The Gesar Of Ling Epic is the major secular narrative of Buddhist Central Asia. It probably originated in Tibet, but versions exist in many other languages, including Mongol and Chinese. It tells the story of a divine warrior/sorcerer hero who is born in Tibet to defeat demon kings who have taken over all the great empires and countries of Asia. Gesar has magical weapons, a flying horse, all the powers of a Buddha, and the aid of a vast pantheon of Buddhist and local deities. The epic is still sung today Tibetan bards in numerous dialects, and strangely, it continues to grow in size. It is accompanied by a panoply of religious practices, some based on the native religion of Tibet and others adapted from Buddhist Tantric rituals, which have assimilated Gesar into the pantheon of enlightened guardian spirits.

The Gesar Epic is still in its period of flourishing and composition. More than a hundred volumes of composed or transcribed materials have been discovered and more than 2100 hours of oral performances have been recorded. The Gesar Corpus is without a doubt the largest body of epic literature in existence.

Anthropological studies of the Gesar have been done, particularly in Paris where R.A. Stein established a tradition of Gesar study and where his students continue his work. This dissertation, on the other hand, approaches the Gesar as a literary piece, looking at its plot structures and divine machinery. We examine in particular one of the more literary versions of the epic, the version of the Gesar edited in the 19th century by the great Nyingma scholar, Mipham Gyatso. Large sections of this version are translated along with related materials and receive a detailed linguistic and literary commentary.

With these materials available, we then compare the Gesar with the Illiad. The critical tradition of Aristotle's Poetics and of Horace is evoked and the Tibetan epic is examined using these traditional Western tools of analysis from the Western tradition of literary criticism. This includes a derailed study of the cosmology of the Mipham Gesar.