Under the Qing dynasty, Mongol intellectuals, historians in particular, had been convinced by the Qing emperors that they belonged to a single Buddhist continuum extending from India to Mongolia, and they also became interested in Chinese Buddhism. At a more popular level, the Sandalwood Buddha (Ch. Zhantanfo, Mong. Candan Juu) enshrined in a Beijing monastery, the Zhantansi旃檀寺or Hongrensi 弘仁寺, was a major site of pilgrimage for Mongols visiting the Qing capital. This statue reputed to be the only true, lifelike portrait of Buddha Shākyamuni - the holiest of all Buddha images - was one of the most important famous "relics" of Beijing. It helped to create for the Mongols, as it had done for the Chinese before, a direct link between their country and India. Geographically accessible from the steppe, the pilgrimage to Beijing became a substitute to the pilgrimage to India. Furthermore, the emblematic icon contributed to establish the Qing as a legitimate dynasty able to rule a multiethnic Buddhist empire, as it had done to earlier Northern Chinese dynasties. Through a short "biography" of this statue and description of the last Beijing temple that enshrined it, I will discuss the construction of Beijing as a site of pilgrimage for Mongols. I will then try to understand how the Sandalwood Buddha legend circulated in Mongolia through popular tales and official narratives. At last, I will present different replicas of the statue in Qing dynasty Beijing, in Tibet and in Mongolia to highlight the different interpretations of this image common to Tibetans, Mongols, and Chinese Buddhists. This article raises comparative questions on the adoption of foreign objects and narratives in situations of contact between cultures (how artifacts are culturally defined and put to use), on the circulation of miraculous images in North Asia, and on the insertion of eighteen century Mongols within a Buddhist historical continuum.
