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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 profane’ in riddles that deal with Buddhism and related sacral themes in two extensive collections of Mongolian riddles. These riddles unite Buddhist themes with the daily life of the nomad, integrating the sacral into the tropes of everyday 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 create a distinct visual image in the mind of the auditor, often with humorous associations. Rather than expressing disdain for religion or religious rights, these riddles 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 everyday 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 generations. 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 knowledge, 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. 147
