And Gesar’s horse is the warrior’s sense of confidence, which enables him to reach whatever destination he profoundly desires.

Western scholarship on the Gesar epic

Detail depicting a group of Gesar's knights and beneficent deities. Like Gesar, each knight was considered a hero, and after the advent of Buddhism, was also considered a reincarnation of a bodhisattva.

Just as the facts about epic figures of other cultures have defied researchers, the historical Gesar and his knights remain a mystery.  From the beginning of Western scholarship on the epic, there have been various attempts to locate Ling, the central setting of the epic, in Ladakh, in the Tibetan region of Kham, and even in Central Asia.  Equally in question has been the date of its composition or compilation, with estimates ranging from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries.  Much of this uncertainty results from the source material itself.  Written texts are known in Lepcha, Burushaski, Oirat, Xalxa, Buriat, Mongol, Turkic, Chinese, and, of course, Tibetan.  Oral versions may be as widely spread even today.

It was through a Mongolian rendering that the epic of Gesar first came to Europe.  In 1839, I.J. Schmidt completed a German summary of the Mongolian saga, Die Thaten Bogda Gesser Chan’s.  This version clearly depicts Gesar’s mission as bringing order to earthly society, but lacks some of the more distinctively Buddhist additions of later Tibetan texts.  After the turn of the century, additional texts were made available through the work of Moravian missionary A.H. Francke, and the writing of French explorer-scholar Alexandra David-Neel.  David-Neel was the first white woman to enter Lhasa, Tibet’s capital.

Francke’s work traces the short sagas and song-cycles of Ladakh’s Gesar stories.  While the material is definitely pre-Buddhist, Francke says it “has taken the shape of a religion.”  The legends, he says, are still very much a part of each village’s spring festival and archery competition.  David-Neel, on the other hand, provides a fully Buddhist version of the epic gathered in Kham, one which she feels may be entitled to the designation “the official version.”