Research On The Totem Culture Of Gesar

Discussion on the totem culture of Gesar is of illustrative help in comprehending the original traditional culture of the ancient Tibetan people and is indispensible in exploring the primitive belief and the history of Bon Religion and Tibetan culture. It is of great theoretical and practical significance in making up for the insufficiency in researching the totem culture of Tibetan people, in order to make the totem research fly side by side with that of other minorities, helping more people to understand the unique the totem worship culture of ancient Tibetans.This paper researches the totem culture of Gesar from all sides, including totem objects, the inheritance and dissemination of totems, the amount of totems, and the derivation, accumulation, function, types, names and taboos of totems, etc.The totem worship in this epic is expressed through the containers of life which is called objects for preserving one's life, whose origin was from the conceptions of soul and the protection of it. The symbolic meaning of totems in Gesar lies in the external manifestation of the archetypes of characters. The totem worship in Gesar was a natural religious belief of the early Tibetan tribal society that came into being with the clan system. The totem objects were usually animals and plants, then other natural objects, inorganic or man-made things.Analyzing and discussing in the angle of cultural dimensions and from various aspects, we can find more intuitively that the totems in Gesar can be divided into four groups: the early stage of totem worship, the original and sub-original totem worship, post-original totem worship and totem gods. These types were formed through gradual accumulation and existed in Gesar which reflected the social life of more than one generation of Gesar.If the structure and condition of various totems was argued and analyzed in the perspective of cultural layers, it could be found out that the totem culture of Gesar was not just totem worship, but including some cultural contents such as taboos, names, exogamy and procreation belief of totems, etc.