The Naxi

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Beneath the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, on the high plain where the Yangtze turns north through its gorges, a priest sits with a long unbound book open on his knees. The pages are not written in Chinese, nor in Tibetan, nor in any alphabet. They carry rows of small drawn figures — a man, a horse, a mountain, a flame, an eye — read not one sound at a time but scene by scene, the priest supplying from memory the words the pictures only cue. It is the last writing of its kind still read aloud anywhere on earth. On his headgear are the faces of gods whose names belong to Tibet. In his hand, when he traces the sacred sign, the cross turns the other way: the counter-clockwise swastika, the yungdrung, the emblem of the Bon religion of the plateau to the north. And the word for what he is — dongba — is itself a Tibetan word worn smooth by distance, ston pa, “teacher,” carried south over the ranges and kept.

The people of that plain are the Naxi, and the priest is a dongba, and between the two — the living Yunnan people and the ritual world their priests preserve — runs one of the more remarkable inheritances in the religious geography of inner Asia. China’s 2020 census counted 323,767 Naxi, most of them in the Lijiang region of the Hengduan Mountains in northwestern Yunnan, with kindred communities across the border in southwestern Sichuan. They are a small people who keep, in their liturgical books, something very old and very far from home.

A dongba priest writing the pictographic Dongba script in a temple near Lijiang. Popolon, 2007, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

A people out of the northern marches, and the word ston pa

The Naxi — also spelled Nakhi and Nasi, and written in Chinese 纳西族 — speak a language of the Sino-Tibetan family, in its Lolo-Burmese, or Loloish, branch. Their name for themselves is old, but their presence in the Lijiang basin is, by the reckoning of most scholars, the end of a long southward drift. The consensus traces them to the ancient Qiang, the herding peoples of the grasslands and river valleys of the northwestern Tibetan-Chinese borderlands — the country of the upper Yellow River — who over centuries moved down out of those marches into the deep gorges of the upper Yangtze and settled the Lijiang region by roughly the early first millennium of the common era. The Naxi’s own accounts, preserved in the ritual books, remember a migration too: ancestors coming from the north, down the river the Chinese call the Jinsha, the “Gold Sand,” which is the Yangtze in its youth.

It is where that migration ends that the record joins the Bon world. The indigenous religion of the Naxi is called Dongba, after the priests who carry it — the dongba, a word that in the Naxi language means “wise man.” But the word is not, at root, a Naxi word at all. Philologists trace it to the Tibetan ston pa, “teacher” or “one who shows,” the same title that in Tibet names the Buddha of an age and, in the Bon religion, names its enlightened founder. The dongba is, etymologically, a ston pa — a teacher — the Tibetan word surviving in a Yunnan valley long after the tongue that lent it moved on.

The tradition names its own founder in the same key. The Naxi call him Dongba Shilo — in the transcription of Joseph Rock, who first brought the religion to Western readers, dto-mba shi-lo — and they identify him with Tonpa Shenrab, in Tibetan ston pa gshen rab, the enlightened founder of Bon. Here the figure of Tonpa Shenrab reaches a second people: the same teacher the Bonpos hold to have opened the door of the doctrine from his paradise-homeland is, in the Naxi telling, the fountainhead of the dongba’s own art. Naxi tradition localizes him, placing the founder of the religion near the white travertine terraces of Baishuitai in the mountains northeast of Lijiang — the shape of the story fitting its own landscape. The Bon world, for its part, sets Tonpa Shenrab many thousands of years before the Buddha and in a country no map records; that is the tradition’s own sacred reckoning of its founder, held as revealed scripture rather than as dated chronicle. What the two peoples share, past dispute, is the name and the office: the teacher who stands at the head of the priestly line.

The dongba reaches the record, then, twice over — as the priest of a living Yunnan people, and as the keeper of a writing found nowhere else. That writing is the Dongba script, and its survival is the reason the Naxi are known far beyond their valley. It is documented in Chinese records as early as the seventh century, in the early Tang, and by the Song dynasty of the tenth century it was in wide use among the Naxi; the earliest artifacts bearing the script are dated by some to around the beginning of the common era. Naxi genealogies traditionally credit a script to a king of the thirteenth century, Móubǎo Āzōng, while the religious fable, keeping to its own logic, credits the whole of the writing to Tonpa Shenrab. However its origin is told, it is the only pictographic writing system still in living liturgical use in the world.

The cosmos in the books, and the signature of Bon

Within its own frame the Dongba world is densely inhabited. It is a cosmos of gods and ancestors and nature-spirits, of demons that trouble the living and protective powers that can be summoned against them, and the dongba is the one man in the community who can move among these — reciting from the pictographic manuscripts to propitiate the deities, settle the ancestral dead, and drive back the demons that bring sickness, madness, and misfortune. The priest does not so much read the books as perform them. The pictographs are a score, and the ritual is the music: the drawn figures cue a text the dongba has by heart, and to know the script is to know the liturgies it stands for.

At the center of the Naxi teaching is a myth about kinship, and it carries an ethic. In the dongba scriptures the primordial ancestor takes two wives. By the first, a goddess, he fathers the natural world — the plants and the animals, the creatures of water and air — and she becomes the mother of nature, whose spirit- progeny the Naxi call the Su (rendered by earlier writers as Ssù). By the second he fathers humankind. Nature and humanity are therefore half-brothers, sons of one father and two mothers, and for a long age they lived side by side in peace. Then people grew grasping. They burned the forests and fouled the waters and took more than their half, and the Su, wronged, sent back sickness and disaster in return. Much of what the dongba does is the repair of that broken kinship — offerings to the Su, rites to restore the balance between the half-brothers — so that the Naxi ethic of harmony between people and the living land is not sentiment but genealogy. To injure the natural world is to injure one’s own kin.

The signatures of that ritual world are unmistakably those of Bon. The dongba invoke Bon deities by name. Their costume shows strong Tibetan influence, and the faces of Bon gods are figured on the ritual headdress the priest wears at the great ceremonies. Above all they carry the yungdrung — the swastika turned counter-clockwise, the “eternal” sign that is the quintessential emblem of Yungdrung (“Eternal”) Bon and, in the iconography of the plateau after the eleventh century, the marker of the Bon rather than the Buddhist turning. Where a Buddhist thangka turns the wheel and the swastika sunwise, the Bonpo — and the dongba after him — turns the other way, and walks the holy mountains in that same left-handed circuit. It is the most concrete thread tying the Lijiang priest to the Bon world of Mount Kailash and the lost western kingdom of Zhangzhung, from whose direction the inheritance flowed south.

A Dongba manuscript in the Naxi pictographic script, Yunnan Provincial Museum, Kunming. Daderot, 2011, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The script that carries all this is a thing unto itself. It is both pictographic and ideographic — a figure may stand for the object it draws, or for an idea that object suggests — and it works as a mnemonic notation rather than a full transcription: it cues the liturgy without spelling out every word of the Naxi language. The counts run wide, from about a thousand characters to more than two thousand, the tally fluid because dongba have gone on coining new glyphs; fourteen hundred or so is a figure often cited. Where the pictographs alone grow ambiguous, the Naxi supplement them with a second, phonetic writing — a syllabary they call Geba — so that the manuscripts move between the picture and the sound. What the two scripts together preserve is, in effect, an encyclopedia of the old Naxi world. The dongba books hold creation myths and funeral liturgies, exorcisms and offerings, divination and the propitiation of the Su; they hold astronomy and the calendar, genealogy, agriculture, and medicine — the whole knowledge of a society written down in pictures. Read beside the Bon canon, they answer to it closely: the deities, the exorcistic structure of the rites, and the creation narratives run parallel to those of the great Bon biographies, the Ziji and the Zermig, closely enough that scholars have long laid the two literatures side by side.

Chieftains, a botanist, and the honest shape of a kinship

The political afterlife of the Naxi runs through a line of native lords. For centuries the Lijiang region was governed by the hereditary Mu chieftains, whose authority the Mongols confirmed when the Yuan dynasty established Lijiang Prefecture in 1278 under a Mu chief. Through the Ming and into the Qing the Mu ruled as tusi — native chieftains tributary to the empire but sovereign at home — building the town of Lijiang into a prosperous crossroads on the tea-and- horse roads between Yunnan and Tibet, patronizing Naxi letters and the dongba alike. Their rule ended with the imperial policy of gaitu guiliu, “replacing the native with the appointed,” which in 1723 exchanged the hereditary lords for magistrates sent from the center. The Naxi kept their religion and their script; they lost their kings.

The tradition drew the wider world’s attention chiefly through one obsessive outsider. Joseph Rock (1884–1962), an Austrian-born American botanist and explorer, came to northwestern Yunnan collecting plants and stayed for the people. He settled in the village of Nguluko — Yuhu — at the foot of the Jade Dragon range near Lijiang, and lived there through much of the period from about 1922 to 1949, some twenty-seven years. He learned the pictographs, worked with dongba priests to transcribe and translate their scriptures — more than a hundred of the ceremonial books, together with a vast dictionary-encyclopedia of the script — and from 1924 made the Naxi and their mountains famous in the pages of National Geographic. His readings, uneven and idiosyncratic, remain the foundation on which later scholarship was built. It is partly through the labors of Rock and the collectors who came after him that roughly half of the Dongba manuscripts surviving today are held not in China but in the United States, Germany, and Spain — dispersed abroad in the same decades that the Cultural Revolution destroyed thousands of the books that had stayed home, burned or pulped as feudal superstition.

On the deepest question — what exactly the dongba owe to Bon — the record has to stay honest, because the scholars themselves are not agreed. Part of the difficulty is the word Bon itself. Per Kvaerne, the standard historian of the living tradition, has cautioned that “Bon” names at least three different things: the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet, the organized Yungdrung Bon that took shape from the tenth and eleventh centuries with its own canon and lineages, and an assortment of local and nameless cults. To ask whether Dongba “is” Bon is to ask which of these one means. The connection between the two is real and concrete — the shared name ston pa, the founder-figure, the yungdrung, the Bon gods on the headdress, the answering shape of the liturgies. But its exact form is contested. It may be that Dongba is a southern offshoot of organized Yungdrung Bon; or that both draw on a common, older stratum of Tibetan ritual that predates the organized religion; or that the dongba tradition formed on its own terms and later absorbed Bon elements moving down the trade roads. In his study of the kinship between early Tibetan ritualists and the Naxi dongba, Charles Ramble has traced real continuities between the archetypal ritual- priest of the old Tibetan manuscripts and the figure of Dongba Shilo in the Naxi books — an inheritance that may reach back to a Tibet before an organized Bon existed at all — without collapsing the two traditions into a simple line of descent. The kinship holds. Its exact degree is where the honest historian stops.

Two things must be said plainly against an old habit of writing. The Naxi are not a relic; they are a living people of some three hundred thousand, and Dongba is a living religion, not a primitive layer beneath somebody else’s faith. It is a developed ritual literature with its own canon, its own priesthood, and its own script — the sibling of the Bon of the plateau, and through Bon a cousin of Tibetan Buddhism and of the wider religious world of the Tibetans to the north, not a superstition below any of them. The Naxi nationality is drawn broadly in China’s official classification: it includes the Mosuo of the Yongning region, a distinct matrilineal people with their own customs, subsumed administratively under the Naxi name.

The tradition survives now under a double pressure — the losses of the past century, and the slow erosion of the present. Its standing, though, has been formally acknowledged. Lijiang Old Town, the Mu chieftains’ crossroads and the Naxi cultural center, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997. The Ancient Naxi Dongba Literature Manuscripts were entered on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in August 2003 — the world’s last pictographic scripture recognized as a heritage of all humanity. And yet the recognition arrives as the living knowledge thins. The dongba who can still read the books aloud, and perform what the pictures only cue, number now a handful of aging masters. The script that outlasted the Mu kings and the bonfires of the Cultural Revolution faces its narrowest passage in the men who carry it. Each page waits on a voice that fewer and fewer can supply — the teacher’s word, the ston pa’s word, still owed to the pictures a priest laid down beneath the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, and still, for a little while, repaid.

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