The increase of ethnocultural and ethnoconfessional interactions in the context of modern cultural and religious diversity of Russia demands modernization of learning process according to the existing educational policy of multicultural education and defines the relevancy of the article. The purpose of the article is to analyze retrospectively the functioning of Buddhist religious education system in the Republic of Buryatia taking into account the multicultural component. The central methods in this research along with analysis, synthesis, abstraction, induction, deduction, generalization are the analysis of interactive documents and the method of case-study, an active problem-contextual analysis. The article briefly characterizes the main stages of Buddhist education development and the current religious situation in the Republic of Buryatia, reveals the peculiarities of introducing the subjects studying the basics of religious cultures and secular ethics in educational process, defines national and territorial characteristics of Buddhist education implementation in secular schools in the Republic of Buryatia, justifies its preventive educational potential for multicultural society. The study material can be useful for orientalist scholars and also both theorists and practitioners of general pedagogics, Buddhist and multicultural education.