몽골 창세신화의‘꽃피우기 경쟁’ 이야기에 대한 종합적 고찰

Abstract

This thesis is an analytical research of the flower contest story which appears in Mongolian creation myth. As you may know, there appears a story of the flower contest between God the creator (or his sons) in Mongolian creation myth. The purpose of the flower contest is to decide who will superintend the world created by the sons (or by their father). The names of the characters vary like Sakyamuni and Maitreya, Tsagaan Shükhert and Ochirvani, and Shingybyl' and Tol'ty khan'; but it is common to decide the supremacy over the world through flower contest. What is the most curious here is the competition for the world between a Buddha and a bodhisattva, who are described as in a friendly relationship in Buddhist sutras and other Buddhist literature, let alone between brothers. Furthermore, such stories appear in various places like Korea, Japan, China and Siberia other than Mongolia; it poses another question how to understand the correlation of such stories. Among them, some are transmitted as complete myth and others as folklore; however, the narrative are similar such as making a flower bloom, sleeping, a trick and the attainment of the world or other specific items by the trick. This conveys the possibility that the flower contest story was generated at one place and then transmitted to other places; the author also wonders about its origin and the background of its introduction to Mongolian myth. The study of the flower contest story has been led by Korean and Japanese scholars. The primary reason for that may be the abundance of related materials in both countries. By them, materials from various places were found out and many problems around this topic were solved. However, there remains something unsatisfactory in the previous studies of the story. One of such unsatisfactory things is the perspective that sees the background of the emergence of the flower contest story as the confrontation between Buddhism and traditional religion; the hypothesis of the early Japanese scholars who thought the flower contest story was affected by Buddhist fable has not been developed any further. In particular, the study of Manau Waida, who intended to include every place where the flower contest story has been found out such as Korea, Ryukyu Islands, Mongolia, Buryat and Siberia, and thereby to clarify the difference and the common points among each region, furthermore the origin of the flower contest story, still has a limit in that he excluded China from the target of his analysis. With the aforementioned things in mind, the author analyzed and studied the flower contest story in Mongolian myth from three aspects. First, the author analyzed four mythic materials where this story appeared and reviewed the background under which the pertinent material was made. Next, the author examined the background of the introduction and diffusion of this story into Mongolian creation myth from the perspectives of the science of religion and mythology. Finally, the author observed that the story appeared over wide regions such as Siberia, Korea, China and Japan as well as Mongolia; so the author inferred the place of its origin and the path of its spread.