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APPENDIX 1. The Riddle of The Buddhist Monk

The riddle of the Buddhist monk involves a monk walking up a mountain over one day and back down the next, and asks where the monk would be at the same time of day on both journeys without assumptions about pace or timing. The solution conceptualizes the monk walking up and down on the same day, so there must be a place where their paths cross and they would occupy the same space and time. This solution is analyzed as a conceptual blend, where the up and down journeys are separate input spaces that are blended into a single composite space with the monk counterparts meeting at time t'.

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Milica Pavlovic
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85 views

APPENDIX 1. The Riddle of The Buddhist Monk

The riddle of the Buddhist monk involves a monk walking up a mountain over one day and back down the next, and asks where the monk would be at the same time of day on both journeys without assumptions about pace or timing. The solution conceptualizes the monk walking up and down on the same day, so there must be a place where their paths cross and they would occupy the same space and time. This solution is analyzed as a conceptual blend, where the up and down journeys are separate input spaces that are blended into a single composite space with the monk counterparts meeting at time t'.

Uploaded by

Milica Pavlovic
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© © All Rights Reserved
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APPENDIX 1.

The Riddle of the Buddhist Monk

A well-known example of a conceptual blend is the inferential solution to the riddle of the Buddhist
monk, analyzed by Fauconnier and Turner (1998:136-141). The monk begins walking up a
mountain at dawn, reaches the top at sunset and meditates there for several days. One dawn he
begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain and reaches it at sunset. Making no assumptions
about his starting, stopping or pace during the trips, our task is to prove that there is a place on the
path which he occupies at the same time of day on the two journeys.

The inferential solution to the riddle is to imagine the monk walking both up and down the path on
the same day. There must be a place where he “meets himself” on the path and that place is the one
he would occupy at the same time on the two journeys. Fauconnier and Turner (1998) analyze the
inferential solution by breaking up the riddle and its solution into mental spaces (a more specific
term for the domains of knowledge to which I refer in Section 2 of the main text when describing
metaphorical mapping). Mental spaces are “small conceptual packets constructed as we think and
talk, for purposes of local understanding and action” (Fauconnier and Turner 1998:137). There are
three types of mental space: input space, blended space and generic space. In the riddle, for
example, there are two input spaces, in which d1 is the day of the upward journey, d2 the day of the
downward journey, a1 the monk going up and a2 the monk going down (Figure A1.1). The blended
space consists of a single day d’ which is the fusion of the two days of travel d1 and d2, and monks
a1’ and a2’ which are the counterparts of a1 and a2 at time t’ (Fauconnier and Turner 2002:41-42).
Generic space (not shown in Figure A1.1) contains what the input spaces have in common.

a2
a1 d1 d2

Input 1 d’ Input 2
time t’ (day d1) time t’ (day d2)

a2’
a1’

Blend
time t’ (day d’)

Figure A1.1. Conceptual blending as a solution to the Buddhist monk riddle (adapted from
Fauconnier and Turner 1998:141, Fig. 5).
The monk riddle illustrates the three operations of blending that are explained in the main text. The
riddle composes the two travelers making two journeys; it completes the composed structure by
recruiting the well-known scenario of two people encountering each other on a path; and it can be
elaborated by running an imaginative mental simulation according to the principles of the blend.
The simulation example Fauconnier and Turner use is that the imaginary two monks would meet
each other and begin a discussion on the concept of identity (Fauconnier and Turner 1998).

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