Khambo Lama: Buryat Buddhism's Senior Lamas, and Tsyren Lama of Transbaikalia

The word is Tibetan in origin: khenpo, an abbatial or scholarly rank, joined to lama. In Mongolia and Russia, Khambo Lama became the title of a senior lama — roughly, the head of a monastery or of a region’s clergy. In Buryatia, Tuva, Altai and Mongolia it has been used for about three centuries.

Buddhism beyond Lake Baikal

The Buryats are a Mongolic people whose homeland lies around Lake Baikal in Siberia. Buddhism reached those east of the lake — Transbaikalia — from Mongolia in the early seventeenth century. Around 1712 some hundred Mongolian and fifty Tibetan monks arrived, and in 1741 the first permanent monastery, or datsan, was built at Tsongol. The same year the Empress Elizabeth formally recognised the faith and approved eleven monasteries.

In 1764, under Catherine II, the chief lama of Tsongol was given a new title: Pandito Khambo Lama, supreme lama of the Buddhists of Transbaikalia. The office still exists; its holder today heads the Buddhist Traditional Sangha of Russia. By 1917 there were 46 datsans and about 15,000 monks and students.

Itigelov

The most famous Pandito Khambo Lama is the twelfth, Dashi-Dorzho Itigelov (1852–1927), a scholar of medicine and philosophy who held the office from 1911 to 1917. He died in 1927 seated in meditation and was buried in that posture. When his body was exhumed in 2002, it was found remarkably preserved; it is kept today at Ivolginsky Datsan near Ulan-Ude. Buryat Buddhists regard him as remaining in meditation; scientists have offered natural explanations. Either way he has become the emblem of a tradition that outlived its persecutors.

Repression and revival

Between 1932 and 1939 the Soviet state destroyed the monasteries, imprisoned or killed the lamas and burned the books. In 1945 Ivolginsky Datsan was allowed to open, and with Aginsky Datsan, which resumed services in 1946, it was one of the very few Buddhist centres the Soviet state permitted for decades. After 1991 the tradition revived quickly: monasteries were rebuilt, a Buddhist university opened at Ivolginsky, and Russia today counts Buddhism among its traditional religions.

Tsyren Lama Dondukbaev

Tsyren Lama — civil name Andrey Lubsandashievich Dondukbaev — was born on 9 August 1962 in Chindant, in the Onon district of Transbaikalia. He entered Aginsky Datsan in 1980 and studied at the Zanabazar Buddhist Institute at Gandan Monastery in Ulaanbaatar, receiving the gabzhi degree, a doctorate in Buddhist philosophy, in 2004.

He rose through Aginsky Datsan — founded in 1810 and by the late nineteenth century Russia’s largest centre of Buddhist woodblock printing — to become its twentieth abbot in the 1990s, serving until 2000. Since 1996 he has been Did Khambo Lama, the regional deputy head of the Buddhist Traditional Sangha of Russia for Transbaikalia. The Aga collection of Buddhist woodblock prints has since been digitised under the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. In 2023 he was elected a vice-president of the International Buddhist Confederation.

In Bhutan

Tsyren Lama was invited to Bhutan in November 2025 for the Global Peace Prayer Festival in Thimphu. He will be in Gelephu from 1 to 4 November 2026 for the raising and consecration of the 108 Jangchub Chortens, bringing the Buddhist tradition of the Buryats to the gathering. The prayers and rituals in Gelephu are led by His Holiness the Je Khenpo, Bhutan’s Chief Abbot. The full list of masters is in Project 108 Masters.