Two organised traditions hold the plateau, and they are not simply older and newer versions of one another. Tibetan Buddhism runs in four principal schools, Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya and Gelug, which differ over lineage, over which tantric cycles they transmit, and over how the philosophical positions inherited from India should be read, while agreeing on the canon. Bon presents itself as the tradition of the plateau before Buddhism arrived, transmitted from an earlier teacher and a western land, and it carries its own canon, its own monastic system and its own scholastic curriculum. Its relationship to Buddhism is one of long mutual influence, and the two now resemble one another in institutional shape while insisting on separate descent.
Both are laid over a landscape read as sacred. Mountains, lakes and caves are pilgrimage destinations for adherents of both, and for Hindus in the case of Kailash, and the circumambulation of a mountain is a devotional act rather than a walk with a view. Local deities of place, older than either tradition and not fully absorbed by either, are propitiated alongside them.
A distinctive Tibetan institution is the treasure text, the terma: a teaching held to have been concealed by a master of the imperial period and recovered centuries later by a designated finder. It is a mechanism for authorising new material as ancient, and it accounts for a large part of the Nyingma and Bon literatures.
Since the twentieth century a substantial exile community, centred on India and Nepal, has carried these institutions abroad.