Nangzhig Monastery

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Before Sunday the courtyards go quiet. Six days a week the debate grounds of the monastery carry the sound that any Tibetan traveler would know at once — the clap of a standing monk’s hand driving home a question, the seated answer, the whole hillside busy with argument — and then, one day in seven and through the long retreats, the noise stops and the ground empties. The place that falls silent is not a small one. It is a town of monks climbing a grassland slope above Ngawa, hundreds of red-robed figures among assembly halls and colleges and rows of quarters, and its Geshe candidates spend the better part of a decade there working through logic and medicine and the dead language of an old western kingdom. This is Nangzhig, the largest living monastery of Bon anywhere on earth, set down on the high Amdo plateau of what is now northern Sichuan.

The house on the grassland

The Tibetan name is Snang zhig dgon (Wylie snang zhig dgon), which travelers and neighbors soften into “Narshi” or “Nogi”; in Chinese it is 郎依寺, Langyi si. The fuller titles the tradition uses read like a charter — Snang zhig rgyal bstan phun tshogs gling and Snang zhig bkra shis g.yung drung gling, “Nangzhig, the isle of the flourishing victorious teaching” and “Nangzhig, the isle of auspicious eternal Bon.” The last words matter. G.yung drung, the yungdrung, is the eternal left-turning swastika that is Bon’s own emblem, and to build a monastery under that name is to plant a flag: this is a house of Yungdrung (“Eternal”) Bon, the developed religion that traces itself to the enlightened founder Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, the sibling of Tibetan Buddhism and not, whatever an older scholarship liked to say, a folk-layer beneath it.

The site sits on the far northwestern edge of Sichuan, in Ngawa (Chinese Aba) County of the Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, in the historic Amdo region of the eastern Tibetan plateau. The monastery stands on a hill about four kilometers north of Ngawa town — a short climb “up a shortcut,” in the plain phrase of the survey record — at a coordinate the mapping fixes near 32°56′ north, 101°43′ east, and at an elevation of roughly 3,448 meters. This is grassland country, not the deep gorge Tibet of the tourist poster: wide pasture rolling to the horizon, nomad tents in the summer, the light very clean and very hard. The monastery is a real, documented, mapped place, and everything below about its scale can be walked and counted today.

Its founding belongs to the twelfth century, though the tradition tells the story in more than one voice. The Bon reckoning traces the house to 1107 or 1108 — the German record gives 1107, the English 1108, and the one-year gap is the ordinary friction of a religious chronology rather than a real dispute — when the master Nyimadzin established a monastery he called Gyelten Puntsok, rgyal bstan phun tshogs gling, “the isle of the flourishing victorious teaching,” the phrase that survives inside the monastery’s later full name. He did it, the accounts agree, at the request of his father, the Bon teacher Dophag, remembered by the honorific title Nangzhig Dopag Chenpo, “the great Dophag of Nangzhig,” and also named as Nangzhig Lodro Gyaltsen. Dophag is reckoned the first holder of the Nangzhig line, the ancestor of the whole hereditary and reincarnate leadership that runs down from him. Some tellings put a different name at the origin — the founder is given elsewhere as Yönten Gyaltsen — and the tradition has not flattened the two accounts into one; the discrepancy is part of the record, not a thing to be tidied away. What is not in doubt is the shape of the founding: a father who taught, a son who built, and a lineage-house that took the family’s own name and carried it forward.

That lineage is long. The community counts its holders down the centuries to a thirty-ninth, Kelsang Lodro Gyatso (Wylie bskal bzang blo gros rgya mtsho), so that the abbatial seat of Nangzhig is not merely an office but a genealogy — a family and a reincarnation line braided together, the “family” of the monastery’s own historians. In 1754 the community left its earlier ground and moved to the present hillside north of Ngawa, the site it has held for more than two and a half centuries. From that seat it grew into the mother-house of Bon across Amdo, tied by a branch relationship to Nogi — the Duiansi monastery at Changla, in Songpan County to the southeast — and reckoned, by its own historians and by the scholars who have surveyed the Bon world, the single largest Yungdrung Bon monastery in Tibet.

Nangzhig (Narshi Gonpa / Langyi si), the largest Bon monastery in the world, on the grasslands above Ngawa in Amdo, northern Sichuan, photographed in 2003. Jialiang Gao, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The scholarship that maps this world is recent and concrete. The great survey of the field, A Survey of Bonpo Monasteries and Temples in Tibet and the Himalaya, edited by Samten G. Karmay and Yasuhiko Nagano and compiled by a team including Dondrup Lhagyal, Phuntso Tsering Sharyul, Tsering Thar, Charles Ramble, and Marietta Kind, was the fruit of a general fieldwork survey of Bon houses run out of the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka and first published there in 2003. It was Tsering Thar who wrote the volume’s chapter on the Bon monasteries of the Tibetan regions of Qinghai, Gansu, and Sichuan — the Amdo section in which Nangzhig sits — and who returned to the subject at book length in Nangshig: A Tibetan Bönpo Monastery and its Family in Amdo, a study of the monastery and the reincarnation and blood lineages bound to it, drawn from his own fieldwork on the Amdo grasslands. (An earlier monastic history compiled inside the community itself was published in 1994.) In that documentation Nangzhig is not a curiosity or a survival but exactly what its neighbors take it for: a working Bon university, the largest of its kind.

Sutra, tantra, and the great perfection

What a monastery of this size is for, in the Bon frame, is the whole teaching. Yungdrung Bon holds a complete path — the tradition arranges it as a graded ascent, from the outer ways of ritual and cause and effect up to the innermost — and its canon preserves the three great bodies of doctrine that a full monastic university must transmit: Sutra, the discourses and the philosophy; Tantra, the deity practice; and Dzogchen, the “Great Perfection,” the direct approach to the nature of mind that Bon shares in its own line with the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. Nangzhig is built to carry all three. It does so, characteristically, by dividing its labor between two colleges, one for the head and one for what lies past the head — a dialectic college and a meditation college, the scholar’s road and the yogin’s, kept under one roof.

The dialectic college is the shedra, the philosophy school, and its life runs on debate. Except on Sundays and during the sealed retreats, the monks debate every day, working through the graded course that leads to the tradition’s doctorate. The Bon dialectic curriculum is a demanding one, ordered on the old Indic model of the “sciences”: the inner science of doctrine and philosophy at the center, and around it logic and epistemology (pramana), grammar and poetics, astrology and the calendar, and the healing science of Tibetan medicine, together with the ritual and meditation training that a monk must carry into practice. At Nangzhig the course also reaches back toward the tradition’s own deep past by teaching the languages in which its scripture is anchored — Sanskrit, and the tongue of Zhang Zhung, the lost western kingdom from which Bon says its first teachings came. A monk who finishes the whole course — reckoned in the accounts at about ten to eleven years of study — and passes the final examinations receives the degree of Geshe, the Bon doctorate of philosophy and religion, the exact counterpart of the Geshe won in the great Buddhist colleges. The parallel is not accidental. Bon and Buddhism built their monastic universities alongside one another over centuries, each watching and borrowing from the other, and the shared word for the degree is one of the plainest marks of how closely the two traditions grew.

The meditation college turns from argument to sitting. Its center of gravity is the long retreat — the classic three-year, three-fortnight sealed retreat of the Tibetan world — and the practice around which that retreat is organized at Nangzhig is the A-tri (Wylie a khrid), “the guidance to the [primordial] A,” one of the three great Dzogchen transmissions that Bon carries. Where the Buddhist Great Perfection descends through Nyingma lines, Bon holds its own three streams of Dzogchen, and the A-tri is the one shaped into a graded, teachable course of contemplation, systematized in the medieval period so that a community could take a retreatant through it stage by stage. It is transmitted and practiced at Nangzhig behind the retreat wall, from teacher to sealed student, and it is described here only at the distance the public record allows — named, placed, its lineage acknowledged — never set down as an operating instruction, which is not the sort of thing a monastery hands to a passerby, and not the sort of thing an outside account is entitled to supply.

The two colleges together make Nangzhig the principal training ground of Bon inside the People’s Republic. More than two hundred new students arrive each year, drawn from across the Tibetan regions — from the far grasslands of Amdo, from Kham to the south, and from central Tibet — to study the Sutra, Tantra, and Dzogchen of Yungdrung Bon, so that the monastery functions as a national seminary for a religion whose homeland houses are otherwise scattered thin. And the deep memory the place keeps is older than any monastery. The Zhang Zhung language its Geshe candidates parse is the surviving thread of the kingdom that Bon holds as the source of its teaching, the western realm whose silver cliff-city of Khyunglung lay near the sacred mountain of Mount Kailash; to sit in a classroom on the Amdo grass and construe a Zhang Zhung verse is to keep a line open to that lost world at the far western end of the plateau. The scale and the antiquity are the two things to hold together: a crowded, present-tense university, and a curriculum that reaches back past the founding of any Tibetan school.

Destruction, rebuilding, and the living center

Nangzhig’s modern history is the sober history of Bon under the twentieth century, and it turns on a single decade. Down to 1958, while the master Nangzhig Kyapgön Tenpa Rabgye held the seat, the monastery carried on the order of a thousand monks. At the great Monlam prayer gathering around Losar, the Tibetan New Year, the resident community swelled with monks come in from the surrounding country until the assembled total could rise toward two thousand — a figure that measures better than any other what Nangzhig was on the Amdo grasslands: not one house among many but the gravitational center, the place the whole region’s Bon converged on at the turning of the year. Then the decade closed. Like every monastery of every Tibetan school, of Bon and of Buddhism alike, Nangzhig was caught in the upheavals that ran from the late 1950s into the Cultural Revolution, and its halls and colleges and sacred objects were destroyed. The loss was total in the way it was total everywhere on the plateau; the account of it is best kept plain, without adornment, because the plainness is the respect.

The rebuilding began around 1980, when the People’s Republic permitted religious life to resume. A representative of the Nangzhig Kyapgön, remembered as Jawop Rinpoche, took on the work of restoring the monastery’s sacred objects — many of which had been hidden through the worst years by lay followers and were now carried back — and the community set about raising again the assembly halls, the two colleges, and the monks’ quarters. What stands today is the result: a monastic town rebuilt to a scale near its old one, its population numbered once more in the many hundreds toward a thousand and climbing on its two-hundred-plus new entrants a year, the debate grounds full six days in seven, the retreat wall occupied. The reconstruction is not a museum restoration but a working recovery — a religion putting its largest house back into use.

That recovery has a shape worth naming, because it sets Nangzhig apart from its own siblings. When the monasteries fell and the exodus of 1959 carried much of the Tibetan religious world into India and Nepal, Bon rebuilt its head institutions abroad: the mother monastery of Menri was reestablished at Dolanji in the Indian hills in 1969, and Triten Norbutse rose above Kathmandu, and it is in those exile houses that the story of Bon’s survival is usually told. Nangzhig is the counterweight to that story inside the homeland. It is the great Bon house that stayed — destroyed and rebuilt on its own ground, the principal surviving center of the religion within Tibet and China rather than in the diaspora, the internal partner to the external mother-houses. Between them, Menri in exile and Nangzhig on the Amdo grass, they keep Bon a coherent, functioning tradition on both sides of the 1959 line.

And keeping it functioning is, in the end, an argument as much as a fact. For a long stretch of both colonial ethnography and triumphalist Buddhist history it was convenient to file Bon under other headings — the primitive shamanism of Tibet, the animist dark the Buddhist light had overcome, the “old religion” that lost. A place like Nangzhig is what that filing cannot hold. Here is a monastic university of several hundred to a thousand monks, running an eleven-year doctoral course in logic and medicine and the languages of scripture, transmitting a systematized Great Perfection behind a three-year retreat wall, drawing students from across a plateau, and doing all of it as the sibling institution of the Buddhist colleges it grew up beside. The scholars who have surveyed the Bon world — Karmay and Nagano’s team, Charles Ramble, and Tsering Thar in his fieldwork on the monastery and its family — describe it in exactly those terms, as a working Bon university and not a relic. The old caricature is a thing that was said about Bon. The town of monks on the hill above Ngawa, quiet only on Sundays, is the standing reply.

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