Epic of King Gesar

The epic relates the heroic deeds of the culture hero Gesar,[1] the fearless lord of the legendary kingdom of Ling (Wylie: gling).

[21] Legends variously place him in Golok,[e] between Dotō and Domé,[f] or in Markham, Tanak, Öyuk or the village of Panam on the Nyang River.

Though the epic was sung all over Tibetan-speaking regions, with Kham and Amdo long regarded as the centres for its diffusion,[23] traditions do connect Gesar with the former Kingdom of Ling (Wylie: gling).

The Gsumge Mani Stone Castle located near the source of Yalong River houses a shrine dedicated to Gesar at its centre.

The success of the Turk Fromo Kesaro, whose name is a Persian pronunciation of "Rome (Byzantium) Caesar", in overwhelming an intrusive Arab army in Gandhara sometime between 739 and 745, may have formed the historic core behind the Gesar epic in Tibet.

[25] In the records of the earliest rulers of Ladakh, Baltistan, and Gilgit, whose countries were later overrun by Tibetans, royal ancestry is connected to the Bactrian Gesar.

The oral tradition of this epic is most prominent in the two remote areas associated with the pre-Buddhist ethnic religion known as Bon (Ladakh and Zanskar in the far west of Tibet and Kham and Amdo in the east), strongly suggesting that the story has native roots.

However, the epic narrative was certainly in something similar to its present form by the 15th century at the latest as shown by the mentions in the rLangs-kyi Po-ti bSe-ru by Byang chub rgyal mtshan.

Despite the age of the tradition, the oldest extant text of the epic is actually the Mongolian woodblock print commissioned by the Kangxi Emperor of Qing China in 1716.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries a woodblock printing of the story was compiled by a scholar-monk from Ling-tsang, a small kingdom northeast of Derge, with inspiration from the prolific Tibetan philosopher Jamgon Ju Mipham Gyatso.

The epic has a vast number of variants in plot and motifs, but the core of the story, similar to that of many legendary cycles, has been summed up as follows: King Ge-sar has a miraculous birth, a despised and neglected childhood, and then becomes ruler and wins his (first) wife 'Brug-mo through a series of marvellous feats.

[28]For Samuels, the Gesar epic lies towards the shamanic pole in the continuum of Tibetan culture and religion, which he sees as evincing a constant tension between 'clerical' and 'shamanic' Buddhism, the latter grounded in its earlier Bon substrate.

7–23); (Samuel 2005, p. 166)) The received versions of the Ge-sar cycle are thickly overlaid with Buddhist ideas and motifs, and detecting the original 'heroic' form is difficult.

According to Samten Karmay, Gesar arose as the hero of a society still thinly permeated by Buddhism and the earlier myths associate him with pre-Buddhist beliefs like the mountain cult.

In most episodes, Gesar fights against the enemies of dharma, an old warrior ethos, where physical power, courage, a combative spirit, and qualities such as cunning and deceit prevail.

The act almost causes the extinction of humanity; the middle son of Khormusta (Bukhe Belligte or Uile Butelegcji) was sent from the realm of heaven to undo the damage.

[43] According to Li Lianrong (李連榮): By narrowing the period of its creation to the tenth and eleventh centuries, the dynamic of literary composition is erroneously attributed to an oral epic.

[49] Consequentially, the question of whether babdrung (visionary Gesar bards) should be regarded as religious practitioners (Wylie: chos pa) will be answered differently by those who favor and those who oppose the epic; the babdrung themselves, however, generally emphasize the connection of the epic with the Dharma (Wylie: chos, THL: chö) and see themselves as a kind of religious practitioner.

[49] Orgyen Tobgyal explained that in the Nyingma perspective, "the real nature of the manifestation we know as Ling Gesar is actually that of Guru Rinpoche himself appearing in the form of a drala" (Wylie: dgra bla, "protective warrior spirit").

[50] Chögyam Trungpa, who represented both Kagyu and Nyingma lineages and founded Shambhala Buddhism in the diaspora, inspired by the Greek philosophers of the polis, used the Gesar epic's detailed tales about an idealized nomadic government formed by the Mukpo clan, which constructed a nomadic confederation of imperial reach, to develop a model of a Tibetan polity.

[52] In the region of Baltistan the King Kesar's saga was told in homes, especially in winter, but now it is at the verge of distinction due to availability of the media devices.

The first three volumes of the version known as the Lingtsang-Dege woodblock, which was composed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were published with a very faithful though incomplete French translation by Rolf Stein in 1956.

[53] Stein followed this publication with his 600-page magnum opus on the Tibetan Epic entitled Recherches sur l'Epopee et le Barde au Tibet.

A retelling of these volumes in a more accessible and contemporary voice was rendered by David Shapiro and published in 2019 as Gesar of Ling: A Bardic Tale from the Snow Land of Tibet.

This book also contains extensive study by Hermanns explaining the epic as the product of the Heroic Age of the nomads of North-eastern Tibet and their interactions with the many other peoples of the Inner Asian steppe.