Menri Monastery

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In March 1969 a Bonpo monk named Sangye Tenzin Jongdong was living in Norway, half a world from the mountain villages where he had studied. A telegram reached him there. The protector deities of Bon, it said, had chosen him — by lot, before the images, out of ten eligible geshes whose names had been sealed in balls of barley dough and shaken loose one by one — as the thirty-third abbot of Menri. He accepted an office whose monastery no longer stood. The original Menri, the mother house of the whole tradition, had been destroyed in Tibet a decade earlier. The throne had outlived its building. What Sangye Tenzin inherited was a name, a lineage, and the obligation to give both a body again. He would raise it on a hillside of medicinal herbs above the village of Dolanji, in the Indian Himalaya, and take the name by which the tradition now remembers him: Lungtok Tenpai Nyima.

Medicine Mountain

The name carries the story. sMan-ri means “Medicine Mountain,” and the tradition takes it from the medicinal plants and the medicinal springs on the slope where the first Menri was built. That slope is Mount Shari Phowa, above the village of Tobgyal in the Tsang region of central Tibet, west of Shigatse. Long before any monastery stood there, the site had a prophecy attached to it. Bon tradition holds that Tonpa Shenrab, the enlightened founder of the religion, passed through Tobgyal on his way to subdue the demons of the Kongpo region, pressed his foot into the rock, and told a child he met there that in time a monastery would stand in this place. The footprint in the stone became a token of the prophecy — a tradition-internal claim, marked as such, the kind of foundation-legend by which a sacred site announces that it was always meant to be.

The documented chain of foundation is longer and more particular than a single miracle. Menri did not spring up on empty ground; it inherited a seat. The organized monastic Bon of Tsang had its first great house at Yeru Wensakha (g.Yas-ru dBen-sa-kha), founded in 1072, which for three centuries served as the central monastery of the tradition. In 1386 a flood swept it away. The loss left the discipline of Bon without a mother house at exactly the moment it most needed one, and the man who supplied the replacement was among the most consequential figures the religion produced.

Nyammed Sherab Gyaltsen (mNyam-med Shes-rab rGyal-mtshan, 1356–1416) was born in Gyarong, in the eastern marches of the Tibetan world, and his epithet — mNyam-med, “the Peerless One,” the one without equal — was earned in the scholastic arena rather than granted by birth. In 1405, at the age of fifty, he founded Tashi Menri Ling on the slope of Shari Phowa, on the very ground the prophecy had named. He is remembered in the tradition as a second Tonpa Shenrab, a restorer who gathered the scattered teachings and set them on a monastic footing that would hold. From that founding, the abbacy of Menri became the highest office in Bon. Its holder took the title Menri Trizin (sMan-ri Khri-‘dzin), “holder of the throne of Menri,” and was recognized not merely as the head of one monastery but as the supreme head of the entire tradition — the living successor of Nyammed Sherab Gyaltsen and, through him, of the transmission that Bon traces back to Tonpa Shenrab himself.

The manner of choosing that successor is one of the tradition’s distinctive institutional signatures. Where Tibetan Buddhist lineages generally pass their highest offices through recognized rebirth — the discovery of a child in whom the previous holder is held to have returned — Menri does not select its abbot as a reincarnation. The Menri Trizin is drawn by lot before the protector deities. When a throne falls vacant, the names of the eligible geshes are written out, enclosed in identical dough balls, and, after days of prayer to the guardians of Yungdrung Bon, shaken from the vessel until one emerges. The office is thus held to be conferred by the protectors directly, on a candidate already qualified by learning, rather than carried in a body across death. It is a small procedural difference with a large meaning: it makes the headship of Bon an office of the deities’ choosing rather than an inheritance of the soul.

Monks at the reestablished Menri Monastery (Pal Shenten Menri Ling), Dolanji, Solan district, Himachal Pradesh — the mother house of Bon rebuilt in exile. Soap Boy 1, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The seat from which the tradition is governed

To call Menri the “mother monastery” of Bon is not sentiment but a description of function. It was, and remains, the disciplinary and doctrinal center of Yungdrung Bon — the model against which other houses measured themselves. The institutional record collected by The Treasury of Lives notes that the original Menri was known for the strictness of its monastic rule, which set the standard for Bon houses across the plateau; by the twentieth century it counted some two hundred and fifty branch monasteries spread from Tibet into Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, India, Mongolia, and the Chinese provinces, and before 1959 its own halls held between four and five hundred monks divided among four colleges. Thirty-two abbots sat on its throne between the founding and the destruction. Menri was the point from which the ordination lines, the curriculum, and the calendar of the tradition radiated outward.

The internal architecture mattered as much as the reach. Old Menri was organized into four residential colleges, each with its own hall and discipline, through which monks advanced as they progressed; the abbot presided over ordination and over the great annual observances that fixed the tradition’s ritual year. A monk who took his vows at Menri entered a line that the whole Bon world recognized, and a text corrected against Menri’s copies carried an authority a provincial house could not confer on its own. The monastery was in this sense less a single building than a clearing-house of legitimacy — the place where the standards of learning, ordination, and observance were kept, and against which the branch houses measured themselves. When later Bon monasteries were founded, they were founded on Menri’s model, and often by monks Menri had trained.

What was taught there was the full inheritance of Bon, and it is worth insisting on the scope of that inheritance, because for a long time European and Buddhist accounts alike shrank it to almost nothing. Yungdrung Bon possesses its own scriptural canon — a Kangyur and Tengyur parallel to the Buddhist collections — its own twelve-volume life of the founder, its own set of enlightened lords at the head of the cosmos, and its own graded path, the Nine Ways of Bon, ascending from the ritual and medical arts through the sutra and tantra vehicles to the summit teaching of Dzogchen, the Great Perfection. Menri transmitted all of it. The monastery trained monks in the same rigorous scholastic dialectics that the Tibetan monastic world developed on both sides of the Bon–Buddhist divide, culminating in the geshe (dge-bshes) degree — the doctorate of Tibetan learning, won through years of memorization, debate, and commentary. That the two traditions each built a geshe system, in parallel and in mutual pressure, is one of the clearest signs of how closely Tibetan Buddhism and Bon grew up together: siblings who borrowed each other’s tools even while disputing each other’s claims.

The graded structure of that curriculum is the Nine Ways of Bon, the ninefold path by which the tradition orders its whole teaching. The lower ways gather the ritual, prognostic, and medical arts and the methods of dealing with the world’s obstructing forces; the middle ways carry the ethical and ascetic disciplines and the vows of the ordained; the higher ways rise through the tantric vehicles to the summit, the Great Perfection, in which the mind is held to recognize its own nature directly. Menri’s business was to transmit the entire ladder without dropping a rung — to keep the ritual and medical knowledge alive alongside the philosophical training, so that a geshe left the monastery competent in both the debate hall and the practices the surrounding communities depended on. The counter-clockwise turn that marks Bon apart — the yungdrung, the eternal swastika, wheeling against the direction the Buddhists take, and the pilgrim circling a sacred peak leftward rather than right — is not a mere emblem but a whole orientation of practice, and Menri was the house that guarded its correctness.

The protectors before whom the abbot is chosen are themselves part of what Menri guards. Chief among the guardians of the doctrine is Sidpa Gyalmo, the fierce queen who rides a mule and defends the teaching — the deity to whom the fourteen days of prayer at an abbatial election are addressed. To be ordained at Menri, to complete the geshe course there, or to circumambulate its halls, is for a Bonpo to stand at the head of the whole system: the place from which the discipline of the tradition flows and to which its lineages return for validation. This is why the loss of the building did not dissolve the office, and why an abbot could be elected to a monastery that had ceased to exist. The seat was understood to inhere in the succession, not in the stone.

Destruction and the second founding

The tradition that Menri anchored had spent much of its history under a shadow cast by others. From the polemics that accompanied the later diffusion of Buddhism in Tibet, rival chroniclers had painted Bon as the crude, heterodox layer that “true” religion had supplanted — a primitive substrate of spirit-cults and blood offerings beneath the clean surface of the Dharma. That picture was carried into modern scholarship and hardened there, until Bon meant, to many outside readers, little more than Tibetan shamanism. The correction, when it came, was decisive. David Snellgrove’s The Nine Ways of Bon (1967), translating directly from the Bon scripture the gZi-brjid, presented the tradition in its own words as a fully articulated religion; Per Kvaerne’s The Bon Religion of Tibet (1995), Samten Karmay, and Charles Ramble extended the recovery, and the field came to recognize Bon as the developed sibling of Tibetan Buddhism rather than its raw material — two religions that had persecuted, borrowed from, and shaped one another across a thousand years. The judgment had a Tibetan precedent: the nineteenth-century nonsectarian Rimé movement had already accorded Bon a place among the plateau’s legitimate lineages, collecting and honoring its transmissions alongside the Buddhist schools.

Scholarly rehabilitation did not protect the monastery. After the Chinese annexation of Tibet and the flight of 1959, the original Tashi Menri Ling in Tsang was destroyed, along with much of the monastic fabric of the Tibetans on both sides of the religious divide. The thirty-second abbot’s line reached its material end. What survived was the succession and a scattering of exiled monks across the Himalayan borderlands — and, in Norway, one geshe whom a lottery of dough balls would shortly name.

Sangye Tenzin Jongdong received the telegram in March 1969. As the newly recognized thirty-third Menri Trizin, taking the name Lungtok Tenpai Nyima (1929–2017), he set himself to the second founding. He was not alone: the work was shared above all with Lopön Tenzin Namdak, the great Bon scholar-teacher whose own escape from Tibet had been harrowing and whose learning would become the intellectual engine of the revival. A settlement for Bon refugees had been established at Dolanji, near Solan in Himachal Pradesh, in 1967; there, on the medicinal hillside chosen to echo the lost Medicine Mountain, the foundations of a new temple were laid in 1969, and the monastery — Pal Shenten Menri Ling — was completed in 1978. Around the temple rose a monastic town: a dialectic school that revived the geshe course, a children’s home, a Central School for the education of Tibetan children, and a settlement of lay Bonpo families gathered from Tibet, Nepal, and the Indian and Himalayan borderlands. The rebuilding was also a rescue of texts. Much of the Bon canon had survived only in copies carried out of Tibet or preserved in Himalayan communities beyond the reach of the destruction, and the exile decades became a long labor of collecting, editing, and reprinting the scriptures so that the tradition would have its books as well as its buildings — work in which Lopön Tenzin Namdak’s learning was decisive. A monastery is only as durable as the corpus it can teach from, and the Dolanji community set out to reconstitute both at once. The reestablished Menri today houses over two hundred monks and runs one of only two functioning Bon geshe programs in the world; the other is at Triten Norbutse, the sister monastery founded near Kathmandu. Between them they train the scholars who now carry the teaching back out to Bon communities wherever they survive.

Lungtok Tenpai Nyima held the throne for nearly half a century and died in 2017, having accomplished the improbable thing the telegram had asked of him. The office passed as it always had. On 1 January 2018, before the protectors, the lot fell to Lungtok Dawa Dhargyal Rinpoche — born on 29 November 1972 in Amdo, in eastern Tibet — who was enthroned at Dolanji on 6 September 2018 as the thirty-fourth Menri Trizin and the reigning supreme head of Bon. The full Bon curriculum, the sutra and tantra and Dzogchen that the Zhangzhung inheritance and the founder’s transmission had carried down, is taught again on a hillside a thousand miles from Tobgyal, and geshes graduate from it to serve monasteries the original Menri would have recognized as its own — from the pilgrimage mountain of Bonri in the southeast to the great grassland monastic city of Nangzhig in Amdo, and out to the Western diaspora beyond. The tradition-wide frame in which all of this sits — the yungdrung turned counter-clockwise, the pilgrim circling the sacred peak of Mount Kailash against the sun — is older than any of its buildings, and it was that frame, not the masonry, that the thirty-third abbot was charged with keeping. The building at Tobgyal is gone; the one at Dolanji is a working monastery with monks in its courtyards. Between the two stands an unbroken chain of names drawn, one dough ball at a time, before the guardians of the doctrine — a succession that a flood in 1386 and an army after 1959 both failed to end.

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