It may be three years since I visited Moska, a small farming village in Dainba County of Southwest China's Sichuan Province, but my memory of the local ethnic Tibetans, and their relationship with ancient Tibetan hero King Gesar, remains very strong.

King Gesar is a heroic figure to the Tibetans - as important as Zeus in Greek mythology - and has been immortalised in many a ballad, folk tale, opera, dance and painting.

To the Tibetans, King Gesar was a great saviour, the embodiment of honesty, integrity, courage and justice.

That was why I had some reservations when a local cultural official suggested, during my trip to Dainba in May 2001, that we go and look at some inscribed stones featuring King Gesar in Moska.

I had never heard of stone inscriptions about Gesar, despite paying close attention to both international and domestic research into King Gesar and related anthropological studies.

But I was also intrigued, and took two trips to Moska that year and made wonderful discoveries.

Moska is under the direct jurisdiction of Daindong Township, but it is more than 70 kilometres from the county seat via a mountainous road. It is possible to reach the township by jeep, but the rest of the journey to Moska has to be made on horseback, with the accompaniment of two herders, who guided our steeds.

During the first trip, we first passed through the forest in a deep gully and entered an alpine meadow. We then crossed the Jinlongshan Mountain pass, more than 4,000 metres above sea level.

Following the Tibetan custom, we added several stones to a heap of Mani stones while walking clockwise around the stones to pray for safety on road, and then descended the mountain on foot.

It took us two hours to reach the foot of the mountain, where we were greeted by some 20 herders led by Tashi Zenang, the head of Moska village.

We headed directly for Gesar Lhakong Hall, the sutra hall where the Gesar stone inscriptions are stored.

Once we arrived at the hall, I could not help but be surprised at what I saw: In the middle of the hall sat a human-sized King Gesar stone inscription, around which were 100 more stone inscriptions of different sizes placed in an orderly manner on wooden shelves against the walls.

For more than three hours, I stayed there examining the inscriptions, looking at the familiar figures in the King Gesar epic. I took pictures of all the stone inscriptions, a total of 109 stones.

Unique settlement

Moska is quite a unique small nomadic community because monks and lay people live alongside each other.

The entire village is surrounded by a 1.5-2 meter high square enclosure that is 110 meters long from east to west and 90 meters wide from south to north.

There is a gate in the middle of each side of the square enclosure. The gate sections of the enclosure are convex shaped outward with tilted covers over the gates. The thresholds are 1 meter higher over the ground with wooden steps for people to climb, but to prevent the entrance of domestic animals.

Besides Jinlong Monastery, there are a number of two-storey homes within the enclosure.

It is said there were 70 herders' households in the small castle at the time of the founding of New China in 1949.

As the local population has grown in the past half a century, there are now 130 households with more than 600 people.

This settlement has been formed over a century. On the meadow around the enclosure there is a dual-circle ring paved with cobbles, which is called "Mairi" in Tibetan and represents water and fire. In some way it is similar to an ancient moat.

In a religious sense, it represents peace and guarding against evil. Local herders explained that, by standing on a high place, the territory of the whole of Moska could be viewed as a diamond club - a musical instrument used by Tibetan Buddhists. The "Gesar Lhakong Hall" is built on the top of the "diamond club."

The central part is the complete "Pocket Castle."

The lower tip is close to a river, where a dagoba is built.

The whole castle is built in the "Mandala" style. The herders in the castle, especially young people, go away to the summer pastures leaving behind the old and very young.

In winter, people gather at the settlement and spend some time to study the Tibetan language.

The roofs of both monasteries and houses are formed like an inverted Y, and covered with locally produced slates. The whole village building complex shows distinct features of locality and personality.

Coming to Moska for the first time, I was struck by an intense feeling in a day infused with the atmosphere of Gesar culture.

The village Tibetan opera troupe performed for us "Winning the Throne by Winning King Gesar's Horse Race" in the courtyard before the main hall of the monastery, surrounded by a throng of local herders.

Although these actors were not professionals, they, in full costume, performed well, accompanied by music.

The masks they wore in Ling State King Gesar are very similar to those we saw in neighbouring Dege County, also in Sichuan Province.

Living Buddha Rigong, another monk and a lay person performed a segment of King Gesar.

Finally, all actors formed a circle to perform the Gesar dance and invited us three to join them, which we did despite our exhaustion.

Further findings

As rain and snow were ready to fall, I had to leave Moska without carefully looking at other Gesar-related relics.

However, my photos of 109 stone inscriptions of King Gesar and his tales aroused wide interest during the activities commemorating the millennium of King Gesar at the museum of the Southwest Nationality University where I work.

Professor Gyangbian Gyamco, a famous specialist in King Gesar studies, declared in a recently published book entitled "A Journey Into Gesar": "Another thing that is interesting to me and makes me excited is the discovery of a great deal of slates inscribed with figures in a small outlying monastery."

"This is a discovery of great value and significance," Gyangbian Gyamco was quoted as saying. "I have been engaged in studies of King Gesar for dozens of years and have never seen so many stone inscriptions, which will provide us with extremely valuable new data four our studies. It also indicates that there are rich cultural resources about King Gesar that remain to be discovered."

To further clarify the historical and cultural backgrounds of the Moska Gesar stone inscriptions and investigate the number of them and their distribution, I made a second trip to Moska on July 24, 2001.

When I arrived at Moska, Living Buddha Rigong and local herders once again greeted me and my companion, a township official, with great ceremony.

Living Buddha Rigong told me that he was born at Akoli pasture, in neighbouring Jinchuan County. He came to Moska when he was a child and was believed to be the Living Buddha of the Jinlong Monastery.

Now, he is also vice-chairman of the local committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and the director of public security for two prefectures (Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture) and three counties (Dainba, Daofu and Jinchuan).

He enjoys high public prestige and knows Moska and Akoli, Bian'er Township and Yoko pasture like the back of his hand, and has a good understanding of the local Gesar culture. We were glad that he would accompany us during our research.

We first carefully studied the stone inscriptions in the main hall of the Jinlong Monastery.

They could be classified into two types.

One is stone inscriptions on 40 slates made by Qenche Yexei Dorje, the founder of Jinglong Monastery, with a history of some 210 years. These include inscriptions about Ling State King Gesar and his favourite concubine and his mother, as well as 30 senior generals of the Ling State.

When the monastery was completed, Yexei Dorje put the 10 stone inscriptions of Ling State King Gesar, Zholmo and Gesar's mother on the top layer of the main hall.

Meanwhile, he placed the stone inscriptions for the 30 senior generals beside the 30 columns of the hall as guardian deities.

Today, only 10 of the 40 stone inscriptions are intact, in addition to some fragments stored on the top layer of the main hall. The inscriptions are plain, lacking any colour. They are the earliest stone inscriptions found in Moska. Though they are largely different from those in Gesar Lhakong Hall in terms of their artistic quality, they are of great historical and cultural value.

The other stone inscriptions, a total of 37 slates, are coloured ones restored in 1997.

A herder told me quietly that it was thanks to our visit that they were lucky to see the Gesar stone inscriptions for the first time. For many years, they could not visit the top layer of the main hall although they knew there were precious Gesar stone artifacts there.

Then we went to Gecong Gully, a two-hour ride on horseback from the village.

No Gesar stone inscriptions were found there, but it was said there were two interconnected alpine lakes. Beside the lower and larger lake there was a Gesar sacrificial altar. Each summer, sacrificial activities to the mountain deity, water deity and Ling State King Gesar are carried out.

These activities had concluded before we reached Moska. To show respect to me, Living Buddha Rigong accompanied me to Haizi Lake. It is also a pasture for Moska herders and their argali sheep. In the vicinity of Haizi Lake we saw hundreds of argali on the meadows and gravel shoals. Pairs of yellow ducks can be seen on the clear lake. Beside the lake is a larger heap of mani stones, where there is a place for burning aromatic plants.

Next to it is a stone platform as high as a man, which is called the "Gesar Seat Platform" by local herders.

On the platform there is a stone with some pattern like human fingerprints. It has been considered as sacred fingerprint stone of Ling State King Gesar. Slate with the inscribed figure of Yexei Dorje, the founder of Jinlong Monastery, as well as some white stones, are piled around the platform.

The sacred activities are not complicated. The locals burn cypress branches, scatter pieces of paper with pictures of horses in the air, and then all made a circuit of the lake on foot or on horseback.

Finally, they circled the Gesar seat platform three times while praying or reciting sutras.

During this trip, I was also able to visit several other sites. At Kasgyiado, a settlement of Bian'er Township pasture located to the south of Moska, I found a towering stone dagoba near the Buddhist hall of a local monastery.

The local herders call it the "Gesar dagoba," as the walls on four sides of the dagoba have Gesar stone inscriptions. A slate inscribed with the figure of Ling State King Gesar twice the size of the other stone inscriptions is placed in the centre of the front side.

There are a total of 83 stone inscriptions on the dagoba. Besides 31 stone inscriptions inscribed with figures of Buddha, Bodhisattvas, deities and eminent monks, all the others feature Gesar.

A dagoba with Gesar stone inscriptions is very unique to the Tibetan populated areas. Upon the holy mountain of Qenmaizin in Gyini Gully, I also saw and examined similar stone engravings.

Under a large rock, a house with half-open front and closed sides is built against the rock, in which there are 80 stone inscriptions placed in four layers. The quality of these inscriptions is similar to that of the Kasgyiado Gesar dagoba, but being indoors they have brighter colours.

Thinking back, I had seen so many relics featuring King Gesar. How can I forget my trips to Moska?

The writer is a researcher with the Museum of Southwest Nationality University. The article first appeared in China's Tibet magazine.

Source: China Daily