Oldal 164 [164]
OCR
RACHEL MIKos Tibetan Lowon: 50 tsen Leather bag: 2 tsen Walking stick: 1 tsen — Badaréin The yon is an old Chinese measurement equivalent to about four grams. As can be seen, this riddle uses exaggeration to make its point: the itinerant monk Lowon weighs altogether about 200 grams, his bag is only eight grams, and his walking stick weighs four grams. “//ogon’ is a humorous name for a monk. Conclusion As in any other riddling culture, Mongolian riddles work with familiar strategies of concealment and unexpected overlapping of categories. However, it can definitely be stated that there are inherent linguistic possibilities of Mongolian that allow for even more elliptical terseness and abstraction. The resulting quality of ambiguity needs to be considered within a cultural context (for example, in a contemporary Anglo-Saxon linguo-cultural context, ambiguity is often perceived as being undesirable). Ambiguity, polysemy, and polyreferentiality, far from being ‘accidents’ in the two riddle corpuses under consideration, should be considered as deliberate aesthetic strategies, even if formed jointly and orally over centuries. On the syntactical, semantic, linguistic, and symbolic levels, Mongolian riddles are extremely close to proverbs, calling into question some of the usual genre distinctions known from Western literary theory. Mongolian riddles demand an ability to reflect on their deeper philosophical meanings, forming a true ‘university of the nomads.’ The radical opening or widening of the semantic field occasioned by the solution to many riddles is very striking: rather than narrowing things down from a nearly infinite series of possibilities, the riddle itself appears instead to open into a vast semantic field of polyreferentiality. Livestock imagery is very prevalent in riddles about Buddhism (as it is throughout the entire corpus), meshing or merging categories from original indigenous religious and sacral traditions and Buddhism. Religious categories and themes are thus integrated into the images of everyday life, such as herding. The inherently nomadic trope of movement and motionlessness (see the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari)** is emphatic in many of the riddles. As in the spoken language — historically speaking —a performative domesticization of Tibetan words and names occurs. (It is interesting to consider this reverse movement within the context what could be described — again, historically speaking — as the colonizing tendencies of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia.) 4 See Deleuze, Gilles — Guattari, Félix: Milles Plateaux. Les Editions de Minuit, Paris 1980. 162
