The Tibetans

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On the stony pilgrim road that rings Mount Kailash, at just under nineteen thousand feet, two streams of walkers pass each other all day long. Most go one way — clockwise, keeping the peak on their right, prostrating in stages, counting the single circuit that is said to wipe out the sins of a life. A smaller number go the other way, counter-clockwise, against the human traffic, their prayer-beads turning left. They are not lost and they are not quarreling. The clockwise walkers are Buddhists; the counter-clockwise walkers are Bonpo, followers of the older Tibetan religion, and the direction is the whole argument, worn smooth into the ground. One mountain, one people, two ways of turning around the axis of the world.

The people are the Tibetans. They call themselves Bodpa (བོད་པ, Wylie bod pa), “people of Bod” — Bod being the plateau that outsiders learned to call Tibet. They are, by recent counting, roughly 7.7 million, the large majority of them in the Tibet Autonomous Region and the historic provinces of Ü-Tsang, Kham, and Amdo within the People’s Republic of China, with old and living communities across the border in India, Nepal, and Bhutan. Their speech is Tibetic, a branch of the Tibeto-Burman languages within the great Sino-Tibetan family, conventionally grouped into the Ü-Tsang, Kham, and Amdo dialects — a grouping that flattens a real diversity, since several of these are mutually unintelligible and held together as one language chiefly by a common script and a common canon. To the south and east live their linguistic kin, among them the Naxi, or Nakhi, of the Yunnan gorges, whose priestly tradition scholars have long tried, and argued over how, to connect to the old Tibetan religion.

The plateau and the empire

The plateau is one of the hardest inhabited places on earth, and its people are old upon it. Genetic and archaeological work on the peopling of the highland traces the Tibetans to a deep East Asian lineage present on the plateau on the order of thirty to forty thousand years ago, layered within the last ten millennia by Neolithic farmers moving up from the Yellow River — a settlement history reaching back long before any of it was written down. The writing, when it came, came suddenly and late, and it came with a state.

The Tibetans enter the documentary record in the seventh century, when the Yarlung dynasty of the southern valleys welded the plateau’s clans into a single power. Its thirty-third king, Songtsen Gampo, reckoned the first great emperor, unified the highland and moved his seat toward Lhasa before his death in 650; the empire he founded is conventionally dated from around 618 or 632 to its collapse in 842, and at its height it was a match for Tang China, holding the passes and once, briefly, the Tang capital itself. It was under Songtsen Gampo that the empire absorbed the ancient western kingdom of Zhangzhung, whose heartland lay out toward Mount Kailash — the conquest placed by the historian R. A. Stein around 645 — and Zhangzhung was the cradle of the indigenous religion the Tibetans would carry ever after. At its farthest reach the empire pushed west into Central Asia and south into the Gangetic plain, garrisoned the Silk Road oases, and dealt with Tang China as an equal and a threat; for two centuries the Tibetans were one of the great powers of Asia, and the memory of that empire — its emperors, its law, its translation of two scriptural worlds into a single script — is the armature on which the later national self was built.

In the same imperial century the Tibetans became a literate people. The Tibetan script — an alphabet of thirty consonants and four vowels, written left to right and derived from an Indian model — appears in the early seventh century, and tradition credits its design to Songtsen Gampo’s minister Thonmi Sambhota, sent to India to bring back a vehicle in which Tibetan could be written. It is a good story, and it may hold a true kernel, but it should be told as tradition: the earliest Old Tibetan sources do not name Thonmi Sambhota, and the attribution belongs to later histories rather than to the imperial record itself. What is certain is that from this moment the Tibetans possessed the instrument by which two whole libraries of the sacred would be carried into their tongue — the indigenous teaching being rendered out of the Zhangzhung language, and the Buddhism arriving from India and China.

The people of two religions

What sets the Tibetans apart in the religious map of Asia is not that they are devout, which many peoples are, but that they are a single nation carrying two complete religions that have shaped one another for a thousand years. The two are siblings, and rivals, and neither is a mere shading of the other.

The elder is Bon — more exactly Yungdrung Bon, the “Eternal Bon,” named for the yungdrung, the enduring swastika-cross that is its emblem of the imperishable. Within its own world Bon is a finished religion in every sense: it has its own enlightened founder in Tonpa Shenrab, who is held to have taught long before the Buddha of India, out of the hidden central land of Olmo Lungring; its own vast canon and biography-cycles; its own monasteries, ordination, and philosophy; and its own summit teaching in the Great Perfection, Dzogchen. Its cosmos is ordered by enlightened lords and guarded by fierce protectors, among them the queen Sidpa Gyalmo, who rides her mule around the edge of the doctrine. Bon reckons the antiquity of its founder in tens of thousands of years; that reckoning is the tradition’s own sacred chronology, not a date the documentary record can carry, and the two should not be confused.

The younger religion is Tibetan Buddhism, which arrived under Songtsen Gampo through his marriage alliances with Tang China and Nepal, and was made the religion of the state two reigns later by the emperor Trisong Detsen (r. 755–797), who invited the Indian abbot Shantarakshita and the tantric master Padmasambhava and built the first Tibetan monastery at Samye, where seven Tibetans took monastic ordination around 779. Out of that beginning grew the whole monastic civilization the Tibetans are known for: the great colleges of dialectic where monks debate with clapped hands and stamped feet, the geshe degree earned over decades, the block-printed scriptures — the Buddhist Kangyur and Tengyur, and the Bon Kangyur and Tengyur set beside them — and the terma or “treasure” texts, hidden to be found in a later age.

For a long time the outside way of describing this doubleness was to arrange it as a ladder: Buddhism the civilized religion on top, Bon the primitive layer beneath — the “shamanism” or “animism” or “devil-worship” that real Tibet had supposedly grown out of. That arrangement is worth naming precisely because it is wrong, and because it was never neutral. It is a polemic, inherited partly from Tibetan Buddhist writers who cast the old religion as the defeated one, and partly from colonial and missionary observers who reached for the vocabulary of “savage” cults. Read at its own level, Yungdrung Bon is no substrate. It is a developed religion with an enlightened founder, a nine-stage path culminating in Dzogchen, a monastic university system, and a thousand years of scripture — the sibling of Tibetan Buddhism, not its raw material. Over those centuries the two borrowed relentlessly from each other: forms of ordination, styles of scripture, the treasure-revelation system, the vocabulary of the Great Perfection all pass back and forth, and the scholars who study either now find it impossible to draw the border cleanly.

Nowhere is the doubleness plainer than in what the Tibetans do with their land, which both religions read as a living body of deities, mountain-lords, and territorial spirits. At Mount Kailash — Kang Rinpoche, the “Precious Snow Mountain” — the same peak is the throne of a Buddhist meditational deity and the ninefold sacred mountain of Bon, and the pilgrims of the two religions circle it in opposite directions, clockwise and counter-clockwise, the yungdrung of Bon itself turning the “wrong” way from the Buddhist swastika. It is one people at one mountain holding two directions of devotion, and neither considers the other’s circuit a mistake.

Turns of the wheel

The history the Tibetans carry is a history of religious turns, and it has been told from both sides in ways that flatter the teller. Bon tradition remembers a persecution under the Buddhist-favoring emperors of the imperial age, in which the great Bon master Drenpa Namkha is said to have hidden his tradition’s texts in the walls of Samye and feigned conversion so that the teaching might survive underground — an act later Bonpo understand as the very seed of the treasure revelations, the terma recovered in the centuries after. Buddhist historiography tells the counter-story: that the last emperor of unified Tibet, Langdarma, turned against Buddhism, and that his assassination in 842 by a monk was a deliverance from a dark age. Both are polemics, and the sober fact under them is simpler and larger. The murder of Langdarma broke the empire. Central authority collapsed, the plateau fractured into contending lordships, and Tibet passed into the long Era of Fragmentation, running from 842 to roughly the middle of the thirteenth century.

Out of that fragmentation the religions reorganized. It is in these centuries that Yungdrung Bon crystallized into its systematic form, gathering its scriptures, its lineages, and its treasure-texts into the shape it has held since; its principal seat, the monastery of Menri in Tsang, was founded in 1405 and became the mother-house of the tradition and the throne of its abbatial line. Buddhism, in the same era, spread again from new Indian teachers into the orders — Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and later Gelug — that would govern Tibetan life. For most of the second millennium the two traditions lived alongside each other in a settled, if unequal, coexistence, Bon the smaller and often the slighted, but never extinguished.

The nineteenth century brought a notable softening. In the Kham country of eastern Tibet a group of masters launched the Rimé, or “non-sectarian,” movement, led by Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo (1820–1892) and Jamgön Kongtrül (1813–1899), who set out to gather and preserve the teachings of every lineage rather than let the rivalries grind them down. The movement’s ecumenism reached across to Bon as well: teachers from all the Buddhist schools and from Bon took part in its work, and the greatest Bon master of the age, Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen (1859–1935), belongs to its climate — a scholar and contemplative whose death is remembered in his tradition as an attainment of the rainbow body. For a moment the ladder was set aside, and Bon was treated as one integral tradition among the others.

Then came the modern rupture, which is recent and grievous, and is best held to the record. The People’s Liberation Army entered Tibet in 1950, defeating the small Tibetan force at Chamdo; the following year the Seventeen Point Agreement was signed and put into effect, binding Tibet into the People’s Republic. Tension gathered through the decade and broke in Lhasa on 10 March 1959, when crowds massed around the summer palace fearing for the safety of the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Within days he fled south across the Himalaya into exile in India, and tens of thousands of Tibetans followed him over the passes in the years that came, while inside Tibet the upheavals that followed — and above all the Cultural Revolution — brought the destruction of the great majority of the country’s monasteries, Buddhist and Bon alike.

Bon, the smaller religion, rebuilt itself in exile with remarkable speed. Menri was raised again at Dolanji in Himachal Pradesh — the settlement organized in the late 1960s, the temple’s foundations laid in 1969 and the building completed in 1978 — under the thirty-third Menri Trizin, Lungtok Tenpai Nyima, who held the abbatial throne of Bon from exile until his death in 2017. A second house, Triten Norbutse, was founded on a hill facing the Swayambhu stupa at Kathmandu. Between them, and together with the surviving monasteries inside Tibet, these keep the full Bon geshe program alive — the long monastic degree that is the measure of a complete education in the tradition.

The same century that nearly unmade Bon also, at last, took it seriously as scholarship. The old dismissal began to fall with David Snellgrove’s The Nine Ways of Bon (1967), an edition and translation made in close collaboration with the Bon master Lopon Tenzin Namdak, which presented Bon’s own account of its graded path in Bon’s own words; the work of Per Kvaerne, Samten Karmay — himself born a Bonpo of Amdo — and Charles Ramble carried the study further, until the serious literature no longer treated Bon as the leftover of Tibet but as one of its two integral religions. Much is still genuinely debated: how much of organized Yungdrung Bon reaches back before Buddhism and how much took its shape in the parallel formation of the tenth and eleventh centuries; the historicity and antiquity of Tonpa Shenrab and of Olmo Lungring; the reach of the Zhangzhung language and its texts. Those are live scholarly questions, and the honest answer is that they remain contested.

What is not contested is the doubleness itself. The Tibetans are a living people, their language spoken and their monasteries filled on the plateau and in the diaspora, and Bon is a living religion, not a memory of one. A Tibetan child may be born into a Buddhist family or a Bon one; the two share a script, a canon-form, a monastic grammar, a landscape of sacred mountains, and a thousand years of mutual argument. At Kailash the two lines of walkers still pass each other on the track, the beads turning right and the beads turning left, and the mountain between them belongs entirely to both.

The Potala Palace above Lhasa, seat of the later Tibetan state on the hill where tradition places Songtsen Gampo’s imperial-age fortress. Dennis G. Jarvis, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

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