Tonpa Shenrab

← Encyclopedia

Seven blue horses have been stolen. A demon-king’s sons drove them out of the paradise at the center of the world and eastward across the ranges, toward a valley on the Tibetan plateau. The teacher whose horses they were is not, by his own account, attached to horses; he owns a canon, a cosmos, and a lineage, and a string of ponies is nothing beside them. He looses the arrow anyway. It leaves the bow, strikes the ring of snow mountains that walls his homeland from the outer world, and bores clean through — a shaft of light opening a corridor where there had been only rock. The Bon tradition calls it the öser dalam, the pathway of the arrow of light, and it is not really about the horses at all. The theft was the pretext the teacher had been waiting for. The arrow is the door of the teaching, opened toward Tibet.

The teacher is Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, and this is the deed that plants his religion on the plateau. He is not a name recovered from a dated chronicle. He arrives in the record through his life story — three of them, each longer than the last, each held by the Bon world as revealed scripture — and the oldest layers of that story place him not in any century a historian could mark but many thousands of years before the Buddha, in a land no map can locate. To read him at all is to read those books, because in his case the books are the man.

Olmo Lungring, the sacred inner land at the center of Tazig where Tonpa Shenrab was born — 19th-century Tibetan thangka, Rubin Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

A teacher who reaches the record through his own scriptures

The name unfolds like a title. Tonpa (Tibetan ston pa) is “teacher,” the one who opens the door; Shenrab (gshen rab) is the personal name, the “supreme priest” or “best of the shen,” the shen being the priestly officiants of the oldest Tibetan religious world; Miwoche (mi bo che) is “the great man,” the supreme human. Set together — ston pa gshen rab mi bo che — the whole reads as “the Teacher Shenrab, the Great Man.” Bonpos gloss the elements in the sacred language of Zhangzhung and in Tibetan alike, and to a Bon reader the string of honorifics does the work a Buddhist ascribes to the Buddha: it names the enlightened one who founded the doctrine of this age.

In the tradition’s own telling he is a prince. His father is Gyalbön Thökar, of the Mu (dmu) clan — one of the ancient sacred lineages that Tibetan myth traces to the sky; his mother is Yöchi Gyalzhema. He is born at the palace of Barpo Sogyé, in the land called Olmo Lungring, which lies at the heart of a vast paradise-realm named Tazig (Tagzig), a country the tradition places to the west of Tibet, in the direction of Central Asia. Olmo Lungring is not a region a traveler could reach. It is a mythic geography — a sacred inner land walled by snow ranges, watered by four rivers, centered on a four-faced palace and a nine-story mountain called Yungdrung Gutsek, the “pyramid of nine swastikas.” The place names carry meaning, not coordinates. When the arrow opens the corridor eastward, it opens it out of myth and into the mappable world.

How, then, does such a figure reach the documentary record at all? Through three graded biographies, which the Bon tradition ranks by length and holds in ascending esteem. The concise one is the Dodü (mdo ‘dus, the “Epitome of Aphorisms”), a single volume of some two dozen chapters. The medium one is the Zermik (gzer mig, the “Piercing Eye”), in two volumes and eighteen chapters. Both are counted as terma — treasure-texts, scriptures held to have been concealed in an earlier age and recovered by treasure-revealers (tertöns) when the time was ripe, in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The vast one is the Ziji (gzi brjid, the “Glorious”), twelve volumes and sixty-one chapters, the most complete life of the teacher the tradition possesses. It came later and by a different route: not dug from the ground but received as nyengyü, “aural transmission,” dictated in the fourteenth century to the tulku and treasure-revealer Loden Nyingpo (born 1360), who in the tradition’s account had it from enlightened beings. The Columbia University account of the twelve deeds sets these three side by side as the sources for everything the Bon world knows of its founder’s life.

Read from within the frame, the three books are graded revelation, later and fuller disclosures of a life lived at the dawn of the age. Read as documents, they are the whole of the evidence, and they are late. The scholar Samten G. Karmay put the difficulty plainly in his 1975 survey of Bon history and doctrine: “we have no available sources with which to establish his historicity, his dates.” David Snellgrove, who did more than any Western scholar to bring the Bon canon into view, and Per Kvaerne after him, framed the same problem as a question about the whole tradition: whether the organized founder-figure is genuinely ancient, or a formation that crystallized around the tenth to fourteenth centuries, in the same period and by the same means as Yungdrung Bon itself took shape — the layered emergence of the life story that later scholarship has traced through the three books in turn. This is the contested register, and it is worth keeping distinct from two others. Bon’s own dating of Shenrab — roughly eighteen thousand years ago, with one standard reckoning fixing his birth at 16,017 BCE — is a religious chronology, the tradition’s sacred time, not a claim a historian tests. The terma and aural provenance of the three biographies is tradition-internal, an account the Bon world gives of how its scriptures came. And the scholarly debate over historicity is a third thing again: an open question in the study of Tibetan religion, flagged as such and settled by no one.

The founder of Eternal Bon

Within the Bon world none of that unsettles anything. Tonpa Shenrab is the enlightened one who opened the teaching for this world-age — a buddha in the full sense the tradition means, the sovereign source of its doctrine, its cosmology, its lineage. His life is not read as biography in the modern sense but as a template: the deeds are a map of the path, and a devotee reads them the way a pilgrim reads a route. The Bon calendar tells them as the Twelve Deeds, from the descent into birth on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, through the taming of demons and the turning of the wheel of Bon, to the passing into peace.

The shape of the life is that of a king who becomes a renunciant. Shenrab is born to rule; he marries, and in the tradition’s fullest telling fathers eight sons and two daughters, who carry his teaching outward. He masters the ordinary sciences a prince must know — logic and grammar, astronomy and the reckoning of time, medicine and the arts of healing — and teaches them, so that Bon in its lower reaches is a science of the world before it is a path beyond it. Then, at thirty-one, he turns. He cuts his hair, sets aside the royal robes for the dress of a renunciant, gives his wealth to the poor, and takes up austerity. He teaches for the rest of a long life and passes into nirvana at the age of eighty-two. The arc — sovereignty renounced, the world’s knowledge mastered and then transcended — is the pattern the whole tradition is built to repeat.

The teaching he founds is Yungdrung Bon, “Eternal Bon,” and the adjective is carried by a symbol. The yungdrung is the swastika, but turned the other way: where the Buddhist emblem of the plateau wheels clockwise, the Bon sign turns counter-clockwise, and that single reversal of direction is the most economical statement the tradition makes about itself. It is the indestructible sign, the “eternal,” the unbreakable thing that abides through the destruction of worlds — Bon’s counterpart to the Buddhist diamond-thunderbolt. The same left-turning sense governs Bon practice on the ground: where Buddhist pilgrims circle a holy place clockwise, Bonpos circle it counter-clockwise, and the two streams of walkers passing each other in opposite directions around a sacred mountain are the most visible sign that two traditions, not one, hold the Tibetan world. It is the sense in which Bonpos circumambulate Mount Kailash, the great pyramid-peak of the far west, against the sun.

Shenrab’s doctrine is arranged as the Nine Ways of Bon — the graded vehicles, each a complete approach that the higher ones subsume. The lower four are the “causal” ways, the practical religion of the world: the Way of Prediction, with its prognostication, astrology, and sortilege; the Way of the Visible World, mapping the psycho-physical cosmos; the Way of Illusion, dispersing hostile forces; and the Way of Existence, the rites of death and the guidance of the dead. Above them rise the “resultant” ways of the renunciant and the mystic: the ways of the lay follower and the monk, with their vows and disciplines; then the tantric ways; and at the summit the ninth, the Unsurpassable Way, which is the Great Perfection — Dzogchen — that Bon holds as its highest teaching, no less than the Buddhist schools hold their own. It was extracts from the Ziji, turning on this ninefold scheme, that Snellgrove translated with the Bon master Lopön Tenzin Namdak and published in 1967 as The Nine Ways of Bon, the book that first opened the Bon canon to a Western readership on the tradition’s own terms rather than as a heretical shadow of Buddhism.

Shenrab does not stand alone at the head of the Bon cosmos. Above and around him the tradition sets the enlightened lords from whom the teaching flows — the loving wisdom-mother Satrig Ersang, the white god of light Shenlha Ökar who orders the world, the lord of the manifest world Sangpo Bumtri — and the fierce queen Sidpa Gyalmo who guards the doctrine. Shenrab is the one who brings the teaching into human history, the buddha of this world and age. Here the parallel to Shakyamuni is exact and, from the Bon side, deliberate: Bonpos hold that in a former life the future Buddha Shakyamuni was a prince called White Banner, and that Shenrab was his teacher. But the parallel is drawn by Bon, and drawn to place Shenrab first. He is not a copy of the Buddha. He is the sovereign teacher of a canon, a cosmos, and a lineage that answer to no other founder — the counterpart of Shakyamuni within Bon’s own terms, and within those terms the elder of the two. The relation between his tradition and Tibetan Buddhism runs deeper than rivalry: over a thousand years the two borrowed from, argued with, and shaped each other, until a Bon temple and a Buddhist one share almost everything but the direction their symbols turn and the founder on the central throne.

The arrow to Kongpo, and the afterlife of a founder

Return to the horses. The best-loved of Shenrab’s deeds, and the one that matters most to the plateau, is his single journey to Tibet — the deed by which Bon crosses over from Olmo Lungring into the world of men. Its engine is enmity. The demon-king Khyabpa Lagring stood in long hostility to the teacher, and in the tradition’s telling his campaign of theft and abduction was constant; at last his sons stole seven of Shenrab’s horses and drove them east to Kongpo, the forested valley country of southeastern Tibet. Shenrab, unmoved by the loss of property, saw in it something else — the moment ripe for taming the demons and carrying Bon to a land that did not yet have it.

So he loosed the arrow. It struck the wall of snow mountains ringing Olmo Lungring and bored through, and along that shaft of light — the öser dalam, the pathway of the arrow of light — Shenrab passed out of paradise and onto the plateau in pursuit. At Kongpo the demons and their allies gave battle. They hurled poisoned weapons; Shenrab turned them, in the air, to flowers. He summoned the protective gods of his own line, subdued the demon-king and his host, and recovered the horses — though the horses were never the point. On the site of the demons’ broken support-mountain he emanated a sacred peak, Kongpo Bonri, the “Bon Mountain of Kongpo,” and Khyabpa Lagring himself, defeated, is said in some tellings to have become his disciple. Kongpo Bonri stands still, a place of pilgrimage where Bonpos and Buddhists alike walk the mountain — the Bonpos, and here even many Buddhists, keeping to the counter-clockwise Bon direction that the founder’s own circuit set. This is the tradition’s own account of how Bon reached Tibet, in an age before the Tibetan Empire, carried by the teacher himself along the corridor his arrow opened.

The wider afterlife of the figure runs through the history of the tradition he anchors. When Yungdrung Bon took organized shape from the tenth and eleventh centuries — its canon assembled, its lineages formalized, its founder’s life set down in the recovered treasure-texts — Tonpa Shenrab stood at the head of it, the fixed point from which the whole edifice was reckoned. The monasteries carried him forward: Menri, founded in 1405 in the province of Tsang, became the mother house of the tradition and the guardian of its ordination lineage, and the great Bon monastic towns of the eastern grasslands, Nangzhig among them, gathered thousands of monks around the same founder and the same canon. In the nineteenth century the ecumenical Rimé movement, seeking to preserve every strand of Tibetan religious life against sectarian narrowing, recognized Bon among the traditions of the plateau — a formal acknowledgment, from within the Buddhist world, that the followers of Shenrab held a complete path and not a superstition.

Then came the rupture that every living Tibetan tradition carries. In the years after 1959 the Bon monasteries of the plateau were destroyed along with the Buddhist ones, and the lineage that had run unbroken from Menri faced extinction. It survived by going into exile. Menri was re-established in 1969 at Dolanji in the Indian Himalayan foothills, its abbatial succession carried over intact; Triten Norbutse was founded at Kathmandu, where Lopön Tenzin Namdak — Snellgrove’s collaborator on The Nine Ways of Bon — taught a new generation. In those refounded houses, and in the villages of the plateau where Bon has returned, the three biographies of Tonpa Shenrab are studied as living scripture, and the anniversary of his birth is kept each year. The fuller story of that persecution and rebirth belongs to the history of the Tibetan people and their monasteries; here it is enough that the founder outlasted the destruction of the buildings raised in his name.

What the arrow opened has not closed. A prince who wanted nothing his enemies could steal turned a petty theft into the founding deed of a religion, and the corridor of light his shaft bored from a paradise no map records still lets the teaching through: down onto the plateau, along the counter-clockwise circuits of its holy mountains, and out again into exile and return. The horses were only ever the reason to draw the bow.

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