The Legend of Mother Green Tārā (Noguγan dari eke-yin tuγuǰi) is one of the best-known and most deeply cherished legends to emerge from the long history of Buddhism in Mongolia, which dates back at least to the reign of Khubilaj Khan and the Yuan Dynasty—or even possibly to the advent of Sogdian traders making their way along the Silk Road in the early centuries of the first millennium of the Common Era. As is the case with so much of the history and culture of Buddhism in that vast land, the cult of Tārā in Mongolia syncretically combines elements of early Indian Buddhism preserved in surviving Sanskrit scriptures along with Tibetan Mahāyāna influences—all held together by the “glue” of the utterly unique Mongolian milieu. Hence there are emergences of elements of Tārā’s narrative that are unknown in other linguistic versions (at least to my knowledge).
At the same time, Tārā’s legend can be read as a manifestation of the Deleuzian nomadic narrative in which endless movement manifests itself against the smooth space of her story, territorializing itself with constantly repeating refrains. To mention just a few of these patterns—which I have examined in detail as part of an upcoming monograph concerning the subject of Mongolian Buddhism and nomadic narrative—a “code” of repetitions can be established in terms of the narrative semes (i.e., Barthes’ sèmes, employed in his renowned analysis of Balzac’s Sarrasine in S/Z.) When these semes are identified and precisely mapped out, distinct patterns emerge: we can for example discern various movement-semes (up and down to hell- or heavenly- realms, or transverse movements). Perhaps it should not surprise us that in a narrative originating from a nomadic milieu, semes of movement or spatial determination form at least one-third of the overall semes. Another significant group of semes are those that express attribution, which, in a folk- religious narrative as ‘The Legend of Green Tārā’, are equally expressive of veneration and worship. For example, Tārā‟s epithet “the most tender of nature / the manifest speedy liberator” at once describes her, venerates her, and in fact summons her presence to the teller and auditor of the tale.
It would appear that for Deleuze, the refrain (the repeated seme), as he describes it in A Thousand Plateaus, comprises many qualities which are inherently nomadic in nature. Indeed, these repeating semes of the Tārā narrative actually form, in my view, what Deleuze termed the refrain or ritournelle. Yet the refrain—inherently nomadic in Deleuze‟s formulation— while essentially an act of territorialisation, does not carry within itself the same goal as sedentary territorialisation. The nomadic refrain is implicitly linked to the continual act of deterritorialization:
It is in this sense that nomads have no points, paths or land, even though they do by all appearances. If the nomad can be the Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no re-territorialization afterwards, as with the migrant, or upon something else, as in the sedentary. (The sedentary‟s relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a property regime, a State apparatus). With the nomad, on the contrary, it is deterritorializing that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes a deterritorialization itself... [They] are vectors of deterritorialization. (A Thousand Plateaus, tr. Brian Massumi, p.381-2).
While accomplishing these acts of nomadic refrain, the narrative of Green Tārā even linguistically performs the movements of circumambulation, that movement so well known to Buddhist pilgrims, in which the devoted trace a circular path around the altar or the shrine. In this sense, the words and the refrains keep circling around Tārā, who also verbally “circumambulates” her own son, the lost Bodhisattva, with her endless re- iteration of his attributes: “...with a colour like that of the rising sun / with reds lips like a pomegranate / with a beautiful tall balanced body like Vairocana...”
The text is full of refrains, and yet, in one sense, it is also itself a refrain. If this is the case, and if (following Deleuze) it is the function of refrains to territorialize, then what is it ‘territorializing’? The story takes up a Buddhist theme (Tārā) that is highly popular across inner Asia, and yet it The text is full of refrains, and yet, in one sense, it is also itself a refrain. If this is the case, and if (following Deleuze) it is the function of refrains to territorialize, then what is it ‘territorializing’? The story takes up a Buddhist theme (Tārā) that is highly popular across inner Asia, and yet it endows her narrative with a number of highly specifically Mongolian elements (Tārā’s ‘Great White Breast,’ the horse with the golden saddle falling from the sky, Shakyamuni Buddha falling off his throne in shock, etc.) The Legend of Green Dari Eh territorializes, at least in the view of the present author, the story (trope) of Tārā onto the inherently nomadic, deterritorializing and re-territorializing space of the Mongolian language.
In a more general sense, this narrative is an act (obviously, only one of countless such acts) of the territorialisation of Buddhism itself: that is, a religion accepted and eventually embraced by the Mongolians, but arriving from the ‘outside’ in subsequent waves, possibly beginning as far back as the arrival of the Sogdian traders from Bactria in the territories of the tribes that were later to become the Mongolians.
One final note: in an attempt to preserve the flavour of the original, I have left several expressions untranslated, thus: burqan (pronounced burhan)=deity, buddha, or the Buddha; Erleg Dharma Khan is more or less the equivalent of Yama, Lord of the Underworld (Tib. gshin rje) in Tibetan religion and folklore; baγsi is a teacher or a wise person; Qatun is the Middle Mongolian word for Queen; Tengri is a very general term for the supreme deity; and finally, the term ber-e is an old Uighur measurement. The name of Green Tārā’s son, Oyuu, is related to the Tibetan word for turquoise.
The text used as the basis for the translation is taken from C. Damdinsüren‟s ground-breaking collection of folkloric texts, Mongγo uran jˆokiyal-un degejˆi jˆaγun bilig orusibai, originally published in Ulaanbaatar in 1959 by the Academy of Sciences. (I have used the Inner Mongolian reprint of 2008.) I have also consulted the invaluable volume монгол ногоон дара эхийн тууж, by D. Sumiya (Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Ulaanbaatar, 2011). I would like to express my profound thanks to Professor J. Luvsandorj of Charles University in Prague, who aided me so kindly in clearing up uncertain terms. This translation is dedicated to him on the occasion of his recent 75th birthday, and to his family. Урт насалж удаан жаргаарай Багш минь!
Ottilie Mulzet translates from Hungarian and Mongolian. In 2014, she won the Best Translated Book Award for her translation of László Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below. Upcoming translations include Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens by László Krasznahorkai (Seagull, 2016) and The Dispossessed by Szilárd Borbely (HarperCollins, 2016).