Satrig Ersang

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In one hand she holds a mirror. It is not a mirror for looking at oneself; it reflects every phenomenon exactly as it stands, karma and suffering and the shape of things unclouded by wanting them otherwise — wisdom that sees without distortion. In the other hand she holds a vase, and the vase is full to the lip with the nectar of compassion, which pours out to heal. Seeing that leaves nothing false, and love that leaves nothing unmended: the two are held at once, in the two hands of a single goddess. The pairing is the whole of her. In the Bon religion of Tibet she is the wisdom-mother from whom the enlightened are born, and she is named first — ahead of the god of light, ahead of the lord of the manifest world, ahead even of the founder-teacher — among the Four Transcendent Lords at the summit of the Bon cosmos.

The wisdom that comes from Zhang Zhung

Her oldest name is not Tibetan. Satrig Ersang — also written Satrik Ersang, or Sa-trig Er-sangs — is a word from the language of Zhang Zhung, the kingdom that spread across the far west of the Tibetan plateau, around the sacred massif of Mount Kailash, long before the Tibetan empire absorbed it in the seventh century. In that old western tongue the element sa trig carries the sense of wisdom, and the whole name marks her as the wisdom that existed before there was a Tibet to receive it. When the Bon tradition renders her in Tibetan she becomes Sherab Chamma (shes rab byams ma), the Loving Mother of Wisdom, and in a second Tibetan title Thugje Chamma, the Loving Mother of Compassion. The two Tibetan names are not two goddesses; they are the two faces already named in her two hands — wisdom and the compassion that is its warmth. That her primordial name should be a Zhang Zhung word is itself part of her meaning within the tradition: she belongs to the oldest stratum of the Bon world, the layer that reaches back through the silver cliff-city of Khyunglung to the founding revelations of the religion.

Bon reaches the written record along two channels, and she appears in both. The first is the tradition’s own scripture-history — the vast biographies of the enlightened founder Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, the long twelve-volume Ziji (gzi brjid) and the middle-length Zermig (gzer mig), together with the ritual and iconographic canon in which the wisdom-mother is fixed as the maternal ground of the enlightened field. The second is modern scholarship, which came to Bon late and, at first, badly. Western writing on Bon before the middle of the twentieth century inherited a hostile frame from Tibetan Buddhist polemic and colonial fascination alike, in which “Bon” meant a primitive, shamanic layer of superstition lying beneath the real — that is, the Buddhist — religion of Tibet. That reading is a problem in the history of scholarship, not a description of the thing. Yungdrung (“Eternal”) Bon has its own enlightened founder, its own canon, its own graded path of Nine Ways rising to the Great Perfection, and its own monastic universities; it is the developed sibling of Tibetan Buddhism, and the two shaped, borrowed from, and persecuted one another across a thousand years. The corrective work began with Helmut Hoffmann and, in English, with David Snellgrove’s The Nine Ways of Bon in 1967, produced with the Bon scholar-lama Lopon Tenzin Namdak; it was carried on by Per Kvaerne, whose survey of the tradition’s images is pointedly subtitled the Iconography of a Living Tradition, and by Samten G. Karmay and Charles Ramble. Satrig Ersang sits at the head of the pantheon that scholarship reconstructs and the tradition worships — which is to say, she is one of the figures through whom the old dismissive picture of Bon is undone.

How far back she reaches is, in the historian’s register, a genuinely open question, and it is worth marking as such. The polity of Zhang Zhung whose language gave her a name is broadly accepted as a real Upper Tibetan kingdom of the first millennium; the systematized Yungdrung Bon in which she is enthroned first among the four took its organized shape from around the tenth and eleventh centuries, in close and reciprocal exchange with the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. Whether the goddess in her developed form descends unbroken from a pre-Buddhist western cult or was crystallized in that later formation is not a matter scholars can settle from the surviving imperial-period documents, which mention Bon ritual specialists but not this pantheon. The tradition’s own answer is unhesitating: she is primordial, older than any dating. The two accounts — the sacred one that places her before time, and the documentary one that watches her image come into focus in the second millennium — are best held side by side, neither collapsed into the other.

The mirror and the vase

Her image is legible; it holds steady across paintings and centuries, and the reader who learns to read it can find her in any Bon temple. She takes two chief forms, and the tradition distinguishes them by name and by color.

As Satrig Ersang, the primordial form, she is shown yellow — some paintings warm the color toward a reddish gold or orange — youthful, with one face and two hands, seated in a secure meditative posture. Documented in the survey by Himalayan Art Resources, this is the standard appearance among the Four Transcendent Lords: in the right hand she holds a golden yungdrung, and in the left a mirror, each often rising on the stem of a flower to the level of the heart and the shoulder. The yungdrung is the Bon swastika, and it is not the Buddhist or Hindu emblem turned the ordinary way. It faces left; it turns counter-clockwise, the direction in which the Bon circle their holy mountains. It is the principal symbol of the whole religion, signifying eternity and unending energy, and the tradition holds it equal in value to the vajra, the diamond-thunderbolt of the Buddhists. In her hand it marks her as a source that does not run down.

As Sherab Chamma she is the manifest, “loving mother” emanation of that primordial wisdom — one framing places this form as the nirmanakaya, the emanation body, the level at which the enlightened reach the world. Peaceful in aspect and painted yellow, orange, or white according to the scheme, she again has one face and two hands, and here the pair that opens her story stands plainest. In one hand she holds the mirror; in the other, at or below the heart, she holds a vase brimming with nectar, a white lotus opening over her shoulder. The mirror, the tradition says, shows the purity of her heart in a perfect understanding of the karma and suffering of every being — the surface that reflects all things without adding to them or subtracting from them. The vase holds the essence of the hopes and the healing of all who turn to her; it is the nectar of compassion, and her power is to pour it out. Her medicine, as her present-day teachers put it, is love and compassion. She is understood as the source of loving-kindness, of healing, and of the dispelling of fear, and the distinction between the two forms is finally a distinction of register and not of person: the yellow Satrig Ersang is wisdom in its primordial ground, the white or golden Sherab Chamma is that same wisdom bending toward the sick and the frightened.

The iconography carries a working theology. Bon teaches that she has the power to drive off obstacles — fear, sickness, sorrow, and hostile forces — and that she assumes for this purpose a fivefold form, and, like the eight-formed Tara of the Buddhists, an eightfold form, each of the eight banishing a particular danger: enemies, curses, barrenness, the water-spirits, false views, harm and error, death, and the malign turnings of the planets. Her five heroic seed-syllables are given as SRUM, GAM, RAM, YAM, OM. In prose one may say that her office resembles that of Prajnaparamita, the “Perfection of Wisdom” made a goddess, or of Tara the deliverer, and the resemblance is not accidental, for Bon and Buddhism grew up beside one another. But she is not either of them under another name. Bon renders her in its own lineage, from its own Zhang Zhung root, as a distinct goddess at the head of its own enlightened field, and to fold her into a Buddhist figure is to repeat the old error of treating Bon as a mere echo.

Mother of the enlightened

To grasp why she stands first, one must see the company she keeps. The Four Transcendent Lords — in Tibetan the Deshek Tsozhi (bde gshegs gtso bzhi), the four chief “Well-Gone Ones” — are the supreme enlightened principles of Bon, and a set of four thangkas showing them together hangs in essentially every Bon temple across the Tibetan world, filling a place that the Buddha Shakyamuni and the sixteen arhats fill in a Buddhist hall. The other three are Shenlha Okar, the white god of light who orders the world; Sangpo Bumtri, the lord who makes the world manifest; and Tonpa Shenrab, the enlightened teacher who founded the religion and loosed the arrow of light from the hidden land of Olmo Lungring. Satrig Ersang is named ahead of all three. She is the feminine wisdom-principle out of which the enlightened are born, and the tradition titles her accordingly: the Gyalyum (rgyal yum), the Mother of all the Buddhas — the Mother of all the Enlightened Ones — as well as the Mother of Space and the Great Goddess. To be first among the four is not to be the most powerful in a contest; it is to be the ground the others stand on. Enlightenment in Bon is something mothered, and she is the mother.

Her motherhood radiates outward into other goddesses whom the tradition understands not as rivals but as her own further reaches. In her healing aspect she becomes Yeshe Walmo, the goddess of medicine and protection; in her fierce aspect she manifests as Sipe Gyalmo, Sidpa Gyalmo, the queen-protectress who rides her mule as the principal guardian of the Bon doctrine. Peaceful, healing, wrathful: a single wisdom-source showing three faces to three needs, the loving mother at the still center and the fierce queen at the defending edge.

She is also the fountainhead of one of the tradition’s great tantric cycles. The Mother Tantra, the Ma Gyu, belongs to the seventh of the Nine Ways of Bon — the Way of the White A, the outer higher tantra of deity-yoga — and its transmission, in the tradition’s own religious reckoning, descends from her. As described at the public-record distance by the Bon scholar and translator Raven Cypress Wood, the root texts of the Secret Mother Tantra are said to have arisen in the dimension of Bon itself, shared between the primordial buddhas in an eternal divine language and then rendered into Sanskrit for a retinue of sky-goers, foremost among whom was Zangza Ringtsun — herself an emanation of the great Chamma, the Loving Mother. From Zangza Ringtsun the transmission passed, through a miraculous birth, to the human teacher Milu Samlek of the land of Tazig, who composed the commentaries and spread the teaching in the human realm. These meditational and healing tantras are named here as public record and described, never given as an operative instruction; the dates and the descent are the tradition’s sacred history, held as such. What matters for her portrait is the shape of the claim: the tantra by which practitioners meet the loving mother comes down, at its head, from the loving mother herself.

A living devotion

She is not a museum figure. In the classic thangka format documented by Kvaerne and by Himalayan Art Resources, her central image is ringed by two hundred and fifty-two miniature repetitions of herself, so that her single painting already contains a small multitude; and the four paintings of the Transcendent Lords, counted together, reach one thousand and eight — the number of the Enlightened Beings of the present world-age. That arithmetic is worked into the walls of Bon temples wherever they stand.

Where they stand is itself part of her story, though the full weight of the catastrophe belongs to the places that bore it. The mother monastery of Bon, Menri, founded in 1405, was carried into exile after 1959 and rebuilt abroad. That history is told at Menri Monastery; here it is enough to say that her image and her mother-tantra lineage traveled with the monks who carried the tradition out of Tibet, and that they are worshiped in the living monasteries still — as they are in the great Bon monastic town of Nangzhig on the Amdo grasslands, and among the Tibetans of the diaspora.

Contemporary Bon teachers transmit her practice openly. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and the Ligmincha community hold healing retreats on Sherab Chamma as the divine feminine, teaching, in their words, that she is the source of wisdom and that her medicine is love and compassion; other Bon institutes offer her empowerment and her heart-mantra. One diaspora center in Canada simply took her Tibetan name for its own. To follow her devotion is to find it in the present tense, in living rooms turned into shrine-rooms and in online retreats as much as in the monastery halls.

The emblem of the Bon religion set over a monastery entrance in Tibet; the left-facing, counter-clockwise yungdrung is the tradition’s principal symbol, held equal to the Buddhist vajra, and it is the object Satrig Ersang carries in her right hand. Bgabel, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

In the scholarly register she anchors the modern study of Bon precisely because she is so central and so well attested. Snellgrove’s opening of the canon in 1967 and Kvaerne’s The Bon Religion of Tibet in 1995 — that word living in the subtitle doing quiet, deliberate work — catalog the Four Transcendent Lords and fix her attributes, with foundational studies alongside by Karmay and Ramble. Read critically, that body of work has helped dismantle the old polemic that reduced Bon to a primitive substrate beneath the “real” religion of Tibet, and has recovered it as the developed sibling tradition it is. Satrig Ersang stands at the head of what was recovered: not a folk survival, not a shadow of a Buddhist goddess, but the wisdom-mother whom a whole religion places first.

The mirror still reflects; the vase is still full. In the temples at Dolanji and Kathmandu, and in the rebuilt halls back on the plateau, the four paintings of the Transcendent Lords hang together as they have for centuries — and of the four, hers is the one the tradition hangs first.

→ Related: Tonpa Shenrab · Shenlha Okar · Sangpo Bumtri · Sipe Gyalmo · Bonri · Khyunglung · Menri Monastery · Nangzhig Monastery · The Tibetans · Zhangzhung · The Nakhi