On the confrontation between lamas and shamans in the oral tales of the Tuvans

The article examines notions of hostility between ritual specialists – lamas and shamans – using examples of oral stories common in the context of shamanic-Buddhist syncretism in the oral tradition of the Tuvans. While stories about conflicts among shamans existed among other Turkic peoples of Siberia, narratives about confrontations between shamans and lamas are found only among Tuvans who follow the Gelug school of Buddhism. However, this topic has not been addressed in folkloristics, which confirms the relevance and novelty of its study, since plots about confrontations between religious practitioners serve as vivid indicators of religious syncretism among the Tuvans, for whom shamanism and Buddhism played a significant role in everyday and ritual life. The aim of the article is to examine the features of the stories about the confrontation between a lama and a shaman; to analyze the Tuvans' perceptions of Buddhist lamas and shamans based on these narratives; and to determine the semantic orientation of the stories about the struggle between religious practitioners. The study revealed that oral accounts of the confrontation between a lama and a shaman possess the characteristics and functions of various genres of non-fairy-tale prose of the Tuvans, in which an intertwining of mythological, historical, shamanic, and Buddhist plots is observed. The specificity of narratives about the struggle between the lama and the shaman is analyzed, and their mythological subtext, containing a complex of shamanic and Buddhist views, is considered. It is determined that in the narratives, duels between a lama and a shaman are usually conveyed through the following means: the use of the sound characteristics of ritual attributes, the description of magical rites, and ritual actions of an imitative nature. In some cases, the struggle of the cult servants in the stories is barely covered; they only convey brief information about the miraculous abilities of both opponents. The study used descriptive, structural-semantic, and systemic research methods. A promising direction for further study of oral narratives about cult practitioners among Turkic-Mongol peoples is the analysis of the plots of their magical competitions in a comparative aspect with the traditions of the peoples of Siberia and Inner Asia.

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