The Epic of King Gesar tells of Gesar, a king and warrior of the land of Ling, sent or born into the human world to subdue tyrants, demons and the forces disturbing right order, and it is claimed as living heritage by both Tibetan and Mongolian communities, who tell overlapping but not identical versions of his story. Gesar is often introduced as an unlikely hero, mocked or exiled in his early years before winning a horse race that establishes his kingship, a pattern of the humble figure revealed as chosen that recurs across the wider cycle.
Unlike a scripture with a fixed table of contents, the Gesar epic exists as a constellation of episodes, some focused on Gesar's taming of demon kings in the four directions, others on internal conflicts within Ling itself, and different bards, regions and eras have favored different episodes, expanded some and let others fade. Because of this, no single performance or written compilation is treated as definitive, and the epic continues to be performed, recorded and in places actively composed rather than existing only as a closed historical text.
The demon kings Gesar subdues in different tellings are often mapped onto the cardinal directions surrounding Ling, giving individual episode cycles names tied to a specific adversary and region, so a bard specializing in one direction's cycle may never perform material belonging to another, which is part of why the epic as a whole resists compression into a single linear narrative.