Zhangzhung

← Encyclopedia

On the north bank of the Sutlej, some thirty kilometers downriver from the snows of Mount Kailash, a cliff of pale rock stands honeycombed with small carved caves. The Tibetans call the place Khyunglung Ngulkhar, the Silver Palace of the Garuda Valley. Most of the cavities are barely four square meters, each with a raised hearth at the back and a ceiling blackened by the smoke of fires that had nowhere to go but the doorway. Between 2004 and 2012, survey teams working under China’s cultural-heritage administration dug into the site and the tombs around it, and pulled from the rubble the material remains of a kingdom that Tibet had all but forgotten: stone-built houses, altars, passages driven down toward the base of the mountain, grinding stones and stone pestles, fragments of iron armor, iron arrowheads, small stones incised with script, and — set in one stone altar — a double-faced bronze figure with a fierce, un-Buddhist face, taken to be an image of an early Bon deity. The people who made these things called their country Zhangzhung, and they spoke a language that the Tibetan tongue, spreading west, eventually buried.

Zhangzhung (Zhang-zhung; also written Shangshung) was the ancient kingdom and people of far western Tibet — the high plateau of Ngari, the country of Mount Kailash and the upper Sutlej. In the reckoning of the Bon histories and the later Tibetan chronicles it flourished in the western marches from roughly the middle of the first millennium BCE — the tradition names about 500 BCE — until its absorption by the expanding Yarlung dynasty of central Tibet in the seventh century CE. It was genuinely old, older by centuries than Buddhism in Tibet, and within the sacred world of Bon it is not merely a place on a map but the ground from which that religion came into the plateau: the cradle-country whose fall did not end its gift.

The country and the record

The heart of Zhangzhung lay in the far west, on the roof of the plateau, where four of the great rivers of Asia rise within sight of a single mountain. Its core was the upper Sutlej and the Kailash range; from there the kingdom is described as reaching west toward Ladakh, Gilgit, and Baltistan, north toward the Khotan oases, and south toward Mustang and the Nepal border — a loose dominion over the highest and most arid corner of Tibet rather than a compact state. The Annals of Lake Manasarovar count it as eighteen kingdoms gathered around Kailash, and the survey work of recent decades has confirmed the scale of the thing that lies behind the number: John Vincent Bellezza, mapping the ruined citadels, pillar-arrays, and all-stone corbelled buildings of Upper Tibet, has argued for a real pre-Buddhist civilization to which the name Zhangzhung properly belongs — the subject of his survey Zhang Zhung: Foundations of Civilization in Tibet (2008). The reputed capital was Khyunglung, the silver cliff-city on the Sutlej, whose modern village sits just upstream of the ancient ruins at roughly 31°02′N 80°35′E. The garuda — the golden-winged khyung — was the royal emblem, and the kings of Zhangzhung were styled kings of the garuda; the “Silver Palace of the Garuda Valley” was their seat.

The kingdom reaches the documentary record from several directions at once. It is named in the earliest Tibetan imperial documents and in the Old Tibetan manuscripts sealed at Dunhuang; it appears in the Bon religious histories as the homeland of their faith; and it is noticed in Chinese sources, where the Tang Annals record its dealings with the rising power of central Tibet. Set against one another, these sources give a kingdom that was neither a Bon fantasy nor a mere Chinese rumor but a polity with a court, a script, and a king who could be married into and, when the time came, killed.

What the ruins on the Sutlej were actually for remains partly open. The caves of Khyunglung are small, blackened, and without chimneys, and it has been suggested that the site was never quite a city in the ordinary sense — that it served as a gathering-place for the clans and their ritual specialists rather than a dense population center. Yet the 2012 excavation turned up the apparatus of a settled and armed society all the same: stone houses and altars, subterranean passages, the iron of armor and arrowheads, the millstones and pestles of people who ground their grain in place. The Wikipedia account of Kyunglung notes the small inscribed stones and the stone images of Bon deities the caves have yielded — the material trace of a religion already at home in the valley. Around Kailash and across Upper Tibet, Bellezza’s surveys have recorded hundreds of pre-Buddhist sites — walled citadels on defensible spurs, arrays of standing stones, corbelled all-stone temples, mortuary fields — that together sketch a civilization with fortification, cult, and funerary architecture of its own, centuries before the Yarlung kings came west.

The people of Zhangzhung spoke Zhangzhung, an extinct Sino-Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman) language of the West Himalayish branch — the group sometimes called Tibeto-Kanauri — closely related to modern Kinnauri, still spoken downriver along the Sutlej in Himachal Pradesh, whose speakers claim descent from the old kingdom. As the Wikipedia account of the language sets out, the West Himalayish classification is now broadly agreed; Zhangzhung was not a dialect of Tibetan but a cousin of it, near enough to be written in a related script yet far enough to need translating. Its documents used the Marchen (smar-chen) script and its descendants — Marchung, Pungchen, Pungchung, and Drusha — alongside the ordinary Tibetan letters. In that tongue, the Bon tradition holds, its oldest scriptures were first set down.

The cradle of the teaching

Within the sacred world of Bon, Zhangzhung is where Tibet received its first religion, its first sacred script, and its first holy speech. The tradition tells that the doctrine of the enlightened founder, Tonpa Shenrab Miwo, arose in the mythic homeland of Olmo Lungring — the central land of a larger western country the texts call Tazig — and passed from there, through Zhangzhung, into the human world of the plateau. Olmo Lungring stays a country of the sacred geography, a paradise at the foot of a nine-storey mountain, never a set of coordinates on any map; some scholars have speculated about western links for it, from Persia to the Pamirs, but the tradition keeps it a mythic place. Zhangzhung is the opposite kind of ground: the real, historical country where the teaching took root, was studied by its sages, and was carried eastward toward central Tibet. If Olmo Lungring is the source, Zhangzhung is the doorway.

At the center of that country stood Kailash, which the Zhangzhung reckoning called Ti-se: the axis of the world, the “nine-storey swastika mountain,” yungdrung gutsek, whose form the tradition reads as the sign of the imperishable heaped up in stone. The swastika of Bon — the yungdrung — turns counter-clockwise, the direction of the tradition, and the Bonpo circle the mountain leftward, reversing the clockwise circuit of the Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims who share the peak with them. To walk Kailash counter-clockwise is to declare, in the plainest bodily language, which of the plateau’s religions one keeps. That the two great traditions of Tibet meet at the same mountain and walk it in opposite directions is the whole relation of Bon and Tibetan Buddhism compressed into a single circuit.

The Zhangzhung language itself carries a special sanctity here. The Bon canon preserves invocations, mantra-syllables, and the titles of texts in Zhangzhung, and the tradition treasures it as the original tongue of revelation — the speech of the drangsong, the great ascetic sages, and of the realized masters of the Zhangzhung Nyengyu, the “Oral Transmission of Zhangzhung.” This is the most distinctive of the Bon lineages of Dzogchen, the Great Perfection: not a revealed treasure but a bka’-ma, a continuous teaching passed mouth to ear from master to disciple, traced back through a line of realized adepts of Tazig and Zhangzhung who are said to have attained the rainbow body. Its historical anchor in the tradition is Gyerpung Nangzher Lodpo, to whom the earlier master Tapihritsa is said to have reappeared, authorizing the first writing-down of the cycle in the Zhangzhung tongue. The substance of that transmission belongs to the practitioners who hold it and is not a matter for public instruction; what belongs to the record is the claim the lineage makes — that an unbroken line of realization runs out of the lost western kingdom into the living monasteries of today.

Here it is worth naming, and setting aside, an old habit of describing this material. For more than a century, Western and Buddhist writers alike tended to cast “Bon” as the primitive, shamanic, animist layer beneath the real — that is, Buddhist — religion of Tibet: a substrate of demon-worship and blood sacrifice over which Buddhism was later laid like a floor. L. A. Waddell’s 1895 Buddhism of Tibet is the classic instance, framing Bon as unreformed shamanism. That framing is itself a piece of history — a product of Buddhist-sectarian polemic filtered through colonial condescension — and not a description of the thing. Yungdrung Bon is a developed religion with its own enlightened founder, its own many-volume biography of that founder, its own Four Transcendent Lords and Nine Ways of ascent, its own monastic universities, and its own Dzogchen. Zhangzhung, in its own frame and in the sober archaeological one alike, was not a huddle of magicians on the roof of the world but the sophisticated cradle-culture of that religion — a kingdom with a court, a script, iron, and gods of its own.

The fall and the afterlife

The kingdom’s end is the best-documented thing about it, and it is a story of marriage turned to treachery. Under Songtsen Gampo — Srong-btsan sgam-po, the king who first welded the plateau into an empire, reigning until 649 — the Yarlung dynasty of central Tibet moved against the west. The early Tibetan accounts tell it through his sister. Semarkar (Sad-mar-kar; also Sadmarkar) was given in marriage to the Zhangzhung king Ligmigya (Lig-myi-rhya), and, the sources say, was slighted at his court. The biography preserved in the Treasury of Lives records that when the king declined to treat her as his wife, she turned her position into a weapon for her brother: through her collusion, Ligmigya was ambushed and killed by Songtsen Gampo’s soldiers while traveling toward Sumpa, in the direction of Amdo, and his kingdom was annexed to the Tibetan Empire. The Tang Annals note Zhangzhung’s submission in 634; R. A. Stein dated the decisive conquest to 645. The two dates mark the arc of a single decade in which the western kingdom passed under central Tibetan power.

It did not go quietly. After the death of Songtsen Gampo’s grandson Mangsong Mangtsen, who reigned to 677, Zhangzhung rose in revolt, and the rebellion was put down by the firm hand of the mGar — the powerful Gar clan that ran the empire’s affairs in that generation. With the second suppression the political life of Zhangzhung effectively ended. Over the following centuries, as Tibetan speech spread west across Ngari, the Zhangzhung language died as a spoken tongue, surviving only where it had been fixed in writing: in the Bon liturgy, in the mantra-syllables and text-titles the tradition would not let go.

Its recovery, when it came, came as revelation. The mDzod-phug — “A Cavern of Treasures” — is the only lengthy bilingual work in Zhangzhung and Tibetan, the single text long enough to give scholars real purchase on the vocabulary of the dead language. The Bon tradition holds that it was rediscovered as terma, revealed treasure, by the treasure-finder Shenchen Luga (gShen-chen Klu-dga’, 996–1035) in the early eleventh century — the very moment when Yungdrung Bon was organizing itself into a canonical school with monasteries, a scriptural corpus, and a settled account of its own past. The dead kingdom’s speech thus re-entered the tradition not as a survival but as a treasure drawn back out of the ground, which is the tradition’s own way of saying that what Zhangzhung gave could be lost and found but not destroyed.

Modern scholarship reads the linguistic record more warily, and its story is its own small drama of discovery and doubt. F. W. Thomas, working through the Old Tibetan manuscripts of Dunhuang, first identified in 1933 an undeciphered language he called Old Zhangzhung, surviving in five documents written in Tibetan script and datable to the late eighth or early ninth century — two of them now in the British Library, three in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Takeuchi Tsuguhito later enlarged the corpus; Guillaume Jacques, in 2009, argued that Zhangzhung is not a Qiangic language, refining its place on the Tibeto-Burman tree; and Dan Martin has pressed the sharpest question of all, doubting whether the Dunhuang material Thomas labeled “Old Zhangzhung” really represents the language of the kingdom at all. Against these philological arguments, historians of the tradition — Samten Karmay, Per Kvaerne, and others — have set the kingdom’s history against the Bon chronicles and the imperial documents, distinguishing carefully between the ritual specialists called bon-po in the imperial-age Dunhuang texts and the fully systematized Yungdrung Bon that took shape from the eleventh century. How much of the later religion reaches back through Zhangzhung into genuine antiquity, and how much is a parallel formation of the eleventh century looking backward for its roots, remains a live and openly argued matter — one of the real controversies of the field, and one the tradition and the philologists answer differently.

The land itself has never stopped being a Bon country. West of Kailash the Bonpo still turn the mountain leftward; the caves of Khyunglung are still visited, and the sacred geography that Zhangzhung bequeathed — Ti-se at the center, the counter-clockwise circuit, the swastika read into the mountain’s form — is kept alive in a religion whose mother monastery, Menri, destroyed in Tibet, was reborn in exile at Dolanji in India, and whose sacred hill of Bonri in the southeast is still circled by pilgrims. The Zhangzhung inheritance reaches beyond Tibet proper: far to the southeast, in the mountains of Yunnan, the Naxi keep a priestly tradition and a pictographic scripture that scholars have long compared, cautiously, to Bon. And the kingdom’s memory is folded into the self-understanding of the Tibetans themselves, whose empire took the west by marriage and ambush and whose religion of the plateau, in one of its two great forms, still traces its descent to a country on the upper Sutlej that spoke a language the rest of Tibet forgot.

Mount Kailash — Ti-se in the Zhangzhung reckoning — the ‘nine-storey swastika mountain’ at the heart of the ancient kingdom, circumambulated counter-clockwise by the Bonpo. Ondřej Žváček, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.5.

The yungdrung, the counter-clockwise swastika of Bon, read by the tradition into the form of Kailash and carried out of Zhangzhung into the living religion. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA.

The garuda-kings are gone, and the iron the excavators lifted from the altar at Khyunglung is rust and museum-glass now. But the river below the honeycomb runs the way it always ran, and west of it the leftward circuit of the mountain still turns — a kingdom that fell in a single decade, keeping its promise across thirteen hundred years to hand Tibet a religion and outlive the handing.

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