Financing of Old Mongolian Monasteries as Model of Financing Civil Society Today

This article suggests that the financial system of old Mongolian monasteries may serve as a good model for civil society financing today. As a long accustomed procedure, the local community found a monastery, and each family contributed a small number of animals to jas (treasury), which funded the monastery's daily costs. As animals and herds grow, jas increase and strengthen, and the monastery expands its number of buildings and outside walls. A settlement emerged around the monastery with small shops and merchandise. It was called huree and understood as a town. Caravan routes emerge to huree to supply the local population with goods and herders also frequently visit huree to meet their cultural, religious, and daily needs such as flour, rice, and tea. The current lifestyle in soum centers (a usual country town where the lowest administrative units reside) has a long historical root of such settled life of huree, hundreds of which existed before the communist annihilation of 1930s. Later the communist ideology narrates that Mongols were nomadic barbarians till the mid-20th century and completely overlooked at settled history of Mongols, which in fact led to the annihilation of Mongolia as a civilization. Things like “local community” and “civil society” sound alien today for may Mongolians, who even call them “Western pets”. A careful study of jas however reveals that it is consistent with modern Western legal definitions of endowment and social entrepreneurship. It is a good historical justification for independent financing of civil society. It also demands us to study current lifestyle in soum centers and old huree culture in deep.