Shenlha Okar

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A white body like the essence of crystal, seated without strain. A hook held up in the right hand and, in the left, a coiled lasso. Beneath, a throne carried on the backs of elephants, so that the whole serene figure rests on a sign of unshakable strength. The color is not decoration but doctrine: this is a god made of light, and the two implements in his hands are the instruments of compassion, the hook that draws a being in and the noose that gently binds it toward release. In the sacred world of Yungdrung Bon — the “Eternal” Bon, the developed religion that is the sibling of Tibetan Buddhism on the Tibetan plateau — the figure is Shenlha Okar, the white god of light through whom the world of appearances is brought forth and set in order.

The White-Light God of the Shen

The name is written in Tibetan gShen lha ‘od dkar. It resolves into three weighted parts. ‘Od dkar is “white light.” Lha is “god,” the divine. And gshen is the word that stands at the very heart of Bon: the priest-figure, the sacred officiant, the one who performs the rites — the same term that names the tradition’s enlightened founder, Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, whose title carries the sense of the supreme priest. In Shenlha Okar the priestly word is lifted clear of the human office and set upon a god, so that the name is often glossed “wisdom-gshen of white light.” A common alternate form, Shiwa Okar (Wylie zhi ba ‘od dkar), turns the same light peaceful: “peaceful white light.” The two names hold his double character in a phrase. He is light, and he is serenity — the still, radiant, entirely peaceful pole of the Bon cosmos.

He reaches the documentary record along two channels that must be kept distinct. The first is the living tradition itself: the Bon canon read as scripture-history, and the teachers and monasteries who carry Shenlha Okar as an object of devotion into the present day. The second is modern critical scholarship, above all the iconographic catalog assembled by the Norwegian scholar Per Kvaerne, The Bon Religion of Tibet: The Iconography of a Living Tradition (Serindia, London, 1995; reprinted by Shambhala in 2001), which reads the thangkas and the ritual and biographical texts of the tradition and sets down the pantheon, its ranks and its images, as they are actually painted and invoked. It is from that critically-read scholarship, together with the tradition’s own voice, that the following account is drawn; the Wikipedia summary of Shenlha Okar gathers the same material in outline.

Within the frame of the tradition, Shenlha Okar stands among the highest company Bon knows: he is one of the Four Transcendent Lords, the four “gone to bliss” (Wylie bde bar gshegs pa). The other three are Satrig Ersang — also called Sherab Chamma, the loving wisdom-mother at the head of the enlightened; Sangpo Bumtri, the lord who makes the world manifest; and Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche himself, the founder who descended into the world of men. Placed in that set, Shenlha Okar’s office comes into focus by contrast. He is not the mother of wisdom, not the lord of manifestation, not the teacher-in-the-world. He is the white source: the radiant clear light from which the compassionate powers of Bon stream downward toward beings.

This is a distinction worth guarding, because the Bon pantheon is populous and its serene figures can blur together for a newcomer. Shenlha Okar is not Tonpa Shenrab, the enlightened founder who loosed the arrow of light and tamed the demons of Kongpo; he is the still light behind that descent, not the descent itself. Nor is he the fierce queen Sidpa Gyalmo, who rides her mule as the wrathful guardian of the doctrine. Where she is dark and terrible in defense, he is white and untroubled at the center. He is the peace, not the war; the source, not the messenger; the light, not the wrath.

The Bonpo deity Kunzang Akor, a form of the primordial All-Good (Kunzang / Kuntu Zangpo) from whom the clear-light and worldly emanations of Bon descend; gilt brass, Central Tibet, 16th century. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The ordering of a luminous world

To place Shenlha Okar precisely, the tradition uses the threefold body — the trikaya — that Bon shares in vocabulary with Tibetan Buddhism while filling it with its own figures. At the ground stands the dharmakaya, the “body of reality,” which Bon calls the Bonku: the primordial, unconditioned expanse, named Kuntu Zangpo (Kunzang), the All-Good. From that formless ground shines the sambhogakaya, the “body of perfect enjoyment” (Wylie rdzogs sku, Dzogku) — the radiant, clear-light aspect in which the enlightened appear to those able to see. And into the world of ordinary beings descends the nirmanakaya, the “body of emanation,” the form a teacher takes to be born, to teach, and to die. In this reckoning Shenlha Okar holds the middle rank. He is the sambhogakaya, the clear light that emanates from the primordial Bonku, while Tonpa Shenrab is the nirmanakaya who comes down into history. The two are the same current at different depths — the radiant source and the walking teacher — and some accounts fold them tighter still, reading Shenlha Okar simply as the sambhogakaya form of Tonpa Shenrab himself. That the tradition holds more than one arrangement of these figures is itself a mark of a thought-through cosmology rather than a fixed folk pantheon.

What makes Shenlha Okar more than a rank in a scheme is the work assigned to him: he is the god through whom the world of appearances is brought forth. The tradition tells that he fashioned the manifest cosmos with the help of nine cosmic gods — the srid pa’i lha, “gods of existence,” brother-deities who take form in the world as drala (Wylie dgra bla), the war-gods and vital protective powers native to the Tibetan religious imagination. The division of their labor is precise. One of the nine embodies all light: glancing in every direction, this deity brought into being every kind of illumination there is — the sun, the moon, the light of the planets and the stars, and the inward luminosity of consciousness itself. Another embodies space and direction. Others take up the remaining structures of a world. And when the nine have made their creation, Shenlha Okar goes among the things they have raised and quickens each with a living power, a drala of its own.

The theological weight of this story lies in what it refuses to say. Creation here is not a fall, not a darkening, not the trapping of spirit in gross matter. It is the ordering of a luminous world — the setting-out, at the wish of the primordial, of light into sun and star and mind, of emptiness into space and bearing. The world that comes forth is a lit world, and the god who presides over its coming is white. Bon does not narrate the origin of appearances as a catastrophe to be escaped but as a radiance to be seen through. (The cosmology of these nine creator-lha survives in more than one telling; the twentieth-century Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa gathered a version of it, drawn from the drala traditions, in his unfinished epic of the lha and the kingdom of Shambhala.)

Above every other attribute, Shenlha Okar is the deity of compassion, and here the tradition’s own language is emphatic: his compassion is all-pervading, reaching without exception toward all that lives. As the sambhogakaya — the clear light purified of every defilement — he is the fountainhead from which the compassionate emanations of Bon pour down. This office is what draws the frequent comparison, made both inside the tradition and by the scholars who study it, to the great compassion-figures of Tibetan Buddhism: to Chenrezig, the Avalokiteshvara of infinite mercy, and to Amitabha, the buddha of boundless light. The resemblance is close and it is worth naming plainly. A white deity of compassion at the sambhogakaya rank, a buddha of light standing behind the world — the parallels to Tibetan Buddhism are neither faint nor accidental, and the two traditions traded such structures across a thousand years on the same plateau. But a parallel is a relation between two things that stand apart, and to see the likeness is not to collapse the one figure into the other. Shenlha Okar is drawn from within the Bon canon, ranked among the Four Transcendent Lords, painted in the Bon manner, invoked in Bon rites. What the comparison illuminates is a kinship, not a copy.

The iconography carries the whole teaching on its surface, which is why the tradition attends to it so exactly. The body is white “like the essence of crystal” — not merely pale but translucent, a color that stands for light passing cleanly through, for a mind without stain. The posture is peaceful, the face serene. The right hand raises a hook and the left, in the common form, holds a lasso: the two are compassion made into tools, the hook to catch a wandering being and the noose to draw it, unhurt, toward liberation — the same imagery of the beckoning and binding of the lost that recurs across the Tibetan traditions of enlightened rescue. And the throne rests on elephants, whose great patient strength says that the peace above them is not fragility but power at rest. Nothing in the image is idle. The crystal is his purity, the hook and lasso his mercy, the elephants his unshakable ground. He is shown as what he is: the still white center that both makes the world and holds it.

A living god, and a case in the history of scholarship

Shenlha Okar is not a figure recovered from a closed past. He remains a living object of devotion wherever Yungdrung Bon survives — in the Bon regions of Tibet, and, since the middle of the twentieth century, among the exile communities that rebuilt the tradition’s institutions abroad. When the monasteries of Bon were caught in the destruction that followed 1959, the tradition carried its lineages into exile and rebuilt them abroad — a story that belongs to Menri Monastery and to the Tibetans themselves. What matters here is only that the white god of light did not become a museum piece. He is still taught. Teachers of the exile lineages, among them Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, present him to students in the West as exactly what the tradition has always held him to be: the white light of compassion, the sambhogakaya source from which the enlightened emanate.

His very prominence, though, has made Shenlha Okar a test case in a long and unhappy argument about the standing of Bon itself. Because so much about him runs parallel to Buddhist figures — the trikaya scheme that ranks him, the compassion-buddha who resembles Avalokiteshvara, the light-buddha who resembles Amitabha — older writers seized on the resemblance as proof of a hierarchy. Bon, on this reading, was merely a shadow of Buddhism, a primitive or shamanic or animist substrate that had dressed itself up in borrowed Buddhist clothes; its gods were counterfeits of the real ones. That verdict came from two directions at once — from a strand of Buddhist polemic that cast Bon as the defeated old religion, and from a colonial-era scholarship happy to file any non-Buddhist Tibetan religion under “primitive.” It should be named for what it is and then set down, because it is a claim about the prejudices of its authors more than about Shenlha Okar. Yungdrung Bon has its own enlightened founder, its own vast biographical canon, its own Four Transcendent Lords and Nine Ways rising to Dzogchen, its own monastic universities and unbroken lineages. It is a developed religion, the sibling of Tibetan Buddhism rather than its counterfeit, and the two shaped each other — borrowing, competing, converging — over the whole length of their shared history. The likeness of Shenlha Okar to a Buddhist buddha of light is evidence of that long entanglement between equals. It was never evidence of theft.

Modern scholarship has largely made this correction its own. Kvaerne’s iconographic catalog documents Shenlha Okar soberly, as a central deity of a coherent living tradition, painted and ranked according to the tradition’s own logic; the earlier work of David Snellgrove, whose The Nine Ways of Bon (1967) presented Bon texts on their own terms, and the studies of Samten Karmay and others, belong to the same rehabilitation. Read this way, the figure loses none of his interest and gains his dignity. He is the white god through whom a lit world is ordered and held; the peaceful pole of a pantheon that also knows the wrath of its guardians; the source, at the sambhogakaya rank, of the mercy that the tradition believes descends toward every living thing. The Bon of Zhangzhung and of the mountains around Mount Kailash is not a superstition beneath a religion. It is a religion, and Shenlha Okar is one of its high gods.

The crystal figure with the hook and the lasso keeps its place at the center of that world. Painted on the thangkas, invoked in the rites of the reborn monasteries, taught to new students in exile and abroad, the white god of light does the same double work he has always done. He is the radiance that orders the world of appearances, and he is the mercy that reaches back into it to draw the living toward release — the still white source at the heart of a religion that goes on.

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