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A GOAT AS BUDDHA’S THRONE: THE SACRED
AND THE PROFANE IN MONGOLIAN RIDDLES
Rachel Mikos
Charles University, Institute of South and Central Asia, Prague
In this paper, I will examine some of the aspects of the ‘sacred and the pro¬
fane’ in riddles that deal with Buddhism and related sacral themes in two ex¬
tensive collections of Mongolian riddles. These riddles unite Buddhist themes
with the daily life of the nomad, integrating the sacral into the tropes of every¬
day life. The use of iconopoeic words is also highly evidenced. In this article, I
examine riddles employing iconopoeic words that describe figures associated
with Buddhism and Buddhist clergy. Iconopoeic or ‘shape-painting’ words cre¬
ate a distinct visual image in the mind of the auditor, often with humorous asso¬
ciations. Rather than expressing disdain for religion or religious rights, these ridd¬
les express a degree of affectionate intimacy with the objects of these qualities.
Introduction
Riddles have formed an integral part of the oral culture of Mongolian nomads through
the centuries. Similarly to proverbs, as well as the use of metaphorical speech in every¬
day life, riddles are an oral form that have served to pass on the values of nomadic
society, as well as profound cosmological modellings of the universe and the nomads’
place in the universe. At the same time, it is less clear to what extent riddles remain
widely employed in everyday life today by nomads of the middle and younger genera¬
tions. Drawing upon the present author’s experience in Khéwsgél aimag, riddles do
not seem to form a part of the “invisible, purely oral” corpus of overtly shared knowl¬
edge, but rather were a subject studied at school as part of an official transmission of
national heritage.
Even among native speakers, it is widely acknowledged that certain riddles are
extremely difficult to understand. The rationale behind certain riddles may be quite
clear to someone who has mainly lived in the countryside, yet completely opaque to
an urban dweller. In some instances, the ethnographic context under which the riddle
must have first been created has fallen away and can be reconstructed only with great
difficulty. The forced loss of cultural and historical memory occasioned by the seventy
1
Author’s field research, Khöwsgöl aimag, 2014.
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