Mikhail Erentsenov, About Zul and Buddhism in the Soviet Period
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Mikhail reminisces about his childhood and relays a story about how people celebrated Zul and about his experience with Buddhism: I was friends with the granddaughter of Begali Onkorov who was the richest herder in Kalmykia. What I liked about Zul is when people made pancakes in the shape of boats (tsokts), baked them and ate them. We searched for sharljn, a kind of dry grass, then made a certain number of wicks by wrapping the dry grass in cotton. We melted butter several times, so that there was no black soot in it. Zul was first a religious holiday, not a secular one. In my childhood my grandmother often went to Tsagan-Aman to see a famous lama. She was also friends with grandfather Ubushiev, who wrote on Todo bichig (old Kalmyk script) and read prayers. Once I decided to paint the thangka of Green Tara. My grandmother liked my work. Grandfather Ubushiev asked me to paint another thangka for him, and promised to pay 3 rubles for that. I remember there was also one man who cut tsokts boats out of bronze. One day my grandmother asked me to draw a Green Tara, and set off to Tsagan-Aman to see the lama to ask him to animate the drawing. That lama asked who I was and told my grandmother that I should be brought to him and sent to study in Tibet. It was in 1966. I declined. That lama flew to Lhasa from time to time, for back then relations between the Soviet Union and China were good.