About Grigoriy Potanin's buddhist collection

The authors of this article dedicated their work to anniversaries of outstanding Russian researcher Grigoriy Potanin - 185 years since his birth and 100 years since his death. For the first time in the research literature, the article examines activities of Potanin as a collector and scientist expert of Buddhist subjects. The authors studied the process of the origin of Potanin's interest in Eastern culture. It is known, that he was born in 1835 in the Cossack stanitsa of Yamyshevskaya on the Russian-Kazakh border. His grandfather kept as a relic a letter of Kazakh Khan Ablay. It is important to say, that during studies at the Omsk Cadet Corps, Grigoriy Potanin made friends with Ablay-Khan's great-grandson Chokan Valikhanov. Friends dreamed of traveling to the eastern countries. However, on the way to the realization of this dream Potanin met many obstacles. His dream began to come true in 1876, when he went on his first scientific expedition to Mongolia. Working in this expedition, Potanin got the first opportunity to explore Buddhist monasteries, began to record Buddhist as well as other Asian legends. During the following decades, Potanin made major scientific expeditions to Central and North Asia. He fulfilled the tasks of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, studied the geology, flora and fauna of Mongolia, Eastern China, Northern Kazakhstan. At the same time, he collected legends and cultural artifacts of Buddhism. Potanin visited many Buddhist monasteries in China and Mongolia, communicated with lamas and gained a deep knowledge of Buddhist culture. In 1887, Grigoriy Potanin became the ruler of the East-Siberian Department of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, and he was the head of the Irkutsk Museum simultaneously. Together with the Orthodox Priest I.A. Podgorbunskiy Potanin organized an exhibition of Buddhist objects, and it was the first exhibition in the history of the Irkutsk Museum. He attracted Siberian collectors to the exhibition and exhibited his own collection of Buddhist objects. In 1888, the organizers of the Buddhist exhibition published a catalogue, which included describing of 560 exhibits. This catalogue has been a bibliographic rarity, but it was republished at Tomsk State University in 2019, and became available. The catalogue of the Buddhist exhibition contains important information on the memorials of spiritual and material culture of Buddhism, and it has not lost its scientific significance today. All of that helps the authors of the article refer Potanin to one of the first Russian researchers of Buddhism. Therefore, it is quite reasonable to believe that Potanin was the first Russian investigator who organized the acquisition of Buddhist artifacts and transformation them into museum subjects.

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