Bön

Bön is the older religious tradition of Tibet, and the one most often mistaken for a version of something else. Set a Bön monastery beside a Buddhist one and the resemblance is close: the same robes, the same debate courtyard, monastic vows, tantric cycles, a full Dzogchen curriculum. The descent is what differs. Bönpos trace their teaching to Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche and to Zhang Zhung, the kingdom that stood west of central Tibet around Mount Kailash before the Tibetan empire absorbed it, and not to India.

How much of present-day Bön is genuinely pre-Buddhist is a live scholarly argument, and it is worth knowing that it is unresolved rather than pretending otherwise in either direction. What is not in dispute is that Yungdrung Bön, the organised tradition taught today, took its present shape from the eleventh century onward in close and mutual exchange with Tibetan Buddhism. Two rivers cut the same valley. That does not make them one river.

The path is laid out as nine ways, rising from healing, divination, ransom rites and the care of the dead, through the sutra and tantra vehicles, to Dzogchen at the summit. Western students usually arrive at the top of that ladder and stay there, drawn by the Zhang Zhung Nyen Gyüd, an oral Dzogchen cycle that Bönpos hold to have passed from teacher to student without ever being hidden and rediscovered. Around it sit the practices Bön is known for: tsa lung and trul khor, the yogas of dream and sleep, work with sound and syllable, and extended retreat in complete darkness.

Almost none of this should have survived the twentieth century. Bön lost most of its monasteries, and the rebuilding happened in exile: Menri, refounded at Dolanji in the Indian Himalaya in 1967, and Triten Norbutse above Kathmandu in 1987. The fourteenth Dalai Lama has since recognised Bön as one of Tibet's principal religious traditions and seated it alongside the four Buddhist schools, closing a long stretch in which Bönpos were treated by their neighbours as heretics.

What reaches the West now comes through a handful of lamas trained in those two monasteries, and through the centres they founded: Ligmincha, Shenten Dargye Ling in western France, Yeru in the United States. It is a small tradition with an unusually long memory.