Pre-Buddhist Tibetan 'nameless religion'

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The “nameless religion” is a label scholars use for the indigenous Tibetan religious world that long preceded Buddhism and that neither Buddhism nor the later organized Bön tradition ever quite replaced. The name is a confession of ignorance as much as a description: the complex carries no single founder, no canon, and no proper name of its own, and the Tibetan tradition itself distinguishes it less as a religion than as a body of inherited custom. The term was given currency by the Tibetologist Rolf Stein, whose Tibetan Civilization (French 1962; English 1972) needed a way to speak of a thing the sources never named — la religion sans nom, the religion without a name. What he meant was not an absence of belief but the opposite: a religion so thoroughly woven into the fabric of ordinary life that it never stood off from it far enough to acquire a name, a creed, or a church. It was simply how the world worked.

The main peak of Nyenchen Tanglha seen across Lake Namtso; a peak of this kind, at once the highest summit in sight and a clan ancestor, anchored the older Tibetan world of place-bound powers. — 张骐 (User:Brookqi), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Tibetan usage marks the distinction from the inside. Buddhism is chos, the Dharma, the religion of the gods or of the high doctrine; the older layer is mi chos, the “religion of men” — the practices of fortune, kinship, and the land that ordinary life turned on. The pairing is not an outsider’s classification but a native idiom, and it draws the line at exactly the place the imported and the inherited met: chos is what came over the mountains with the missionaries and the translators, the doctrine of liberation from the round of rebirth; mi chos is the older economy of how to live well, die well, and keep the powers of a place from turning hostile. The two were never rivals in the way Buddhism and Bön would later be made to seem. A household could give its mornings to the recitation of chos and its harvest-rites to mi chos without sensing a contradiction, because the second answered questions the first never asked.

The populated landscape

What the older layer held together was a populated landscape. The world was full of powers tied to particular places, and the central religious fact was not a cosmology of liberation but a map of who lived where and what they required. The greatest of these powers were the mountain gods — yul lha, the gods of a territory, often also the ancestral deities of the clan that held a valley. A mountain god was at once the highest peak in sight and the first forefather of the people below it; to worship the mountain was to honor the lineage, and the god rode in the iconography as an armed warrior on horseback, a guardian who defended the valley and avenged insult. He could be addressed as the deity of the males of a household (pho lha), as the protector of a clan, and as the warrior-god who went before men into danger. The cult of the mountain, in the reading the Bönpo-trained scholar Samten Karmay made central, was inseparable from the sense of who one’s people were: the secular worship of a peak as ancestor and protector, a tie of identity older and tougher than any doctrine.

Amnye Machen in Golog, one of the most venerated of the Tibetan mountain gods (yul lha), worshipped as both the highest peak of its region and the ancestral protector of the people below it. — Andreas Gruschke, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Below the mountain gods ran a denser population. The klu were serpent spirits of springs, streams, lakes, and the moist places of the soil — kin to the Indian nāga but native to the Tibetan ground long before the Sanskrit word arrived to name them. They were custodians of the underground and the wet, easily fouled and quick to take offense; to pollute a spring, to dig where they dwelt, to foul water with refuse was to invite the diseases they sent, above all the skin afflictions, swellings, and wasting illnesses laid at their door. The sa bdag were the lords of the ground itself, the owners of the earth who had to be reckoned with before a field was broken, a foundation dug, or a grave opened — the soil belonged to them, and to break it without leave was theft. Around and among these moved the btsan, fierce red spirits of rock and pass, imagined as armored riders on red horses, and the gnyan, powers of stone and tree and high ground whose territory one crossed at one’s peril. To offend a btsan or a gnyan — to cut their tree, quarry their rock, build on their ground — was to fall sick, and a great part of the diagnostic art lay in reading an illness back to the power that had been wronged and the trespass that had wronged it.

This was a world in which sickness and misfortune were not impersonal but relational. A man did not simply fall ill; he had disturbed something, crossed a boundary, taken what was not freely given. The remedy was correspondingly relational: to identify the offended power, to make restitution, to restore the broken courtesy between the human settlement and the older inhabitants whose land it shared.

The vulnerable self: bla and g.yang

A person, in this understanding, did not carry a single soul of the kind the high doctrines argued over. He carried a bla — a life-force, a vital essence that was not quite the self and not quite separable from it. The bla could wander in sleep, could be frightened loose by a shock, could be lured away or seized by a hostile spirit, and a body emptied of its bla sickened and could die while still breathing. Much of the everyday religious labor of the nameless religion was the work of keeping the bla attached and, when it strayed, calling it home: a soul-summoning, a ritual recall of the wandered vitality. The bla could lodge in external things — a turquoise worn at the throat, a particular tree, a lake, a mountain — so that a person’s life was bound up with objects and places outside the body, and to damage the bla-tree or foul the bla-lake was to wound the person whose force it held. (As a concept the bla runs parallel to what other traditions call the soul, but it is not the immortal, individual, judgment-bound soul of those systems; it is a force that can be lost and recovered, nearer to vitality than to identity, and the analogy should be held loosely.)

Beside the bla of the person stood the g.yang of the household — its luck, its increase, its prosperity and vital surplus. The g.yang was the difference between a flock that thrived and one that dwindled, a hearth that flourished and one that failed; it too could leak away or be stolen, and it too had to be kept, summoned, and secured. The rites of fortune that fill the calendar of the nameless religion — the calling-down of luck at the new year, the securing of the household’s increase, the wards against the slow draining of vitality — were addressed to this: not salvation, but the keeping intact of a life-force and a luck that were always in danger of slipping away.

The apparatus of rite

Around this turned an apparatus of rite. There was divination and the reading of signs — the casting of lots, the inspection of omens, the reading of a sheep’s shoulder-blade scorched in the fire, the bird-augury that the early European observers found and recorded — by which the will of the powers and the shape of the future were drawn out of the visible world. There was the summoning back of strayed bla or leaking g.yang. There was exorcism and the casting-out, the ransom-rites by which a substitute effigy was offered to a spirit in a sick person’s place, the redrawing of the broken boundary between the human and the offended power. And there was an elaborate treatment of the dead, the most developed and the best-documented part of the whole complex.

The funerary cult of the early kings is recoverable in part from the manuscripts sealed around the year 1000 in a cave at Dunhuang and reopened in 1900 — the single richest window onto Tibetan religion before the Buddhist redaction. The old funerary texts among them describe death not as the dissolution the Buddhists taught but as a journey: the dead set out across a perilous country toward a land of the ancestors, a place of pasture and plenty where they would live as they had lived, and they had to be equipped for the road. They required guides — psychopomp animals, above all the horse and the sheep, led or sacrificed to carry the dead and to go before them along the way — and they required offerings, provisions, and the services of a class of funerary specialists who knew the route and could speak the dead across the river that divided the worlds. The work of these officiants, who summoned and guided the dead and dealt across the boundary with the powers that held them, stands at the root of a long Tibetan concern with the management of the dead that later Buddhist and Bön ritual would carry forward in their own idioms, including the necromantic addressing of the deceased. The tomb was not a disposal but a launching; the rite did not commend the dead to nothing but sent them on, accompanied and provisioned, to rejoin the manes in the uranic paradise of the forefathers.

A Dunhuang manuscript (Or.8210/S.12243) in which a Buddhist writer criticizes the older funeral rites performed “according to the Bon religion,” a rare contemporary glimpse of the pre-Buddhist treatment of the dead. — British Library, International Dunhuang Project, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Behind this lay the royal myth recoverable from the same sources: that the first kings of Tibet had descended from the sky on a cord — the dmu cord, a sky-rope binding heaven to a mountain-top — and that each king, his work on earth done, climbed back up the cord and was gone, leaving no corpse. The line broke when a king, in the myth, severed the cord in a moment of fear or fault; from that point the kings died like men and had to be buried like men, and the great funerary apparatus — the tombs, the guides, the offerings, the specialists — arose precisely to manage a death that had once been an ascent and was now a journey requiring help. The myth and the rite are of a piece: the funerary cult is the answer to a heaven that has been cut off.

The opening of the Old Tibetan Chronicle (Pelliot tibétain 1287), a ninth-century Dunhuang manuscript that preserves the imperial myths, including the tale of the king Drigum Tsenpo and the severing of the sky-cord. — Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The textual situation and modern scholarship

Almost everything in the preceding paragraphs is reconstruction, and the register must be kept honest. The people who practiced the nameless religion left little that speaks in its own voice. What survives was written down by others — by Buddhists for whom these were the customs of an unenlightened past, or by the later systematizers of Bön for whom they were raw material to be ordered into a church. The Dunhuang manuscripts are the great exception, a body of imperial-period and immediately post-imperial material that escaped the redaction, and the whole modern picture of the pre-Buddhist substratum rests heavily on them: the royal funerary documents, the divination texts, the ritual-origin narratives that Stein, and after him a generation of philologists, worked through. Even these are fragmentary, often ritual rather than expository, and they do not present a system — which is the point, since the nameless religion was never a system.

Paul Pelliot examining manuscripts in 1908 inside Cave 17, the “library cave” at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang, whose sealed cache reopened in 1900 is the great exception to the silence of the pre-Buddhist sources. — Charles Nouette (1869–1910), Musée Guimet, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The foundational synthesis remains Rolf Stein’s, whose Tibetan Civilization gave the substratum its working name and its first coherent portrait. Samten Karmay’s collected studies, gathered in The Arrow and the Spindle (Kathmandu, 1998), are the indispensable later treatment of the mountain cult, the cult of the soul and the bla, the local deities, and the archaic funerary material; Karmay, himself trained in the Bön tradition before he became a scholar of it at the CNRS in Paris, reads the pre-Buddhist layer with an eye to its substantial continuities into living practice. John Vincent Bellezza’s Death and Beyond in Ancient Tibet (Vienna, 2013) brings the archaic funerary manuscripts of Dunhuang and the Gathang Bumpa cache together into the fullest study of the death-journey, the guide-animals, and the eschatology of the ancestral land. And the vexed question of what the word bon itself meant before there was an organized Bön — whether it named a religion, a class of priests, or a kind of rite — has been re-examined through the imperial-period sources by Sam van Schaik, whose study of the naming of Tibetan religion argues that in the earliest texts bon and bon po designate ritual specialists — funerary officiants above all — and not yet the systematized tradition that would later carry the name. That conclusion is the empirical foundation of the “two Böns” distinction that governs all careful work in the field.

Two churches and a survival

That second point — what bon meant, and when — is where the registers part. The organized Bön religion, as it took shape from around the tenth century, claimed this archaic material as its own ancient inheritance and gave it what the nameless religion had always lacked: a founder, the enlightened teacher Tönpa Shenrab Miwoche; scriptures, revealed and redacted; and a complete doctrine that often mirrors Buddhism closely, down to the parallel canon and the parallel scholastic path. Within the tradition this is not a claim of borrowing but of recovery — that Yungdrung (“Eternal”) Bön is the original teaching of Tibet, older than the Buddha’s, of which the diffuse folk practices are the worn remainder. (A later current, New Bön, would go further still and openly fold Buddhist treasure-material into that frame; but it, like the organized mainstream, is a literary and institutional formation, not the nameless substratum itself.) Scholarship treats that account with care and holds it apart from the historical record. The diffuse folk substratum and the later systematic church are not simply the same thing; “bon” in the old texts may name something far narrower than the institution that later bore the word, and the continuities, where they exist, run through specific channels — the funerary ritual, the mountain cult, the propitiation of sa bdag and gnyan — rather than through any single unbroken religion. Karmay reads the eleventh-century systematization as the redaction of authentic pre-Buddhist material; the revisionist reading, associated with Henk Blezer, treats much of the “always-already-there” self-presentation as a retrospective construction of the period of competition with the new Buddhist schools. The matter is genuinely contested, and the nameless religion is precisely not to be flattened into the church that claimed it.

The other church arrived earlier. Buddhism, coming over the passes from the seventh century, did not erase the older powers but absorbed them. The mountain gods and the earth-lords, the btsan and the klu, were not denied out of existence; they were bound by oath — subdued, in the tradition’s own telling, by the tantric masters who tamed them and set them under vow — and enrolled in the Buddhist order as oath-bound protectors of the Dharma. The same peak that had been a clan-ancestor became a guardian of the doctrine; the same serpent of the spring became a Dharma-protector with a place in the liturgy. The local deities kept their mountains. They merely changed masters.

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