Bon: Tibet's Fifth Tradition and Its Claim to Predate Buddhism
By DailyDestiny Editorial Team
If Tibetan dream yoga or a left-facing swastika led you here, this guide explains Bon, the tradition that follows Tonpa Shenrab, not the Buddha. Covers whether it predates Buddhism, its three stages, nine ways, deities and scriptures, the suppression it survived and where to study it.
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What is Bon, and was it really Tibet's religion before Buddhism?
Imagine you have been practicing dream yoga from a book for months, keeping a notebook by your bed to catch the edges of your dreams. Then a friend mentions that these teachings are not Buddhist at all; they come from Bon. You feel a little thrown. What exactly have you been practicing?
The short answer: Bon is a Tibetan religion whose followers, Bonpos, trace their teachings to a founder named Tonpa Shenrab, not the Buddha Shakyamuni. The popular claim that it was simply Tibet's religion before Buddhism is only half right, because one word covers two things.
First, imperial Tibet had pre-Buddhist ritual specialists. Old Tibetan documents from the sealed library cave at Dunhuang show priests called bon po and gshen performing funerals, oath rites and divination for the Yarlung kings in the seventh and eighth centuries.
Second, there is Yungdrung Bon, an organized religion with monasteries, a canon, a nine-vehicle teaching system and a founder's biography, which appears in the record around the eleventh century.
Bonpos hold that the second is the first surviving, driven underground by royal persecution and later recovered from hidden caches. Most historians, including David Snellgrove, Per Kvaerne and Samten Karmay, hold that Yungdrung Bon took shape alongside the Tibetan Buddhist schools, in constant conversation with them. Both sides agree Bon carries pre-Buddhist material; they disagree on how much, and how unbroken the line is.
The argument stays slippery because bon is a verb, a class of priest and a religion. In Old Tibetan sources it names a type of rite and its performer, alongside gshen, a second class of ritualist whose name survives in Tonpa Shenrab's title and the ordinary Bon word for a practitioner.
Snellgrove's reading of Bon as heterodox Buddhism annoyed Bonpos and satisfied few historians, but it caught the problem: nearly every Yungdrung Bon category has a Buddhist twin, and the differences lie in names, lineages and origin stories, not metaphysics. Think of two siblings raised in one house who tell very different stories about where the family came from.
Henk Blezer and others have traced how the founder's biography was assembled and expanded between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. What looks truly old is ritual technology: rites for local gods, ransom offerings, dice divination, and an elaborate treatment of the dead with no Indian model.
Does bon mean the same thing in every Tibetan source?
No. In Old Tibetan documents it names a rite or its priest, with no organized religion implied. From the eleventh century Bonpo authors use it for their whole tradition, roughly as a Buddhist writer uses chos. Tibetan writers also use it loosely for village ritual with no Bonpo link, a steady source of confusion in English writing on Tibet.
Is Bon older than Buddhism?
As ritual practice, yes, in Tibet. As an organized religion with texts, monasteries and a named founder, not demonstrably; its surviving documents begin centuries after Buddhism took root. Both claims often hide in one sentence. Bonpo tradition dates Tonpa Shenrab many thousands of years before Shakyamuni, a religious rather than historical claim.
What did the Yarlung kings' religion actually look like?
The Dunhuang manuscripts and imperial pillar inscriptions show a religion centered on the king's divine descent. Oaths were sealed with animal sacrifice, kings were buried in tombs in the Chongye valley, and long rites guided the dead to a land of ancestors. Later Tibetan writers called this mi chos, the religion of men, as distinct from lha chos, the religion of the gods.
Who was Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, and what does Bon claim about its own origin?
If you take refuge in a teacher, you want to know who he was. For Bonpos, it is Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche: an enlightened teacher born in Olmo Lungring, in a country called Tazig somewhere west of Tibet, said to have taught all of Bon long before the Buddha was born in India.
His name means teacher (tonpa), supreme shen or priest (shen rab), great man (mi bo che).
In the tradition's account he was a prince who married young, is said to have had eight sons and two daughters, gave up his inheritance at thirty-one and died at eighty-two. Shakyamuni, by contrast, left home at twenty-nine and taught for forty-five years. But Bon counts Shenrab's years as shen years, stretching his life across a span no chronology can hold, and some accounts place him about eighteen thousand years ago. Much of his story is setting up rites, subduing demons and teaching ritual method, which Buddhist accounts of Shakyamuni keep to the margins.
He came to Tibet, the story goes, chasing a demon who had stolen his horses. Finding the country unready, he left only Bon's ritual and divination teachings and promised the rest later.
Bonpos treat him as a fully enlightened buddha, not a prophet or folk hero, and take refuge in him as Tibetan Buddhists do in Shakyamuni. Exile Bon scholars present his life as sacred history, not chronicle, and no evidence of him survives outside Bon texts.
Three texts carry his life, growing in this order: the Dodu, one volume; the Zermig, two; and the Ziji, twelve, which came to Loden Nyingpo, born 1360, as an oral transmission dictated to him rather than a text dug from the ground. Snellgrove translated the Ziji for his 1967 The Nine Ways of Bon, working in London with the Bonpo scholars Tenzin Namdak and Samten Karmay, brought to England in 1961 with Rockefeller Foundation funding.
Read side by side, the three show a biography growing like a family story retold: episodes multiply, Olmo Lungring gains detail, and parallels with the Buddha sharpen.
What is Olmo Lungring?
Olmo Lungring is said to cover a third of the world, with a nine-tiered central mountain and four great rivers flowing to the cardinal directions, a real place ordinary travelers can no longer reach. Reading Tazig as Tajik, and so Persia, fed a mid-twentieth-century theory of Iranian origins. But the layout follows the widespread Indian model of a world mountain with radiating rivers, idealized sacred geography rather than a place you could survey.
What do the three stages of Bon mean, and what is Yungdrung Bon?
If Bon has felt confusing, this map helps. Since the 1970s scholars have separated three things Tibetan writers all call bon, and that has worked better than treating it as one.
Stage one: imperial ritual. Funeral, divination and oath rites for the Yarlung kings before and during Buddhism's arrival, known mainly from Dunhuang manuscripts, not Bon's own literature.
Stage two: Yungdrung Bon. The organized religion of the eleventh century onward, with a canon, monastic ordination, a philosophy curriculum and a founder. This is what someone means today by Bonpo.
Stage three: New Bon, or Bon sarma. From about the fourteenth century, mainly in Kham and Gyalrong in eastern Tibet, it accepts Padmasambhava beside Tonpa Shenrab and blends with Nyingma so closely that several of its treasure-revealers are claimed by both traditions and some of their revelations still circulate in both. Conservative central Tibetan Yungdrung Bon institutions have long viewed it with reserve.
Yungdrung means everlasting or indestructible. It is the Tibetan word for the swastika, and Bon uses it almost everywhere Tibetan Buddhism uses dorje, the vajra: the officiant's scepter is a yungdrung, and where a Buddhist text says adamantine reality, a Bon text says yungdrung reality. It always turns counterclockwise on Bon altar cloths and walls, the quickest way to tell a Bon building from across a valley.
Stage two turns on one event every Bonpo historian records: in 1017 Shenchen Luga, usually dated 996 to 1035, uncovered a large cache of Bon texts in Tsang. Whatever happened, it gave the tradition a scriptural base.
He divided the material among three disciples from three families, which is why cosmology, Dzogchen and tantra come down separately. The Dru took cosmology and metaphysics and founded Yeru Wensakha monastery in Tsang in 1072; the Zhu took Dzogchen; the Pa took the tantric cycles.
The three-stage scheme is an outsider's tool. Bonpos see one teaching, given by Tonpa Shenrab, hidden in hostile times and returned when they improved, like seeds kept safe through a hard winter.
Where did Bon's hidden texts come from?
Terma, recovered hidden texts, matter as much to Bon as to the Nyingma. They are said to have been hidden in the persecutions, mainly under the eighth-century king Trisong Detsen, and recovered from the eleventh century by qualified finders. Shenchen Luga's discovery of 1017 is the largest and the most consequential. Bon also recognizes mind treasures received in visionary experience. From outside, the mechanism looks like a way to authorize new writing.
What does Bon actually teach across its nine ways?
If meditation brought you to Bon, you may be surprised that it shares a curriculum with divination and healing. Bon arranges its teachings as nine ways, a ladder from divination and healing to Dzogchen at the top. Bon and the Nyingma are the two Tibetan traditions that count nine vehicles, and their nine do not match.
In the best-known version, the Southern Treasure system Snellgrove translated, the first four are causal ways, working with cause and effect in the world:
The Way of the Shen of Prediction: divination, astrology, ritual diagnosis and healing. The one you would turn to when something is wrong and you want to know why.
The Way of the Shen of the Visual World, in Snellgrove's rendering: gods and spirits of the land and negotiating between them and people.
The Way of the Shen of Illusion: rites to drive off hostile forces, for when you feel under threat.
The Way of the Shen of Existence: death, funerals, guiding the consciousness, and the ransom of the dying. The one families need when someone they love is leaving.
The five resultant ways aim at liberation: lay practitioners under vows, monastic ascetics, the White A tantric way, the primordial shen, and the Unsurpassable Way, Dzogchen.
Bon presents the nine as one graded curriculum, not rival sects, like one house with many floors joined by a single staircase.
If you have only read Snellgrove, know there is more than one ninefold scheme. The Central Treasure and Northern Treasure systems divide the same ground differently; the Central Treasure sorts it into sutra, tantra and Dzogchen, much as Tibetan Buddhism does.
Scriptures are sorted by yet another scheme, the four portals and the treasury: White Waters for higher tantra, Black Waters for funeral and magical rites, the Land of Phan for monastic discipline and philosophy, the Guides for Dzogchen, and the Treasury for general material.
The upper ways would be familiar to any student of Tibetan Buddhism. The lower four have no Buddhist counterpart as a formal vehicle, and that is where Bon is most itself. Snellgrove's 1967 book ran through all nine in order, which is why English readers know the Southern Treasure scheme and not the other two.
Does Bon teach Dzogchen?
Yes, at the top of its nine ways, as the Nyingma do, with little that would surprise a Nyingma practitioner. Three cycles carry it: the Oral Transmission of Zhang Zhung, the A-tri system, and the Dzogchen Yangtse Longchen. Bonpos claim the first as an unbroken oral lineage, never hidden or rediscovered, and value that above any treasure line.
What are Bon's five elements?
Earth, water, fire, air and space, the same set Indian Buddhism uses, taught as arising from an unconditioned base and making up both the outer world and the body. They are not the Chinese five phases of wood, fire, earth, metal and water with their generating and controlling cycles; see The Five Elements (Wu Xing): Cycles, Correspondences and Uses.
How much Bon doctrine is identical to Buddhist doctrine?
Philosophically, most of it. Yungdrung Bon teaches the four noble truths, dependent origination, the six perfections, emptiness and the bodhisattva ideal, in Bon terms with Bon lineages. Its monastic curriculum covers logic, epistemology and Madhyamaka in an order a Buddhist geshe would recognize. What differs is provenance, ritual repertoire, and the four causal ways.
Which deities, scriptures and lineages are distinctly Bon?
If you walked into a Bon shrine room expecting familiar Buddhist faces, you would recognize almost no one. Bon has its own pantheon, two-part canon and lineages.
At the head of the pantheon is a group usually given as four. Kuntu Zangpo is the all-good primordial buddha. Shenlha Okar, god of white light, is the deity of compassion and the source of the teachings, the one to turn to when your heart feels closed. Sangpo Bumtri brings the visible world into being. And Tonpa Shenrab himself.
Satrig Ersang, or Sherab Chamma, the Loving Mother of Wisdom, holds the place Tibetan Buddhists give Prajnaparamita and Tara, the one you might picture when you need tenderness.
Sipe Gyalmo, Queen of Existence, is the chief protector: a wrathful dark female figure with many arms and heads, riding a mule and ringed with flames. Bon monasteries perform her rites on a fixed calendar, and Menri holds her as its special guardian. Buddhism has no protector by that name, though she follows the same visual rules as Palden Lhamo and the two are often compared.
Meditation deities include Walse Ngampa, Meri and Trowo Tsochog Khagying, absent from the Buddhist canon.
The scriptures form a Bon Kanjur, well over a hundred volumes attributed to Tonpa Shenrab, and a still larger Katen of commentaries, built like the Buddhist Kanjur and Tenjur but with almost no shared content. Full sets were rare until reprints appeared in India and Nepal in the later twentieth century. Per Kvaerne catalogued the canon in 1974, and Samten Karmay's 1972 translation of the Treasury of Good Sayings, written by the master Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen in 1922, remains the standard English window onto how Bon tells its past.
Bonpos recite the Ma Tri daily, om ma tri mu ye sa le du, to Shenlha Okar, where Tibetan Buddhists say om mani padme hum. The syllable A, in Tibetan script and usually pictured white, is the central Bon emblem of the natural state, hence the Dzogchen cycle A-tri, the guidance of A.
Lineage runs deepest. A Bon teacher's authority goes back through Menri and the Zhang Zhung masters to Tonpa Shenrab, never through Nalanda, Atisha, Marpa or Padmasambhava, like a family tree running parallel to another for centuries without the branches crossing. That makes Bon a fifth Tibetan tradition, not a sixth Buddhist school, however much the teachings overlap. The Zhang Zhung oral transmission lists its masters, twenty-four in the standard count, each with a short life story, as evidence the line never broke.
Does Bon have reincarnate lamas?
Bon recognizes incarnate lamas as Tibetan Buddhism does, and several tulku lines continue in exile. The abbot of Menri, head of the whole tradition, is chosen by lot from qualified geshes instead; Dawa Dhargyal Rinpoche was chosen this way as the thirty-fourth holder after his predecessor died in 2017. Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth explains recognition across Tibetan schools.
How does Bon ritual practice differ from Tibetan Buddhist practice?
If you visit a Tibetan temple and wonder whether it is Bon, a few clues settle it within seconds. Robes will not: Bon monastic robes are maroon like Buddhist ones, and vows, shaved heads and daily schedules are close.
Instead, watch direction, symbol and sound. Bonpos circle sacred sites and turn prayer wheels counterclockwise. The altar swastika faces left. The chant is the Ma Tri, not om mani padme hum, and the officiant holds a yungdrung, not a dorje.
Bon also keeps far more practical ritual as formal teaching than any Buddhist school, rites for daily worries: earth-lord rites for when digging a foundation disturbs them; ransom ceremonies putting a dough effigy in place of a sick person; thread-crosses to catch a harmful influence; divination by dice and knotted cord when you cannot decide; and a long graded sequence of funeral rites.
The sang belongs here: juniper and other fragrant plants burned at dawn on a roof, hilltop or pass for local gods, earth lords and water spirits, as courtesy and apology for the disturbance ordinary living causes. So does raising wind horse flags to restore your fortune after a run of bad luck. In Bon these have their own texts and officiants, not household custom.
The four causal ways explain the large ritual repertoire. Bon never demoted its methods for lha, nyen and lu, beings said to live in the sky, the middle world, and water and soil. It kept that work inside its hierarchy of teachings instead of pushing it to the edge as folk custom.
Tibetan Buddhism absorbed much of the same material early on, so Nyingma and Sakya monasteries also perform earth-lord rites and build thread-crosses. The difference is that Bon gives these a formal vehicle and scriptural home.
Bon also has its own tantric cycles, deities, mandalas and initiations, so a practitioner can walk a tantric path without touching a Buddhist lineage. Its parallel to the intermediate-state teachings is the Bon Zhi Khro cycle of peaceful and wrathful deities.
What is the Ma Tri mantra?
The Ma Tri, om ma tri mu ye sa le du, is addressed to Shenlha Okar, and Bon teachers explain it as purifying rebirth in each of the six realms, the same logic Tibetan Buddhists apply to om mani padme hum. Lay Bonpos learn it first, count it on a mala of one hundred and eight beads, and carve it on prayer walls in Dolpo and Gyalrong.
How did Bon survive suppression, and what happened to its monasteries?
If you have kept something precious alive through a hard season, you will recognize how Bon survived: it moved east, built a self-reproducing monastic system, and in the twentieth century rebuilt it in exile.
Bon history records two persecutions. The first, under the early king Drigum Tsenpo, is legendary. The second is partly documented: sources on both sides agree that Trisong Detsen made Buddhism the state religion in the eighth century and Bon lost royal support. The detailed story of texts buried in cliffs and priests exiled comes from Bon histories written centuries later; historians accept the lost patronage and read the burial account as explaining where the treasure texts came from.
From the seventeenth century the Ganden Podrang government of the Dalai Lamas funded the Buddhist schools, leaving Bon out and at times pressing it to convert. Bon's center shifted to Kham, Amdo and Gyalrong in the east and the Himalayan borderlands of Nepal, where distance from Lhasa was protection.
Menri, meaning medicine mountain, founded in Tsang in 1405 by Nyammey Sherab Gyaltsen, became the head monastery and model for a curriculum ending in a geshe degree. The Cultural Revolution destroyed it with most Tibetan religious institutions of every school, and by the late 1960s Bon's continuity rested on a few refugees.
Nyammey Sherab Gyaltsen, 1356 to 1415, did more for Bon's survival than anyone, because Menri gave it curriculum, examinations and a degree. Yungdrung Ling, founded in 1834, became the second great central Tibetan Bon monastery. The nonsectarian movement in nineteenth-century Kham, linked with Jamgon Kongtrul and his circle, collected Bon material instead of suppressing it, and Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen, who died in 1934, wrote the histories and Dzogchen manuals behind most Bon teaching in the West.
After 1959 a handful of people rebuilt everything, like a library carried over mountains in a few memories. Refugees obtained land at Dolanji in Himachal Pradesh, India, and began building the new Menri in 1967; it now runs a full geshe curriculum, a children's school, a nearby nunnery and Bon text printing, and its abbot, the Menri Trizin, holds Bon's senior office. Sangye Tenzin Jongdong was chosen as the thirty-third Menri Trizin in 1968 and enthroned in March 1969 as Lungtok Tenpai Nyima, leading until his death in 2017. Yongdzin Tenzin Namdak, born 1926, carried the Dzogchen transmission out of Tibet and founded Triten Norbutse monastery in Kathmandu.
How many Bon monasteries survive in Tibet today?
Bon sources counted a little over three hundred across Tibet in the early twentieth century. Several hundred monasteries and temples are described as active today in the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Tibetan areas of Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu, most in Gyalrong and Ngawa in western Sichuan and around Nagchu. No independent census exists; figures come from the institutions or Chinese state surveys, so treat them as rough.
Where is Bon practiced today, and can an outsider study it?
If, like the dream yoga reader at the start, you feel drawn to learn more, the good news is that most of Bon is open to you.
Tibet: strongest in Gyalrong and Ngawa in western Sichuan, parts of Amdo, and Nagchu in the north, with scattered communities further west.
Nepal: Bon villages in Dolpo and Mustang, including the old settlement at Lubra; Triten Norbutse in Kathmandu trains monks from all of them.
India: Menri at Dolanji is the exile tradition's administrative and teaching center.
The West: Ligmincha International, founded by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche in 1992, teaches dream yoga, sleep yoga and Dzogchen to lay students, and European centers linked to Yongdzin Tenzin Namdak have taught since the 1990s.
There is no ethnic or hereditary bar to lay practice. Western students take refuge, receive the Ma Tri and study Dzogchen in Europe, North America and Nepal, and a few have taken monastic ordination. Senior teachers have generally been willing to explain the tradition to scholars and foreigners. Advanced tantric cycles need initiation at a teacher's discretion, the normal rule in every Tibetan lineage, not a barrier aimed at you.
Bon's standing rose sharply in exile. In 1977 a Bon representative joined the exile parliament with the four Buddhist schools, and the fourteenth Dalai Lama recognized Bon as a Tibetan religious tradition in its own right, restating it in a letter at Menri in 1987; The 14th Dalai Lama: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices covers his teaching and role. That ended centuries in which central Tibet treated Bonpos as heterodox at best.
Mount Kailash in the far west, heart of the old Zhang Zhung country, is Bon's holiest mountain; Mount Kailash: History, Alignments and Spiritual Significance explains what the four traditions that revere it do there.
In English, start with the translations, Snellgrove and Karmay for the texts and Kvaerne for the iconography, plus teaching programs in Kathmandu, Dolanji and Europe, long open to foreign students. Where would you like to begin: a book, a mantra, or a night of watching your dreams?
What is the best-known Bon teaching in the West?
Dream yoga and sleep yoga, mostly through Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's 1998 book The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. Bon Dzogchen and the trul khor movement exercises also draw students. Many people meet these practices without learning they are Bon, since presentations rarely stress the difference. If that is you, you are in good company.
Is the Zhang Zhung language still spoken?
No. It is extinct as a spoken language, known from bilingual passages in Bon texts, short glossaries and names in Tibetan sources. Linguists place it in the Tibeto-Burman family, near the West Himalayish group that includes languages still spoken in Kinnaur and Lahaul. Bon liturgies keep Zhang Zhung phrases recited today rather than understood.
Questions people ask
Is Bon a form of Buddhism or a separate religion?
Bon is a separate Tibetan religion that shares most of its doctrine and much of its structure with Tibetan Buddhism. Bonpos take refuge in Tonpa Shenrab, not Shakyamuni, use their own canon, and trace lineages that never pass through India. David Snellgrove read Bon as a heterodox form of Buddhism, which captures the overlap and understandably irritates Bonpos. The Tibetan exile administration counts Bon as the fifth Tibetan tradition, not a Buddhist school.
How many Bon practitioners are there today?
No reliable count exists. Estimates run from roughly 160,000 to about 400,000, between one and four percent of Tibetans, but no census has ever asked, and religious identity in the People's Republic of China is not surveyed in a way that would settle it. The exile community numbers in the thousands, centered at Dolanji in India and in Kathmandu. Be wary of any precise number.
Does the Dalai Lama recognize Bon as a Tibetan school?
Yes, since 1977, when a Bon representative was first seated in the exile parliament and the fourteenth Dalai Lama recognized Bon as a religious tradition of Tibet beside the Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya and Gelug. He visited Menri at Dolanji in 1987, leaving a letter calling Bon an indigenous religion of Tibet, and returned in 2007. He has said the tradition carries parts of Tibetan culture older than Buddhism. This broke with centuries in which central Tibet gave Bon no state patronage and often treated it as suspect.
Is Bon the same thing as Tibetan shamanism?
No. Bon is a monastic religion with a canon, ordination, a philosophy curriculum and Dzogchen; calling it shamanism describes only the four causal ways at the bottom of its hierarchy. Tibet does have possession and trance specialists, including oracle mediums and village practitioners, some locally called bonpo, but they are not the ordained Bonpos of Menri and Triten Norbutse.
Why is the Bon swastika drawn facing left?
The Bon yungdrung turns counterclockwise, the mirror of the Buddhist swastika, and Bonpos see that direction as original to their tradition, not a reversal. The same direction governs how a Bonpo walks around a temple or sacred mountain and spins a prayer wheel; walk the wrong way around Kailash and a Bonpo pilgrim will put you right. The shape is old in both India and Tibet. Its twentieth-century European use came from nineteenth-century German philology about a supposed Aryan past and has nothing to do with a Bon altar.
Did Bon come from Persia or Central Asia?
Bon texts place Tonpa Shenrab's homeland in Tazig, often read as Tajik and so Iran, and Helmut Hoffmann argued in the mid twentieth century for real Iranian and Manichaean influence. Later specialists found the Manichaean evidence thin, and Tazig's location is still argued, from Persia to the Gilgit and Bactria borderlands of today's northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. Traceable Bon material leads to India and Tibet's own imperial ritual, and Olmo Lungring reads as sacred geography, not a mappable country.
Is Tibetan Bon related to Japan's Obon festival?
No. The likeness is an accident of spelling. Japan's Obon is a Buddhist summer observance for ancestral dead, shortened from urabon-e, which renders ullambana and reached Japan through Chinese Buddhist texts. Tibetan Bon is a word for a religion and a class of priest, written with different letters and said closer to pon, with a front rounded vowel Japanese lacks.
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Related topics: bon religion, bon tibet, bonpo, tibetan bon tradition, bon buddhism difference, yungdrung bon, tonpa shenrab
