Gesar of Ling

Gesar of Ling riding a reindeer. Distemper painting.

The Epic of King Gesar (Tibetan: གླིང་གེ་སར།, Wylie: gling ge sar), spelled Geser (especially in Mongolian contexts) or Kesar, is a work of epic literature of Tibet and greater Central Asia. The epic originally developed around 200 BCE or 300 BCE and about 600 CE. Following this, folk balladeers continued to pass on the story orally; this enriched the plot and embellished the language. The story reached its final form and height of popularity in the early 12th Century.

The Epic relates the heroic deeds of the culture hero Gesar, the fearless lord of the legendary kingdom of Ling. It is recorded variously in poetry and prose, through oral poetry performance, and is sung widely throughout Central Asia and North East of South Asia. Its classic version is to be found in central Tibet.

Some 100 bards of this epic are still active today in the Gesar belt of China. Tibetan, Mongolian, Buryat, Balti, Ladakhi and Monguor singers maintain the oral tradition and the epic has attracted intense scholarly curiosity as one of the few oral epic traditions to survive as a performing art. Besides stories conserved by such Chinese minorities as the Bai, Naxi, the Pumi (Boemi or Tibetans), Lisu, Yugur and Salar, versions of the epic are also recorded among the Balti of Baltistan, the Burusho people of Hunza and Gilgit and the Kalmyk and Ladakhi peoples, in Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, and among various Tibeto-Burmese, Turkic, and Tungus tribes. The first printed version was a Mongolian text published in Beijing in 1716.

There exists a very large body of versions, each with many variants, and is reputed by some to be the longest in the world. Although there is no one definitive text, the Chinese compilation of its Tibetan versions so far has filled some 120 volumes, more than one million verses, divided into 29 "chapters". Western calculations speak of more than 50 different books edited so far in China, India and Tibet.

A Tibetan scholar has written:

Like the outstanding Greek epics, Indian epics and Kalevala, King Gesar is a brilliant pearl in the world's cultural treasure and is an important contribution made by our country to human civilization.

In Tibet, the existence of Gesar as a historical figure is rarely questioned. ((Samuel 1993, p. 365); (Lǐ Liánróng 2001, p. 334) Some scholars there argued he was born in 1027, on the basis of a note in a 19th-century chronicle, the Mdo smad chos 'byung by Brag dgon pa dkon mchog bstan pa rab.