New Bön (bon gsar)

← Encyclopedia

New Bön — Tibetan bon gsar, “new Bön” — is a strand of the Tibetan Bön religion that took shape mainly from the seventeenth century onward, chiefly in the eastern regions of Khams and Amdo. Its name marks it off from the older mainstream, the “Eternal Bön” (g.yung drung bon) that traces itself to the legendary teacher Tönpa Shenrab and presents Bön as a self-standing tradition older than Buddhism in Tibet. What set the new current apart was how openly it took in material from the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism — not as foreign borrowing quietly absorbed, but as the recovery of a heritage the tradition held had been its own from the beginning.

Tönpa Shenrab Miwoche, the legendary founder of Bön, with episodes from his life; 19th-century thangka from Amdo, eastern Tibet. New Bön kept him at the head of its lineage. — Collection of the Rubin Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Two Böns, one founder

The adjective in “new Bön” only makes sense against the noun it qualifies. Eternal Bön takes its name from the yungdrung, the counter-clockwise swastika that signifies the indestructible — the unchanging, the ever-the-same. It is, by its own account, the teaching of Tönpa Shenrab Miwoche, an enlightened master said to have lived ages before the Buddha Shakyamuni in the western land of Olmo Lungring, and to have brought a complete path — cosmology, ritual, monastic discipline, and a summit teaching of the Great Perfection — into the world long before Indian Buddhism reached Tibet. The institutional form of that tradition crystallized from the eleventh century, around the mass treasure-revelation of Shenchen Luga (996–1035) in 1017, and built its monastic backbone at Yeru Wensaka and, from 1405, at Tashi Menri in Tsang. This is the Bön that the broader scholarly literature, following Per Kvaerne’s The Bon Religion of Tibet (1995), treats as the living tradition — the one a fourteenth-century chronicle, a thangka, or a monastic curriculum belongs to.

The yungdrung — the left-turning, counter-clockwise swastika signifying the indestructible — is the emblem of Bön and gives Eternal Bön (g.yung drung bon) its name; New Bön kept it as its sign. — Unknown author, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The deeper doctrinal architecture of organized Bön — the nine-vehicle path, the figure of Tönpa Shenrab, the Olmo Lungring cosmology — is the parent body within which the new current moved. New Bön did not reject any of it. It kept Tönpa Shenrab at the head of the lineage and the yungdrung as its sign. What it changed was the company that founder kept.

The Bonpo themselves, in working out their tradition’s self-image, came to speak of three kinds of Bön. The first is an “Original” or “Old” Bön (bon rnying) — the practice held to have been current in Tibet before Tönpa Shenrab’s teaching arrived, the diffuse stratum of mortuary, divinatory, and spirit-managing rite that scholarship reconstructs as a pre-Buddhist Tibetan substratum underlying both later churches. The second is Eternal Bön, the “authentic” systematized tradition of Tönpa Shenrab. The third is bon gsar itself. The threefold scheme is the tradition’s own ordering of its history, and it places New Bön not at the margin but as one of the three legitimate forms the teaching has taken — the most recent, openly entangled with the Buddhism around it, yet still Bön.

The borrowing made explicit

The most visible new arrival was Padmasambhava. In the Nyingma account this tantric master came from the Swat valley in the eighth century, helped establish Buddhism in Tibet under King Trisong Detsen, and concealed teachings as “treasures” (gter ma) for discovery in later, fitter ages. New Bön adopted both the figure and the mechanism. Its own scriptures were likewise revealed as treasures by visionary discoverers (gter ston), and Padmasambhava appears in them not as an outsider or a rival to Tönpa Shenrab but woven into the Bön family itself, so that the two lineages run side by side rather than against each other.

Padmasambhava, the eighth-century tantric master, depicted attaining the rainbow body; 19th-century Nyingma thangka. New Bön adopted both the figure and his treasure-concealing mechanism, identifying him as a son of the Bön sage Drenpa Namkha. — Himalayan Art Resources (item 31903), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The thread that joins them is a single Bön sage of the imperial period: Drenpa Namkha, held to have lived in the eighth century, in the reign of Trisong Detsen, when the new Buddhist order was pressing hard on the older priesthood. In the New Bön mythology Drenpa Namkha had two sons. One, Tsewang Rigdzin, won through austerity the gift of unbounded life and became the “knowledge-holder of the life-force,” a long-life deity in his own right. The other, Pema Tongdröl, is identified with Padmasambhava himself. By this genealogy the Lotus-Born master of the Nyingma is no importation at all but a son of a Bön sage — and Bön, Padmasambhava, and the long-life teachings become branches of one ancestral house. The triad of Drenpa Namkha, Tsewang Rigdzin, and Padmasambhava, all set in the eighth century, became the recurring center of gravity for the new revelations. This is the move that the older mainstream would not make and the new current built its identity upon: not a quiet parallel but a worked-out kinship, fixed in scripture and lineage-prayer.

The revealers

The treasures that carry New Bön were drawn out across several centuries by a line of gter ston. The acknowledged precursor stands well before the seventeenth century: Dorje Lingpa (1346–1405), counted both among the great treasure-revealers of the Nyingma and as an important Dzogchen master by the Bonpo, and remembered for revealing both Buddhist and Bön treasures from the same hand — a dual standing exceptional in his age and read by later writers as the precursor of the eclectic temper that would govern eastern Tibet five centuries on. The current that took his impartiality as a program flourished later. Its pivotal figure is Kundröl Drakpa (Rigdzin Kun grol grags pa, born 1700), who became an heir of the Atri (A khrid) Dzogchen lineage and produced a large body of tersar — “new treasure” — literature; Jean-Luc Achard’s study of his revelation of a treasury of teachings on the subtle channels and winds treats him as the figure in whom the eighteenth-century shape of New Bön comes clearest into view. Around and after him stand others remembered in the same stream — Lodän Nyingpo, Mizhik Dorje, Dechen Lingpa, Sang-ngak Lingpa, the treasure-revealer Khandro Dechen Wangmo, and Tulku Sangye Lingpa (born 1705) — their cycles gathered, copied, and transmitted in the monasteries of Khams and Amdo from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.

Where the established Bönpo institutions had been careful to keep their identity distinct, to maintain a parallel canon and a separate origin against the Buddhist majority, these revealers treated the boundary as porous and held the two founders as compatible sources of one liberating teaching. Practitioners did not experience this as a desertion of Bön. They understood the borrowed material as rightfully theirs — a recovery, in the treasure idiom, of what had always belonged to the tradition and had merely been hidden until its hour. The treasure mechanism, which dates a text not to the moment of its discovery but to the moment of its concealment, is what makes that self-understanding coherent: a teaching surfacing in the eighteenth century can still be older than any school, because its true age is the age of its sealing-away. The architecture of treasure-revelation that New Bön shares with the Nyingma treasure and Dzogchen tradition is precisely the device by which the new can be received as the recovered.

A current, not a church

New Bön never became a separate institution with its own monasteries and throne-holders set against Menri. It is better described as a literary and revelatory current — a body of treasure-cycles, deity-practices, and lineage-prayers — that ran through communities and individual masters who in other respects remained Bönpo. The line between New Bön and Eternal Bön was never sharp, and was never meant to be; some lineages and some monasteries drew on both, and a single figure could hold a thoroughly orthodox Bön ordination and a New Bön treasure-transmission at once. How far the new current stands apart from the old has accordingly remained a matter of debate among both its own commentators and outside historians, with no clean seam to point to. What is clear is that the current arose, that it carried Padmasambhava and the treasure-model into the heart of Bön devotion, and that it did so as a deliberate doctrine rather than an embarrassment to be explained away.

Some within Eternal Bön regarded the new material with suspicion, as a dilution of the tradition’s hard-won distinctness; the great eastern-Tibetan master Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen (1859–1934) is remembered, among much else, for taking up the defense of New Bön revelations against such criticism even as he stood at the center of Bönpo Dzogchen in his generation. That such a figure — a master whose death was marked by accounts of the rainbow body, and who drew students from across the Buddhist schools as readily as from his own — should be the one to vindicate the new current says much about the climate in which it matured.

The non-sectarian climate

That climate has a name. New Bön reached its fullest flowering in the nineteenth-century ris med movement of eastern Tibet — the “non-sectarian” or “unbounded” current that, gathering around such figures as Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo and Jamgön Kongtrul, set itself against narrow lineage partisanship and worked to preserve and exchange teachings across the divisions of school. In a milieu that prized the recovery of endangered transmissions and the crossing of old boundaries, a Bön current organized around shared treasure-revelation and a common cast of eighth-century masters was not an anomaly but a natural expression of the age. The great Nyingma compilations of the period — above all the Rinchen Terdzö, the “Treasury of Precious Treasures,” assembled by Jamgön Kongtrul — were the Buddhist counterpart of the same impulse, and Bön participated in the wider work of gathering and safeguarding. Dorje Lingpa’s five-centuries-earlier impartiality, in this light, looks less like an isolated oddity than like the first clear instance of a disposition that eastern Tibet would eventually make into a movement.

The scholarly reading

Modern scholarship reads New Bön as one episode within a much wider convergence. By the later centuries the ritual repertoires, contemplative systems, monastic forms, and textual genres of Bön and of the Nyingma school had grown so close that the question of which borrowed from which loses much of its force; the gter ma system and the Great Perfection (Dzogchen) corpus run in near-exact parallel across the two, with shared vocabulary, shared lineage-figures, and shared root-text genres. Kvaerne’s account, and the broader body of work it represents, describes mature Bön as, in structure, a fifth school of Tibetan Buddhism — one that keeps its own founder and its own myth of origin while sharing almost everything else with the four Buddhist schools. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s recognition of Bön as the fifth Tibetan religious tradition, consolidated through the late 1970s and 1980s, registers that same structural closeness at the institutional level. New Bön is the place where the convergence stops being a matter of quiet structural parallel and becomes explicit doctrine: the borrowing is no longer something to be detected by the historian but something the tradition proclaims of itself.

The texts and their study

New Bön is, before it is anything else, a body of revealed literature, and the modern understanding of it has grown up alongside the editing and reading of that literature. The pivotal modern study is Jean-Luc Achard’s work on Kundröl Drakpa and the revelation of his treasury of teachings on the subtle channels and winds, which reconstructs the eighteenth-century formation of the current from the treasures themselves and argues that this is the period in which New Bön takes its mature shape; Achard, of the CNRS in Paris, edits the Revue d’Études Tibétaines, the open-access journal that has become the principal venue for fine-grained work on Bonpo Dzogchen and treasure-literature (Revue d’Études Tibétaines). Samten Karmay’s collected studies, gathered in The Arrow and the Spindle (1998), supply the indispensable frame for the whole question of how organized Bön relates to what came before and beside it; Dan Martin’s Unearthing Bon Treasures (2001), the major study of the eleventh-century revealer Shenchen Luga, anatomizes the Bön treasure-system on which New Bön later drew; and Kvaerne’s The Bon Religion of Tibet (1995) remains the standard single-volume overview within which the structural likeness of mature Bön to the Buddhist schools is set out. For the genealogical machinery that lets New Bön claim Padmasambhava — the threefold scheme of Old, Eternal, and New Bön, and the eighth-century triad of Drenpa Namkha, Tsewang Rigdzin, and the Lotus-Born — the biographical literature gathered by the Treasury of Lives offers an accessible, scholar-written entry point (Treasury of Lives, “The Three Kinds of Bon”). The treasure-revealers’ own cycles — Kundröl Drakpa’s, and those of the revealers around him — survive in the Bonpo collections now being cataloged and digitized, and it is on those primary cycles, rather than on any single later synthesis, that the historical reading ultimately rests. Much of the apparatus through which the wider tradition is studied — the critical editions, the catalogs of the Bonpo canon, the monographs — remains the work of living scholars and of institutions that steward the tradition’s own self-presentation; the reader is pointed to that literature rather than offered a substitute for it.

The convergence reading and the tradition’s own account are not, in the end, in contradiction so much as describing the same fact from two sides. The historian sees a Bön current of the seventeenth century onward openly absorbing Nyingma treasure-cycles and the Padmasambhava material, drawn into the orbit of a Buddhism it had long defined itself against. The tradition sees a recovery of what was always its own — Padmasambhava a son of a Bön sage, the treasures a delayed delivery of teachings sealed away in the imperial age, the whole an unsealing rather than an acquisition. Neither account requires the other to be false. The treasure idiom is built precisely to hold the two together: the scroll that the historian dates to its first appearance, the tradition dates to its concealment, and the same text carries both dates without strain. New Bön is the current that took the most contested boundary in Tibetan religion — the one between Bön and Buddhism, guarded on both sides for the better part of a millennium — and chose to cross it in the open, setting Padmasambhava and Tönpa Shenrab in a single lineage and presenting them, against all the long habit of their separation, as teachers of one continuous truth.

→ Related: Bon Yungdrung Bon · Nyingma Terma Dzogchen · Padmasambhava · Tibetan Buddhism · Buddhism · Pre Buddhist Tibetan Nameless Religion · Tibetan Vajrayana · Mahayana · Newar Vajrayana · Tibetan Buddhist Lung Gom