For those of you curious about what informs my interpretations of the Mongolian scholar-poet Zava Damdin Luvsandarzhaa’s poetry, the following short essay may offer a helpful place to begin.

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Ever since co-translating Zava Damdin’s (b. 1976) song lines and stanzas for “The Great Nenchen” in the Green Wood Horse Year (2015), my way of studying Zava Rinpoche’s Mongolian dohas has gradually become a deliberately interdisciplinary practice.

I have come to feel that such poems do not yield well to any single method on its own. They ask instead for a way of reading that keeps several forms of attention in play at once. For me, that begins not with doctrine in the abstract, nor with literary taxonomy, but with Mongolian expressive worlds as they are lived and recognised: voice, memory, gesture, weather, kinship, landscape, animals, movement, and the felt texture of everyday relation. Only from there does it make sense to turn more fully to Mongolian Gelug Buddhism and its metaphysical depth, then to textual analysis, and only then to broader historical framing.

The order matters. It changes the poem one thinks one is reading.

In practice, this means relying less on any single settled method than on a cluster of neighbouring forms of scholarship. What we do have are a number of adjacent bodies of scholarship that help clarify the available approaches and the different results they tend to produce. The most useful of these lie in Mongolian anthropology and ethnography, Buddhist studies of Mongolian Buddhism, literary history, poetics, and translation-oriented reading of Mongolian texts.Taken together, they suggest that,

Reading a Mongolian doha well is less a matter of applying a settled method than of learning how to move responsibly between methods.

For me, the first and most necessary horizon is ethnographic context and Mongolian expressive worlds. A great many things in these dohas are missed when one reads them too quickly as “images” in the abstract. Birds, mist, steppe wind, moonlight, tea, old women, fathers, chest-voices, swans, springs, sky, dust, instruments, and remembered meetings do not enter the poem merely as decorative emblems. They come out of a Mongolian world of relation.

Caroline Humphrey’s work remains indispensable here, not because it explains poetry directly, but because it shows how deeply Mongolian expression depends upon relation, placement, comparison, moral bearing, and ways of inhabiting space with others (Humphrey 1997; 2016). Carole Pegg’s work on sounding place in Inner Asia sharpens this even further: it reminds us that voice, resonance, environment, and memory are not separable domains, and that sound itself may be spatial, social, and affective rather than merely musical (Pegg 2024). Read in this light,

A doha is not just a verbal artefact; it is also a small field of recognisable life.

The second horizon, for me, is Mongolian Gelug Buddhism and the metaphysical depth it gives to the form. A doha may seem plain on the surface, but it often carries pressures that are not exhausted by literary paraphrase: devotion, transmission, insight, ethical bearing, non-duality, impermanence, karmic relation, or the felt nearness of the Path. Mongolian Buddhist scholarship has increasingly shown that such expressions should not be treated simply as provincial echoes of some elsewhere-original Buddhism, but as local and historically active forms of Mongolian Buddhist understanding and practice (Ujeed 2009; Birtalan, Teleki, Béres et al. 2022). This is especially important in relation to the Mongolian scholar-poet Zava Damdin. Rinpoche’s dohas may be intimate, domestic, or culturally textured, but that does not make them less metaphysical. On the contrary, one of their particular strengths is the way they allow insight, memory, image, and devotion to remain in relation without forcing them into separate compartments.

Only after that do I turn, in any sustained way, to textual analysis. By this I mean not simply “close reading” in the modern literary-critical sense, though that too matters, but attention to the actual workings of the line: repetition, refrain, parallelism, image-sequence, verbal texture, tonal turn, and rhetorical balance. Simon Wickham-Smith’s literary history of Buddhism in Mongolia is helpful precisely because it situates Mongolian Buddhist writing within literary history rather than treating it as transparent religious content (Wickham-Smith 2015). That matters a great deal when reading doha.

These poems are not only vehicles for Buddhist meaning; they are carefully made verbal forms. A line may hinge on one verb. A repeated phrase may create incantatory steadiness. A cultural image may bear both ordinary and spiritual force at once. In practice, this is why I work line by line. Not because the poem can be reduced to philology, but because the line is often where the poem decides what kind of reading it will permit.

Historical framing comes after that, though it remains necessary. Once one has some feel for the world of the poem, and some sense of its Buddhist and textual pressures, then questions of intellectual history and literary history begin to matter differently. One can ask how Mongolian Buddhist writing has inherited, adapted, and transformed older doha-like forms; how Gelug scholastic and devotional currents have entered Mongolian poetic speech; how contemporary revival, modern readership, and local literary preference shape the language of recent dohas; and how figures such as Zava Damdin (b.1976) stand within both continuity and renewal. Historical framing, in other words, is not something I would now place at the beginning of reading, but it becomes crucial once the poem has begun to disclose its own bearings.

This ordering of methods is not accidental. Different methods produce different poems. A doctrinal reading may hear emptiness or transmission where a literary reading hears refrain and tonal balance. An ethnographic reading may recognise a lived Mongolian intimacy where a metaphysical reading recognises devotion or karmic relation. A historical reading may place a poem within revival and lineage, while a translator’s reading may become absorbed by the weight of a single term. None of these is wrong. The difficulty begins only when one of them is taken to be sufficient on its own.

That is why I have become increasingly convinced that studying Zava Damdin’s Mongolian doha involves a synthesis of textual analysis, ethnographic context, historical framing, and metaphysical depth. That is not simply a neat conclusion to state at the end; it is, for me, the central fact of the work.

If reading a Mongolian doha well is less a matter of applying a settled method than of moving responsibly between methods, then my own readings have become increasingly process-based. As so often with Zava Rinpoche’s dohas, the shape of an English interpretation emerges through the process of working line by line — closer, perhaps, to grounded theory and reflexive practice than to the application of any fixed method — and that process, however many times I return to it, seems to unfold differently each time. Some dohas invite greater plainness in English; some require more cultural texture to be retained; some need space left around them so that imagery can work without explanation; some have to be approached through sound first, others through metaphysical pressure, others through the world they assume. Some call for extensive translator’s notes and glossaries drawn from one or more epistemological domains of knowledge; others do not.

The doha itself, if one stays with it long enough, begins to teach the method by which it wants to be read.

This, finally, is what I most want to communicate to readers approaching Mongolian doha for the first time. One is not simply “decoding” a mystical text. One is learning how to remain answerable to several kinds of truth at once: the truth of language, the truth of culture, the truth of Buddhist thought, the truth of history, and the truth of one’s own reading practice. That is why, for me, the study of Zava Damdin’s dohas continues to feel less like the application of a method than like an ongoing discipline of attunement. It begins in Mongolian expressive worlds, deepens through Mongolian Gelug Buddhism, sharpens through textual analysis, and is steadied by historical framing. Taken together, these do not simplify the poem. They allow it to remain, to the best of my abilities, fully itself.

Catherine Pleteshner
Research Fellow (Nomadic and Buddhist Philosophies)
for the Zava Damdin Sutra and Scripture Institute of Mongolia

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References

Artscape 02: The Great Nenchen

Birtalan, Ágnes, Krisztina Teleki, József Béres, eds. 2022. Aspects of Mongolian Buddhism 3: Tradition and Innovation.

Humphrey, Caroline. 1997. “Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse of Moralities in Mongolia.” In The Ethnography of Moralities, edited by Signe Howell. London: Routledge.

Humphrey, Caroline. 2016. “Placing Self amid Others: A Mongolian Technique of Comparison.” L’Homme 219–220.

Pegg, Carole. 2024. Drones, Tones, and Timbres: Sounding Place among Nomads of the Inner Asian Mountain-Steppes.

Ujeed, Hurelbaatar. 2009. Indigenous Efforts and Dimensions of Mongolian Buddhism Exemplified by the Mergen Tradition. PhD diss., SOAS, University of London.

Wickham-Smith, Simon. 2015. “A Literary History of Buddhism in Mongolia.” In Buddhism in Mongolian History, Culture, and Society, edited by Vesna Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

End of transcript.

Please refer to the INDEX for other Mongolian poems and articles that may be of interest.

© 2013-2026. CP in Mongolia. “Letter from Mongolia 18: a deliberately inter-disciplinary practice” is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Documents linked from this page may be subject to other restrictions. Posted: 21 April 2026. Last updated: 21 April 2026.