Gesar of Ling

A bronze mirror goes down on a pile of fragrant wood, the singer reads a few lines of scripture into the smoke, and then he starts, and he does not stop for hours. He will tell you he never learned the story. It came in a fever dream when he was young, one that ran for days and left him ill afterwards, and when he got up again the whole thing was simply there, and would not stay quiet. Some of these singers keep going for weeks. One of them, an old herdsman remembered as Thrapa, was recorded at six hundred thousand lines of verse.

That is around twenty-five times the length of Homer. The story is the life of Gesar of Ling, and it is very probably the longest poem in the world. Nobody has ever heard all of it.

He was born into the ruling line of Ling, in the Dza valley of eastern Tibet, to Senglon Gyalpo and a woman of the Gog country called Lhakar Drönma, whom everyone calls Gogmo. Senglon was king, and gentle, and losing his grip on the kingdom to his brother Trothung, who was loud, short-tempered, cowardly and extremely persistent. Between Trothung’s ambition and the jealousy of Senglon’s senior wife, Gogmo and her infant son were pushed out to the edge of things and then banished altogether, up onto the high grass of the Ma valley. She named the boy Chori. He grew up in a tent with nothing in it but worn sheepskin to wrap himself in, and he got about by riding a willow pole between his knees, which on account of what he was moved faster than any horse in the valley. For a weapon he had a herdsman’s stone sling. It was enough.

Then the goddess Manene came to him and told him the waiting was over. What he did next set the pattern for everything after. He took the form of a raven, flew to his uncle, and talked him into staging a horse race with the throne of Ling as the prize, on the understanding that Trothung would obviously win it. On the day, a filthy beggar turned up on a donkey and the assembled nobility of Ling laughed until they could not breathe. The beggar was Joru. The donkey was Kyang Gö Karkar, a horse he had taken out of the wild country in the north, which could fly and could talk. He won the race, the kingdom, and Sengcham Drugmo, daughter of Kyalö Tönpa Gyaltsen, in a single afternoon.

He dropped the childhood name on the spot and took the throne as Sengchen Norbu Dradul. What followed was a campaign in all four directions against the demon kingdoms that hemmed Ling in: Jang, Mon, Hor, and the north, and by some counts eighteen major wars in all, reaching as far as Persia, the Turkic lands and Ladakh. He commanded eighty champions, thirty warrior brothers, seven men of supreme warriorhood and eighteen ladies of the first rank, most of them gods who had come down with him under the same arrangement.

Most of the wars begin as retaliation, and several of them begin badly. The king of Hor sacked Ling and took Drugmo for his own wife while Gesar was away in meditative retreat, which happens with a frequency that borders on structural. His kingdom keeps getting wrecked while its king is somewhere else being holy.

Ling warriors did not fight the way people usually fight. They stood still and let the enemy sing first. Every exchange opened with the mantra of the Buddha of Compassion and an invocation of Guru Rinpoche, after which the warrior named himself, described the ground he was standing on, laid out the reasons for the quarrel, catalogued the guilt of the man opposite and what the weapons were about to do to him, and only at the very end of all that actually threw anything. If you were struck mid-song, you were expected to cut the weapon out of the air or take it. Running was almost unheard of. The exception, every time, was Trothung, who provoked wars, fled them, and then betrayed Ling’s positions from captivity.

He is far easier to look at than to date. The painted Gesar rides a light brown horse with a blue mane at full gallop, in body armour worked with a round mirror at the chest and auspicious signs across it, under a gold battle helmet set with jewels and a half vajra, flags and streamers streaming off the crown. The eyes are wide, the brows raised, the moustache and goatee cut in the fashion of a Tibetan king. The right hand is up with a bamboo riding crop hung with coloured ribbons. The left holds the reins together with a lasso whose ends fly out sideways and an upright flaming spear flying a white and orange pennant. Sword, battle axe, bow and quiver are tied at his belt. A garuda, a tiger, a dragon and a snow lion ride the clouds around him. Almost every surviving image of him was made in the last two hundred years.

That last fact carries more weight than it looks. The epic is old and the paintings are not, and the Gesar of the paintings is not quite the Gesar of the grasslands. The version who receives prayers and offerings, who is consulted in divination and painted in ranks of emanations, was substantially assembled by one nineteenth century scholar, Ju Mipham Namgyal, who wrote the ritual literature and oversaw an explicitly Buddhist edition of the story. In Mipham’s system Gesar is an emanation of Manjushri, Avalokiteshvara and Vajrapani at once, and of Padmasambhava, and will return as Rudrachakrin, the twenty-fifth king of Shambhala. The bards on the plateau were singing about a boy who cheated at a horse race.

The powers all follow from the bargain struck before he was born. In the Buddhist tellings he consents to take human form only after setting conditions, naming the parents he wants, the weapons that must be waiting for him and the gods who have to come down with him, so he arrives on earth pre-equipped and pre-staffed. The rest is prophecy delivered in waking visions, a horse that can argue, and an appetite for winning by deceit that the epic never once treats as a fault.

The limits are more interesting than the gifts. His enemies are demonic rather than merely hostile, so beating them is a conversion problem rather than a military one, and the work is never finished while a direction remains uncleared. He is chronically absent from his own kingdom at the moment it needs him. His most dangerous enemy is inside his own family and cannot be killed for exactly that reason. And his own tradition cannot agree that he was ever there at all.

The Tibetan chronicles put his birth in 1000, or 1027, or 1038, or 1053, and give him eighty-eight years. In the eighteenth century Sumpa Khenpo Yeshe Peljor argued in correspondence with the Sixth Panchen Lama that Gesar had been a real man of Dege, and most Tibetans in that region still hold to it. Chinese scholarship spent half a century hunting the date and the author before concluding the question was malformed: an epic is a river rather than a document, and asking what year it was composed asks the wrong thing of it. European scholars, hearing khrom Gesar in the manuscripts, proposed Rome, and traced the name to Caesar by way of kaiser and czar. Their Chinese counterparts were unimpressed, and offered instead a shout out of the epic’s own pages, Joru ge sar song, Joru has come to power. Gedün Chöphel, the sharpest and most inconvenient mind Tibet produced in the twentieth century, settled his own view in four lines: the snow lion exists nowhere, King Gesar is nothing but a phenomenon that appears to fabricating minds, material proper only for poetic composition.

He does not die in any telling the singers will give you. At eighty-eight he called in Denma, the last of the old commanders still alive, taught for a while, and said he was going. Some saw him carried up the next morning on a shawl of light held at the four corners by dakinis. Others saw him dissolve into rainbow light and leave his clothing on the ground. The tradition went onto the UNESCO heritage list in 2009, and a handful of bards now draw official salaries for knowing it, which is one way to keep a river moving. The singers themselves account for their gift differently. Gesar’s horse once trod on a frog, and the king was so undone at having killed it that he blessed the creature, offered to go to the demons in its place, and told it to multiply like the hairs on a horse of many colours. The frog came back as a man and became Gesar’s own singer. Every bard since is that frog, which is also the reason no two of them ever tell it the same way.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is King Gesar of Ling?

Gesar of Ling is the warrior king at the centre of the Tibetan Gesar epic, a divine being born into the ruling family of Ling in eastern Tibet to break the demonic kingdoms surrounding it and prepare the plateau for Buddhism. He wins the throne as a boy by taking a horse race in disguise, then rules under the name Sengchen Norbu Dradul, the Great Lion, Jewel Tamer of Enemies. The epic about him is sung across Tibetan, Mongolian, Tu and other communities and was inscribed on the UNESCO intangible heritage list in 2009.

Was Gesar of Ling a real person?

No one has settled it. Tibetan chronicles date his birth to 1000, 1027, 1038 or 1053 and give him eighty-eight years, and the eighteenth century scholar Sumpa Khenpo Yeshe Peljor argued he was a real man of Dege. The twentieth century Tibetan scholar Gedün Chöphel rejected the whole idea, writing that Gesar is a phenomenon appearing to fabricating minds and fit only for poetry, and modern epic scholarship has largely abandoned the search for a single date or author as the wrong question to ask of an oral tradition.

Why is the Epic of King Gesar the longest epic in the world?

Because it is not one poem but an open tradition that keeps growing. Individual bards perform separate episodes rather than a fixed whole, and no two performances match; one singer, Thrapa, was recorded at six hundred thousand lines, roughly twenty-five times the length of Homer. More than two hundred cantos are known in China alone, and new ones are still being produced by singers who say the material comes to them in dreams.

How did Gesar win the throne of Ling?

He rigged a horse race. Exiled with his mother by his uncle Trothung, the boy then called Joru took the form of a raven, flew to Trothung and persuaded him that a horse race with the kingdom as the prize was a certain win. Joru arrived at the race dressed as a beggar on what looked like a donkey, which was really his flying, talking horse Kyang Gö Karkar, and took the throne and the hand of Sengcham Drugmo in one afternoon.

Is Gesar a god or a hero?

Both, depending on which tradition you are standing in. In the sung epic he is a hero, a king who fights, marries, blunders and eventually departs. In the religious cult built largely by the nineteenth century scholar Ju Mipham Namgyal he is an object of prayer and offering, an emanation of Manjushri, Avalokiteshvara, Vajrapani and Padmasambhava who will return as Rudrachakrin, the twenty-fifth king of Shambhala.

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