KEY POINTS:
The old woman's back is stooped from osteoporosis but nothing will dim her determination.
For more than two hours in the blistering heat in the national stadium on the outskirts of the capital, Ulan Bator (more correctly called Ulaanbaatar), she faces the elevated stage.
Over and over, in the ancient act of obeisance known as prostration, she touches her steepled hands to her forehead and her chest before dropping to her knees and stretching out full length on the dusty ground.
The man on the stage is the Dalai Lama, who in August visited Mongolia for the seventh time. More than 20,000 heard him give teachings.
As he spoke, a grim visage looked on. On a steep hillside south of the city, the face of history's most famous Mongolian, Genghis (Chinggis) Khan, is depicted 50m high by thousands of carefully assembled white stones.
Through the 66 years of the Soviet rule that the Mongolians call "the socialist era", Buddhism was repressed. But so was any mention of Genghis who, 800 years ago, united the region's disparate and warring tribes under a single banner.
Now, 16 years after the Soviets marched out, taking more than a third of the country's economy with them, the cult of Genghis is alive and well. Buddhism may be reviving, but its hold on the heart of Mongolians is nowhere near as strong as that of the Mongol warrior.
The exiled leader of the world's Buddhists made it plain that Mongolia holds a special place in his heart, said Carol Beairsto, the Canadian-born director of the Mahayana Buddhist Centre in Ulan Bator.
"He said to them 'Tibet is lost. You have your freedom. You must protect the Mahayana tradition'."
That utterance is extraordinary, coming from the man who was spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet before the Chinese invaded in 1959.
In recent years, the Dalai Lama has moderated his formerly outspoken criticism of the Chinese occupation - Tibet is now formally defined as an autonomous region of China - preferring to turn his attention to broad global peace concerns.
The Mongolian Government, anxious to avoid alienating its giant southern neighbour which has been known to close its airspace and borders to frustrate the Dalai Lama's travel plans, was at pains to describe the visit as unofficial and non-political, even publicly expressing the hope he would avoid political comment.
He obliged, and it is understood he was rewarded with a meeting with Mongolian President Nambaryn Enkhbayar.
The Dalai Lama's silence on political matters reflected what he sees as his mission in Mongolia: reviving Buddhism's flagging fortunes and settling long-simmering factional disputes between a fragmented clergy that has yet to re-establish a hierarchy of authority.
Mongolia was for centuries a stronghold of Buddhist belief. Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai (Khubilai) were famously religiously tolerant. The first-named Dalai Lama was Mongolian - indeed the very word "dalai", meaning "great ocean", is Mongolian.
But Mongolian Buddhism was always mixed with superstitions and shamanistic ideas. Mongolians believe, for example, that money must be thrown, rather than handed, to a beggar lest the donor hand over his virtue as well as his cash.
Meanwhile, high points on roads throughout the country are crowned with cairns called oovoo: piles of stones, silk cloths and low-denomination banknotes and sometimes an animal skull as a sobering memento mori underline the perilousness of the harsh environment.
Tradition demands that the traveller ensure a safe journey by walking clockwise three times around an oovoo, although modern drivers of vans and Japanese 4WDs are more likely to honk the horn three times as they pass.
The Soviet-backed Government subjected Buddhism to particularly brutal treatment. In purges instituted in the 1930s by Choibalsan, the enthusiastic Mongolian equivalent of Stalin, all but one of the country's hundreds of monasteries were destroyed and between 10,000 and 20,000 monks slaughtered. For 66 years until the fall of the Soviet Union, what Buddhism survived was practised behind drawn curtains and closed doors.
Now it faces new challenges: the creeping lure of globalisation which has brought cellphones, rap music and Western fashions to Mongolia; and competition from other religions, in particular energetic and well-resourced Christian missionary groups such as the Mormons.
In the same week that the Dalai Lama visited, a Canadian Christian evangelist pulled enthusiastic crowds. They were no match for the 20,000 who heard the Dalai Lama speak and, although many prostrated themselves or told prayer beads, a large number were driven more by curiosity than reverence.
Sanhir, a young hip entrepreneur, who shrugged when I asked him if he had been to the stadium, echoed the view of many in Mongolia when he said Buddhism is part of the country's culture, but far from being a national religion. "We grow up knowing all about it, but I have never practised as a Buddhist or meditated," he said.
The elderly woman with whom I stayed, a Russian-educated polyglot who served as a diplomat in Paris and London, says she is not a Buddhist, but she was still marking the sudden death of her son by lighting a candle each morning for 49 days - the supposed maximum period that a soul is in limbo before reincarnation. "It is," she said, "the way we do things."
Certainly the Buddhist revival faces a challenge from the worldly wannabes of Ulan Bator who seem to regard it as remote, ascetic and medieval. Beairsto attributes much of that to the failure to re-establish a robust monastic tradition.
Teaching is poor "so things are misrepresented and misunderstood" and many monks are married and live civilian lives.
The Buddhist Centre's president, Ueli Minder, an impish Swiss, recalls that the Dalai Lama told him at a meeting at the centre: "There are many people here with robes on, but there are no monks."
The Dalai Lama did his best to redress that, ordaining an unannounced number of monks in a secret ceremony during the visit and enjoining them to adhere to 256 rules of conduct, including celibacy.
And Minder and Beairsto say they sense a growing hunger among Mongolian youth for spiritual guidance.
"There's a real void here, and for many it has to do with the fact that kids have nothing to do. A youth leader told me that they just hang around on the streets after school because there is nowhere to go."
She throws a wistful glance at the well-appointed headquarters of the Mormons in the building next door and notes that some churches run social programmes that have a "religious lesson thrown in".
The Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition itself runs social programmes - English lessons, a primary health care clinic, a soup kitchen - which do not come close to answering the demands they tap. But Beairsto knows her budget is a fraction of that pouring out of well-heeled Mormon Utah.
Buddhism has twice been the state religion in Mongolia, when it attracted the favour of one or other ancient khan, but it enjoys no such status now.
Minder says that is the result of pressure from a Christian US ambassador at the time the country lurched into the post-Soviet era and it is hard to imagine that the Bush Administration, an enthusiastic donor under the Millennium Challenge Account to regimes whose politics please it, would look kindly on such a move now.
Minder will say only that the Government is "helpful".
These days, he says, there are "a few hundred, 1000 at most" monks in Mongolia.
Certainly it is a long way from the great Buddhist land of fable. Minder has his work cut out. And so, when he next returns, has the Dalai Lama.
* Peter Calder travelled to Mongolia with support from the Asia New Zealand Foundation.
