Bon

Bon presents itself as older than Buddhism in Tibet and as having a different source of authority: not the Buddha Shakyamuni and India, but the enlightened teacher Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, who taught in a land called Olmo Lungring, generally located to the west or north-west of Tibet, in a remote antiquity that the tradition dates far earlier than the historical Buddha.

That teaching is said to have reached Tibet through Zhangzhung, a kingdom in the west of the plateau with its own language and its own religious learning, and to have been the established religion of the Tibetan court before Buddhism was adopted. The tradition holds that it was suppressed under King Trisong Detsen in the eighth century, when royal patronage shifted to Buddhism, and that practitioners concealed their texts so that they could be recovered later. From the tenth and eleventh centuries a large body of scripture duly reappeared as terma, treasure discovered by named finders, a mechanism the Nyingma school of Buddhism uses in the same way and over the same period.

The doctrinal content of the developed tradition, Yungdrung Bon or eternal Bon, is extensive: a graded path to enlightenment, monastic ordination and philosophical training, tantric practice, and Dzogchen, the great perfection, which Bon regards as its highest teaching and holds independently of the Nyingma transmission of the same name. Alongside this sits a large practical repertoire in ritual, divination, astrology, medicine, funerary rites and the management of local gods and spirits of land and water.

The emblem is the yungdrung, a left-facing swastika signifying indestructibility, corresponding to the vajra in Buddhist use. Practitioners circumambulate counter-clockwise, the reverse of Buddhist practice, and Bon has its own liturgical language elements traced to Zhangzhung.

Bonpos do not regard themselves as a variant of Buddhism, and object to being described as one.

The relationship between Bon and Tibetan Buddhism is one of the genuinely unsettled questions in Tibetan studies, and the honest position is to set out what is agreed and what is not.

Agreed: Zhangzhung existed as a polity in western Tibet and a Zhangzhung language is attested in surviving material, so Bon's geography is not fabricated. Pre-Buddhist Tibet certainly had its own ritual specialists, royal funerary practice and cults of local deities, documented in Dunhuang manuscripts and in the imperial records. And the organised, textual, monastic tradition calling itself Bon becomes visible in the historical record from the eleventh century, at the same time as the Buddhist renaissance in Tibet.

Disputed: whether the second grew out of the first. The eleventh-century tradition shares with Tibetan Buddhism its philosophical vocabulary, its structure of the path, its monastic rules, its logic and debate curriculum, and large stretches of literature that correspond text for text. Bon explains this by saying Buddhism took it from Bon. Older Western scholarship said the reverse and dismissed Bon as plagiarism. David Snellgrove, working with Bonpo scholars from the 1960s, argued for something more even-handed: an unorthodox but genuine Tibetan form of Buddhism, drawing on non-Indian sources and on indigenous material, developing in close and mutual exchange with the Buddhist schools rather than either preceding them cleanly or copying them.

Per Kvaerne made a distinction that resolves much of the confusion by separating three things the single word carries: the ritual practices of the pre-Buddhist period; the systematised Yungdrung Bon of the eleventh century onward; and the unsystematised local ritual found throughout the Himalaya, sometimes called the nameless religion, which is neither of the first two. Calling Bon simply "the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet" collapses all three and is the most common error in general accounts.

There is also New Bon, developing from around the eighteenth century, which incorporates Padmasambhava and material shared with the Nyingma, and which Yungdrung Bon institutions treat with some reserve. Its existence shows that exchange between the traditions did not stop.

Bon has never been large relative to the Buddhist schools, and has often been in a defensive position, but it has continuous institutions.

Menri, founded in 1405 in Tsang, became the tradition's principal monastery and set the standard for monastic discipline and the academic curriculum, including the long philosophical training that culminates in the geshe degree, which Bon confers on its own authority. Bon communities have been concentrated in eastern Tibet, particularly Amdo and Gyarong, in the far west around Mount Kailash, and in Himalayan areas including Dolpo in Nepal, where Bon village practice continues.

The twentieth century was as damaging for Bon as for every other Tibetan tradition. Monasteries were closed or destroyed after 1959 and during the Cultural Revolution, and the tradition was in a worse position than the Buddhist schools to survive the loss because its numbers were smaller and its literature less widely copied outside Tibet.

Exile institutions rebuilt it. A community settled at Dolanji in Himachal Pradesh from 1967 and established a new Menri there, with a monastic college, a library and a programme of publishing that put a large part of the Bon canon into print for the first time. In 1978 the fourteenth Dalai Lama visited Dolanji and recognised Bon as a distinct Tibetan religious tradition alongside the four Buddhist schools, with representation in the exile assembly, a significant shift, since Bon had frequently been treated as heterodox in earlier Tibetan usage. Monasteries have also been rebuilt and reoccupied inside Tibet, and Bon has a small following in Europe and North America, chiefly for its Dzogchen and its dream and sleep practices.

The living tradition is therefore two things at once: a monastic and scholastic system closely comparable to the Buddhist schools, and a village-level repertoire of ritual for land spirits, illness, weather and the dead that has often been the reason ordinary people call on a Bonpo at all.