The Eternal Teaching

Before the dharma arrived in Tibet, something was already there.

What it was depends on who you ask. The Bonpo themselves say it was always there — that the Teacher of Knowledge, Tonpa Shenrab Miwo, taught the complete path to liberation in the land of Olmo Lungring tens of thousands of years before the historical Buddha was born. Western scholars, following Per Kvaerne's careful work, say something more measured: that Bon as an organized religion shows clear structural parallels with Buddhism and probably crystallized in conversation with it, but that the substrate — the shamanic, divinatory, funerary practices of the Tibetan plateau — is genuinely ancient and genuinely distinct. The Bonpo respond: you are confusing our history with your categories.

Both positions contain truth. Neither is sufficient alone. What is not in question is that Bon exists today as a living religion with an unbroken monastic lineage, its own scriptural canon, its own philosophical tradition, its own meditation practices, and its own communities scattered from the highlands of eastern Tibet to a monastery in the Kangra Valley of India to meditation centers in Virginia and Poland and São Paulo. The Dalai Lama recognized Bon as the fifth school of Tibetan religion in 1977. The Bonpo did not need his recognition to know what they were. But they accepted it with grace.

This profile tells the story of a tradition that has survived everything — Buddhist hegemony, Mongol invasion, Chinese occupation, cultural revolution, and exile — and is still here. Not as a museum piece. As a living way.

I. The Name

Bon (Tibetan: བོན་) is a word whose meaning has shifted across centuries of use and contestation. In its broadest sense, it simply meant "religion" or "religious practice" in the earliest Tibetan usage — much as dharma in Sanskrit carries the weight of "law, truth, the way things are" before it narrows into a specific tradition's name. The followers of the tradition call themselves Bonpo (བོན་པོ་), "practitioners of Bon."

The tradition's own name for itself is Yungdrung Bon (གཡུང་དྲུང་བོན་) — "Eternal Bon" or "the Bon of the Swastika," the yungdrung (གཡུང་དྲུང་) being the counterclockwise swastika that serves as Bon's primary symbol, representing permanence, indestructibility, and the unconditioned nature of reality. The symbol predates its catastrophic twentieth-century European associations by millennia. In Bon, it is what the dharma wheel is in Buddhism: the sign of the teaching itself.

The name "Bon" carries a political charge in Tibet that outsiders rarely appreciate. For the Buddhist establishment, bon was historically a pejorative — shorthand for the superstitious, the shamanistic, the pre-civilized. The Bonpo have spent centuries resisting this characterization, insisting that their tradition is not a collection of folk practices awaiting Buddhist refinement but a complete path to liberation in its own right. The tension between these two framings — Bon as primitive predecessor versus Bon as independent peer — remains the central axis of the tradition's identity.

II. The Teacher of Knowledge

Every religion has a founding figure, and Bon's is Tonpa Shenrab Miwo (སྟོན་པ་གཤེན་རབ་མི་བོ།) — the Teacher of Knowledge, the Supreme One Among Men. His biography is preserved in three versions of increasing length: the short Do Dus ("Epitome of Aphorisms"), the medium Zer Mig ("Piercing Eye") in two volumes, and the vast Zi Ji ("The Glorious") in twelve volumes, totaling roughly sixty thousand verses.

According to Bon tradition, Tonpa Shenrab was born in Olmo Lungring (འོལ་མོ་ལུང་རིང་), a land of perfection traditionally located in the mystical region of Tazig (སྟག་གཟིག་), which some Bonpo scholars associate with ancient Persia or Central Asia, and which others understand as a pure land beyond ordinary geography. The dates given for his life vary wildly — some accounts place him thousands of years before the historical Buddha, others frame the chronology in mythological terms that resist literal dating.

In the Bon narrative, Tonpa Shenrab did not discover the path. He is the primordial teacher who transmitted it to the human realm. He taught the Nine Ways of Bon (bon gyi theg pa rim dgu), a progressive system of teachings from the most worldly (divination, astrology, healing rituals) to the most transcendent (the Great Perfection). He tamed demons, established rituals, ordained the first Bonpo monks, and passed through twelve great deeds that structurally mirror the twelve deeds of Shakyamuni Buddha in Buddhist hagiography — a parallel that delights the Bonpo and troubles the scholars.

Western scholars treat Tonpa Shenrab as the tradition's legitimizing figure rather than a historical person in the modern sense. Per Kvaerne, the foremost Western authority on Bon, notes that the biographical literature shows progressive elaboration over centuries and clear awareness of Buddhist biographical conventions. The Bonpo respond that structural similarity does not prove derivation — that parallel lives reflect parallel truths. The conversation is ongoing. Neither side has conceded.

III. Shang Shung — The Lost Kingdom

Behind the mythological landscape of Olmo Lungring lies a historical one: Shang Shung (ཞང་ཞུང་), the ancient kingdom of western Tibet centered on Mount Kailash and the surrounding highlands. Shang Shung is to Bon what Israel is to Judaism — the homeland, the place where the teaching was alive in its fullness before history intervened.

Shang Shung is not mythological. Chinese and Tibetan historical sources confirm the existence of a kingdom in western Tibet prior to the rise of the Yarlung dynasty and the unification of Tibet under Songtsen Gampo in the seventh century CE. The kingdom had its own language — Zhangzhung — which survives in fragments, liturgical formulas, and tantric texts. It has been partly deciphered by scholars including Dan Martin and Samten Karmay, and appears to belong to the Tibeto-Burman language family but is not mutually intelligible with any modern Tibetan dialect.

The Bonpo maintain that Shang Shung was the vehicle through which Tonpa Shenrab's teaching entered the Tibetan cultural sphere. Whether the Bon practiced in Shang Shung resembles the systematized Yungdrung Bon of later centuries is another of the questions that scholars and practitioners answer differently. What is not contested is that a distinct religious culture existed in western Tibet before Buddhism arrived — a culture centered on sacred mountains, sky burial, oracular priests, divination, and a cosmology of gods and demons that Buddhism would later absorb, adapt, and partially suppress.

Mount Kailash (གངས་རིན་པོ་ཆེ་, Gang Rinpoche — "Precious Snow Mountain") remains sacred to both Bonpo and Buddhists, but the direction of circumambulation marks the difference: Bonpo circle the mountain counterclockwise (following the yungdrung), Buddhists clockwise. The two streams of pilgrims pass each other on the same path around the same mountain, going opposite directions. It is a perfect physical metaphor for the relationship between the two traditions.

IV. The Suppression

The critical event in Bon's history — the trauma that shaped everything that followed — was the persecution under King Trisong Detsen (ཁྲི་སྲོང་ལྡེ་བཙན་) in the eighth century CE.

Trisong Detsen is one of Tibet's three great dharma kings — the ruler who invited Padmasambhava and Shantarakshita to Tibet, established the first Buddhist monastery at Samye, and declared Buddhism the state religion. In the Bonpo telling, he did this by force: suppressing Bon, banning its practice, burning or confiscating its scriptures, and compelling Bonpo priests to convert or flee.

The Buddhist sources acknowledge the suppression but frame it as the natural triumph of a higher teaching over a lower one — the light of the dharma dispelling the darkness of primitive rituals. The Bonpo frame it as religious persecution: an organized campaign to destroy a legitimate tradition and steal its cultural position.

The historical reality is probably more complex than either narrative allows. The eighth century was a period of intense political and religious competition in Tibet. Multiple factions at court supported different religious traditions, and the rise of Buddhism was entangled with questions of alliance, tribute, and succession that had little to do with theology. What is clear is that the consequences for Bon were severe: major Bon centers were closed, scriptures were confiscated, and the tradition was driven to the margins of Tibetan society.

The hidden treasures (གཏེར་མ་, terma) are Bon's response to the suppression. According to the tradition, Bonpo practitioners hid their most precious texts — in caves, in pillars, in the earth, in the minds of adepts — to protect them from destruction. Centuries later, treasure-revealers (tertön, གཏེར་སྟོན་) would discover these texts and return them to circulation. This is structurally identical to the Nyingma Buddhist treasure tradition, and the question of which tradition originated the practice is another of the great unresolved debates in Tibetan studies. The Bonpo say they hid their treasures first because they were persecuted first. The Nyingmapa say Padmasambhava hid Buddhist treasures for the same future-oriented reason. Both traditions recognize the other's treasure-revealers as legitimate within their own lineage.

The most important Bon treasure-revealer was Shenchen Luga (གཤེན་ཆེན་ཀླུ་དགའ་, 996–1035 CE), who discovered a large cache of Bon scriptures in the eleventh century and initiated the revival that became organized Yungdrung Bon. Whether Shenchen Luga "rediscovered" genuinely ancient texts or "composed" new texts using ancient motifs is — predictably — a question that divides practitioners and scholars.

V. The Nine Ways of Bon

Bon classifies its entire teaching into nine ways (ཐེག་པ་རིམ་དགུ་, theg pa rim dgu), a graduated path from the most worldly practices to the highest realization. Two classification systems exist: the Southern Treasures system and the Central Treasures system. The Southern system, more widely known, organizes the nine ways as follows:

The Four Causal Ways:

1. Chashen (ཕྱ་གཤེན་) — the Way of the Shen of Prediction. Divination, astrology, medical diagnosis, ritual diagnosis. This is the layer that outsiders most often mistake for the whole of Bon — the oracles, the mo divination, the reading of signs.
2. Nangshen (སྣང་གཤེན་) — the Way of the Shen of the Visible World. Rituals for the gods of the phenomenal world — the spirits of mountains, lakes, trees, and sky. Offerings, purification, the management of relationships between humans and the spirits of place.
3. Trulshen (འཕྲུལ་གཤེན་) — the Way of the Shen of Magical Power. Rites of subjugation, exorcism, and ransom — subduing hostile spirits, protecting the dead during the intermediate state (bar do), guiding souls.
4. Sichen (སྲིད་གཤེན་) — the Way of the Shen of Existence. Funerary rites, death rituals, and the guidance of consciousness through the bardos. This is where Bon's deep knowledge of death practices lives — the tradition's expertise in psychopomp work that Buddhism would later develop into its own bardo literature.

The Five Resultant Ways:

5. Genyen (དགེ་བསྙེན་) — the Way of Virtuous Lay Practitioners. Ethics, moral discipline, the ten virtues and ten non-virtues. The foundation of the monastic path.
6. Drangsong (དྲང་སྲོང་) — the Way of the Sages. Monastic discipline, rules of conduct, the life of renunciation. The Bonpo monastic code parallels but is distinct from the Buddhist vinaya.
7. A-kar (ཨ་དཀར་) — the Way of the White A. Tantric practice — visualization, mantra, mudra, mandala. The Bonpo tantric system includes its own deity cycle, its own initiations, and its own ritual texts.
8. Ye-shen (ཡེ་གཤེན་) — the Way of the Primordial Shen. Higher tantra — the generation and completion stages, the manipulation of subtle body energies.
9. Lame (བླ་མེད་) — the Supreme Way — the Way Without Limit. Dzogchen (རྫོགས་ཆེན་), the Great Perfection. The highest teaching, the direct recognition of the nature of mind.

The structure reveals something essential about Bon: it is not just a collection of pre-Buddhist folk practices, nor is it a copy of Buddhism with different names. It is a complete religious system that encompasses the folk practices (ways 1–4) within a framework that extends through ethics, monasticism, tantra, and the highest contemplative realization. The Bonpo point to this structure as evidence of their tradition's completeness. Scholars note its structural parallels with Buddhist classification systems and ask whether the completeness was always there or was achieved in dialogue with Buddhism. The Bonpo answer: both, and the dialogue does not diminish us.

VI. The Scriptures

Bon possesses its own scriptural canon, organized in conscious parallel with the Buddhist canon:

The Bon Kanjur (བཀའ་འགྱུར་, literally "translated words") contains the words attributed to Tonpa Shenrab — sutras, tantras, and Dzogchen texts. The most comprehensive modern edition, compiled at Menri Monastery in exile, runs to approximately 190 volumes.

The Bon Tenjur (བསྟན་འགྱུར་, "translated treatises") contains commentaries, philosophical works, ritual manuals, and scholarly literature by Bon masters across the centuries. It is less standardized than the Kanjur and varies between editions.

The most sacred Bon scriptures include:

• The Zi Ji (གཟི་བརྗིད་, "The Glorious") — the twelve-volume biography of Tonpa Shenrab, the Bon tradition's equivalent of the Jataka tales and the Lalitavistara combined.
• The Zhangzhung Nyengyud (ཞང་ཞུང་སྙན་རྒྱུད་) — the Oral Transmission of Zhangzhung, a Dzogchen cycle claimed to descend directly from the Zhangzhung masters without passing through the terma system. This is the text that Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche has taught most extensively in the West, and it is the Bonpo's strongest claim to an independent Dzogchen lineage.
• The Mdo 'Dus and Gzer Mig — the short and medium biographies of Tonpa Shenrab.
• Various terma cycles revealed by Shenchen Luga and later treasure-revealers.

The question of these scriptures' historical age is — again — contested. Samten Karmay, the Tibetan-born scholar at CNRS Paris whose The Treasury of Good Sayings (1972) remains foundational, demonstrated that the Bonpo scriptures as they exist today show evidence of composition and redaction across many centuries, with the earliest datable layers reaching to the tenth or eleventh century CE. The Bonpo do not dispute that the texts were compiled at various periods. They dispute the implication that compilation means fabrication.

VII. Menri — The Mother Monastery

If Bon has a Vatican, it is Menri (སྨན་རི་, "Medicine Mountain").

Menri Monastery was founded in 1405 CE in the Tsang region of central Tibet by Nyammed Sherab Gyaltsen (མཉམ་མེད་ཤེས་རབ་རྒྱལ་མཚན་, 1356–1415), one of the most important figures in Bon's history. Nyammed Sherab Gyaltsen was a scholar, a monastic reformer, and a systematizer — the Bon equivalent of Tsongkhapa, who was reforming the Buddhist Gelug school in the same period. He established Menri as a center of monastic discipline, scholastic learning, and ritual practice, and the monastery became the premier institution of organized Bon for the next five and a half centuries.

The abbot of Menri, bearing the title Menri Trizin (སྨན་རི་ཁྲི་འཛིན་, "throne-holder of Menri"), became the de facto head of the entire Bon tradition — a position of spiritual authority comparable to the Ganden Tripa of the Gelug school. The line of succession has continued unbroken from the fifteenth century to the present day.

In 1959, the Chinese occupation and its aftermath destroyed Menri. The monastery was physically demolished during the Cultural Revolution. The monks who survived fled across the Himalayas.

In 1967, the 33rd Menri Trizin, Lungtok Tenpai Nyima (ལུང་རྟོགས་བསྟན་པའི་ཉི་མ་, 1929–2017), began rebuilding Menri in exile at Dolanji, a settlement in the Kangra Valley of Himachal Pradesh, India, granted by the Indian government for Tibetan refugees. The new Menri — sometimes called Pal Shenrab Nampar Gyalwai Ling — was consecrated in 1969 and has served as the spiritual headquarters of Bon in exile ever since.

Dolanji is modest by the standards of Tibetan exile monasteries — smaller than Sera, less internationally famous than Dharamsala — but it is the institutional heart of the tradition. It houses the dialectics school where Bonpo monks earn the geshe degree (the equivalent of a doctorate in Bon philosophy), the ritual college where the great ceremonies are maintained, and the library where the Bon Kanjur and Tenjur are preserved.

Lungtok Tenpai Nyima's death in 2017 was a significant moment. He had led the tradition through its most catastrophic period — destruction, exile, rebuilding — and his passing raised questions about continuity that the tradition is still answering. His successor, the 34th Menri Trizin, was enthroned following the traditional selection process.

VIII. The Fifth School

In 1977, the 14th Dalai Lama formally recognized Bon as the fifth school (ཆོས་ལུགས་ལྔ་པ་) of Tibetan religion, alongside the four Buddhist schools (Nyingma, Sakya, Kagyu, Gelug). A Bonpo representative was given a seat in the Tibetan parliament-in-exile. Bon monasteries became eligible for the same governmental support as Buddhist monasteries.

This recognition was more than ceremonial. For centuries, the Bonpo had occupied an ambiguous position in Tibetan religious life — tolerated, sometimes respected, often marginalized, never quite equal. The recognition by the Dalai Lama and the government-in-exile gave Bon institutional parity for the first time in its recorded history. It did not resolve the theological questions (the Dalai Lama has spoken respectfully of Bon without endorsing its historical claims), but it settled the political ones: Bon is a legitimate Tibetan religion, not a pre-religious curiosity.

The recognition also reflects a pragmatic reality of exile: with the Tibetan cultural world shattered by Chinese occupation, the government-in-exile cannot afford to exclude any surviving tradition. The Bonpo brought their own monastic lineage, their own scriptural canon, their own intellectual tradition, and their own diaspora communities. In exile, these are assets. The Dalai Lama, whatever his personal theological views, understood that a unified Tibetan religious culture in exile was stronger with Bon than without it.

The Bonpo accepted the recognition with characteristic ambivalence. They were grateful for the institutional support and the political acknowledgment. They were less comfortable with the framing — "fifth school" implicitly places Bon alongside Buddhist schools, as if it were one variation among five, rather than an independent tradition that predates all four of the others. The tension is permanent. The recognition helps. The framing chafes.

IX. Practice — Dzogchen and the Path of Light

To a practitioner, the most important thing about Bon is not its history or its politics but its practice. And the crown jewel of Bon practice is Dzogchen (རྫོགས་ཆེན་) — the Great Perfection.

Dzogchen is the highest teaching in both Bon and the Nyingma school of Buddhism. In both traditions, it points to the same realization: the direct recognition of the nature of mind — luminous, empty, spontaneously present, already perfect. The practitioner does not create enlightenment through effort. They recognize what was always there.

The Bon Dzogchen lineage transmits primarily through the Zhangzhung Nyengyud, the Oral Transmission of Zhangzhung, which the Bonpo maintain has passed from master to student in unbroken succession from the Zhangzhung masters of the pre-Buddhist era. This is the Bonpo's most historically sensitive claim: that their Dzogchen lineage is independent of — and older than — the Buddhist Dzogchen that entered Tibet through Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra. The claim cannot be conclusively verified or refuted with available evidence, and the debate generates more heat than light. What can be observed is that Bon Dzogchen and Nyingma Dzogchen, while sharing the same essential view, differ in their preliminary practices, their lineage prayers, their iconography, and their ritual context.

Beyond Dzogchen, Bon's living practice includes:

Ngondro (སྔོན་འགྲོ་) — the preliminary practices that prepare a practitioner for higher meditation. The Bon ngondro includes prostrations, refuge, mandala offering, and guru yoga, but with Bon-specific refuges: one takes refuge in the Bon (the teaching), the Shen (the community), and the Tonpa (the teacher), rather than the Buddhist triple refuge.

The Five Elements practice — a distinctive Bon contemplative system working with earth, water, fire, air, and space. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche has made this practice particularly accessible in the West through his book Healing with Form, Energy, and Light (2002). The five elements are not abstract categories but experiential realities: the practitioner learns to feel the solidity of earth, the fluidity of water, the heat of fire, the movement of air, and the openness of space within their own body and mind.

Chod (གཅོད་) — the practice of "cutting through" ego-clinging by visualizing the offering of one's own body to demons and hungry spirits. Both Bon and Buddhism practice chod; the Bonpo maintain their version predates the Buddhist form attributed to Machig Labdron.

Ma Tri (མ་ཏྲི་) — the Bon equivalent of Om Mani Padme Hum. The mantra Om Ma Tri Mu Ye Sa Le Du (ༀ་མ་ཏྲི་མུ་ཡེ་ས་ལེ་འདུ་) invokes the compassion of Tonpa Shenrab and is the most commonly recited prayer in the Bon world.

X. The Scholarly Debate

No profile of Bon can avoid the question that has defined its academic study for over a century: is Bon genuinely pre-Buddhist, or is it a later reconstruction using Buddhist categories?

The debate has several distinct strands:

The maximalist Bonpo position holds that Yungdrung Bon is the complete, original teaching of Tonpa Shenrab, transmitted through Shang Shung into Tibet, predating Buddhism by millennia. The suppression under Trisong Detsen interrupted the transmission; the terma tradition restored it. The structural parallels with Buddhism reflect the universal truth of the teaching, not borrowing.

The minimalist scholarly position, once common in Western and Buddhist Tibetan studies, held that Bon was essentially a late imitation of Buddhism — that the Bon canon was compiled in the tenth through fourteenth centuries by Bonpo scholars who repackaged Buddhist teachings under different names and attributed them to a fictional founder. This view is now largely abandoned by serious scholars, but it persists in popular and Buddhist polemical literature.

The current scholarly consensus, as represented by Per Kvaerne, Samten Karmay, and David Snellgrove, occupies a middle position: Bon as an organized, scriptural religion crystallized in the tenth through fifteenth centuries in dialogue with — and in structural parallel to — Buddhism, but it drew on genuinely pre-Buddhist elements (shamanic practices, funerary rituals, cosmological ideas, the Zhangzhung cultural substrate) that cannot be reduced to Buddhist borrowing. The relationship is one of centuries-long mutual influence, not one-directional copying.

Kvaerne, in The Bon Religion of Tibet (2001), is characteristically precise: he argues that the Bon scriptural tradition as it exists today cannot be traced with certainty earlier than the tenth century, but that this does not mean the practices and ideas recorded in those scriptures are themselves tenth-century inventions. The same argument, he notes, could be made about early Buddhism: the Pali canon was written down centuries after the Buddha's death, but nobody concludes from this that the teachings it records were invented at the moment of writing.

The Dzogchen question is the sharpest edge of the debate. Both Bon and Nyingma Buddhism claim Dzogchen as their highest teaching. Both claim transmission lineages extending into deep antiquity. If Bon Dzogchen is genuinely independent of Buddhist Dzogchen, it would constitute strong evidence for the antiquity of Bon's contemplative tradition. If it was borrowed from Buddhism, the Bonpo's historical claims are significantly weakened. The evidence is insufficient to settle the question either way, and scholars who have examined it most carefully — including Kvaerne and Namkhai Norbu, who was himself a practitioner of both traditions — tend to acknowledge the impasse rather than force a conclusion.

XI. Shadows

A profile that does not name what is difficult is not a profile but an advertisement.

The history problem. Bon's historical claims are not verifiable by the standards of modern historiography. This is not unique to Bon — few ancient religious traditions can document their origins to the satisfaction of critical history — but the gap between the Bonpo's self-understanding and the scholarly evidence is wider than most, and the tradition's insistence on the literal historicity of Tonpa Shenrab and the extreme antiquity of its scriptures creates a friction with academic study that is not easily resolved.

The "Buddhism with different names" charge. The structural parallels between Bon and Tibetan Buddhism are extensive: the scriptural canon, the monastic system, the tantric practices, the Dzogchen teachings, the treasure tradition, the biographical conventions for the founder. Critics — both Buddhist and academic — have argued that Bon is essentially Buddhism wearing a Bon costume. The Bonpo find this charge deeply offensive and point to genuine differences (the counterclockwise circumambulation, the distinct deity cycles, the Zhangzhung Nyengyud lineage, the four causal ways that have no Buddhist parallel) as evidence of independent identity. The truth, as usual, is a crosstruth: Bon is both deeply shaped by Buddhism and genuinely distinct from it, and the attempt to collapse it into one or the other does violence to the complexity of how religions actually develop.

Internal tensions. The Bon community is not monolithic. Tensions exist between the monastic establishment at Dolanji and practitioners in eastern Tibet who maintained Bon through the Chinese occupation without exile. Tensions exist between the scholastic Bon of the geshe system and the village Bon of local ritual specialists. Tensions exist between older Bonpo who remember Tibet and younger Bonpo raised in India or the West. These are the normal tensions of any living tradition under pressure, but they are real.

The demographic crisis. The Bonpo were always a minority within Tibetan religion, concentrated in certain regions (Gyarong, Amdo, Dolpo). The Chinese occupation devastated their institutional base in Tibet. The exile community is small. The Western convert community is tiny. The tradition does not proselytize aggressively. Whether Bon's institutional base is large enough to sustain itself across generations of diaspora is a genuine question without a comfortable answer.

XII. The Living Spring

And yet Bon is alive.

At Dolanji, the rebuilt Menri Monastery continues to train monks in the full curriculum of Bon philosophy, ritual, and meditation. The geshe program produces qualified scholars and teachers. The great annual ceremonies are performed. Young Bonpo from the diaspora come to study.

At Triten Norbutse (ཁྲི་བརྟན་ནོར་བུ་རྩེ་), a second major Bon monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal, founded in 1987, Bonpo monks maintain the tradition in closer proximity to Tibet. Triten Norbutse has become an important center for the preservation of Bon ritual arts — painting, sculpture, manuscript copying.

In Tibet itself, despite decades of suppression, Bon survives. Monasteries in Sichuan, Qinghai, and the Tibet Autonomous Region have been partially rebuilt since the 1980s. Local Bon communities in areas like Gyarong and Dolpo continue practices that the exile community sometimes no longer remembers. The relationship between Bon in Tibet and Bon in exile is complex — parallel streams of the same tradition, each carrying elements the other has lost.

In the West, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche has been the most visible ambassador of Bon since the 1990s. Born in Amritsar, India, trained at Dolanji, and holding the geshe degree, he founded the Ligmincha Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1992. Through his books — Wonders of the Natural Mind (1993), The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (1998), Healing with Form, Energy, and Light (2002) — and his global teaching program, he has made Bon Dzogchen and the Five Elements practice accessible to Western students. Ligmincha has study groups across North America, Europe, and Latin America.

Other Bon teachers active in the West include Yongdzin Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche, one of the most senior Bon scholars alive, who has taught at universities in London and Oslo, and Geshe Tenzin Yangton, who has established teaching centers in Europe.

The academic study of Bon has matured significantly. Where earlier Western scholars often dismissed Bon as derivative, the current generation treats it as a tradition worthy of study on its own terms. The International Association for Bon Research, founded in 2012, holds regular conferences. Doctoral dissertations on Bon topics are no longer exotic. The digital preservation of Bon manuscripts — many of which exist in single copies — is an active priority.

What keeps Bon alive is what keeps any religion alive: people who practice it. A Bonpo family in Dolanji who recites the Ma Tri every morning. A monk in Kathmandu who paints a mandala of the Bon deities with pigments he ground himself. A student in San Francisco who sits with the five elements and feels the earth solidify beneath them. A grandmother in Gyarong who never stopped making offerings to the local spirits, even when the Red Guards came, because the spirits were there before the party and will be there after.

The tradition has survived everything. It is smaller than it was. It is more studied than it was. It is more contested than it was. It is still here.

Colophon

This profile draws on the scholarship of Per Kvaerne (The Bon Religion of Tibet, 2001), Samten Karmay (The Treasury of Good Sayings, 1972; The Arrow and the Spindle, 1998), David Snellgrove (The Nine Ways of Bon, 1967), and the published teachings of Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Any errors of fact or emphasis are the author's.

Bon is the indigenous religious tradition of Tibet — contested, suppressed, exiled, rebuilt, and still practiced. It is not a curiosity. It is a complete way.

Profiled for the Good Work Library by Rinchen of the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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