Khyunglung

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On the north bank of the upper Sutlej, about a day’s walk west of the hot springs and gompa of Tirthapuri, a honeycomb of small square caves is cut into the ochre bluffs above the river. Most are no bigger than four paces across. Many have a small raised hearth set at the back, and ceilings blackened where the smoke found no chimney and went out the door. Above them run terraced footings and the broken lines of walls, climbing the earthen ridge that rises from the water. The Bon tradition calls this place Khyunglung Ngulkhar — the Silver Castle of the Garuda Valley — and remembers it as a seat of the kings of Zhangzhung, the ancient kingdom of the far west, a cave-city in the sky-country a little south and west of the great snow-mountain of Mount Kailash.

The name and how it reaches the record

The name is Tibetan, and it is transparent. In Wylie transliteration it is khyung-lung dngul-mkhar, written ཁྱུང་ལུང་དངུལ་མཁར in the Tibetan script: khyung the garuda, the great horned eagle of the western sky; lung the valley or the place; dngul silver; mkhar the castle or fortress. Read whole, it is the Silver Castle of the Garuda Valley — and the choice of bird is not incidental. The garuda was Zhangzhung’s emblematic creature, a being of the heights and of clear sight, and to seat the kings in a Garuda Valley was to seat them in the mountain air of their own country.

The site reaches the documentary record on two tracks that careful scholars keep apart. The first is textual. Bon histories, and the wider Tibetan tradition behind them, name Khyunglung as the capital of Zhangzhung — the seat of a long line of western kings, whom the tradition numbers among the patrons of the doctrine — and the outside record agrees that a western polity of this name existed, for the Tang Chinese annals register the submission of “Yangtong,” the Chinese rendering of Zhangzhung, to the Tibetan king in 634 CE. That entry in a foreign chronicle gives a hard date to the kingdom the ruins are tied to, independent of any Bon claim. The second track is the ground itself. A cluster of ruins on the upper Sutlej — terraced palace foundations, defensive walling, and the honeycomb of small rock-cut cells — has been identified with the literary capital and surveyed in earnest since the 1990s. The identification is older than the modern surveys: in the 1930s the Bon lama Khyungtrul Jikme Namkha Dorje matched the Gurgyam site and the nearby Khardong citadel to the Khyunglung Ngulkhar of the Bon scriptures, reading the ruins against the texts he carried. According to the Kyunglung record, the caves themselves still hold small stones inscribed with archaic Tibetan letters, stone images of Bon deities, and vessels — the residue of a place long used for offering.

The name, exactly because it is transparent, is also common, and it repays a moment of care. Tibet holds more than one “khyung lung,” more than one Garuda Valley, and the survey literature distinguishes the Sutlej cave-city from other places carrying the same eagle-name — Khyunglung Khartsé and the like — that appear in the imagery of Upper Tibet without being the royal capital. The Khyunglung that concerns Bon history is this one: the western site above the Sutlej, near Tirthapuri, within reach of Kailash. It is the specificity of the setting, more than the name, that does the identifying work — the confluence of streams, the earthen bluffs, the fortified ridge, the tombs — and it is that setting that the surveys and the excavations have been reading.

The most systematic modern work is that of the American scholar John Vincent Bellezza, who since 1994 has walked and cataloged the monuments of Upper Tibet, compiling inventories of more than four hundred pre-Buddhist monumental sites — fortresses on the high ground, cubic mountaintop tombs, temples tucked into hidden folds of rock, and fields of rock art — across the uppermost reaches of the plateau. His survey of the Zhangzhung heartland places its fortified settlements in the Sutlej drainage at roughly four to five thousand meters, castles standing above the small pockets of arable land, and it is within this landscape that the presumed capital sits. That much is agreed. What is not agreed is exactly which ruin-field held the royal seat. Several candidates cluster along the upper Sutlej near Tirthapuri, and Bellezza himself has argued that the principal capital should be read somewhat farther upriver, toward 32°N, at the palace complex he associates with the site called Gna’-shul — which would make the famous cave-city near Tirthapuri one strong candidate rather than a settled fact. The point is worth holding onto: the ruins are certainly ancient and certainly Zhangzhung, but the sentence “this is the capital” is an argument, not a datum. Snellgrove and Karmay, reading the Bon sources critically, treated the western capital as a firmly remembered place whose precise stones remained to be found; the finding is still in progress.

Mount Kailash (Tibetan Tisé) at sunset above Lake Manasarovar, the snow-mountain that rises to the northeast of the Garuda Valley and anchors the sacred geography of Zhangzhung. Andy Engelson, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The capital of the sky-country

Within the Bon sacred world Khyunglung is the earthly capital of a whole country. Zhangzhung was the land of the far west whose kings the tradition counts among the early guardians of the doctrine, and whose priest-lineages, it holds, carried the transmission of Yungdrung — “Eternal” — Bon before it ever spread east into central Tibet. The country’s founder-teacher, in the tradition’s telling, was Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, and Bon is said to have come from his homeland of Olmo Lungring, in the land of Tazig, into Zhangzhung, and from Zhangzhung into Tibet. That homeland is a paradise named only in prose — a country of the imagination, given no coordinate — and the Bon devotional literature sometimes reaches to blur the western capital with it, folding the Silver Castle into the mythic land of light. The gesture is legible and old; it is also, the documentary register would insist, a devotional move rather than a geographical one, and the two should not be run together.

The symbolism of the place is carried in its name. The garuda (khyung) is the emblem of Zhangzhung, the bird of the high air, and its valley is a seat pitched in the mountain sky — the same western world whose axis is Mount Kailash, the great snow-mountain that the Bonpo circle counter-clockwise, sacred at once to Bon, to Tibetan Buddhism, to Hinduism and to Jainism. Kailash rises close by to the northeast, with the round freshwater lake of Manasarovar at its foot, and Khyunglung lies within a long day’s reach of the pilgrim routes that gather there. The “silver” of the castle marks it as a precious and royal thing, a fortress-palace of the manifest world, fit for kings. To name a capital in these terms — an eagle, a valley, silver, a castle — is to write a small cosmology into a place-name: the bird of the heights, the precious metal, the seat of rule, all set in the high thin country where Bon locates its own beginnings.

The kings of Zhangzhung, in the tradition’s account, did not rule alone. Beside them stood priest-lineages, the bearers of the teaching, and the country is remembered less as a mere political power than as the reservoir from which the doctrine flowed east. The graded path that Yungdrung Bon calls its Nine Ways — the series of vehicles that climbs from the pragmatic rites of the everyday world up to the summit contemplations of Dzogchen — is presented by the tradition as a Zhangzhung inheritance, carried by these western lineages before it was ever written in central Tibet. Whatever the historian makes of that chronology, and the historian is cautious with it, the point for the sacred geography is plain: the far west, and this castle in it, is where Bon says the light first came to ground.

The caves read as the fabric of a lived religious landscape rather than as a curiosity. Small square cells, roughly four square meters each, many with the raised hearth at the far end and no vent but the doorway: some were dwellings for the kings and their retinue, the tradition holds, and others were shrines. The stone images and inscribed stones inside them point less to ordinary habitation than to offering, and the cave-shrines are remembered, and in places still kept, as places where offerings are made. This is the fabric of Yungdrung Bon at its western source — and it is worth naming plainly what Bon is here, because for a long time it was named as something else. In the older frame, still met in popular writing, “Bon” was taken to mean a primitive shamanic or animist layer beneath the real, Buddhist Tibet — a substrate to be overcome. That reading is a polemic with a history, Buddhist and colonial by turns, and it does not describe the thing itself. Yungdrung Bon is a developed religion with its own enlightened founder, its own scriptural canon, its own monastic universities and graded path, the sibling of Tibetan Buddhism rather than its rude ancestor; and Khyunglung, in the tradition’s memory, is one of the places where that religion is oldest. The country of the Garuda Valley is not the shadow of a faith but its western cradle.

The fall of the kingdom and the afterlife of the stones

The kingdom whose capital this was ended in conquest, and here the Bon and the Chinese records agree. In the seventh century Zhangzhung was absorbed into the expanding Tibetan Empire. Its last king, given in the sources as Ligmigya — also Lig-min-skya, or Ligmincha — was, in the Tibetan account, ambushed and killed while traveling toward Sumpa in the northeast, in the campaigns associated with the empire-builder Songtsen Gampo. The outside dates bracket the event: the Tang annals place the submission of Yangtong in 634, and the French Tibetologist R. A. Stein dated the conquest of the western kingdom to around 645. After it, the country and its people passed into the Tibetan orbit, and over the following centuries the Zhangzhung tongue — a Tibeto-Burman language of the West Himalayish group, kin to Kinnauri across the range in what is now Himachal Pradesh — faded from daily speech, even as it survived, fossilized and honored, in the opening lines of Bon liturgy. The Tibetans inherited the west; the Silver Castle fell to ruin; and for long stretches Khyunglung survived mainly as a name in the Bon histories, a capital remembered rather than seen.

A seal held by tradition to belong to the last kings of Zhangzhung, the dynasty whose line ended with Ligmigya in the seventh-century Tibetan conquest. Unknown author, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Its modern afterlife has been one of rediscovery and dispute. From the 1990s onward Western and Tibetan surveys — Bellezza’s foremost among them — mapped the Sutlej ruins and the rock-cut caves and argued for their pre-Buddhist antiquity, reading the fortresses and tombs of Upper Tibet as the material trace of a genuine highland civilization rather than a legend. Chinese archaeology came to the same ground: between 2004 and 2012 the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, working with the Tibetan antiquities authorities, investigated and excavated the Khardong city-site and an associated cemetery in the upper Sutlej basin as the presumed Silver City. The reported finds are those of a fortified settlement and not a shrine only: stone-built houses, altars, passages driven down toward the foot of the mountain, stone grinding plates and pestles, fragments of iron armor and iron arrowheads, and a stone image said to be of the Bon master Drenpa Namkha — the residue of people who lived, worked, worshiped, and fought here, on a hilltop compound reported at some four thousand four hundred meters. The excavation did not silence the older question. Which of several upper-Sutlej ruin-fields was the true royal seat is still argued, and Bellezza’s reading, placing the principal capital farther upriver, remains on the table against the identification of the cave-city near Tirthapuri. There is a further wrinkle, and it is a modern one: the framing of the digs. To excavate a “lost capital” is also to make a claim about who the ancient west belonged to, and the state-sponsored archaeology of Zhangzhung has been read by some observers as an exercise with a political edge as well as a scholarly one, folding the pre-imperial west into a narrative of Tibetan and Chinese continuity. That the ruins are real, and Zhangzhung, is not in doubt; how their story is told, and to what end, is its own contested matter, and an honest account keeps both the archaeology and its framing in the same view.

The wider country did not stay empty after the kingdom fell. Centuries later the same upper-Sutlej valleys became the heart of the Buddhist kingdom of Guge, whose cliff-cut capital at Tsaparang and whose monastery at Toling rose a few days’ travel down the river — a second highland civilization built into the same eroded earth, so that the western drainage carries the ruins of two ages layered over one another. The Zhangzhung stones belong to the older, thinner stratum: the one that the Bon histories remember and the surveys are still recovering.

And the place is not only a ruin, or only a problem. It remains a corner of a living world. Travelers and the tradition’s own record alike note that the villagers of the Khyunglung area still keep the ancient religion of Bon — the faith of their Zhangzhung forebears — so that the ground is at once an archaeological landscape, a contested historical puzzle, and a living Bon community near Kailash. The counter-clockwise mountain of Bonri in the southeast and the mother monastery of Menri, reborn in exile in India, belong to the same living tradition that these cliffs helped begin. Above the river the small cells hold their cold hearths and their inscribed stones; in the houses below, offerings are still made in the old western way. The Silver Castle of the Garuda Valley keeps its two lives at once — the kingdom that ended, and the religion that did not.

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