Geser

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He comes into the world in the worst possible body. The old couple are poor and long past hoping for a child, and the infant born to them is a horror to look at — snot-nosed, scabbed, filthy, forever crying, forever fouling himself, a thing no one in the camp would take for anything but a burden. The listeners around the fire know exactly who he is, and that is the pleasure of it. This scabby, squalling nuisance is Bukhe Beligte, the middle son of the sky-father, sent down out of heaven to save the middle world; he has hidden his glory inside the most repellent shape the poem can find for him, and he will keep it hidden until the day he chooses. Then he throws off the disguise, masters his heavenly horse, takes the name by which the whole Baikal country knows him — Abai Geser — and rides out against the monsters that are eating the earth.

That reversal is the heart of the Buryat telling, and the uligershin, the epic-singers who carried it, could stretch the wait across whole nights of performance. Geser is not a man who becomes a god. He is a god who consents to be born human, and to be born humiliated, because heaven has broken the earth and heaven is obliged to mend it.

The middle son of the western sky

In the Buryat tradition the hero is Abai Geser Khubun, “the mighty Geser.” Before his earthly birth he is a being of the upper world: Bukhe Beligte, the middle of the three sons of Khan Khormusta, the sky-father of the western heavens. The name Khormusta — heard also as Khan Khyurmas — carries its own long journey inside it. It is the Mongol and Buryat form of a name the steppe received from far to the southwest: the Sogdian Khurmazta, itself the Central Asian descendant of the Iranian Ahura Mazda, the Hormuzd of the Zoroastrian world, passed north through the Uyghur and Turkic peoples until the head of the western sky-gods bore, in the felt tents of Baikal, a name first spoken in Persia (Qormusta Tengri). The figure who fathers Geser is thus already a marker of how far this whole tradition has traveled.

Geser is not only Buryat. He is the northern kinsman of the Tibetan Gesar of Ling and the Mongol Geser Khan, and how the three relate is one of the genuinely contested questions of the field. The earliest Tibetan textual allusions belong to the thirteenth century — among them a smoke-offering ritual ascribed to the second Karmapa, Karma Pakshi (1204–1283), though that very attribution is now argued over — while the story is generally reckoned to have reached something like its “final” shape by around the twelfth century. The Mongols took the epic up later, probably in the late sixteenth century. Many scholars hold that the Mongol and Buryat versions do not descend directly from a Tibetan original at all, but from a common source now lost — which would make the Buryat Geser a cousin of the Tibetan hero rather than his grandchild. The relationship is real; its exact shape is not settled, and the honest statement is that the lines of descent are debated.

The Tibetan Gesar of Ling, the hero’s southern kinsman, riding his mount; distemper painting. Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The written record and the sung record reach us by very different roads. The oldest printed Geser is a Mongolian woodblock text published at Beijing in 1716, commissioned under the Kangxi emperor of the Qing — a state print, produced far from the pastures where the poem lived. It was this Beijing block that carried Geser into Europe: the Moravian orientalist Isaak Jakob Schmidt turned it into Russian in 1836 and into German in 1839, and so the German-reading world met the epic first through a Qing imperial edition, not through a singer’s mouth.

The Buryat Geser, by contrast, comes to the record chiefly as a living oral poem, and it comes in three regional recensions. The Ekhirit-Bulagat version, sung on the western, Cisbaikal side, is the most archaic in shape; the Ungin — or Unga — version, from the Unga valley of the Irkutsk steppe, is the fullest and best documented; and a Khori recension carries the tradition among the eastern, Transbaikal Buryats. These were sung by the uligershin, the rhapsodes who held the branches of the poem in memory and performed them across successive nights, and the outside record exists because those performances were written down from their mouths.

The first Geser reciter ever transcribed was Manshuud Emegeev (1849–1909). His enormous Ekhirit-Bulagat cycle — well over twenty thousand verses, cited commonly at around 22,000 lines — was recorded twice: once in 1900 by the American traveler and collector Jeremiah Curtin, who published it in English in 1909 in A Journey in Southern Siberia, and again in 1906 by the Buryat scholar Tsyben Zhamtsarano, whose version appeared in print in 1930 (Manshuud Emegeev). Curtin was an outsider salvage-collector working through interpreters; Zhamtsarano was a native scholar of the tradition, and the difference in their lenses matters to anyone reading what they took down. A generation later, in 1940–41, the collector I. N. Madason wrote down the Ungin Abai Geser from the gifted teller Pyokhon Petrov, of the Khadakhan settlement in the Nukut district of Irkutsk province; Petrov’s text runs to 12,537 lines and opens, characteristically, with the celestial prologue and the sickness of the beautiful Naran Gokhon. That the two great documented recensions differ so widely in length and in detail — one near 22,000 lines, one at 12,537 — is itself the point: this is a living oral art with regional variants, not a fixed book, as the comparative work on the Buryat versions makes plain (Dampilova, Oriental Studies).

Because heaven broke the earth

The Buryat epic opens not on earth but in the sky, and the disaster that sets everything in motion is a war among the gods. Khan Khormusta and the fifty-five western, white tengri — the bright sky-powers of the right hand — go to war with Atai Ulaan and the forty-four eastern, black tengri, the powers of the left. (The counts belong to the Buryat reckoning of the ninety-nine tengri; the exact numbers on each side shift between recensions and between tellers, and the tidy 55-and-44 is one arrangement among several.) Khormusta wins. But a defeated god is a dangerous thing, for he can gather himself and rise again, and so, to keep his enemy from ever resurrecting, the victor dismembers Atai Ulaan and flings the pieces down to the earth.

This is the hinge of the whole cosmology. The scattered body of the beaten sky-god does not simply vanish. It takes root in the middle world as evil — the pieces become the plagues, the tyrants, and the devouring monsters that break the earth apart. From the cast-down fragments come Gal Dulme Khan, the many-eyed lord of fire and heat; the cruel Sharablin khans; the forest-beast that swallows Orgoli the white deer; the black mangadkhai Lobsogoldoi and his sisters; and a whole population of demons that lay the land waste. Heaven, in other words, is the author of earth’s ruin. And precisely because heaven has broken the earth, heaven is bound to send someone down to heal it. The one chosen is Khormusta’s own middle son, Bukhe Beligte.

He descends into the least likely body the poem can devise — the scabbed, filthy, weeping infant of the poor old couple — and there the great reversal plays out. No one recognizes the savior in the wretched child; he is mocked, underestimated, dismissed. Then, in his own time, he sheds the ugly shape, masters the heavenly steed that has come down with him, names himself Abai Geser, and turns to the work he was sent for: to punish the invaders, to humble the arrogant, to kill the beasts of prey, and to put justice and order back into a world that has lost them. The tradition dwells on the disguise with real relish, because it holds a truth the listeners recognize — that heaven’s help arrives unglamorous, unwashed, easy to despise, and is no less heaven’s help for that.

The scale of the thing is hard to convey. The Buryat Geser is organized in nine branches — nine uliger, each an episode telling how the hero destroys one enemy — and a single branch can fill a night of singing. Emegeev’s Ekhirit-Bulagat cycle runs near 22,000 lines; Petrov’s Unga text runs to 12,537. And unlike the Tibetan compilations to the south — the Chinese-collected Tibetan Gesar has been said to fill some 120 volumes and more than a million verses, which is why it is often called the longest epic on earth — the Buryat poem turns not on the conquest of kingdoms but almost entirely on the killing of monsters. Geser is a demon-slayer before he is a king. His wars are against Gal Dulme and the mangadkhai and the swallowing beasts, against the wreckage of Atai Ulaan’s body, and the point of every branch is the same: the middle world is being cleared of the things that eat it.

A monumental equestrian statue of the hero Gesar, spear raised, at Tawo in Golog — the shared warrior of the Tibeto-Mongol-Buryat traditions. Hana Cincerova, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The poem was never mere entertainment. The uligershin were, in effect, the public servants of a Geser cult, and the singing had work to do — protective, ordering, tied to the calendar and the fortunes of the community. A recitation was a serious undertaking, hedged with observance: the branches were not to be sung carelessly or begun and left unfinished, and a great teller like Emegeev or Petrov held tens of thousands of lines in the alternation of chanted verse and spoken passage that the tradition still uses. To sing Geser through was to call the hero’s ordering power into the present, over the herds and the household and the coming season. The disguise, too, carried its lesson beyond the pleasure of the reveal: that the divine enters the world unrecognized, in weakness and filth, and that to despise the wretched thing in the corner of the tent may be to despise the very help heaven has sent. And the hero stands inside the whole tengri cosmology of the Buryat shamanic religion, boo murgel: an upper world of the sky-gods, the tengri whose bright western council is presided over by fathers such as Esege Malaan Tengri; a middle world of earth, of its masters and spirit-owners, and of the ancestral spirits, the ongon, housed in their felt figures by the tent door; and an underworld below. Geser is the appointed bridge between the first world and the second — the one sent from the sky to mend the earth. To hear his epic was to hear the map of the cosmos sung aloud, and it belonged to the same religious world as the sacred sea of Lake Baikal, the shamans’ island of Olkhon, and the sky-descended owners of the land such as Khan Khoto Baabai of the holy rock.

The trial and the return

Geser’s afterlife runs through every later layer of the Baikal world’s history, and it does not run in a straight line. When Tibetan Buddhism came among the Buryat in the eighteenth century and the datsans — the Gelug monasteries — struck root, the warrior of the epic was not discarded; he was drawn in. Gesar was folded into Buddhist smoke-offering and protector ritual, taken up as a dharmapala-like guardian, and elsewhere in the wider Central Asian world he was identified with the Chinese war-god Guan Yu, whose temples across Mongol lands were understood as Geser’s. So the hero came to live on both sides of the Buryat coexistence of shamanism and the dharma — a figure the two traditions shared rather than one that either could claim alone, much as the white grandfather Sagaan Ubgen crosses the same line. The Buryat did not swap one faith for another; they laid the second over the first and kept both, and Geser rode in both.

Under the Soviet state the epic became a battleground. The 1930s fell hard on the whole religious world that carried it: shamans and lamas were repressed, many killed, and the datsans were closed and destroyed. The Geser tradition survived that decade, and in the “national cultures” drive of the late 1930s and 1940s it was even celebrated — the folk epic legitimated as the voice of the laboring people, its hero read as the embodiment of popular aspiration. Then the line shifted. In May 1948 the Buryat Geser was condemned outright as a feudal, pan-Mongol nationalist work — a covert glorification of khans and aristocracy, a vehicle, the charge ran, for reactionaries to smuggle feudalism back into Soviet culture. Its scholars and champions were suddenly exposed and endangered. The reversal did not hold: by 1953 the epic was politically rehabilitated, redeemed as a monument of the people’s art after all. The whole episode — the celebration, the trial, the redemption — has been studied closely as a case of how a poem can be made and unmade a national symbol by a state (Geser on Trial). Out of the rehabilitation came an authorized, composite literary Geser — a stitched-together text drawn from several recensions, associated above all with the Buryat writer Namzhil Baldano (1907–1984), that stood thereafter as the “national epic.”

The post-Soviet revival, from about 1990, returned the hero to the people who had never actually stopped singing him. In 1995 Buryatia celebrated the epic’s millennium — a thousand years of Geser — across the republic, with festival stages in every district and the opening of the Kray Gesera, the “Land of Geser” ethno-park, in the Oka region of the western Sayan foothills, the country of the Soyot. And in 2009 the Gesar epic tradition, shared by Tibetan, Mongolian, and Tu communities and sung in its Buryat branch around Baikal, was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — an oral art still performed, still embedded in the ritual and daily life of its communities, and no museum piece. The living recovery of the tradition has its center in the shamanic revival around the sacred sites of the lake, above all at Cape Burkhan on Olkhon.

The outside record of all this rests on a specific body of scholarship — Curtin and Zhamtsarano who first wrote the poem down, Nicholas Poppe and the Buryat epic scholars who edited and studied it, and the critical anthropology of the region that has traced its politics. That scholarship serves as documentation, and where the Soviet apparatus framed the poem as feudal backwardness, or the shamanic religion around it as superstition to be stamped out, the framing is named for what it was: a distortion done to the tradition by a state, not a truth about it. Geser is the son of heaven who agreed to be born as the lowest thing in the camp so that he could rise and clear the world — and along the Angara and the Unga and the shores of the great lake, in the country of the Khamnigan and the herders of Barhan Uula as much as anywhere, the uligershin are singing him still.

→ Related: Sagaan Ubgen · Khan Khoto Baabai · Esege Malaan Tengri · Ongon · Lake Baikal · Olkhon · Cape Burkhan · Barhan Uula · The Soyot · The Tofalar · The Khamnigan