apart from that, there are many aspects of Genghis's life that people are unaware about and author tries to shed light on that.
When medieval world was fighting the war of religion on every front, Genghis Khan was managing Buddhism, Taoism, Islam , Christianity among the few. He made sure there was no conflict in his administration by employing religious of masters of opposing religions. He was extremely rational and questioned Holy Men on their religion regularly. He understood importance of all and forged alliances by marrying his family in followers of varied religions. Author effortlessly ends up convincing reader on foundations of secularism propounded by The Great Khan.
This book has left me wanting more and I am going to explore more on Temujin's story and his legacy in the world.
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Quotes too long to fit in the lil update box:
Yet despite the dubious credibility of what is presented as fact, such inscriptions reveal how people thought and what they valued. In choosing to exaggerate military deeds, acts of compassion, and declarations of love or of sexual conquest, the text reveals what the rulers valued most. What was omitted is always as important as what was included. Historical lies are still cultural truths. They tell us what the people wanted us to believe and what they feared, what they respected and what they despised or desired. The stones clearly exposed the ideals of the era.
-
The steppe Christians mounted no crusades against the Europeans and no jihad against Muslims. No one persecuted them as heretics or forced them to believe anything. They wandered freely in their land, with few constraints on their religion, not confined to special buildings or trapped in seemingly incessant arguments over the exact meaning of words. For arguably the first time in its thousand-year history, Christianity found nearly total freedom on the steppes of Mongolia.
-
Genghis Khan permitted some groups that had been consistently loyal to remain together under their traditional leaders, but his new empire would not be a collection of tribes with their own khans ruling over their traditional territories. He abolished all of the old tribes and clans that had resisted or betrayed him and redistributed the conquered subjects throughout his territory into new units of one hundred, one thousand, and ten thousand. He carefully blended his followers into mixed groups, placing former enemies or less reliable individuals into groups with people whom he trusted. These new units, adopted from the system used to ensure loyalty and conformity among the Uighurs, cut through kinship and class lines. Loyal men from the lowest families now ruled over descendants of khans and queens. To prevent the kinds of desertions and factionalism that characterized steppe life, he forbade any of his subjects to leave the units of ten warriors and families to which they had been assigned.
-
In general, Genghis Khan did not distinguish between degrees of crime when punishing his subjects; stealing a horse or telling a lie was no different from murder or betraying one’s family, in his view. He did not establish gradations of offenses; all crimes were equally wrong. To commit one such crime was to violate the moral principles of life. The person who would lie or commit adultery would surely steal or kill. Such people should not live in society, and thus the punishment, regardless of the infraction, was usually death. His rules were even harsher for those close to him. A guard who fell asleep on duty, the thief who took a horse, a subject who rebelled against his khan deserved equal punishment because they had all proven themselves unreliable and unworthy and could not be trusted members of society. Despite the fact that death was the prescribed penalty for virtually every crime, in practice Genghis Khan recognized that everyone was guilty of a crime at some time in his life. He usually showed mercy for the first few infractions and mostly executed habitual offenders.
-
Some foreign observers were mystified by the apparent lack of coordination among the Mongol warriors, who seemed to be dashing back and forth across the countryside, attacking one place, then leaving their work unfinished to race off to attack another. They even sometimes retreated in the midst of a victory without following through. The Mongol warriors were intentionally stirring up the population and driving people from their homes. Their goal was not to kill people but to use them as a weapon for the coming campaign against the capital city. Once amassed behind the city walls, the fleeing population quickly began to consume supplies of food and provoke panic and discord in populations living in crowded conditions, ripe for outbreaks of illnesses and rapidly spreading epidemics. Unable to escape the Mongol siege, the Tangut turned like animals ferociously on one another.
-
On his return to Zhongdu, Genghis Khan set up a camp about ten miles southwest of the city, near a bridge of remarkable beauty. The bridge was relatively new and spanned 874 feet across the modest Yongding River. In the shimmering light of the morning mist, its white marble floated serenely in the air, a phalanx of carved lions guarding its balustrade. The bridge looked like an arched stairway connecting one cloud to another. The Chinese called it the Lugou Qiao, but foreigners later called it the Marco Polo Bridge. The bridge still stands today, frequently repaired due to flood damage and war, but much the same as it was in Genghis Khan’s time.
-
Religious tolerance, although rare in history, was not completely new in the thirteenth century. In addition to the implicit religious tolerance of exceptional leaders such as Cyrus the Great and Alexander the Great, at least once before an emperor had issued an explicit Edict of Tolerance. That was the Roman emperor Julian, commonly known as Julian the Apostate because he had been born a Christian but rejected the faith in the year 361, when he became emperor. The following year he issued the Edict of Tolerance, allowing all types of Christians freedom of practice, restoring the Greek and Roman gods as the state religion, and naming himself, like previous emperors, the Pontifex Maximus, high priest of the empire. He offered to restore the Jewish Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, but despite his leniency toward some religions, he remained devoutly antiChristian, just as the Christians remained antiemperor. The edict, although justifiably famous for its unique intent, did not create religious freedom.
-
He told the Muslims that there was no need to go to the mosque to worship or to make the pilgrimage to Mecca because God was everywhere. He criticized, but did not forbid, such practices and more strenuously discouraged the Muslim punishment of amputation, the ritual of circumcision, and the veiling or segregation of women. Just as he detested foot-binding among Chinese, so he condemned some Muslim practices as deplorable and unclean. In his judgment, they violated the higher law of morality.
-
Despite the utility of Muslims as clerks, Genghis Khan deliberately limited the potential influence of any single religion by employing rivals of different sects and ethnicities and granting them overlapping responsibilities. [...] He forced Sunnis and Shias to work together, alongside Zoroastrians and Sufis. The tensions between them kept any one person from achieving too much power. Their personal animosities were so strong that they often suppressed negative attitudes toward the Mongols.
-
Chronicles in many languages, written by men of many different religions, echoed the same astonished and devastated assessment of the blood and ruin. We can hear it in the anguished cry of the author of The Novgorod Chronicle after the Mongols defeated the Russians at the Battle of Kalka in the spring of 1223: “And thus, for our sins God put misunderstanding into us and a countless number of people perished, and there was lamentation and weeping and grief throughout towns and villages. . . . And the Tartars turned back from the river Dnieper, and we know not whence they came, nor where they hid themselves again; God knows whence he fetched them against us for our sins.”
-
The relaxed informality of the Mongol court allowed Genghis Khan to put his guests at ease while he made quick and decisive evaluations of their character. He judged them by their answers to the easiest and seemingly most innocent questions before listening to their prepared speeches and philosophical discourses on the topics they considered most pressing. Queries about their name, age, family, and origin were not humble politeness or small talk. How visitors answered these questions played into his evaluation. He used the deceptively simple tactic of preceding a question with sweet words of flattery so that while the mind of the guest savored the taste of the compliment, the tongue began to wag freely.
-
Mongols often did not know their age and seemed not to care very much
about it, but the Chinese used the twelve-animal zodiac cycle, and most people, certainly an educated scholar, knew their year of birth. For a monk concerned with telling fortunes, the sign corresponding to the year, day, and hour of birth held great importance. As Yelu Chucai wrote, “He falsely stated that he did not know it. How can an intelligent person not know his age?” By this point, Yelu Chucai had formed a decidedly negative opinion of the sage, but Genghis Khan, accustomed to dealing with all sorts of men, was more tolerant of the evasive answers. Yelu Chucai claimed that if the sage could not be trusted to answer the simplest questions honestly, how could his advice be taken seriously?
-
Because the sage’s disciples claimed he had lived for more than three hundred years, Genghis Khan asked him to share the secret recipe of his life-prolonging medicine. He replied that the secret to eternal life did not come from an elixir but from following the correct path, which he then proposed to explain. As his entire reputation and the prosperity of his sect derived from selling elixirs that promised longevity, rival monks later mocked the sage for this answer.
-
When he was back in China, the Immortal Sage composed a poem about his visit, expressing his frustration at not having a greater impact:
For ten thousand li I rode on a Government horse,
It is three years since I parted from my friends.
The weapons of war are still not at rest.
But of the Way and its workings I have had my chance to preach.
On an autumn night, I spoke of the management of breath.
Later, a Chinese critic answered his poem with a shorter one, mocking the old sage’s inability to give comprehensible answers to the questions he had been asked by the Mongols.
He rode 10,000 li to the West
but could not answer the question.
-
All too often in history, religious leaders, when provided with a modicum of political power, turn arrogant and haughty. As Qiu Chuji traveled farther from the Mongol court, he exercised his power to issue orders, requisition whatever he wanted, dismiss priests and monks from holy places, and replace them with his followers. He confiscated rival temples and forced the conversion of monks from other faiths. He attracted followers because he now had the power to recognize them as ordained members of his sect and therefore to free them from taxes. He became a petty tyrant whom no one dared to challenge.
The sage and his followers became greedy and boasted of their power. “Even if we make no appeal for funds, we shall certainly receive assistance,” said one of his subordinates. “If by any chance sufficient help is not forthcoming—if we exhaust our own stocks of material and have come to the end of the temple-funds —all we have to do is go round with a gourd-bowl. We can collect as much money as we please.”
-
Confucian philosophy had no real gods, and its priests had no ability to control weather, forecast the future, or cure illness. How could they speak to heaven if heaven did not speak to them? Their rituals were formal and inaccessible, alienating the Mongols, who were used to participating in
ceremonies while seated on their horses, moving around as they pleased so that they could draw up close to friends and socialize while worshipping. [...] If the shaman or priest could not capture one’s attention with his show, it was doubtful he would attract the attention of the spirits. By contrast, Confucian rituals were simply boring.
-
Confucius emphasized the priority of the male lineage in almost every aspect of society, but Genghis Khan, having been so poorly treated by his male relatives, depended on and empowered women. Mongol women owned property, including the ger, and a share of the animals. They inherited
property from their families, but they also accrued it based on their service in peace or war, and they were often assigned control over men. Genghis Khan’s mother, daughters, and wives each had her own royal court and administered her lands, waters, and men. With only a million or so Mongols to maintain control over an empire of more than a hundred million people, Genghis Khan had to maximize the talents of every person to the fullest extent possible. The men were primarily his warriors, so he relied on women to administer the homeland, to control trade and finance, and to rule over many of the conquered nations, particularly along the Silk Route. [...] Practices such as these contributed to the Confucian view that the steppe barbarians were the antithesis of civilized. In their view, the Mongols were a tribe who claimed descent from a wolf and a deer; they were scarcely human. The Mongols had no sense of the proper separation of generations, classes, or sexes, and no understanding of etiquette or tradition.
-
Despite his differences with the Immortal Sage, Yelu Chucai consistently preferred the three religions he thought of as Chinese—Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. He dismissed Christianity and Islam as foreign and possibly dangerous. The Christians in the Mongol hierarchy were mostly women or the less powerful sons-in-law of the Great Khan, and Yelu Chucai initially perceived them as a lesser threat. By contrast, the rising influence of the Muslims in court greatly alarmed him. He seemed to enjoy finding small ways to diminish their supposed expertise in mathematics and science, the fields that Genghis Khan most admired. He reportedly once delighted in showing a Muslim prediction of an eclipse to have been wrong; the following year, his forecast was proved correct.
-
Having been through the classical Chinese education system with its emphasis on written exams, Yelu Chucai proposed that the Mongol government test the monks to make sure they qualified for the tax exemption by being, at the very least, able to read. The clergy resisted and angrily objected to even these simple standards, saying that reading was irrelevant to their work. They recited the scriptures that they needed from memory, and looked upon reading as a devious ploy for those not smart enough to memorize.
-
The Mongolian inscription is one of the oldest Mongolian poems recorded—an elegant endorsement of the value of knowledge and law over wealth and jewels:
Knowledge is an ocean, the jewel retreats before it,
the law of knowledge, the wise man knows.
Added as a postscript to the first book on the life of Genghis Khan, it seems a fitting summary of his quest in the final years of his life. By the time he left Afghanistan, he knew virtually everything there was to know about war and conquest, and he had accumulated more wealth than any other person in the world.
-
By the time Genghis Khan returned to his homeland after the second of his long foreign campaigns, most of the people he had known from childhood were long since dead, but the places remained the same. His wives were thriving, and each presided over her court in her own territory. Borte controlled the Kherlen River and adjacent steppes in the area of her birth. The woman who had once been kidnapped into a forced marriage and near servitude among the Merkid was now a queen, with deposed queens and princesses as her servants. Khulan administered the upper Khentii and the Onon River, Yesui the Tuul River, and Yesugen the upper Orkhon and Khangai Mountains.
-
In his decades of conquering people near and far, Genghis Khan had carefully examined the foreign religions of the world and found each of them— Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam—to hold valuable truths. Just as each land produces its particular crops and fruits, each religion had its own unique customs and value. “The books and writings of each nation follow the characteristics of their respective nation and differ in their themes and views,” wrote Injannasi in The Blue Chronicle many centuries later. “For example, the most fragrant and beautiful thing in this world is a flower, but not all flowers are the same. They all possess their characteristic colors. Fruits are tasty, but they all have a different taste.”
Poetry can be beautiful in any language, but each country has its own method and discipline. “While the Chinese use end rhyme, the Mongols use alliteration, the Tibetans use rhythm and the Manchu use parallelism in their speech.”
-
In the Mongolian lament for Genghis Khan, a mourner addressed the deceased conqueror soon after his death to express the shared agony of his people, who had never before seen such a leader. “Have you left this great nation behind?” he cried. “Did you lose yourself, Lord?” Or “did you fly off with the
wind?” Pleading on behalf of the whole nation, he asked: “Lord Genghis Khan, have you abandoned your old Mongol people?”
There was only silence as the mournful lament hung in the still air. But for those who cared to remember, Genghis Khan had already answered that question four years earlier in his last recorded dispatch from the battlefront.
“I have never forgotten you,” he wrote in a letter from Afghanistan. “Do not forget me.”
-
A life cannot properly be measured until it ends. One could argue that the greatest achievements of Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, or political figures such as Alexander, Caesar, and Cleopatra, lie less in what they themselves did, but in their legacies, in what they inspired their followers to do. Genghis Khan’s most enduring impact came from the laws he created and the dynamic energy he infused into his large and ever-growing state. His empire continued to expand for more than sixty years after his death, and it survived another century after that.
-
With the newly conquered territories, wealth poured back into Mongolia, but the heart of the empire had begun to rot. Behind the scenes the brothers squabbled. [...] While the brothers quarreled with each other and gradually absorbed the lands of their sisters, uncles, and their father’s aging widows, a completely new generation of women was coming to power—the wives so shrewdly chosen by Genghis Khan for his sons, who had been left in charge of court life while the men campaigned. Over the next thirty years until the rise of Khubilai Khan in 1260, these women held the empire together.
Spoiler
Yet despite the dubious credibility of what is presented as fact, such inscriptions reveal how people thought and what they valued. In choosing to exaggerate military deeds, acts of compassion, and declarations of love or of sexual conquest, the text reveals what the rulers valued most. What was omitted is always as important as what was included. Historical lies are still cultural truths. They tell us what the people wanted us to believe and what they feared, what they respected and what they despised or desired. The stones clearly exposed the ideals of the era.
-
The steppe Christians mounted no crusades against the Europeans and no jihad against Muslims. No one persecuted them as heretics or forced them to believe anything. They wandered freely in their land, with few constraints on their religion, not confined to special buildings or trapped in seemingly incessant arguments over the exact meaning of words. For arguably the first time in its thousand-year history, Christianity found nearly total freedom on the steppes of Mongolia.
-
Genghis Khan permitted some groups that had been consistently loyal to remain together under their traditional leaders, but his new empire would not be a collection of tribes with their own khans ruling over their traditional territories. He abolished all of the old tribes and clans that had resisted or betrayed him and redistributed the conquered subjects throughout his territory into new units of one hundred, one thousand, and ten thousand. He carefully blended his followers into mixed groups, placing former enemies or less reliable individuals into groups with people whom he trusted. These new units, adopted from the system used to ensure loyalty and conformity among the Uighurs, cut through kinship and class lines. Loyal men from the lowest families now ruled over descendants of khans and queens. To prevent the kinds of desertions and factionalism that characterized steppe life, he forbade any of his subjects to leave the units of ten warriors and families to which they had been assigned.
-
In general, Genghis Khan did not distinguish between degrees of crime when punishing his subjects; stealing a horse or telling a lie was no different from murder or betraying one’s family, in his view. He did not establish gradations of offenses; all crimes were equally wrong. To commit one such crime was to violate the moral principles of life. The person who would lie or commit adultery would surely steal or kill. Such people should not live in society, and thus the punishment, regardless of the infraction, was usually death. His rules were even harsher for those close to him. A guard who fell asleep on duty, the thief who took a horse, a subject who rebelled against his khan deserved equal punishment because they had all proven themselves unreliable and unworthy and could not be trusted members of society. Despite the fact that death was the prescribed penalty for virtually every crime, in practice Genghis Khan recognized that everyone was guilty of a crime at some time in his life. He usually showed mercy for the first few infractions and mostly executed habitual offenders.
-
Some foreign observers were mystified by the apparent lack of coordination among the Mongol warriors, who seemed to be dashing back and forth across the countryside, attacking one place, then leaving their work unfinished to race off to attack another. They even sometimes retreated in the midst of a victory without following through. The Mongol warriors were intentionally stirring up the population and driving people from their homes. Their goal was not to kill people but to use them as a weapon for the coming campaign against the capital city. Once amassed behind the city walls, the fleeing population quickly began to consume supplies of food and provoke panic and discord in populations living in crowded conditions, ripe for outbreaks of illnesses and rapidly spreading epidemics. Unable to escape the Mongol siege, the Tangut turned like animals ferociously on one another.
-
On his return to Zhongdu, Genghis Khan set up a camp about ten miles southwest of the city, near a bridge of remarkable beauty. The bridge was relatively new and spanned 874 feet across the modest Yongding River. In the shimmering light of the morning mist, its white marble floated serenely in the air, a phalanx of carved lions guarding its balustrade. The bridge looked like an arched stairway connecting one cloud to another. The Chinese called it the Lugou Qiao, but foreigners later called it the Marco Polo Bridge. The bridge still stands today, frequently repaired due to flood damage and war, but much the same as it was in Genghis Khan’s time.
-
Religious tolerance, although rare in history, was not completely new in the thirteenth century. In addition to the implicit religious tolerance of exceptional leaders such as Cyrus the Great and Alexander the Great, at least once before an emperor had issued an explicit Edict of Tolerance. That was the Roman emperor Julian, commonly known as Julian the Apostate because he had been born a Christian but rejected the faith in the year 361, when he became emperor. The following year he issued the Edict of Tolerance, allowing all types of Christians freedom of practice, restoring the Greek and Roman gods as the state religion, and naming himself, like previous emperors, the Pontifex Maximus, high priest of the empire. He offered to restore the Jewish Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, but despite his leniency toward some religions, he remained devoutly antiChristian, just as the Christians remained antiemperor. The edict, although justifiably famous for its unique intent, did not create religious freedom.
-
He told the Muslims that there was no need to go to the mosque to worship or to make the pilgrimage to Mecca because God was everywhere. He criticized, but did not forbid, such practices and more strenuously discouraged the Muslim punishment of amputation, the ritual of circumcision, and the veiling or segregation of women. Just as he detested foot-binding among Chinese, so he condemned some Muslim practices as deplorable and unclean. In his judgment, they violated the higher law of morality.
-
Despite the utility of Muslims as clerks, Genghis Khan deliberately limited the potential influence of any single religion by employing rivals of different sects and ethnicities and granting them overlapping responsibilities. [...] He forced Sunnis and Shias to work together, alongside Zoroastrians and Sufis. The tensions between them kept any one person from achieving too much power. Their personal animosities were so strong that they often suppressed negative attitudes toward the Mongols.
-
Chronicles in many languages, written by men of many different religions, echoed the same astonished and devastated assessment of the blood and ruin. We can hear it in the anguished cry of the author of The Novgorod Chronicle after the Mongols defeated the Russians at the Battle of Kalka in the spring of 1223: “And thus, for our sins God put misunderstanding into us and a countless number of people perished, and there was lamentation and weeping and grief throughout towns and villages. . . . And the Tartars turned back from the river Dnieper, and we know not whence they came, nor where they hid themselves again; God knows whence he fetched them against us for our sins.”
-
The relaxed informality of the Mongol court allowed Genghis Khan to put his guests at ease while he made quick and decisive evaluations of their character. He judged them by their answers to the easiest and seemingly most innocent questions before listening to their prepared speeches and philosophical discourses on the topics they considered most pressing. Queries about their name, age, family, and origin were not humble politeness or small talk. How visitors answered these questions played into his evaluation. He used the deceptively simple tactic of preceding a question with sweet words of flattery so that while the mind of the guest savored the taste of the compliment, the tongue began to wag freely.
-
Mongols often did not know their age and seemed not to care very much
about it, but the Chinese used the twelve-animal zodiac cycle, and most people, certainly an educated scholar, knew their year of birth. For a monk concerned with telling fortunes, the sign corresponding to the year, day, and hour of birth held great importance. As Yelu Chucai wrote, “He falsely stated that he did not know it. How can an intelligent person not know his age?” By this point, Yelu Chucai had formed a decidedly negative opinion of the sage, but Genghis Khan, accustomed to dealing with all sorts of men, was more tolerant of the evasive answers. Yelu Chucai claimed that if the sage could not be trusted to answer the simplest questions honestly, how could his advice be taken seriously?
-
Because the sage’s disciples claimed he had lived for more than three hundred years, Genghis Khan asked him to share the secret recipe of his life-prolonging medicine. He replied that the secret to eternal life did not come from an elixir but from following the correct path, which he then proposed to explain. As his entire reputation and the prosperity of his sect derived from selling elixirs that promised longevity, rival monks later mocked the sage for this answer.
-
When he was back in China, the Immortal Sage composed a poem about his visit, expressing his frustration at not having a greater impact:
For ten thousand li I rode on a Government horse,
It is three years since I parted from my friends.
The weapons of war are still not at rest.
But of the Way and its workings I have had my chance to preach.
On an autumn night, I spoke of the management of breath.
Later, a Chinese critic answered his poem with a shorter one, mocking the old sage’s inability to give comprehensible answers to the questions he had been asked by the Mongols.
He rode 10,000 li to the West
but could not answer the question.
-
All too often in history, religious leaders, when provided with a modicum of political power, turn arrogant and haughty. As Qiu Chuji traveled farther from the Mongol court, he exercised his power to issue orders, requisition whatever he wanted, dismiss priests and monks from holy places, and replace them with his followers. He confiscated rival temples and forced the conversion of monks from other faiths. He attracted followers because he now had the power to recognize them as ordained members of his sect and therefore to free them from taxes. He became a petty tyrant whom no one dared to challenge.
The sage and his followers became greedy and boasted of their power. “Even if we make no appeal for funds, we shall certainly receive assistance,” said one of his subordinates. “If by any chance sufficient help is not forthcoming—if we exhaust our own stocks of material and have come to the end of the temple-funds —all we have to do is go round with a gourd-bowl. We can collect as much money as we please.”
-
Confucian philosophy had no real gods, and its priests had no ability to control weather, forecast the future, or cure illness. How could they speak to heaven if heaven did not speak to them? Their rituals were formal and inaccessible, alienating the Mongols, who were used to participating in
ceremonies while seated on their horses, moving around as they pleased so that they could draw up close to friends and socialize while worshipping. [...] If the shaman or priest could not capture one’s attention with his show, it was doubtful he would attract the attention of the spirits. By contrast, Confucian rituals were simply boring.
-
Confucius emphasized the priority of the male lineage in almost every aspect of society, but Genghis Khan, having been so poorly treated by his male relatives, depended on and empowered women. Mongol women owned property, including the ger, and a share of the animals. They inherited
property from their families, but they also accrued it based on their service in peace or war, and they were often assigned control over men. Genghis Khan’s mother, daughters, and wives each had her own royal court and administered her lands, waters, and men. With only a million or so Mongols to maintain control over an empire of more than a hundred million people, Genghis Khan had to maximize the talents of every person to the fullest extent possible. The men were primarily his warriors, so he relied on women to administer the homeland, to control trade and finance, and to rule over many of the conquered nations, particularly along the Silk Route. [...] Practices such as these contributed to the Confucian view that the steppe barbarians were the antithesis of civilized. In their view, the Mongols were a tribe who claimed descent from a wolf and a deer; they were scarcely human. The Mongols had no sense of the proper separation of generations, classes, or sexes, and no understanding of etiquette or tradition.
-
Despite his differences with the Immortal Sage, Yelu Chucai consistently preferred the three religions he thought of as Chinese—Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. He dismissed Christianity and Islam as foreign and possibly dangerous. The Christians in the Mongol hierarchy were mostly women or the less powerful sons-in-law of the Great Khan, and Yelu Chucai initially perceived them as a lesser threat. By contrast, the rising influence of the Muslims in court greatly alarmed him. He seemed to enjoy finding small ways to diminish their supposed expertise in mathematics and science, the fields that Genghis Khan most admired. He reportedly once delighted in showing a Muslim prediction of an eclipse to have been wrong; the following year, his forecast was proved correct.
-
Having been through the classical Chinese education system with its emphasis on written exams, Yelu Chucai proposed that the Mongol government test the monks to make sure they qualified for the tax exemption by being, at the very least, able to read. The clergy resisted and angrily objected to even these simple standards, saying that reading was irrelevant to their work. They recited the scriptures that they needed from memory, and looked upon reading as a devious ploy for those not smart enough to memorize.
-
The Mongolian inscription is one of the oldest Mongolian poems recorded—an elegant endorsement of the value of knowledge and law over wealth and jewels:
Knowledge is an ocean, the jewel retreats before it,
the law of knowledge, the wise man knows.
Added as a postscript to the first book on the life of Genghis Khan, it seems a fitting summary of his quest in the final years of his life. By the time he left Afghanistan, he knew virtually everything there was to know about war and conquest, and he had accumulated more wealth than any other person in the world.
-
By the time Genghis Khan returned to his homeland after the second of his long foreign campaigns, most of the people he had known from childhood were long since dead, but the places remained the same. His wives were thriving, and each presided over her court in her own territory. Borte controlled the Kherlen River and adjacent steppes in the area of her birth. The woman who had once been kidnapped into a forced marriage and near servitude among the Merkid was now a queen, with deposed queens and princesses as her servants. Khulan administered the upper Khentii and the Onon River, Yesui the Tuul River, and Yesugen the upper Orkhon and Khangai Mountains.
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In his decades of conquering people near and far, Genghis Khan had carefully examined the foreign religions of the world and found each of them— Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam—to hold valuable truths. Just as each land produces its particular crops and fruits, each religion had its own unique customs and value. “The books and writings of each nation follow the characteristics of their respective nation and differ in their themes and views,” wrote Injannasi in The Blue Chronicle many centuries later. “For example, the most fragrant and beautiful thing in this world is a flower, but not all flowers are the same. They all possess their characteristic colors. Fruits are tasty, but they all have a different taste.”
Poetry can be beautiful in any language, but each country has its own method and discipline. “While the Chinese use end rhyme, the Mongols use alliteration, the Tibetans use rhythm and the Manchu use parallelism in their speech.”
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In the Mongolian lament for Genghis Khan, a mourner addressed the deceased conqueror soon after his death to express the shared agony of his people, who had never before seen such a leader. “Have you left this great nation behind?” he cried. “Did you lose yourself, Lord?” Or “did you fly off with the
wind?” Pleading on behalf of the whole nation, he asked: “Lord Genghis Khan, have you abandoned your old Mongol people?”
There was only silence as the mournful lament hung in the still air. But for those who cared to remember, Genghis Khan had already answered that question four years earlier in his last recorded dispatch from the battlefront.
“I have never forgotten you,” he wrote in a letter from Afghanistan. “Do not forget me.”
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A life cannot properly be measured until it ends. One could argue that the greatest achievements of Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, or political figures such as Alexander, Caesar, and Cleopatra, lie less in what they themselves did, but in their legacies, in what they inspired their followers to do. Genghis Khan’s most enduring impact came from the laws he created and the dynamic energy he infused into his large and ever-growing state. His empire continued to expand for more than sixty years after his death, and it survived another century after that.
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With the newly conquered territories, wealth poured back into Mongolia, but the heart of the empire had begun to rot. Behind the scenes the brothers squabbled. [...] While the brothers quarreled with each other and gradually absorbed the lands of their sisters, uncles, and their father’s aging widows, a completely new generation of women was coming to power—the wives so shrewdly chosen by Genghis Khan for his sons, who had been left in charge of court life while the men campaigned. Over the next thirty years until the rise of Khubilai Khan in 1260, these women held the empire together.
adventurous
challenging
informative
slow-paced
I learned SO MUCH about Genghis Kahn reading this book. I was so surprised to see how he often used the promise of religious freedom to gain control. It was also very insightful to learn about his origins and upbringing. Knowing that he lead to the deaths of approximately 40 million people, I was surprised to see there wasn’t as much of a focus on his militaristic side, but more so on his philosophical and political side. However, thematically speaking, this makes perfect sense when considering the title. I throughly enjoyed reading and learning from this book.
I don't think there's a historian writing today who is better at finding the gaps in history and turning them inside out for readers' enlightenment as Jack Weatherford. Writing on subjects as diverse as Mongols and Native Americans, Weatherford never fails to instruct, never fails to illumine.
Weatherford is on familiar ground with Quest for God is his fourth book on Genghis Khan and the Mongols, and having previously read Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, I wasn't sure if there was anything new to learn.
Boy was I wrong.
We don't think of Genghis Khan in any sort of religious context. To the Western mind Mongolia was far from the centers of religious practice--China, India, the Middle East. But in Weatherford's deft hand, Mongola was a crossroads of many ideas at the time Timujin became Genghis Khan--Manicheanism, Islam, Taoism--and it would only become more religiously diverse as Genghis's empire expanded and he invited scholars of all faiths to instruct and debate in his presence, all the while refusing to acknowledge any god other than the steppe's blue ocean of sky and brown expanse of land.
Weatherford traces the source of Genghis's religion to the abandonment of his mother and brothers as a young boy. Banished to a hill called Burkhan Khaldun, Genghis would there find his destiny. Once he began to conquer the tribes around him and unite the Mongols, he would return here, time and again, to affirm his destiny, granted not by any sage, seer, or mystic, but by heaven itself.
As Genghis Khan's empire expanded, then, he met all religions with equanimity, admiring the literacy and numeracy of Muslim clerics, the administrative skills of Confucians, and incorporating Jews and Syriac Christians into the wheels of power. The Mongols, never numerous enough to populate the lands they conquered, left most religious systems in place--all the while gutting political and religious elites (who were often corrupt and out of touch anyway).
Weatherford provides several in-depth looks at Genghis Khan's flirtation with Taoism, provided by contemporary chroniclers. In his final chapters, he marks the Mongols' impact on Buddhism, even to the point that the name, "Dalai Lama," is a Mongolian title that stems from their word for "sea."
Ultimately, Genghis Khan's empire was divided among his descendants and ultimately fell. During the Enlightenment, however, European thinkers led by Voltaire took a new look at him and celebrated his policies of religious freedom, which must have seemed attractive after a century of religious warfare. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had biographies of Khan in their libraries, and Weatherford connects this influence with Jefferson's own charter on religious freedom in Virginia, which would pave the way for the First Amendment.
This is a fascinating book, no matter where one lives in the world. Special thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an advanced galley in exchange for an honest review.
Weatherford is on familiar ground with Quest for God is his fourth book on Genghis Khan and the Mongols, and having previously read Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, I wasn't sure if there was anything new to learn.
Boy was I wrong.
We don't think of Genghis Khan in any sort of religious context. To the Western mind Mongolia was far from the centers of religious practice--China, India, the Middle East. But in Weatherford's deft hand, Mongola was a crossroads of many ideas at the time Timujin became Genghis Khan--Manicheanism, Islam, Taoism--and it would only become more religiously diverse as Genghis's empire expanded and he invited scholars of all faiths to instruct and debate in his presence, all the while refusing to acknowledge any god other than the steppe's blue ocean of sky and brown expanse of land.
Weatherford traces the source of Genghis's religion to the abandonment of his mother and brothers as a young boy. Banished to a hill called Burkhan Khaldun, Genghis would there find his destiny. Once he began to conquer the tribes around him and unite the Mongols, he would return here, time and again, to affirm his destiny, granted not by any sage, seer, or mystic, but by heaven itself.
As Genghis Khan's empire expanded, then, he met all religions with equanimity, admiring the literacy and numeracy of Muslim clerics, the administrative skills of Confucians, and incorporating Jews and Syriac Christians into the wheels of power. The Mongols, never numerous enough to populate the lands they conquered, left most religious systems in place--all the while gutting political and religious elites (who were often corrupt and out of touch anyway).
Weatherford provides several in-depth looks at Genghis Khan's flirtation with Taoism, provided by contemporary chroniclers. In his final chapters, he marks the Mongols' impact on Buddhism, even to the point that the name, "Dalai Lama," is a Mongolian title that stems from their word for "sea."
Ultimately, Genghis Khan's empire was divided among his descendants and ultimately fell. During the Enlightenment, however, European thinkers led by Voltaire took a new look at him and celebrated his policies of religious freedom, which must have seemed attractive after a century of religious warfare. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had biographies of Khan in their libraries, and Weatherford connects this influence with Jefferson's own charter on religious freedom in Virginia, which would pave the way for the First Amendment.
This is a fascinating book, no matter where one lives in the world. Special thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an advanced galley in exchange for an honest review.