Religious Lexis in the Kalmyk Heroic Epic Dzhangar

Abstract

Dzhangar has a special place among texts of the folklore corpus, as it is considered to be the basic epic text of the Oirat-speaking ethnoses, having both regional and local versions. The analysis of the lexical structure of the Kalmyk version of the epic and namely of the Buddhist lexis, reflecting images of their creators regarding the religious and sacred way of life, is of great interest. It should be noted that some words posses semantically transparent meanings, whereas others bear rather deep and often non-obvious meanings, some of which are hard to understand owing to the intention of the creators of the epic itself. In addition, the major stratum of the Buddhist lexis is composed of borrowed words coming from Sanskrit and the Tibetan language, which have gone through the process of phono-morphological assimilation and have been adjusted to the graphic and spelling norms of the receiving language. The religious lexis presented in the epic is far from thematically homogeneous. Thematically speaking, nominations of the Buddhist religion tend to be combined into five basic groups. The specific feature of Buddhist lexis in the epic text is defined, first of all, by its composition and function, and by a complicated semantic structure as well (containing both terminological and symbolic word meanings). To reveal a special symbolic meaning containing religious semantics either of a word or a Buddhist term one can refer to background knowledge.