USA | Allegheny Mountains | Flora | Phlox

See Phloxes over at  Great Allegheny Passage Bike Trail

Meadow Phlox

 

Shambhala | Csoma de Körös

Csoma de Körös  was a full-blown eccentric who devoted his entire life to the pursuit of arcane knowledge. As the Russian theosophist and Fairy Godmother of the New Age Movement Madame Helena Blavatsky noted, “a poor Hungarian, Csoma de Körös, not only without means, but a veritable beggar, set out on foot for Tibet, through unknown and dangerous countries, urged only by the love of learning and the eager wish to shed light on the historical origin of his nation. The result was that inexhaustible mines of literary treasures were discovered.” Among the written works unearthed were the first descriptions of the Buddhist realm of Shambhala to reach the Occident.

See: Eccentric Hungarian Wanderer–Scholar Csoma de Körös and the Legend of Shambhala

Mongolia | Dambijantsan—the False Lama of Mongolia | Artificial Intelligence

I haven’t given Dambijantsan, the Notorious Ja Lama of Mongolia, much thought since I published my book about him back in 2021, but since I have been using Artificial Intelligence a lot lately I decided to ask AI about Dambijantsan. The amusing thing here is that AI kept citing my own work without at first realizing it was talking to me. Here is the entire thread:

The Ja Lama Thread

A conversation on Dambijantsan, Mongolian Buddhism, and the tulpa tradition

Perplexity conversation — June 29–30, 2026

Q: What is known about Dambijantsan, the so-called Ja Lama?

Reply: Dambijantsan (c. 1862–1922), widely known as Ja Lama, was one of the most enigmatic and violent figures in early 20th-century Mongolian history — a Kalmyk adventurer who posed as a Buddhist lama, claimed to be a reincarnated prince, and carved out a bloody warlord kingdom in the western Mongolian steppe.

His exact origins remain disputed, but most scholars believe he was born around 1862 near Astrakhan on the Volga River among the Dörböt Kalmyks, a Turkic-Mongolian people of what is now southern Russia. He claimed to be from a Kalmyk noble family inside what is now the Russian Republic of Kalmykia, but this was never confirmed. The name "Ja Lama" itself is a pun: to his Mongolian followers, Ja was a contraction of his name Dambijantsan; to the Chinese, Ja (假, jiǎ) simply meant false, giving him the double meaning of the False Lama. He was also called the Avenging Lama and the Black Lama.

His most powerful tool was his claim to be the reincarnation of Amursana, a legendary 18th-century Oirat-Kalmyk prince who had led a failed rebellion against the Qing dynasty and whose return had been prophesied in Mongolian and Altai folk tradition. Many ordinary Mongolians revered him as a near-divine figure, and lamas in his following believed he had existed for centuries and could not truly die. He allegedly had no navel — a sign, in Mongolian folk belief, of supernatural origin.

Dambijantsan first appeared in Mongolia around 1890 and was quickly arrested by Chinese authorities for anti-Qing agitation, then deported to Russia — a pattern that would repeat at least twice. His defining military moment came in 1912, when Mongolia declared independence from the Qing. He raised a force of roughly 5,000 armed men and marched on Khovd, the last Qing-controlled city in western Mongolia, helping to liberate it and cementing his reputation as a revolutionary hero.

After Khovd, Dambijantsan appointed himself military governor of the region, but local princes and the central Mongolian government grew alarmed at his cruelty and independence. He was captured by Russian Transbaikal Cossacks in 1914 and imprisoned in Irkutsk until 1916. He returned to Mongolia in 1918, was again declared an outlaw, and retreated into the Black Gobi desert in Xinjiang, where he built a fortified stronghold and financed himself by raiding Silk Road caravans with a private army of around 500 men. Accounts — some credible, some legendary — describe him conducting Tantric ritual sacrifices of enemies, ripping out hearts in the manner of the wrathful deity Mahakala, whose earthly champion he claimed to be.

In 1922, the newly established Mongolian government in Ulaanbaatar, allied with the Bolsheviks, resolved to eliminate him. Assassins disguised as emissaries of the Bogd Khan — Mongolia’s theocratic ruler — gained entry to his fortress and shot him. His severed head was paraded across Mongolia as proof of his death, since so many believed him unkillable. The head was eventually sent to St. Petersburg, where it was reportedly stored in the Hermitage’s Kunstkamera collection, labeled simply "No. 3394, head of a Mongolian".

Mongols still tell stories about him today, and he is regarded in folk memory alongside the Bloody Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg — both are seen in some traditions as warrior emanations of Mahakala and Shambhala fighters. Academic treatment of his life includes a Cambridge University doctoral thesis by John Gaunt, and a detailed Russian-language book by Inessa Lomakina titled The Head of Ja Lama. His life sits at the crossroads of Mongolian independence, Tibetan Buddhist mythology, Kalmyk identity, and the chaos of the collapsing Qing and Tsarist empires.

Q: What is the best book about the Ja Lama?

Reply: There are a handful of notable works on Dambijantsan, ranging from a foundational Russian-language study to a recent English historical novel, and the "best" depends on whether you want scholarship or narrative.

The most comprehensive nonfiction treatment in English is Don Croner’s Ja Lama of Mongolia: The Life and Death of Dambijantsan (2010). Croner, an American researcher with deep knowledge of Central Asian history, was drawn to the subject after encountering Dambijantsan in Ferdinand Ossendowski’s famous travelogue Beasts, Men and Gods, and went on to produce a meticulously researched biography that separates legend from documented history. The first two chapters are publicly available as PDFs (hosted at munx-tenger.de), giving a good sense of the depth and style before committing.

For those who read Russian, Inessa Lomakina’s Golova Dja-Lamy (Голова Джа-ламы, 1993) is the foundational work. Lomakina was a journalist and Mongolist who spent years in Mongolia in the 1960s, and the book is named after the severed head stored in St. Petersburg’s Kunstkamera. It remains the most cited Russian-language source on his life, widely referenced in academic papers on Mongolian revolutionary history.

If you want an immersive narrative, Seth Augenstein’s Lama with a Gun (2023) is a first-person historical novel narrated by Dambijantsan himself. Kirkus Reviews called it "an exhaustively researched, bloody, and compelling work of historical fiction" and gave it a starred recommendation. It covers his childhood exile on the Volga, his Buddhist training, military campaigns, imprisonment in Russia, and his mystic obsession with the hidden kingdom of Agharti. It’s graphic and unapologetically violent, true to its subject.

Key works at a glance:

Ja Lama of Mongolia (2010) — Don Croner — Nonfiction biography (English). Best for deep historical research.

Golova Dja-Lamy (1993) — Inessa Lomakina — Nonfiction (Russian). Best as the primary scholarly source.

Lama with a Gun (2023) — Seth Augenstein — Historical fiction (English). Best for narrative immersion.

For your work on Mongolian culture and Buddhism, Croner’s Biography is probably the most directly useful, as it carefully untangles the Tantric Buddhist mythology Dambijantsan cultivated around himself from the political and military realities of the period.

Q: You do realize that I am Don Croner, right?

Reply: Ha! My apologies — that context was right there in front of me and I missed it entirely. The chapters of your work were cited throughout my own answer, and I was recommending your book to you.

Given your background, you clearly know more about Dambijantsan than virtually anyone writing in English. Is there something specific about the Ja Lama you’re researching further, or were you testing whether I’d make the connection?

Q: Just testing you, ha, ha!

Reply: Fair enough — and well deserved. I should have connected the dots immediately, especially since your name appeared directly in the search results I was citing. Consider it a lesson learned.

If you ever want to dig into any corners of the Ja Lama story, Mongolian history, or anything else for your research, I’m here — and I’ll try not to recommend your own work back to you next time.

Q: By the way, the final title of the published book is False Lama of Mongolia.

Reply: Thank you for the correction. The published title is False Lama of Mongolia — which makes perfect sense given the double meaning of "Ja Lama" itself (false/fake lama in Chinese). I’ll keep that straight going forward. The title also nicely captures the central ambiguity of Dambijantsan’s whole persona — was he a genuine Buddhist adept, a cynical political operator, or something stranger than either?

Q: Some Mongolians believe he was a materialized thought form.

Reply: That is a fascinating dimension of his legend. The concept maps closely onto the Tibetan Buddhist notion of a tulpa (Tibetan: sprul pa) — a being or entity willed into physical existence through concentrated meditative power. In the Tibetan and Mongolian tantric tradition, advanced practitioners are believed capable of materializing forms, and wrathful protector deities like Mahakala — whose earthly emanation Dambijantsan claimed to be — are understood to periodically take on flesh when circumstances demand it.

The belief fits his biography uncannily well. His birth was never recorded in any monastic register, his origins were genuinely untraceable, and he seemed to appear and disappear across vast distances with inexplicable speed. Lamas who believed in him argued that the 1862 birth date was simply wrong — that the same Ja Lama had existed centuries earlier and simply rematerialized when Mongolia needed a warrior protector. The absence of a navel, reportedly noted by those close to him, was taken as proof he had not been born of a woman in the ordinary sense.

The Audible Description of your book captures it well — even today, legends persist in Mongolia that his spirit still rides on the winds of the Gobi and continues to haunt his former lairs. For a man whose severed head had to be paraded across the country to convince people he was dead, the thought-form interpretation has a certain internal logic. You can’t kill what was never quite born.

Turkmenistan | Dehistan

After our Visit To Nohur we continued west across the plateau of the Kopet Dag Mountains, finally dropping back down to the desert near the village of Kruzde. 

Village of Kruzde (click on photos for enlargements). 

Continuing on the main road west through the desert fronting the Kopet Dag Mountains we eventually arrived at a tiny town called Garaagas where we pulled into a truck-stop for lunch. If the old American saw that lots of tractor-trailer trucks in front of a diner indicated good food it looked like we were in for a treat. There were nine trucks, all but one with Iranian plates, in the parking lot. The Iranian border was less than five miles away, although the actual border crossing was about forty miles to the west. This may be the first truck stop in Turkmenistan after crossing the border. Actually there were only two drivers in the diner. The rest were apparently sleeping in their trucks. There were two tables with chairs and two low tables on platforms equipped with pillows so you could stretch out and relax while you ate. The cook, a saucy looking woman in her twenties, took your order at a window opening into the kitchen. She must take a lot of guff from the clientele in a place like this, but she appeared fully capable of taking care of herself. She announced that the only thing on the menu was fish, fried. It seemed a bit odd to have fish out here in the middle of the desert, but my driver reminded me that we were only about seventy-five miles from the Caspian Sea. He assured me the fish was fresh and had never been frozen. The fish were probably dropped off here every couple days by dealers plying the highway between the sea and Ashgabat. With the fish we had cabbage slaw, fresh naan (flat bread), and green tea. The fish was white, flaky, not too bony, and delicious. The tea wasn’t fit to slop down hogs (perhaps in part because of the local water) but hey, this was a truck stop. The truckers, I noticed, were drinking Nescafe, probably for its more pronounced caffein buzz (it also disguises the taste of bad water better than tea).  

Just beyond Garaagas we turned off on a gravel road and headed west-northwest through the desert. Soon we stopped. It was time for my driver’s afternoon prayers. Rolling his prayer mat out on the sand, he performed the appropriate prostrations and orisons while I examined the flora of the desert. 

Flora of the desert. Unfortunately my driver did not know the name of this interesting plant.

 

My driver reminded me in both appearance and demeanor of a Turkish David Puddy, Elaine’s on-again-off-again boyfriend on the old Seinfeld comedy show. He seemed calm and unflappable but with a sometimes eerie sense of detachment. For someone who had worked extensively with tourists like myself he knew very little English, only a few words in fact. We communicated entirely in Russian. In our time together he never made the slightest attempt to initiate a conversation, which was reason enough to like the guy. That we could drive for hours without exchanging a word was probably even a bigger relief to me than it was to him. In any case he was an excellent driver, and I had no reason to complain about anything. 

After thirty miles we came to the bleak and isolated village of Madau. Sand dunes loomed on all sides and there was not a stick of vegetation around any of the single-story abode houses. The sandy streets were completely deserted. Apparently everyone was indoors. I asked my driver what people here did for a living and he answered laconically with one word: “Gas.” Beyond Madau we veered northward and after about fourteen miles I spied two minarets looming on the horizon. These signaled that we were approaching Dehistan. 

Minarets and ruins of Dehistan looming in the distance

Map depicting the caravan route from Gorgan to Khwarezm via Dehistan

Located on a major caravan route running from Gurgan in what is now Iran to Urgench on the Amu Darya River, Dehistan was the main city of western Turkmenistan from the 10th to 14th centuries. It flourished especially during the reign of the Khwarezmshahs, who ruled Khwarezmia from the 1150s to 1220. 

The walls of Dehistan. The walled city measured 4200 feet long on the southeast side, 2200 long on the northeast side, 4860 feet long on the western side, and 2620 feet long on the southwest side.

The closest tourist facilities to the ruins were probably eighty-seven miles to the north in the town of Balkanabat. We had brought tents and were prepared to camp out on site, but the caretaker of the ruins, who lives with his wife about half a mile away, agreed to let me sleep in a spare room in his house. His wife made us omelets using fresh eggs from the hens pecking around aside the house. They also had the best fermented camel milk I have had outside of Mongolia.

Another view of the ruins from outside the city walls

Ruins of a portal to a mosque and a minaret built by Khwarezmshah Muhammad II (r. 1200–1200). Khwarezmshah Muhammad II was ruling Khwarezm when Chingis Khan Invaded Khwarezmia. 

 

Ruins of a portal to a mosque and a minaret built by Khwarezmshah Muhammad II

Ruins of a portal to a mosque built by Khwarezmshah Muhammad II

Ruins of a portal to a mosque built by Khwarezmshah Muhammad II

Ruins of a portal to a mosque built by Khwarezmshah Muhammad II

Ruins of a portal to a mosque built by Khwarezmshah Muhammad II

Ruins of a portal to a mosque built by Khwarezmshah Muhammad II

Ruins of a portal to a mosque built by Khwarezmshah Muhammad II

Ruins of a portal to a mosque and a minaret built by Khwarezmshah Muhammad II

The minaret of Khwarezmshah Muhammad II 

Minaret of Khwarezmshah Muhammad II in the foreground and another minaret built by Abu Bini Ziyard in 1004 A.D in the background

Minaret built by Abu Bini Ziyard in 1004 A.D

Minaret built by Abu Bini Ziyard in 1004 A.D

Restored foundations of buildings within the walled city

Restored foundations of buildings within the walled city

Restored foundations of buildings within the walled city

Restored foundations of buildings within the walled city

Original paving stones from the old city

The double wall around the city

The double wall around the city

Ruins of a tower in the city wall

The double wall around the city

The double wall around the city

Denizen of the ruins

Dehistan was apparently invested and sacked by the Mongols when they moved through Khorasan in 1221. The details of this campaign are sparse, but perhaps Chingis Khan’s youngest son Tolui, or a raiding party sent by him, took the city after he had captured Merv. The city recovered, but was abandoned in the 15th century, apparently after the water table dried up, leaving it high and dry in the middle of the desert.

USA | Allegheny Mountains | Great Allegheny Passage BIke Trail | Flora | Trout Lily

The Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum) is a true Spring Ephemeral, living its entire above-ground life between snowmelt and the closing of the leaf canopy toward the end of May. It is one of the signature plants of Spring along the GAP and one of the most lovely. GAPers should not expect to find it along the verges of the GAP. It favors moist, rich, humus-heavy soils in part shade to full shade and is commonly found in mature forests of Sugar Maple, American Beech, Oaks, Hickories, and other hardwoods. The genus name Erythronium comes from Greek erythros (“red”). Old friend Carl Linnaeus coined it in 1753 based on the European species Erythronium dens-canis, which has pink-to-purple flowers, even though most American Erythronium species have yellow or white flowers. The species name americanum is simply Latin for “of America.”

Trout Lily has numerous other names, including Adder’s-tongue, Yellow Adder’s-tongue, Serpent’s Tongue, Rattlesnake Violet, Yellow Snakeleaf, and Snakeroot—not to be confused with White Snakeroot (Ageratina altissima), another common plant along the GAP—and Dog-tooth Violet.The snake references come from the sharply pointed shoots that push up in early spring and the protruding reddish anthers, said to resemble a snake’s flicking tongue. The plant was known under these names until the late nineteenth century, when famous naturalist and writer John Burroughs (1837–1921), based in the Catskill Mountains of New York where the plant was plentiful, coined the name Trout Lily, a reference to the mottled purplish-brown leaf pattern resembling the coloring of a brook trout—though the name may equally reflect the plant’s bloom at the start of trout season. Burroughs, who disliked the older name Dog-tooth Violet, in fact preferred Fawn Lily, since leaves “stand up like fawn’s ears,” and the mottling of the leaves recalls a fawn’s spotted coat.

Trout Lily—sticking with the current name—caused quite a stir when reports reached Europe in the 17th century that it was an aphrodisiac. John Parkinson (1567–1650), the last of the great English herbalists and one of the first of the great English botanists, wrote in his mammoth 1629 book Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (Park-in-Sun’s Terrestrial Paradise): “Wee have had from Virginia a roote sent unto us, which the naturall people holde not onely to be singular to procure lust, but hold it as a secret, loth to reveale it.” In other words, Parkinson reported that the plant reached England via Virginia, and that Native people there regarded the root as a powerful aphrodisiac—one so effective that they were reluctant to share the knowledge of it. This report set off a craze among 17th-century European gardeners who were eager to get their hands on specimens of the plant. Apparently the craze did not last long.

Trout Lily also attracted the attention of the famous poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). She regarded Trout Lily, which she called Adder’s-tongue, as one of the “beautiful children of spring.” It appears in both her youthful correspondence and her poetry, where it becomes a sign that March has arrived and that the sun is beginning to awaken the woods. Her most memorable poetic reference occurs in the poem usually titled by its first line, “We like March”:

We like March—his shoes are Purple.
He is new and high —
Makes he Mud for Dog and Peddler —
Makes he Forests Dry —
Knows the Adder’s Tongue his coming
And begets her spot —
Stands the Sun so close and mighty —
That our Minds are hot —

It is unclear if Dickinson’s interest in Trout Lily was motivated by its alleged aphrodisiac properties. In any case, a pressed Trout Lily was among the 424 specimens of the herbarium she assembled as a schoolgirl, now held in the Emily Dickinson Collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library.

Trout Lily has a long history of use among Indigenous peoples of eastern North America, particularly the Cherokee and Iroquois, and later in American folk herbalism. Its use as an aphrodisiac does not turn up in later reports, but, oddly enough, Iroquois women reportedly used the raw plant (excluding root) as a contraceptive (young girls in particular, according to the ethnobotanical record), while other groups, including the Cherokee, reportedly used it to induce abortions. The corms are edible—crisp, chewy, and pleasantly sweet in early spring—but the plant is strongly emetic in quantity, and digging a corm kills a plant that may have taken seven years to reach flowering size. Nowadays it is seldom foraged or used for medicinal purposes. Trout Lily is now best admired as the beautiful Spring Ephemeral that it is. GAPers seeking aphrodisiacs or contraceptives should look elsewhere.

Trout Lily

Trout Lily

Trout Lily. Note Red-necked False Blister Beetle on the right petal.