Epic
Epic of King Gesar
གེ་སར།
Anonymous · 1200
Synopsis
A being of divine origin is born on earth, in the land of Ling, and has a neglected childhood. He wins kingship and the hand of Drukmo through a horse race, gathers counsellors and generals around him, then confronts the powers of the four directions that threaten the kingdom, each the subject of a great episode, while his uncle Throthung plots for the throne. There is no canonical version: each bard knows his own and sometimes composes new episodes.
Context
The epic took shape in the twelfth century and was fixed around the fourteenth, but the oldest surviving texts date from the eighteenth: the first printed one is a Mongolian woodblock commissioned in Beijing by the Kangxi Emperor in 1716. A hundred or so bards still sing it in Tibet, Mongolia, Ladakh, Baltistan and among the Monguor, sometimes in trance. In Bhutan, a Tibetan lama, Tang Rinpoché, brought a masked dance of Gesar in 1996, performed since 2012 at Choedeypung monastery, in Bumthang.
Who it is for
An immense epic with no reference version, best approached through a partial translation, such as that of Alexandra David-Néel.
Prizes and reception
Inscribed in 2009 on UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage list, it is held to be the longest known literary work.
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