Tibet's Ge-sar epic

UNESCO Courier, August, 1985 by Mireille Helffer

From the land of the Burushaski in the west to Mongolia in the east, in all the regions where Tibetan civilization prevails, the oral as well as the written tradition has preserved the name of a hero, Ge-sar, whose exploits fill an epic cycle (sgrung) which has many ramifications.

The name of "Ge-sar" of course brings to mind the title of the Caesars in the Mediterranean world and Byzantium. But there may also have been a historical Ge-sar, whose existence is doubted by Tibetologists, although coins recently discovered show that there was in the ninth century a certain Phromo Gesaro, who is thought to have been one of the sovereigns of Gandhara (in what is now northwestern Pakistan). Chinese and Tibetan documents also mention a Gru-gu Ge-sar, possibly a reference to the Turkish tribes of Central Asia, and a Ge-sar of Gling, who was connected with the kingdom of that name to the east of Tibet. The latter term, Gling, could be understood as an abbreviation of 'Dzambu-gling, which means "the world" in Tibetan.

In any case, the Ge-sar of the epic appears in turn as a king of armies, a universal sovereign who overcomes the demons of the points of the compass, and a god of war to whom worship is paid, and even a Buddha.

The many episodes that illustrates the exceptional qualities of Ge-sar include the miraculous birth of the hero, who was the son of a celestial father and a mother who was the daughter of a divinity of the underworld; his unhappy childhood; his accession to the throne of Gling and his marriage, after a horse-race; his victorious combats with Klubtsan, the demon of the north, Gur-dkar king of the Hor, Shing-khri king of the Mon, and Sa-tham king of the 'Jang.

In addition to these main episodes there were others, in an order that is not clear--the conquest of the Stag-gzig, Kashmir, China, and the four great and eight small castles, and indeed of the eighteen castles, and the descent into hell.

We have manuscript or wood engraving versions of most of these episodes, which take up tens of thousands of pages. A printed version, which is in Mongolian but is based on a Tibetan original, appeared in Beijing in 1716. And around the middle of the nineteenth century Tibetan scholars contributed much to the development of Ge-sar and the production of a version of the epic.

Tibetans today are again becoming interested in the man they regard as a national hero, and their interest has been stimulated by the many re-editions brought out in India and Bhutan as well as in the People's Republic of China.

The dissemination of the epic in written form did not put a stop to the oral tradition, which remained alive thanks to the singers of epics who were known as sgrung-mkhan. Some of these singers were thought to have been possessed by one of the characters of the epic; sometimes they went into a trance and maintained that they knew the epic without having learned it, by direct inspiration. Others took lessons from teachers; and yet others, who were mere amateurs, used books that they had obtained or that soeone had read to them.

If we examine the sound recordings that have been made in the last forty years, we can see that those who sang the praises of Ge-sar whatever training they had had and wherever they came from, alternated prose tales, rapidly recounted, and strophic songs composed of lines containing seven or eight syllables, in which, in accordance with immutable conventions, the characters introduce themselves, state where they are, and describe the situation, pronouncing many adages.

Few sgrung-mkhan now sing the praises of Ge-sar in Mongolia and Bhutan, but there are quite a number of them in Ladakh, and according to information obtained in August 1984 they had recently held a meeting at Rtse-thang, in the Autonomous Region of Tibet. One of the twenty participants, who attracted special attention was an illiterate youg woman of twenty-five, a native of Byang-thang. She knew by heart some sixty chapters of the epic, which she had learned from her father, who had died in 1968.

This confirms, if any confirmation were needed, the vitality of the epic of Ge-sar in the Tibetan context, and gives us reason to hope that a systematic study of the ways in which it has been handed down can be undertaken in the near future.