Menri Monastery, Exile and Rebuilding

Bon's standing as an organized monastic tradition, distinct from the informal or folk characterizations it was sometimes given by outside observers in the twentieth century, rests heavily on the kind of institution Menri represented for over five hundred years: a monastery with a defined curriculum of philosophical study, formal debate and graded ritual training, functioning as the model other Bon monasteries across Tibet measured their own teaching against, the same institutional role a leading seat of learning plays within any organized monastic tradition. Its destruction during the Cultural Revolution was part of a much broader campaign against religious institutions across Tibet that affected Buddhist monasteries of every school as well as Bon ones, and the scale of loss, of buildings, libraries and an unbroken teaching lineage stretching back to 1405, was correspondingly general rather than particular to Bon. What followed at Dolanji is documented in the scholarship on Bon as a deliberate act of institutional continuity rather than simply a new monastery built from nothing: the monks who fled Tibet carried the same abbatial succession and the same curriculum forward, so that the Dolanji monastery understands itself, and is understood in Tibetological scholarship, as Menri continuing in exile rather than as a successor institution replacing a lost one. That continuity mattered for reasons beyond sentiment, since a monastic tradition's legitimacy rests substantially on an unbroken lineage of ordination and teaching transmission, and the re-establishment at Dolanji preserved exactly that chain at a moment when it could very easily have been severed. The monastery today functions as a working seat of Bon monastic education, drawing students and maintaining the scholarly and ritual training its Tibetan predecessor once provided, and its survival is treated by scholars of Tibetan religion as one of the clearer instances of a persecuted tradition rebuilding its central institution intact rather than only preserving fragments of it.