Editing Agvan Dorzhiev (section)

== Ideas ==

Dorzhiev's intellectual case for the compatibility of Buddhism with Soviet power survives in two distinct registers, and later scholarship has cautioned against reading either as a straightforward statement of personal philosophical conviction.

The first register is written and relatively formal, though credit for its actual composition belongs less to Dorzhiev than to a younger academic associate: a set of theses drafted on June 1, 1926, in Verkhneudinsk (present-day Ulan-Ude) by the Buryat orientalist and public official Bazar Baradin, at Dorzhiev's explicit request, for a lecture Dorzhiev intended to deliver in person.<ref>Baradin, Bazar (2024 [1926]), "Тезисы к докладу Агвана Доржиева на первой международной буддийской выставке, предполагаемой в 1927 г. в г. Ленинграде" [Theses to Agvan Dorzhiev's Report at the First International Buddhist Exhibition Expected in 1927 in Leningrad]. Ed. Sergei P. Nesterkin. ''Вестник Российского университета дружбы народов. Серия: Философия'' 28.1: 126–135, p. 135.</ref> The intended occasion, a planned second and international Buddhist exhibition in Leningrad, was conceived as a sequel to the first Buddhist exhibition of 1919, organized in Petrograd under the leadership of Sergei Oldenburg and Fyodor Stcherbatsky, with public lectures delivered by Oldenburg, Stcherbatsky, Boris Vladimirtsov, and Otto Rosenberg, at a moment when Buddhism's evident dissimilarity from the Abrahamic faiths made it comparatively unthreatening to the new Soviet state.<ref>Nesterkin (2024), "Б. Барадин о буддизме", pp. 121–122.</ref> Stcherbatsky's own lecture at that first exhibition, arguing that Buddhism alone among the world's religions dispensed with a creator God, an immortal soul, and free will while still embodying the highest human ideals, supplied much of the ideological vocabulary that the later renovationist movement, Baradin and Dorzhiev included, would draw on in making its case to Soviet audiences.<ref>Nesterkin (2024), "Б. Барадин о буддизме", p. 123.</ref> The planned 1927 exhibition never materialized, apparently overtaken by the campaign against the Trotskyist opposition then convulsing Leningrad, and no record of its intended program survives beyond Dorzhiev's undelivered lecture.<ref>Nesterkin (2024), "Б. Барадин о буддизме", p. 124.</ref>

Baradin's theses set out four points of comparison between Buddhist doctrine and Western science: that the Buddha's teaching of the fundamental kinship of all living beings anticipated Darwin's findings on the continuity of humans with the rest of the animal kingdom; that Buddhism, like modern science, accepted a thoroughgoing principle of causal determinism, extending even to the workings of karma; that the concept of shunyata (śūnya), read in a relativistic sense that Baradin explicitly credited to his own teacher Stcherbatsky, anticipated Einstein's theory of relativity; and that the Buddhist system of psychotechniques anticipated the modern science of reflexology.<ref>Baradin (2024 [1926]), "Тезисы к докладу Агвана Доржиева", pp. 128–134.</ref> Snelling's English-language biography reproduces a version of this material in translation under the title "Buddhism as an Oriental Culture" and attributes its composition jointly to Dorzhiev and Baradin;<ref>Snelling (1993), ''Buddhism in Russia'', pp. 226–228.</ref> the 2024 publication of the underlying archival document, however, identifies Baradin as its sole author and gives it no title beyond a descriptive heading identifying it as theses for Dorzhiev's report.<ref>Baradin (2024 [1926]), "Тезисы к докладу Агвана Доржиева", p. 126.</ref> Their style has nonetheless been accurately described as strikingly European in idiom rather than "Asiatic," a feature directly attributable to Baradin's own academic training under Stcherbatsky rather than, as earlier scholarship sometimes assumed, to some indirect influence on Dorzhiev.<ref>Nesterkin (2024), "Б. Барадин о буддизме", p. 123.</ref>

The second register is oral and survives only through hostile filtration, in the reports of Soviet secret police informants. A report dated January 1, 1929, records Dorzhiev telling a Buddhist congregation that there was no great difference between Buddhism and Leninism, that Buddha, Marx, and Lenin had all defended the oppressed, and that Marxist atheism, properly understood, was compatible with the Buddhist rejection of a creator God.<ref>Sipeykin (2024), "Агван Доржиев и конец", p. 152.</ref> The statement served two audiences simultaneously: it offered Soviet listeners assurance of Buddhism's ideological conformity, while offering frightened Buddhist congregations, in the same breath, a defense of their religion's legitimacy and an implicit rebuke of the atheist activists then agitating against it.

Later scholarship, drawing on the fuller archival record, has generally concluded that Dorzhiev's arguments were pragmatic and diplomatic before they were systematic: calibrated to specific audiences at specific political moments rather than developed as a sustained philosophical synthesis. This does not mean they were insincere. Dorzhiev devoted his adult life to the institutional survival and intellectual standing of Buddhism, and the available evidence gives no indication of personal opportunism distinct from that underlying commitment.<ref>Snelling (1993), ''Buddhism in Russia'', p. 241.</ref> The 1926 theses are themselves a case in point: Dorzhiev, whose authority within the movement was religious and institutional rather than academic, turned to Baradin, a professionally trained orientalist with direct ties to the Academy of Sciences, to cast the case for compatibility in a scientific idiom that Dorzhiev himself was less equipped to supply, a division of labor that illustrates the coalition-based character on which renovationism depended throughout.<ref>Nesterkin (2024), "Б. Барадин о буддизме", p. 122.</ref> But his renovationism was, above all, an institutional and diplomatic strategy for survival under conditions of extreme constraint, rather than a work of original Buddhist-Marxist theory in the manner later attempted, for instance, by the Chinese lay Buddhist [[Wen Guangxi]].