The Menri Monastery in northern India possesses the world’s largest collection of manuscripts and block-print books relating to Bon, the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet. Most of these materials were rescued from ancient Tibetan monasteries before those institutions were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution (1966-69). After the Tibetan upraising that began on 10 March 1959 in Lhasa, many Tibetans fled their homeland for India. A group of Bonpo Lamas gathered in Kullu-Manali, and in 1967, about 70 families settled in Dolanji, Himachal Pradesh, where they established the Tibetan Bonpo Foundation and the headquarters of the Bon religion.
The foundations for the main new temple of Menri were laid in 1969 and completed in 1978 with the main aim of the monastic centre being to pursue a strict monastic life, educate of monks, and perform religious and ritual ceremonies. Menri was originally founded in 1405 in Tsang, Tibet, by Nyamme Sherab Gyaltsen (1356-1416). Bon was recognised in 1987 by the 14th Dalai Lama as the fifth Tibetan religious school (alongside Buddhism), although its art remains largely unknown.
The manuscripts held at Menri are essential to support the efforts of Bon monks and nuns to preserve their unique culture as well as the efforts of scholars elsewhere to understand not only the Bon religion but also the distinctive aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, and indeed, the early cultural and intellectual history of Central Asia. Under the Endangered Archives Programme, a survey of the holdings and facilities of the library was started in order to prepare a proposal for a future major digitisation project. Sadly, due to the cyber-attack on the British Library in October 2023, the archives and manuscripts database is currently inaccessible and links to the catalogue records for this project are also unavailable.
Bon culture and religion predate the northern advance of Buddhism onto the Tibetan Plateau in the 7th century. Despite Buddhism’s growth in popularity, the Bon religion and culture have continued to the present day. Bon is based on a deep respect for nature and an emphasis on healing – physically, environmentally, and spiritually. Like Buddhism, Bon’s goal is to bring an end to suffering. Both religions believe in karma, nirvana, and personal salvation and both pursue the perfection of religious life and practice.
The beginnings of the Bon religion are associated with elaborate funerary rites for kings. There is evidence of tombs remaining from the Pugyel dynasty (7th to 9th century), whose necropolis was located south of Lhasa. This special category of priests was called Bonpo (those with a sacred calling).
Bon practitioners believe in the spirits of places and natural formations, such as mountains, sky, rivers, stones, and lakes, as well as supernatural spirits and divinities. The belief system is coloured by the idea of animism or animalism, which cares deeply about the natural environment, with indigenous spirits living in trees, rocks, mountains, lakes, and rivers. Nyen spirits live on mountains (or trees or rocks), while Klu spirits (often serpentine in form with human heads) live in water (or under the earth). Men tended to worship the Nyen and women the Klu. Klu are also associated with wealth and protect home shrines. Other spirits include Sadag, lords of the earth, who can be wrathful or benign, and Tsan sky spirits that are associated with high places such as mountains peaks and passes.
These ancient beliefs can run through the fabric of other religions and be an active symbiotic element in practitioners’ beliefs, or seen merely as an echo of an earlier, distant faith that has been lost from the core canon. These shamanistic-like earlier beliefs of Bon often merged with Tibetan Buddhist iconography and artistic traditions in such a way that iconographic identification can sometimes be difficult, both from the Buddhist and Bon points of view. It was this syncretism during the early years of Buddhism in Tibet that has resulted in what is now known as Tibetan or Northern Buddhism.
Modern Bonpo (practitioners of the Bon religion) can be identified as a religious sect made up of a variety of ethnicities and language groups. The largest ethnic group is Tibetan, followed by the Naxi, a minority group in China, and the Kinnauri of Northern India. Western Nepal is also home to a large group identified with the Bon religion and culture.
While there is almost no written tradition of the early pre-Buddhist indigenous religious practices, they were passed down to successive generations. Although not an organised religion, Bon has a coherent and unified system of doctrines based on a vast literature, much of it more than 1,000 years old, however, no written evidence relating to the traditions of the Bon religion has been found before the 10th century. Early manuscripts dating to the end of the 9th and the beginning of 10th century were found among the manuscripts discovered in Dunhuang.
The presence of Bon manuscripts within the Dunhuang collection was noted by early explorers, and later scholars, as they began cataloguing the vast number of documents. A key figure who acquired and subsequently made the larger Tibetan Dunhuang collections available for study were Aurel Stein, the Hungarian-born British explorer who was the first Westerner to access the Library Cave (Cave 17) in 1907. Among the thousands of manuscripts he acquired was a significant number of Tibetan texts, which are now housed primarily in the British Library and the National Museum of India. Stein noted the presence of Bon ritual texts at Dunhuang.
Paul Pelliot, a French sinologist who visited Dunhuang in 1908, shortly after Stein, was able to examine the manuscripts more methodically and selected thousands more for the Bibliothèque nationale de France. His selections included various non-Chinese documents, including Bon-related materials. Also in France, at the Guimet Museum, is a collection of 10 banners (from an original set of 12) brought back by Captain Henri d’Ollone (1868-1945) following his mission to eastern Tibet in 1907-1908 – he recounts this journey in his book entitled The Last Barbarians (1911).
A wide range of subject matter is covered by the manuscripts at Menri in India, including metaphysics, dialectics, logic, history, grammar, poetry, rules of monastic discipline, astronomy/astrology, medicine, divination, mantras, guidance in recognising the stages of inner progress, as well as numerous biographies of prominent teachers (most hagiographical in nature, but some with a degree of historical accuracy), musical scores, and practical instruction manuals for the creation and consecration of paintings, sculptures, mandalas, ritual offerings, reliquaries, amulets, and talismans.
The largest portion, however, are ritual texts, providing cycles of prayers devoted to various deities in their many manifestations, detailed descriptions of procedures conducive to spiritual experience (sadhana), visualisations of symbolic self-dismemberment of the body and ego (chod), as well as assorted religious ceremonies, particularly those focusing on the intermediate state (bardo) between death and rebirth and the transference of consciousness (phowa). The Bonpo take great pride in the fact that they have more – and more elaborate – rituals than do any of the schools of Tibetan Buddhism. These texts contain detailed instructions for a panoply of rituals ranging from simple blessings that can be executed by a single monk in a few minutes to extremely elaborate multi-media ceremonies involving hundreds of participants and taking several weeks to perform.
Bon artefacts can be found in museum collections around the world, including the Rubin Museum of Art, which held an exhibition Bon: The Magic Word in 2007, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, and the Guimet Museum in France. Bon manuscripts are also included in the collections of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and Leiden University. The Library of Congress has Bon xylographs acquired by the scholar and diplomat William Rockhill (1854-1914) and the botanist and ethnographer Joseph Rock (1884-1962). Rockhill was the first American to learn Tibetan and documented his two expeditions between 1888 and 1893 in The Land of the Lamas (1891).
Bonpo art shares spiritual and iconographic similarities with Tibetan Buddhism, with both traditions often employing the same artists. However, details differ, particularly regarding Buddhist attributes. For example, the sceptre (whose branches in Bon are always turned to the left) is emblematic of the Bon tradition. Other differences include the monks’ headdress that evokes an eight-petalled lotus, the dominance of the forces of nature, and the depicition of wild animals. The stupa (the emblematic reliquary monument of Buddhism) is distinguished in Bon art by the horns of a mythical bird placed at its summit – a reference to the arrival on earth of its founder in bird form – Tonpa Shenrab. Pilgrims also circumambulate stupa anti-clockwise unlike Buddhists who walk clockwise.
Legend records that the mysterious figure of Tonpa Shenrab was born into a royal family in the celestial realm and at an early age displayed remarkable abilities, including teaching sciences and appearing in different forms to help others, eventually travelling to the Zhangzhung region near Mount Kailash, which is considered a holy mountain, the spiritual centre of the world, by the Bonpo, as well as being revered by Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus. Tonpa Shenrab renounced his worldly position at thirty-one to pursue enlightenment, eventually becoming a monk and living to the age of eighty-two.
The depiction of Tonpa Shenrab is a central theme of the Bon narrative and religious paintings. In the Guimet’s collection, there is a partial set (10) of thangkas illustrating the many episodes of his life. Most often, he is depicted seated on a throne or travelling in a chariot, accompanied by a retinue of followers. Complete versions of the story of his life usually comprise a series of at least 12 paintings.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s important thangka of the deity Trowo Tsochog Khagying (Wrathful Supreme Lord Towering in the Sky) is worshipped by followers of the Bon religion. Embodying infinite power and ferocity, Trowo Tsochog Khagying is one of five fortress meditation deities associated with the Father Tantras of Bon. He is seen here embracing his fierce consort, Khala Dugmo, and together they clear the pathway of spiritual liberation. Like many Bon deities, he is associated with death and conveying the departed to a rewarding afterlife.
Another quite different religious painting, tsakli, a miniature ‘initiation card’ is held by the National Gallery of Victoria. These paintings were used in Buddhist rituals for instructing monks, consecrating sites, and transferring knowledge. They typically depict sacred figures, symbols, or scenes in sets and serve as memory aids for complex rituals like deity forms and secret iconography. Subjects can be female deities (dakinis), or other figures such as wrathful deities.
The Bon religion is kept alive today largely due to the efforts of Menri Monastery in India. Bon leaders have re-established their traditions including educating nearly 200 geshes (doctorate-level scholars), archiving ancient texts, alongside building schools, a library, a medical college, and a nunnery to sustain their religion and cultural heritage. It remains a living tradition in the Tibetan Plateau (with an estimated 400,000 followers and over 260 active monasteries) and in parts of Nepal, ensuring the survival of this ancient, distinct spiritual path alongside Tibetan Buddhism.
The catalogue Bon the Magic Word: The Indigenous Religion of Tibet by Samten Gyaltsen Karmat and Jeff Watt, published in 2007 to accompany the Rubi Museum of Art exhibition, is still available for purchase.
Several recent books have been published, Fight of the Bon Monks: War, Persecution, and the Salvation of Tibet’s Oldest Religions by Harvey Rice and Jackie Cole (2025) published by Destiny Books; Bon in Nepal by Nagru Geshe, Gelek Jinpa, et al (2012) published by Heritage Publishers; Drenpa’s Proclamation: The Rise and Decline of the Bon Religion in Tibet by Per Kvaerne and Dan Martin (2023) published by Vajra Books; Bo and Bon: Ancient Shamanic Traditions of Siberia and Tibet in Their Relation to the Teachings of a Central Asian Buddha by Dmitry Ermako (2008) published by Vajra Publications.
