Gesar Chooses the Horse No One Can Ride

The race is arranged to determine who will be king of Ling.

This is Aku Chipön’s design. He wants the kingship for himself or for someone he can control. He expects Joru — the ragged, ugly, mocked boy from the wilderness — to lose. The race is structured so that the winner must choose his horse from the tribal herd and then complete a circuit of the plateau. The choice of horse matters enormously; everyone knows which horses are strong and which are not.

Joru is given last choice. This is by design.

He walks among the horses that remain after all the other claimants have chosen. The remaining horses are the ones no one wanted: old ones, thin ones, one with a lame leg, and a miserable-looking grey pony that stands at the far edge of the herd with its head down. The pony is trembling. Its coat is rough and its ribs show. It does not look like a horse that can win anything.

Joru walks to the grey pony.

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The reason he chooses it is not immediately clear from the text, and this ambiguity is deliberate.

In some versions of the telling, he chooses it because the gods have whispered instructions. In others, he simply looks at it and sees something. In the most interesting versions, the text does not specify: he walks to the grey pony and puts his hand on its neck and stands there for a moment, and then he leads it away while the other claimants laugh.

What the other claimants see is a starving, trembling, unpromising animal chosen by an outcast boy. What Joru sees — what the narrative is about, what the bards have been building toward — is Kyang Gö Karkar, the divine horse, the emanation of the wind itself, the being who descended from the divine realm alongside Joru’s own spirit and is waiting in this disguise for its rider to recognize it.

Recognition is the key. The horse does not transform the moment Joru touches it. It transforms the moment the rider who can recognize it arrives. The divine has been sitting in that corner of the herd since before the race was announced, being overlooked by everyone whose eyes could not see past the matted coat and the trembling legs.

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The race is not close.

When the horn sounds and the horses break into movement, Kyang Gö Karkar moves like something the other horses cannot touch — not fast exactly, but in the way that wind is not fast but is simply somewhere before the sound of it arrives. The other claimants, on their carefully chosen strong horses, watch the grey pony extend the lead until it disappears over the first ridge.

Joru wins. By the rules of the arrangement, he becomes king of Ling. His uncle Chipön does not accept this gracefully, but the assembly witnesses the race and the result is not disputable.

He takes the name Gesar.

Kyang Gö Karkar is his companion through all the campaigns — the horse that can fly above mountain passes, that can gallop across the surface of rivers, that speaks in the moments when Gesar needs counsel and has no other source. The relationship between the horse and the king is one of mutual recognition: the divine knows the divine, and the meeting of the two creates something neither can accomplish alone.

The Tibetan tradition uses Kyang Gö Karkar as an image of lungta — wind horse, the term for the energy of confidence and good fortune. When a Tibetan practitioner throws printed lungta papers into the wind, they are releasing this image into the air: the divine horse that was always available, now given flight.