Gesar | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

One of the earliest written instances of his name (as Gesar, king of Phrom) appears in a ninth-century Tibetan manuscript, and the name also appears on a coin that may refer to the king of a Central Asian kingdom in the ninth or tenth century. For most Tibetans he is an eleventh-century historical figure who ruled Ling (Tibetan, Gling), a principality in Khams, that reached its peak in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It has been suggested that Khrom (or Phrom, pronounced "Throm") could be a distant echo of Rome, via the Turkish word Rûm that designated Rome or Byzance, while Gesar would refer to Kaisar, the Turkish word for "king" or "emperor," derived from Caesar. But Gesar is also seen as a Buddhist character, since he is considered as an emanation of both Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion (also embodied in the Dalai Lamas of Tibet) and Padmasambhava (the semi-legendary introducer of Tantric Buddhism in Tibet in the eighth century). He fights in the name of the Buddhist doctrine and the well-being of all men—or, more precisely, Tibetans.

Whether the original epic (if ever there was such a thing) was devoid of references to Buddhism is hard to tell, but it came to pervade most of the narrative.

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