Bon

← Encyclopedia

Turn a swastika the other way. Where the Buddhist emblem of the Tibetan plateau wheels clockwise, the yungdrung turns counter-clockwise — and that single reversal of direction is the most economical statement a tradition has ever made about itself. It is the indestructible sign, the “eternal,” doing for Bon what the diamond-thunderbolt does for Tibetan Buddhism: naming the unbreakable, the thing that abides through the destruction of worlds. A Bon temple looks, at first glance, like any other on the plateau — the same maroon robes, the same debate courtyard, the same banked shelves of scripture — and then the symbols are running the wrong way, and the founder on the central throne is not the figure a visitor expects, and the name of the protector spoken in the liturgy belongs to an older pantheon. Bon is the one major Tibetan system that does not call itself Buddhist, and it makes that refusal in a vocabulary almost wholly shared with Buddhism. Its followers know it as Yungdrung Bon, “Eternal Bon.”

Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, the founder-buddha of Yungdrung Bon, with episodes from his life — 19th-century thangka, Rubin Museum of Art (Google Art Project), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Two senses of one word

The word bon carries two meanings that a careful reader must keep apart, because the entire historical problem of the tradition lives in the gap between them.

In the imperial period — the centuries of the Tibetan empire before the collapse of the ninth — bon names a class of ritual specialists and the rites they performed: funerary offerings and the elaborate conduct of the dead to the next world, divination, the propitiation and management of local gods, demons, and the spirits of place. This is the bon of the Dunhuang manuscripts, the Tibetan-language documents sealed in a cave at Mogao around the year 1000 and recovered at the start of the twentieth century. Those documents mention bon and bon-po as officiants, chiefly in funerary contexts. They do not contain the founder-hagiography, the cosmology of a western paradise, or the graded doctrinal architecture that defines the later religion. The substrate they attest is the cult of kings and mountains and the dead that scholars now usually file under a separate heading — the pre-Buddhist Tibetan “nameless religion”.

In the second sense, bon names the organized religion that took recognizable shape from roughly the tenth and eleventh centuries — a complete system with a canon, monasteries, a scholastic curriculum, a founder-buddha, and a full path of liberation. This is Yungdrung Bon. Its self-conscious crystallization is conventionally dated to a single event: the mass treasure-revelation of Shenchen Luga (996–1035) at a site called ‘Bri-mtshams mtha’ dkar around 1017, from which the systematized lineages descend. That this consolidation happened in the very period when Tibetan Buddhism was reorganizing itself after the imperial collapse — the “later diffusion” of the eleventh century — is the central fact of Bon’s documented history. The two grew up side by side, in close and contested proximity, each watching the other.

How much of the first bon survives in the second is the live question of the field, and Bon is unusual among living religions in making a version of that question part of its own self-understanding. It does not present itself as new. It insists it is the older thing.

Tonpa Shenrab and the land to the west

Yungdrung Bon tells its origin not from the Buddha Shakyamuni but from Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, an enlightened teacher said to have lived ages before him in a land called Olmo Lungring, the central region of a larger country, Tagzig, placed to the west of Tibet — identified at various points with Persia, with Bactria, with the Pamirs, with the country around Mount Kailash. From Tonpa Shenrab descend the scriptures, the cosmology, and the whole graded path. He is to Bon what Shakyamuni is to Buddhism: not a borrowing but a parallel and, by the tradition’s reckoning, prior source of awakened teaching.

Mount Kailash in western Tibet — one of the regions linked to Olmo Lungring and Tagzig, the western homeland from which Bon traces Tonpa Shenrab — Ondřej Žváček, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

The hagiography survives in three biographies of mounting length and lateness. The shortest, the mDo ‘dus, runs to a single volume and is conventionally placed in the tenth or eleventh century, recovered as treasure. The middle one, the gZer mig in two volumes, is the work whose partial translation by the Moravian missionary-scholar A. H. Francke, serialized in Asia Major between 1924 and 1930, gave Europe its first substantial sight of a Bon scripture. The longest, the gZi brjid in twelve volumes, is a fourteenth-century visionary revelation received by Loden Nyingpo (born 1360) and dictated, in the tradition’s account, from a continuous oral lineage; it is the source David Snellgrove drew on for his landmark The Nine Ways of Bon.

The tradition dates Tonpa Shenrab’s birth by its own calendrical reckoning to a year that one standard calculation places around 16,017 BCE, while a revisionist computation within the tradition itself brings the figure down to roughly 1917 BCE. These are the religion’s own datings of its own origin, held in the register of self-understanding rather than of chronology. To the historian, Tonpa Shenrab is not established as a discrete individual — most scholars treat the figure as legendary, and argue only over whether the legend carries any pre-Buddhist substrate or is wholly a construction of the eleventh century and after. The tradition and the historian are answering different questions, and Bon, more than most, knows that they are.

The Nine Ways and the shape of the path

The doctrine is organized as the theg pa rim dgu, the Nine Successive Ways — a ladder that is at once a classification of teachings, a graded program of practice, and a polemical claim that Bon is a complete vehicle-system, structurally the equal of Tibetan Buddhism, and not a residue of folk or shamanic survivals.

The first four are the Causal Ways. They are the inheritance most visibly continuous with the older funerary-and-divinatory bon: the Way of the Shen of Prediction (divination, astrology, ritual diagnosis, medicine); the Way of the Shen of Visible Manifestation (the invocation of deities and the propitiation of guardian classes bearing names — werma, dralha — that belong to the archaic plateau); the Way of the Shen of Magical Illusion; and the Way of the Shen of Existence, which gathers the rites of death and the guidance of the dead through the intermediate states. The five Resultant or higher Ways climb from the path of the virtuous layman, through the path of the Great Ascetics — drangsong, the equivalent of the fully ordained monastic with a vinaya discipline parallel to the Buddhist one — and up through the outer and inner tantric ways to the summit. The ninth and unsurpassed Way is Dzogchen, the Great Perfection.

The architecture is given as architecture. Bon is a living tradition with living transmission-holders, and the operative content of its rites — the funerary liturgies, the tantric generation and completion practices, the Dzogchen instructions — passes from teacher to qualified student under vow, not through an encyclopedia. What can be said is structural: the Nine Ways absorb the whole older apparatus of the plateau into the lowest rungs of a ladder whose top is the same non-dual contemplative summit that the Buddhist schools also climb, by a different stair.

Dzogchen, claimed twice

At that summit sits the most charged overlap in the whole Tibetan religious landscape. Dzogchen, the Great Perfection — the teaching of the mind’s primordial, already-awakened nature, beyond cultivation and correction — is claimed as the highest teaching by both Bon and the Buddhist Nyingma school, and each traces it to a separate origin. Both classify it into the same three series — mind, space, and secret-instruction. Both possess a treasure-revelation system, the terma, through which texts hidden in an earlier age are recovered by destined revealers, and both use almost the same technical vocabulary for it. Bon holds that its Dzogchen lineages, and above all the Oral Transmission of Zhang Zhung — a lineage presented not as recovered treasure but as an unbroken spoken transmission running back through masters of Tagzig and Zhang Zhung said to have attained the rainbow body — antedate the Nyingma cycles and supplied their template. Nyingma writers reverse the claim. Each makes itself the elder.

The historically defensible observation is narrower and more interesting than either priority claim: the parallelism is genuine, reciprocal, and the product of two traditions developing in intimate contact across the second-diffusion period, with extensive traffic of texts, figures, and forms in both directions. The boundary between Bon Dzogchen and Nyingma Dzogchen is one of lineage and attribution far more than of content — and the shared treasure-and-Great-Perfection corpus belongs with Dzogchen, terma, and the Nyingma. What is distinctively Bon is the matter at hand.

Two theses dismantled

Western scholarship long held Bon in one of two grips. The first read it as the pagan substrate that Buddhism arrived to displace — Tibet’s primitive shamanism, surviving in degraded form. The polemical edge of that reading is visible already in L. A. Waddell’s The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism of 1895, which filed Bon under “unreformed shamanism,” a framing inherited wholesale from the hostile Buddhist sources Waddell relied on. The second thesis read Bon as a mere heretical imitation, a counterfeit Buddhism assembled after the fact out of resentment and mimicry.

Close study across the second half of the twentieth century dismantled both. The relationship runs in both directions. Bon absorbed Buddhist scholastic, monastic, and tantric forms on a vast scale — but elements of genuinely pre-Buddhist Tibetan religion, the cult of the dead and the mountains and the gods of place, passed through Bon and around it into Buddhism as well, so that the “Buddhism” Bon is accused of copying was itself partly shaped by the substrate Bon preserved. Neither is simply parent to the other. The resemblance between a Bon monastery and a Buddhist one is near-total — the same robes, the same courtyards of formal debate, a parallel canon divided into a Kangyur of the founder’s word and a Tengyur of commentary, a parallel curriculum culminating in a geshe degree. The differences are real but specific, and they are exactly the four a careful visitor would notice: the founder named (Tonpa Shenrab, not Shakyamuni), the lineages claimed, the direction the holy symbols turn, and the older names borne by the protective deities. Bon shares with Buddhism the deep grammar of the plateau — karma, rebirth, the monastic form, the tantric and contemplative path — and reads it through a different founder and a different memory.

The yungdrung (“eternal”), the counter-clockwise swastika that distinguishes Bon symbolism from its clockwise Buddhist counterpart — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The fifth tradition

For most of its documented history Bon was a marginalized presence beside the four Buddhist schools of Tibet, periodically suppressed, its monasteries pressured, its adherents pushed toward the geographic and social edges of the plateau. Its great institutional anchor, Tashi Menri monastery, was founded in 1405 by Nyammé Sherab Gyaltsen (1356–1415/16) in Tsang, central Tibet, succeeding an earlier seat lost to flood; Menri became the seat of the throne-holding abbatial line and the heart of scholastic Bon until the destructions of the twentieth century.

After 1959 the lineage went into exile. A diaspora settlement was registered with the Indian government in 1967 at Dolanji, in Himachal Pradesh, on land obtained with the help of Catholic Relief Services; its monastery, completed in 1978, bears the name Pal Shenten Menri Ling, and the abbatial seat itself now resides there. The thirty-third throne-holder was enthroned in exile in 1969. In 1987 a second great institution, Triten Norbutse, was founded on a hill facing the Swayambhu stupa above Kathmandu; between them, Dolanji and Triten Norbutse are the two houses in the world that confer the full Bon geshe degree.

The decisive change in Bon’s standing came not in Tibet but in the government-in-exile, and not as a single act but as a sequence. In the late 1970s — 1979 by most accounts, though the seating of Bon representatives in the exile parliament is sometimes dated to 1977 — the fourteenth Dalai Lama advised that body to grant Bon a seat and equal status with the Buddhist schools, the substantive institutional recognition. In 1987 he restated the position publicly at Menri Dolanji, taking up Bon ritual implements and forbidding sectarian discrimination. At a non-sectarian gathering of abbots and incarnate lamas at Sarnath in December 1988 he affirmed that one should thereafter speak of five Tibetan religious traditions — Nyingma, Sakya, Kagyu, Gelug, and Bon. The most-quoted “1988 recognition” is really the public crown of a decade of work whose institutional substance was in place by the end of the 1970s.

That recognition placed Bon, after roughly a millennium at the margin, formally beside the schools that had displaced it — and confirmed in the language of twentieth-century institutions what the tradition had always said of itself: that it was never an intruder but the elder house.

Scholarship and the textual record

The modern study of Bon is young. The tradition did not enter Western scholarly literature in substantive form until the German Tibetologist Helmut Hoffmann’s Quellen zur Geschichte der tibetischen Bon-Religion of 1950 and his survey The Religions of Tibet (German 1956; English 1961). The English-language pivot is David Snellgrove’s The Nine Ways of Bon (Oxford, London Oriental Series 18, 1967), edited and translated in direct collaboration with the Bon scholar-monk Tenzin Namdak — a defining instance of source-tradition and scholarship working in partnership rather than at a distance; the catalog record sits in the Smithsonian Libraries. The standard single-volume overview is Per Kvaerne’s The Bon Religion of Tibet: The Iconography of a Living Tradition (Serindia, 1995), which reads the tradition through its own deities and ritual texts.

The indispensable Bon-scholar voice is Samten Karmay, whose The Treasury of Good Sayings (1972) gave English a Bon history from within the tradition’s own chronicle, and whose collected studies, The Arrow and the Spindle, contain the classic essay “Early Evidence for the Existence of Bon as a Religion in the Royal Period.” Dan Martin’s Unearthing Bon Treasures (Brill, 2001) is the major study of Shenchen Luga and the founding treasure-event, with a general bibliography of Bon attached. The principal periodical, the Revue d’Études Tibétaines founded and directed by the Dzogchen specialist Jean-Luc Achard, is published open-access and archived in full at Digital Himalaya, making it the most accessible doorway into current Bon scholarship.

Three connected problems organize the field. The historicity of Tonpa Shenrab; the historicity and extent of the kingdom of Zhang Zhung; and the relation between the imperial-period bon-po of the Dunhuang documents and the systematized Yungdrung Bon of the eleventh century. On the last, a moderate-traditionalist reading associated with Karmay treats the eleventh-century “later spread” as the systematization and redaction of authentic pre-Buddhist material, with real continuities visible through funerary ritual and mountain cult. A revisionist reading associated with Henk Blezer — gathered in the collective volume Emerging Bon (2011) — reads the figure of Shenrab, the location of Olmo Lungring, and the narratives of Zhang Zhung antiquity as largely retrospective constructions, the Bon self-presentation as “always already there” being itself a strategy of identity in competition with the new Buddhism. Between the textual camps stands the archaeology: John Vincent Bellezza’s survey of some seven hundred pre-Buddhist sites in Upper Tibet, synthesized in Zhang Zhung (2008), tends to vindicate a recognizable Upper Tibetan civilizational substrate to which the name Zhang Zhung fairly applies. The consensus is partial and honest about being so: Zhang Zhung was real; Tonpa Shenrab as an individual is not established; how much of the older bon flows into the later is the question that remains in motion.

The tradition’s own canon is no longer locked away. The Bon Kangyur was digitized in 2006 at the Tibetan Bon Yungdrung Library at Menri, by order of the thirty-third throne-holder, and is cataloged and accessible through the Buddhist Digital Resource Center — the founder’s word, in 179 volumes, now reading-room open.

What is held apart

Two adjacent things stand close to Yungdrung Bon without being part of it. The later syncretic current called New Bon (bon gsar), which arose in exchange with the Nyingma and incorporates figures such as Padmasambhava, is a distinct and later movement; the Buddhist treasure-and-Dzogchen corpus that crosses the sectarian line belongs to the story of the Nyingma school. So, too, does the figure of Milarepa sit on the Buddhist side of a famous rivalry — his legendary contest with a Bon adept on the slopes of Mount Kailash is a Buddhist story about Bon, not a Bon source. And one strand must be named only to be set aside: the “Bhons” and “Dugpas” of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy and the Shambhala literature of the Roerich circle, where a phantom “Bön” appears as a category of degenerate sorcerers. That construction has no contact with Bon doctrine, lineage, or institution; it recycles the hostile nineteenth-century framings without their philological controls, and it stands as a documented Western-esoteric misconstrual rather than as anything bearing on Bon itself.

What practitioners hold and what historians can establish do not fully agree, and Bon is unusual in making that gap part of its own self-understanding — a tradition that insists it is the older thing, surviving in the idiom of the newer.

→ Related: Tibetan Buddhism · Buddhism · Nyingma Terma Dzogchen · New Bon Bon Gsar · Pre Buddhist Tibetan Nameless Religion · Mount Kailash · Milarepa · Padmasambhava · Karma · Reincarnation · Monasticism · Theosophy · Shambhala