IA quick read in five sentences
Bön བོན་ is the long-established religious tradition of the Tibetan plateau, which has stood alongside Tibetan Buddhism for more than a thousand years while keeping its own identity. Its followers call themselves Bönpo བོན་པོ་ and call their religion Yungdrung Bön གཡུང་དྲུང་བོན་, meaning eternal Bön. According to its teaching, the religion was taught by Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, a Buddha whom the tradition places in an age far earlier than Shakyamuni Buddha, born in the land of Olmo Lungring to the west. Bön has its own canon of about three hundred volumes, monasteries, ordained monks, the geshe degree, and a system of teachings divided into Nine Ways, whose summit is Dzogchen. Outsiders recognise Bön followers most quickly by two things: they circumambulate stupas and sacred mountains anticlockwise, and their sacred symbol is a swastika turning anticlockwise, called yungdrung in Tibetan. Scholars are still debating how much of the ancient religion from before Buddhism reached Tibet Bön has preserved, and how far the two religions have borrowed from each other.
One. The word Bön has at least three different meanings depending on who uses it: the ancient religion of the plateau before Buddhism, the Yungdrung Bön tradition with its scriptures and monasteries from the 10th and 11th centuries onward, and the layer of folk belief in mountain gods, earth spirits and water spirits. Read the wrong meaning and the whole page is misunderstood.
Two. Bön followers believe their religion predates Tibetan Buddhism and was taught by a Buddha of its own, Tonpa Shenrab. History has no independent document yet that confirms that dating, and this page sets the two views side by side.
Three. Bön teaching is divided into Nine Ways. The first four deal with the affairs of this life, such as divination, healing, rites for well-being and funerals, the latter five aim at liberation, and the highest way is Dzogchen, the Great Perfection.
Four. Yungdrung གཡུང་དྲུང་ is both a word meaning eternal and indestructible and the name of the swastika shape turning anticlockwise. It appears in the very name of the religion, and it has no connection with the emblem of Nazi Germany.
Five. Mount Kailash in the west of the plateau is the geographical centre of Bön, and Menri Monastery, founded in 1405, is the largest centre of learning of this religion. Bön has no organised presence in Vietnam.
The page follows fifteen sections. Where the teaching and the historical sources diverge, two boxes, according to the teaching and according to the historical sources, are set side by side, and where two sources record different things, both are recorded. For the modern period the page records only the milestones of monasteries, scriptures and scholarship, and does not discuss current affairs.
IIThe plateau, the name and the three meanings of the word Bön
The Tibetan plateau is a land of high valleys, ringed by snow mountains, salt lakes and windswept grasslands. From very early on, the people living there pictured the world as full of powers with their own domains: mountains have mountain gods, lakes have lake gods, the land has its owners. A sick person, or a hailstorm that ruins the harvest, could both be understood as a relationship with some power that had been thrown off balance. That is the ground on which Bön grew up, and which Buddhism encountered when it entered Tibet.
What the word Bön means
In the usage of its own followers, the word Bön བོན་ stands exactly where the word chos ཆོས་, meaning Dharma, stands in Tibetan Buddhism: it refers to the teaching, the truth, the path. Bön followers speak of hearing Bön, teaching Bön and practising Bön in the same way Buddhists speak of hearing, teaching and practising the Dharma. A practitioner is called a Bönpo. The full name the religion uses for itself is Yungdrung Bön, eternal Bön, to distinguish it from the other meanings of the word Bön. In Chinese it is written 苯教, read in Sino-Vietnamese as Bổn giáo, while the name Yungdrung Bön is written 雍仲苯教. The library uses the name Bön to stay close to the original pronunciation.
The Norwegian Tibetologist Per Kværne, in his survey of the history of Bön studies, separates the word Bön into three meanings, and that division is now widely used. The first meaning is the religion of the plateau before Buddhism arrived, which history knows only through a few ancient documents, among them the manuscripts found in the Dunhuang caves. These manuscripts mention ritual specialists called bon po and gshen, who handled funerals and sacrifices for the royal court. The second meaning is the Yungdrung Bön tradition, with scriptures, monasteries and a doctrinal system, which appears clearly in the historical sources from the 10th and 11th centuries. The third meaning is the layer of folk belief in mountain gods, earth spirits and water spirits, divination and rites for well-being, which the Tibetologist Rolf Stein called the nameless religion, because Tibetans, whether they follow Buddhism or Bön, all live within that layer. Followers of Yungdrung Bön read these three layers as one continuous thread: their religion is the ancient religion, which declined and was later restored, not a new tradition.
Zhangzhung, the western kingdom
The place name most closely tied to Bön is Zhangzhung ཞང་ཞུང་, a region in the west of the plateau, surrounding Mount Kailash. According to the Bön tradition, before it spread into central Tibet the teaching was kept in Zhangzhung, many scriptures were translated from the Zhangzhung language into Tibetan, and many Bön scriptures today still open with a title in Zhangzhung before the Tibetan title. The tradition also records a capital called Khyunglung Ngulkhar, the silver palace of the Khyung valley, not far from Mount Kailash.
On the side of history, Zhangzhung is mentioned in ancient Tibetan sources as a region with its own organisation, later absorbed into the Tibetan cultural sphere. The Zhangzhung language is known only through a small number of bilingual texts and word lists, and linguists are still debating which branch it belongs to. For that reason, wherever this page speaks of Zhangzhung as Bön tells it, the page states clearly that this is according to the tradition.
Three strands of Bön today
The main strand, and the one this page mostly describes. It takes Tonpa Shenrab as its founder, has its own Kangyur and Tengyur canon, has monasteries and monks, and its centre of learning is Menri Monastery.
Bön sarma in Tibetan. A strand that took shape from around the 14th century, mainly in the east of the plateau, combining Bön texts with figures and practices originally associated with the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. The Yungdrung Bön strand does not always accept this strand as its own.
Worship of mountain gods, smoke offerings of fragrant plants, prayer flags, divination, healing through ritual. This layer is shared by Bön followers and Buddhists alike on the plateau, and many popular books mistakenly call this whole layer Bön.
Popular books, including some encyclopedias written in the mid-20th century, often describe Bön as a pre-Buddhist shamanic religion devoted to magic and sacrifice. That description mixes the first meaning with the second. The Yungdrung Bön that one meets at Menri Monastery is a tradition with a philosophy, monastic discipline, a course of study lasting many years and a system of Dzogchen meditation. Rites for well-being and healing are still present in Bön, but they are placed within a framework of teaching rather than standing on their own.
IIIThe founder, Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche
Bön followers call the founder of their religion Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche སྟོན་པ་གཤེན་རབ་མི་བོ་ཆེ་. Tonpa means teacher, the one who shows the way. Shenrab means the supreme one among the shen, that is, among the ritual specialists. Miwoche means great man. In Chinese his name is written 辛饒, read in Sino-Vietnamese as Tân Nhiêu. In Bön he holds exactly the position that Shakyamuni Buddha holds in Buddhism: one who has attained complete enlightenment, the Buddha of this age. Under the library's rules, the page does not describe his image in a way that invites the reader to picture a portrait, and records only his role and the accounts of his life.
According to the Bön biographies, Tonpa Shenrab was born in the land of Olmo Lungring འོལ་མོ་ལུང་རིང་, part of the country of Tagzig, in a palace south of Mount Yungdrung Gutseg, the nine-storey mountain. His birth date is recorded as the eighth day of the first month of the Giáp Tý year in the Tibetan calendar, that is, the Wood Male Mouse year. He lived the life of a prince, married, had children, and only at the age of thirty-one renounced worldly life to practise austerities and teach. The tradition tells that he came to Tibet only once, in pursuit of his horses, which had been stolen by a demon king named Khyabpa Lagring, and that he entered Tibet by way of Mount Kongpo. Seeing that the people there were not yet ready to receive the higher teachings, he taught rites for well-being and for driving out evil, and replaced live sacrificial animals with figures moulded from dough. He died at the age of eighty-two, and according to the accounts, his passing was meant to remind his followers of impermanence.
That life is recorded in three biographies, each in its own form. Dodü མདོ་འདུས་ is the shortest. Zermig གཟེར་མིག་ is of middle length, in two volumes. Both are regarded as rediscovered texts, or terma, which appeared around the 10th to the 11th century. Zijid གཟི་བརྗིད་ is the most voluminous, usually counted as twelve volumes, transmitted orally and written down in the 14th century by Loden Nyingpo. It is the Zijid that contains the presentation of the Nine Ways that the Tibetologist David Snellgrove translated in excerpt into English in 1967 under the title The Nine Ways of Bon.
The date according to the standard Bön reckoning is that he was born in 16017 BC, about eighteen thousand years ago. Not every source within Bön itself says so: a calculation by the Bön scholar Tsultrim Gyaltsen in 1804 places his birth in 20995 BC. In addition, various documents give far more recent dates, some placing him at the beginning of the first millennium BC, some in the 6th or the 4th century BC, some in 1917 BC. The library records all of these figures rather than choosing one.
On the side of history, no document independent of the Bön texts yet confirms Tonpa Shenrab as a historical figure at any of the dates above. Scholars also note that the structure of his biography is very close to that of Shakyamuni Buddha: born a prince, leaving worldly life, practising, teaching, passing into final nirvana. Readers taking a historical approach see this as a sign of borrowing during the period when Yungdrung Bön took shape. Bön followers read it the other way round, holding that this biographical pattern belonged to Tonpa Shenrab first. The two readings coexist, and the library does not adjudicate between them.
Newcomers often guess that Tonpa Shenrab is Shakyamuni Buddha called by a name of the Tibetans' own. He is not. In Bön, Tonpa Shenrab is a different Buddha, born in a different place, in a different age, with his own family, his own lineage and his own scriptures. Bön does not deny Shakyamuni either, and some Bön texts even regard Shakyamuni as an emanation who carried the teaching forward. The difference lies in who stands at the centre: Buddhists take refuge in Shakyamuni, Bön followers take refuge in Tonpa Shenrab.
IVTimeline
The Bön timeline has two overlapping layers. The first is the chronology of the tradition, beginning eighteen thousand years ago. The second is the chronology that history can verify, beginning with ancient documents and becoming truly clear from the 11th century. The timeline below records both, and states clearly which layer each date belongs to. For the modern period it records only the milestones of monasteries, scriptures and scholarship.
- 16017 BCBirth of Tonpa Shenrab, according to the traditionThe date according to the standard Bön reckoning. Another calculation, made in 1804, places this event in 20995 BC. History has no independent document with which to verify it.
- Before the 7th centuryZhangzhung and the shenAccording to the tradition, the teaching was kept in the Zhangzhung region around Mount Kailash. Ancient documents mention ritual specialists called bon po and gshen who handled funerals and sacrifices.
- 7th to 9th centuryBuddhism enters TibetBuddhism was introduced and gradually came under the patronage of the royal court. The Bön tradition describes this as the period when its religion declined, and many texts were hidden to preserve them for later generations.
- 996 to 1035Shenchen LugaThe greatest figure of the Bön revival. Around 1017 he rediscovered a large body of texts, and the family lineages that later kept the Bön religion descend from him.
- 1072Founding of Yeru Wensakha MonasteryA large monastery in the Tsang region, forerunner of Menri, which served as the centre of Bön learning for more than three centuries.
- 14th centuryThe Zijid written down, New Bön takes shapeLoden Nyingpo wrote down the vast Zijid biography from oral transmission. In the same century, the New Bön strand took shape in the east of the plateau.
- 1386Yeru Wensakha swept away by a floodA flood destroyed the monastery, ending its role as the central seat of learning.
- 1405Founding of Menri MonasteryNyame Sherab Gyaltsen founded Menri in the Tsang region to continue the scholarly tradition of Yeru Wensakha. Menri became the largest centre of Yungdrung Bön.
- Mid-19th centuryThe canon carved onto woodblocksThe Bön canon, of about three hundred volumes, was carved onto woodblocks for printing, according to the research of Per Kværne.
- 1967Menri re-established at DolanjiMenri Monastery was re-established at Dolanji, in the state of Himachal Pradesh, India, by Lungtok Tenpai Nyima and Lopön Tenzin Namdak. In the same year, David Snellgrove published his excerpted translation The Nine Ways of Bon.
- 1972The Treasury of Good SayingsSamten Karmay published a translation and study of a Bön history, opening a line of research that takes seriously how Bön tells its own story.
- 1987Founding of Triten Norbutse MonasteryA Bön monastery on the western edge of the Kathmandu valley, Nepal, founded by Lopön Tenzin Namdak, now one of the two places that train Bön geshes.
VCore teachings
Vietnamese readers meeting Bön teaching for the first time will find much that is familiar, because its broad framework is close to that of Tibetan Buddhism: there is rebirth, karma, enlightenment, compassion, emptiness, a monastic community and Buddhas. But Bön uses its own vocabulary, its own lineage and its own founder, and arranges its teachings in its own framework. This section goes through each concept, one subsection each, then the next section deals specifically with the Nine Ways and the one after that with the swastika.
Rebirth, karma and enlightenment
Like Buddhism, Bön teaches that beings drift in the cycle of birth and death, reborn into the six realms according to the karma they have created, and that the suffering of that cycle springs from ignorance, that is, not seeing the true nature of the mind and of all things. The final goal is enlightenment, leaving the cycle of birth and death. The Tibetan word for an enlightened being, sangs rgyas, is used in both religions. A practitioner who resolves to act for the benefit of all beings is called byang chub sems dpa' in Tibetan Buddhism, while Bön calls such a person yungdrung sempa, meaning one whose mind is indestructible. The word yungdrung, eternal and indestructible, appears here once again, like a thread running through the whole vocabulary of this religion.
Karma in Bön is likewise intentional action of body, speech and mind, and its fruit ripens according to conditions. The ten virtuous and ten non-virtuous actions are taught much as in Buddhism. The difference lies mainly in arrangement: Bön places many practices that Buddhism regards as folk custom, such as divination, rites for well-being and healing, right inside the framework of its teaching, in the lower ways, as the first rungs of one and the same path.
Kunzhi, the ground of all
In the higher teachings of Bön, above all at the level of Dzogchen, the foundational concept is kunzhi, Tibetan kun gzhi ཀུན་གཞི་, literally the ground of all. Kunzhi is taught as primordially pure, untainted by anything, emptiness and clarity inseparable. All the phenomena of samsara and of nirvana alike arise from that ground. The awareness that recognises itself in that ground is called rigpa རིག་པ་, innate awareness. Not recognising it is called marigpa, ignorance. Therefore, according to Bön teaching, liberation is not going somewhere else but recognising what has always been there.
The word kun gzhi is also found in Buddhist texts, but in many Buddhist systems it refers to the level of the storehouse consciousness, close to the ālaya-vijñāna, something that still lies within the cycle of rebirth. Bön uses the word in a higher sense, for the absolute ground. One word with two levels of meaning, which is why people comparing the two traditions often pause here.
The Four Transcendent Lords and Kuntu Zangpo
At the absolute level, Bön places Kuntu Zangpo ཀུན་ཏུ་བཟང་པོ་, meaning the all-good, as the symbol of the dharmakaya, that is, the formless ground of enlightenment itself. The Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism also uses this name in a similar role, and this is one of the correspondences scholars often cite.
Below that level, Bön venerates a group called the Four Transcendent Lords, in Tibetan de gshegs gtso bo rnam bzhi. Each has a role in the formation and transmission of the teaching. Satrig Ersang is the mother of wisdom, associated with loving kindness and with bringing forth life. Shenlha Okar is the deity of the shen bearing white light, associated with compassion. Sangpo Bumtri is the father of the world, associated with creation. Tonpa Shenrab is the teacher who brings the teaching to beings. Under the library's rules, the page records only the roles of these figures and does not describe their appearance.
The name Sangpo Bumtri, father of the world, easily leads readers to think of a creator standing outside and above the world. Within the framework of Bön teaching, these figures are expressions of enlightenment, not sovereigns who judge beings. Leaving the cycle of rebirth still depends on the practitioner recognising kunzhi, not on anything granted by any being.
A three-tiered world and the spirits of place
Alongside the level of higher teaching is a very concrete worldview, divided into three tiers. The upper tier is the realm of the lha ལྷ་, the beings of the heavens. The middle tier is the realm of the gnyan གཉན་, powers dwelling in rocks, great trees and open space. The lower tier is the realm of the klu ཀླུ་, powers beneath the water and the earth, often translated as dragon spirits or nāgas. There are also the sadag ས་བདག་, the owners of each plot of land, and countless gods of mountains, passes and lakes.
Bön followers do not regard these powers as Buddhas or as objects of refuge. They are beings who share the world with humans, each with its own place and its own temperament. Digging the ground without asking permission, fouling a water source or felling trees at a sacred spot can all offend these powers, and illness or misfortune afterwards is understood as the consequence. That is why there are rites for asking the land's permission, thanking the land, seeking well-being and ransoming a life, which the section on rites below describes. Vietnamese readers familiar with the custom of making offerings to Thổ công, the household earth god, with the ground-breaking ceremony and with the taboo against trespassing where a spirit dwells will find this way of thinking not unfamiliar.
The Four Portals and the Fifth Treasury
Besides the division into Nine Ways, Bön has another way of arranging its teachings, called the Four Portals and the Fifth Treasury, Tibetan sgo bzhi mdzod lnga སྒོ་བཞི་མཛོད་ལྔ་. The sources differ slightly in how they explain each portal. The common understanding is given below.
Chab dkar. The higher tantric teachings, including practices associated with protector deities of wrathful form.
Chab nag. Rites for everyday life: driving out evil, ransoming a life, funerals, divination, rites for well-being.
'Phan yul. Monastic discipline, the vows of lay people and the teachings on emptiness, that is, the part corresponding to the sutras and the vinaya.
dPon gsas. The Dzogchen teachings, transmitted from master to disciple.
mTho thog. The comprehensive treasury, regarded as encompassing and completing all four portals before it.
Dzogchen in Bön
Dzogchen རྫོགས་ཆེན་, meaning the Great Perfection, is the summit of Bön teaching, standing as the ninth way. Bön keeps three main Dzogchen lineages. The first is A-tri, a system of step-by-step practice associated with an 11th-century master named Meuton Gongdzad Ritrod Chenpo. The second is Dzogchen Yangtse Longchen, rediscovered by Zhodton Ngodrub Dragpa in 1080. The third, regarded as the most precious, is Zhangzhung Nyengyud ཞང་ཞུང་སྙན་རྒྱུད་, the oral transmission of Zhangzhung.
What Bön followers stress as special about the Zhangzhung Nyengyud lineage is that it is not a rediscovered text but an unbroken oral transmission from master to disciple. According to this lineage's own account, the teaching passed from Kuntu Zangpo through nine stages of mind-to-mind transmission, then through twenty-four masters, to the accomplished master Tapihritsa, who gave it to Gyerpung Nangzher Lödpo, after which it was written down.
The teaching of Bön Dzogchen is usually summed up like this: the awareness of the mind is primordially pure and self-arising, it does not need to be created, only recognised. All the methods of the eight lower ways serve to prepare the practitioner to reach that recognition. Once it is recognised, the practitioner need not alter anything, only let the mind rest in its natural state, and in this way wandering thoughts dissolve by themselves like writing on the surface of water.
Vows, monastics and lay people
Bön has its own system of vows. A lay person who keeps vows is called a genyen དགེ་བསྙེན་, corresponding to a lay follower. A fully ordained monastic is called a drangsong དྲང་སྲོང་, a word that literally means an upright sage, corresponding to a bhikkhu. The fifth and sixth of the Nine Ways are devoted to these two kinds of people respectively.
Alongside the monks in the monasteries, Bön also keeps a tradition of lay tantric practitioners, who live with their families, perform rites for their villages and pass on their calling within the family line. The history of Bön after the 11th century was in fact carried mainly through a number of family lineages such as the Dru, Zhu, Pa and Meu, which handed down the teaching from generation to generation, before the large monastic system took shape.
VIThe Nine Ways of Bön
The Nine Ways, Tibetan theg pa rim dgu ཐེག་པ་རིམ་དགུ་, are how Bön arranges its entire body of teaching into nine levels, from the most concrete matters of everyday life up to enlightenment. Note that Bön has three different presentations of the Nine Ways, following three bodies of texts called the Southern Treasure, the Northern Treasure and the Central Treasure. The most widely cited, and the one Snellgrove translated in excerpt in 1967, is the Southern Treasure presentation, recorded in the Zijid. The table below follows that presentation. The names of the ways are given in Latin transliteration, because the library has not yet verified the original Tibetan script of each name with enough certainty.
| No. | Name and transliteration | Meaning of the name | Main content | Group |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Phywa gshen, Chashen | Way of the shen of prediction | Divination, consulting the calendar, calculation, diagnosing illness, finding the cause of misfortune | Causal Way |
| 2 | sNang gshen, Nangshen | Way of the shen of the visible world | Rites with the gods and powers of the world: rites for well-being, offerings, inviting protective deities | Causal Way |
| 3 | 'Phrul gshen, Trulshen | Way of the shen of magical illusion | Rites of neutralisation, removing harmful powers | Causal Way |
| 4 | Srid gshen, Sishen | Way of the shen of existence | Funerals, rites for the dead and for the period between two lives | Causal Way |
| 5 | dGe bsnyen, Genyen | Way of the lay follower | The vows of lay people, the ten virtues, generosity, building stupas | Fruitional Way |
| 6 | Drang srong, Drangsong | Way of the sage | The full monastic vows, monastic life | Fruitional Way |
| 7 | A dkar, Akar | Way of the white A | Tantric practice: visualising the tutelary deity, reciting mantras, mandalas | Fruitional Way |
| 8 | Ye gshen, Yeshen | Way of the primordial shen | Higher tantric practice, emphasising attunement with the master and the tutelary deity | Fruitional Way |
| 9 | Bla med, Lame | The unsurpassed way | Dzogchen, the Great Perfection | Fruitional Way |
The most striking thing in the table is the four Causal Ways. Divination, rites for well-being, neutralisation and funerals, matters that in many other religions lie outside official doctrine, or are even regarded as customs to be wary of, are placed in Bön right inside the system of teaching as its first four levels. The reason Bön masters give is that beings differ in capacity: a person who is ill, facing misfortune or grieving a loved one first needs help exactly where they stand, and that very help opens the way for them to the higher ways.
The five Fruitional Ways follow an axis familiar to readers of Tibetan Buddhism: the vows of lay followers, the vows of monastics, two levels of tantric practice, then Dzogchen at the summit. Each higher way does not reject the lower ones but encompasses them, so a Dzogchen master can still perform a rite for the well-being of a village.
The Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism also divides its teachings into nine vehicles and also places Dzogchen at the summit. The two tables coincide in the number nine and in the highest level, but the lower levels differ clearly: the Nyingma table begins with the vehicles of the Śrāvakas, the Pratyekabuddhas and the Bodhisattvas, and has no four Causal Ways dealing with divination and funerals as Bön does. Scholars still discuss the relationship between the two tables. Here it is enough to remember not to substitute one table for the other.
VIIYungdrung, the reversed swastika of Bön
One cannot speak of Bön without yungdrung གཡུང་དྲུང་. It is both a word in Tibetan and a shape: the swastika shape with four arms bent towards the same side. The word appears everywhere in this religion: in the name of the religion, in the name for a practitioner, yungdrung sempa, and in the name of the nine-storey mountain Yungdrung Gutseg. Under the library's rules, this section describes it in words only and prints no image.
According to Bön teaching, the word yungdrung means eternal, indestructible, unchanging. There is a syllable-by-syllable explanation that Bön masters often use: yung refers to what is unborn, drung to what does not cease. That which is neither born nor ceases is the very nature of the mind and of the teaching. The yungdrung shape is therefore the symbol of the absolute permanence of truth, and in Bön it holds a position close to that of the diamond sceptre, the vajra, in Tibetan Buddhism. Chinese transcribes the word as 雍仲, read in Sino-Vietnamese as ung trọng.
The Tibetologist Sam van Schaik, studying the texts found at Dunhuang, notes that yungdrung is a Tibetan word that predates Buddhism, carrying the general meaning of eternal, and associated with the religion of the ancient Tibetan royal court. When Buddhism arrived, Buddhist translators borrowed that very word to translate a number of different concepts: some used it for nirvana, some for the Sanskrit sanātana, meaning everlasting. Later, Tibetan Buddhism standardised its usage. By the 11th century, Bön had taken the word yungdrung as the centre of its identity, and the name Yungdrung Bön was born from that. In other words, the word did not belong to either side from the start, but is an ancient word that both traditions used in their own way.
The direction of turning, and why it is the reverse of Tibetan Buddhism
The Bön yungdrung turns anticlockwise. The swastika used in Tibetan Buddhism turns clockwise. This difference is not accidental: it matches the direction of circumambulation in each religion. Tibetan Buddhists walk around stupas, temples and sacred mountains clockwise, keeping the sacred object on their right. Bön followers walk in the opposite direction. The hand-turned prayer wheels of Bön followers also spin in the opposite direction to those of Buddhists. The yungdrung shape therefore works like a signpost, telling walkers which tradition they are in.
One point that easily causes confusion must be noted. Books name the direction of a swastika in two different ways: some go by the side towards which the arms bend, others by the direction in which the whole figure seems to be turning. So the same shape is called left-turning in one book and right-turning in another. To avoid confusion, the library describes it by the corresponding direction of circumambulation, which is how Bön followers and Tibetan Buddhists themselves understand it. In Vietnam, as the Buddhism page notes, Vietnamese temples use both directions.
How it differs from the Nazi emblem
Readers who grew up with 20th-century European history books are often startled to see a swastika on the gate of a Bön monastery. The distinction needs to be made clearly, and calmly. The emblem used by the German Nazi Party, called in German the Hakenkreuz, literally the hooked cross, has four features: it stands tilted at forty-five degrees, resting on a point, its arms bend clockwise, it is coloured black, and it is set in a white disc on a red flag.
The Bön yungdrung differs on all four points. It stands upright, its edges parallel or perpendicular to the ground. It turns anticlockwise, the reverse even of the direction of the Nazi emblem. It appears on monastery walls, on altars and on decorative cloth, in a religious setting. And most important, it carries the meaning eternal, indestructible, a meaning in use on the Tibetan plateau from before Buddhism arrived, that is, long before that party existed.
The yungdrung is the rightful identifying symbol of Bön. But the Hall of Myriad Paths library has a general rule of not using the swastika shape in its emblems in any form, applied to Buddhism, Jainism and Bön alike, because viewers in different countries read that shape in very different ways. Instead, the emblem of this page is the nine-storey sacred mountain, Yungdrung Gutseg, a genuine sacred symbol of Bön and not a makeshift substitute. This is stated not to suggest that there is anything wrong with the yungdrung shape, only so that readers know why it does not appear at the top of the page.
VIIIScriptures: the Bön Kangyur and Tengyur
Bön has a vast canon, divided into two parts following the very pattern used in Tibetan Buddhism. The Kangyur བཀའ་འགྱུར་ contains the teachings regarded as those of Tonpa Shenrab himself. The Tengyur བརྟེན་འགྱུར་ contains commentaries, annotations and ritual texts composed by later masters. According to Per Kværne, writing in the Encyclopedia of Religion, the entire Bön canon today comprises about three hundred volumes, carved onto woodblocks for printing around the middle of the 19th century.
The Kangyur is divided into four major categories: sutras, mdo, perfection of wisdom, 'bum, tantras, rgyud, and mind, mdzod, the part containing the highest teachings. Some editions add a volume on the lineage. The number of volumes varies from edition to edition, and the table below follows an edition of 179 volumes.
| Part | Tibetan name | Volumes | Content |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sutras | mdo | 1 to 74 | Teachings on rebirth, karma, vows, the biography of Tonpa Shenrab |
| Perfection of wisdom | 'bum | 75 to 144 | Teachings on wisdom and emptiness, long and highly repetitive, like the Prajñāpāramitā corpus of Buddhism |
| Tantras | rgyud | 145 to 170 | Tantric ritual texts, visualisation, mantra recitation, protector practices |
| Mind | mdzod | 171 to 178 | The highest teachings, including the Dzogchen texts |
| Lineage | 179 | Records of the transmission of the teaching |
Terma, the rediscovered texts
Most of the Bön canon, as the religion itself tells it, is terma གཏེར་མ་, texts hidden during the period of the religion's decline and later rediscovered when the conditions were right. A person who reveals them is called a tertön. The texts might be found in rock caves, inside temple pillars or beneath the bases of statues, and some are regarded as revealed from within the mind of a practitioner. The rediscovery mentioned most often is that of Shenchen Luga, who lived from 996 to 1035 and found a large body of texts around 1017. The rediscovered texts are divided into the Southern Treasure, the Northern Treasure and the Central Treasure, depending on where they were found.
Alongside terma is the line of oral transmission, Tibetan snyan brgyud, such as the Zhangzhung Nyengyud lineage mentioned in an earlier section, and the Zijid written down in the 14th century. Tibetan Buddhism, especially the Nyingma school, also has a very large terma tradition, and this is one of the places where the two religions come closest.
The Bön canon only truly entered the scope of international research in the second half of the 20th century. Snellgrove translated excerpts of the Zijid in 1967. Samten Karmay published The Treasury of Good Sayings in 1972, translating and studying a history written by Bön followers themselves. From the late 1990s, a group of Japanese and European scholars compiled catalogues of the Bön Kangyur and Tengyur, making it possible for the first time to look up each individual text.
Textual comparison has shown that many passages of Bön scripture are very close to corresponding Buddhist texts, sometimes almost identical word for word but with the names of people and places changed. Scholars read this phenomenon in different ways. One view holds that Bön adapted Buddhist texts during its formative period. Another points out that the borrowing went in both directions, and that Bön also keeps many texts on ritual, funerary practice and mythology that have no counterpart on the Buddhist side. Bön followers hold to their own understanding, that these texts are the words of Tonpa Shenrab.
IXRites and practice
Seen from outside, the practice of a Bön lay follower looks very much like that of a Tibetan Buddhist: prostrations, circumambulation, mantra recitation, smoke offerings, prayer flags. The differences lie in the direction of walking, the mantras, the figures to whom practice is directed, and which way the everyday rites are assigned to.
In Tibetan, kora སྐོར་བ་. Bön followers walk around stupas, monasteries, sacred mountains and sacred lakes anticlockwise, keeping the sacred object on their left. This is the most easily recognised sign in everyday life.
An eight-syllable mantra often regarded as the heart mantra of Bön, transliterated as Om Ma Tri Mu Ye Sa Le Du, associated with the mother of wisdom. Bön followers carve it onto mani stones and recite it on prayer beads, as Tibetan Buddhists recite Om Mani Padme Hum.
In Tibetan, sang བསང་. Burning juniper branches and fragrant leaves and sprinkling barley flour on the fire so that the smoke rises as an offering to the beings of the heavens and purifies the dwelling place. This custom is shared by Bön followers and Buddhists on the plateau.
In Tibetan, lungta རླུང་རྟ་, literally wind horse. Five-coloured cloth flags printed with mantras and prayers, hung on high passes, rooftops and suspension bridges so that the wind carries the prayers away. Bön followers arrange and interpret the colours in their own way.
Figures moulded from barley flour mixed with butter, used as offerings or as substitutes for a life in ransom rites, called lüd. The Bön tradition tells that Tonpa Shenrab himself taught the use of these figures in place of live sacrificial animals.
Part of the first way. Bön followers divine with prayer beads, with knotted cords and by observing omens, and reckon the calendar by Tibetan years and months to choose days for major undertakings.
Funerals and the state between two lives
Funerals are the area in which Bön has its deepest tradition. The ancient documents on the ritual specialists bon po and gshen speak mainly of their performing funerals for the nobility, and among the Nine Ways, the entire fourth way is devoted to this. Bön has its own teaching on the period between death and rebirth, corresponding to the concept of the intermediate state, bardo in Tibetan, which Vietnamese readers know from books on Tibetan Buddhism. Ritual masters are invited to recite texts guiding the deceased, and to perform ransom rites and offerings in the weeks after the death. Vietnamese readers familiar with cúng thất, the memorial offerings made every seven days after a death, and with prayers for the deliverance of the dead will find this rhythm close to home, although the content of the recitations is entirely different.
Monastic life
A Bön monk's ordinary day includes morning and evening chanting, study of scriptures and treatises, debate and retreat. The course of study for the geshe degree lasts many years, covering logic, monastic discipline, emptiness, tantric practice and Dzogchen, along with medicine and calendrical science. The ritual calendar follows the Tibetan calendar, including Losar, the Tibetan New Year, and the days commemorating the life of Tonpa Shenrab.
Some older books describe Bön as a religion of animal sacrifice. That description refers to rites that ancient documents record for the period before Buddhism, that is, the first meaning of the word Bön. Yungdrung Bön, through its own account of Tonpa Shenrab, replaces live sacrificial animals with torma and ransom effigies moulded from dough, and the vows of Bön monastics forbid killing, just as Buddhist vows do.
XMount Kailash and Lake Mapang
Mount Kailash stands in the west of the Tibetan plateau, in the Ngari region, a snow-covered rock massif of almost pyramidal shape, with four steep faces, standing well apart from the surrounding peaks. In Tibetan it is called Tise ཏི་སེ་ or Gang Rinpoche གངས་རིན་པོ་ཆེ་, meaning precious snow mountain. On its height, the sources differ: Britannica gives 6,714 metres, while many other sources, based on more recent measurements, give 6,638 metres. The library records both.
Kailash is sacred to four religions at once. Hindus regard it as the abode of the god Shiva. Jains regard it as the place where the first Tirthankara attained liberation. Tibetan Buddhists regard it as the abode of the tutelary deity Chakrasamvara. And Bön followers regard it as the centre of the Zhangzhung region, where Tonpa Shenrab came and consecrated the whole area.
According to the Bön tradition, the mountain once bore the name of the mountain god who dwelt on it. Tonpa Shenrab came to this region, entered the mountain, and manifested there the mandala of three hundred and sixty tutelary deities, making the whole area a refuge of the teaching. He renamed the mountain Tise: in the Zhangzhung language ti means water and se means protector deity. Some Bön texts even identify Kailash with Yungdrung Gutseg གཡུང་དྲུང་དགུ་བརྩེགས་ itself, the nine-storey mountain at the centre of the land of Olmo Lungring.
Not every Bön text follows that identification. Bön masters themselves teach that Yungdrung Gutseg of Olmo Lungring and Mount Tise of Zhangzhung are two places, and that texts attaching the name and landscape of one to the other are like the many cities around the world that share the same name. For pilgrims, the distinction does not matter much: the nine-storey mountain is the archetype of a world with an axis, and Kailash is the place where that axis touches the ground in a form human eyes can see.
The circuit around the foot of the mountain is about fifty-two kilometres long, with sources giving 52 to 53 kilometres, and crosses a pass higher than five thousand metres. Bön followers walk anticlockwise, while Buddhists and Hindus walk clockwise, so on the same path the pilgrims of the two sides meet each other face to face. Below the mountain lies Lake Manasarovar, which Bön followers call Mapang Yutso, where according to the tradition the queen of the klu dwells together with countless water spirits.
Surveys in the west of the plateau have recorded many ancient sites around the Kailash region and the Khyunglung valley: citadel foundations on rock, inhabited caves, burials. Linking these sites with the capital Khyunglung Ngulkhar of the Bön tradition has not been agreed upon by archaeologists. The names, dates and religion of those inhabitants remain open questions.
XIMenri Monastery and the structure of the monastic community
Bön has no central church in the sense of a body with authority to decide doctrine for all its followers. What holds Bön together are its lineages of transmission, the families that keep the religion and its great monasteries, with Menri སྨན་རི་ Monastery at their head. The abbot of Menri, called the Menri Trizin, is widely regarded by Bön followers as the spiritual head of Yungdrung Bön.
From Yeru Wensakha to Menri
Before Menri there was Yeru Wensakha Monastery, founded in 1072 in the Tsang region of the central plateau, run by the Dru family, and serving as the centre of Bön learning for more than three centuries. In 1386 a flood destroyed this monastery. In 1405, Nyame Sherab Gyaltsen founded Menri on a nearby mountainside to continue the lost scholarly tradition. On the year of his death, the sources differ by one year: the Encyclopedia of Buddhism gives his dates as 1356 to 1415, while some other sources give 1356 to 1416. In the same Tsang region there are two other large Bön monasteries, Yungdrung Ling and Kharna, often listed together with Menri as the three centres of learning of the religion.
Menri at Dolanji and Triten Norbutse in Kathmandu
In 1967, Menri Monastery was re-established at Dolanji, in the state of Himachal Pradesh, India, built through the efforts of Lungtok Tenpai Nyima, the thirty-third Menri Trizin, together with Lopön Tenzin Namdak. Menri at Dolanji now has more than two hundred monks, a debate school and a geshe training programme. In 1987, Lopön Tenzin Namdak founded Triten Norbutse Monastery on the western edge of the Kathmandu valley, Nepal. These are the only two places currently training Bön geshes. On the plateau, many Bön monasteries still keep up their activities, and in the mountain regions of Nepal such as Dolpo and Mustang there are villages that have followed Bön for generations.
The abbot of Menri Monastery, regarded as the spiritual head of Yungdrung Bön. The word trizin means throne holder.
The principal teaching master of a monastery, the one in charge of the course of study.
The highest degree of the monastic course of study, awarded after many years of studying logic, monastic discipline, tantric practice and Dzogchen.
XIIBön and Tibetan Buddhism: borrowing in both directions
The two religions have lived on the same plateau for more than a thousand years, sharing a language, a style of monastic architecture, a system of medicine and calendrical science, and the same underlying layer of folk belief. An outsider standing in the courtyard of a Bön monastery and of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery may sometimes be unable to tell them apart. Insiders, however, distinguish them very clearly, and the table below gathers the differences commonly cited.
| Feature | Yungdrung Bön | Tibetan Buddhism |
|---|---|---|
| Founder | Tonpa Shenrab, born in Olmo Lungring | Shakyamuni Buddha, born in Lumbini |
| Word for the teaching | Bön | Chos, meaning Dharma |
| Direction of circumambulation | Anticlockwise | Clockwise |
| Direction of the swastika | Turning anticlockwise | Turning clockwise |
| Original language of the scriptures according to the tradition | Zhangzhung, with a more distant origin in Tagzig | Sanskrit |
| Arrangement of the teachings | Nine Ways according to three treasures, the Four Portals and the Fifth Treasury | Three vehicles, with nine vehicles in the Nyingma school alone |
| Summit of the teachings | Dzogchen, with three lineages of Bön's own | Dzogchen in the Nyingma school, Mahamudra in the other schools |
This is the largest debate in Bön studies, and the library records the main readings without adjudicating. Helmut Hoffmann, in the mid-20th century, read ancient Bön as an animist and shamanic religion, and later Yungdrung Bön as an imitation of Buddhism. David Snellgrove revised that reading, regarding Bön as an unorthodox form of Buddhism, possibly originating in tantric Buddhism that had reached the western plateau by way of Zhangzhung, and deliberately emphasising its pre-Buddhist elements rather than dismissing them. Per Kværne uses the word Bön mainly for the tradition that took shape from the 10th and 11th centuries with a conscious sense of continuity with the past. Samten Karmay, himself from the Bön tradition, takes seriously what Bön says about itself and treats Bön as a distinct tradition. Geoffrey Samuel holds that Bön is essentially a variant of Tibetan Buddhism that nonetheless retains some genuinely ancient elements from before Buddhism.
The view of Bön followers themselves is clear: their religion is the teaching of a different Buddha, present on the plateau before Buddhism, and where there are similarities it is because Tibetan Buddhism took much from Bön when it entered this land. Between these two poles, many recent researchers stress one point that both sides can accept: the two religions borrowed from each other in both directions over many centuries. Tibetan Buddhism took from the ancient layer of the plateau its mountain gods, smoke offerings, prayer flags and many local protector deities. Bön took from Buddhism the monastic model, the model of logic and many bodies of texts. The Nyingma school and Bön are especially close: the same terma tradition, the same Dzogchen, the same name Kuntu Zangpo.
In the 19th century, the Rimé movement, meaning non-sectarian, in the east of the plateau brought masters of many traditions to learn from one another, among them the Bön master Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen.
There are two mistaken claims pointing in opposite directions. One holds that Bön is merely a copy of Tibetan Buddhism with the names changed. The other holds that Tibetan Buddhism is merely Bön in Indian dress. Both overlook more than a thousand years in which the two traditions lived side by side, debated with each other and learned from each other. Acknowledging that closeness takes nothing away from the distinct identity of either side.
XIIINumber of followers, and why there is no reliable count
The library must say plainly from the outset: there is no reliable count of the number of Bön followers. The figure cited most often in English-language material is up to about 400,000 people across the whole Tibetan plateau. But that is an estimate by some scholars, repeated by many reports on world religions since 2012, not the result of a census. Per Kværne's article in the Encyclopedia of Religion gives no figure, noting only that Bön followers are a sizeable minority, that there are areas in the east of the plateau where the whole population follows Bön, and that there are scattered communities elsewhere.
Pew Research Center, in its report published in June 2025 with 2020 baseline data, divides the world's population into seven major groups and has no separate category for Bön. Depending on how they answer, Bön followers may fall into the Buddhist group or the group of other religions.
The library could find no population census or large-scale survey in Tibetan-inhabited areas that asks people specifically whether they follow Bön.
Bön followers and Buddhists live within the same layer of folk belief: the same smoke offerings, the same prayer flags, the same worship of mountain gods. At that level, the boundary between the two religions is very blurred. Many families invite a Bön master for one rite and a Buddhist master for another.
Those who count in the broad sense, including the layer of folk belief, arrive at a very large figure. Those who count in the narrow sense, only people who identify as followers of Yungdrung Bön, arrive at a much smaller figure.
For these reasons, the library records the estimated figure with its full source and year, and advises readers to understand it as an order of magnitude, that is, hundreds of thousands of people, not a precise figure. The numbers of monks and monasteries are easier to count, such as the more than two hundred monks at Menri in Dolanji recorded in the previous section.
Beyond the plateau and in Vietnam
Beyond the plateau, Bön is present in India, with Menri Monastery and the settlement around it at Dolanji, in Nepal, with Triten Norbutse Monastery and the Bön villages of the mountain regions of Dolpo and Mustang, and since the late 20th century in a number of practice centres in Europe and the Americas founded by Bön masters, such as Shenten Dargye Ling in France. The Western centres mainly teach Dzogchen meditation and practices for lay people.
In Vietnam, the library found no organisation or place of worship of the Bön religion. According to figures published by the Ban Tôn giáo Chính phủ (the Government Committee for Religious Affairs) on 1 August 2025, Vietnam recognises 16 religions with 43 religious organisations granted registration to operate, with 27.7 million followers and 29,890 places of worship, and Bön is not among them. Vietnamese people know of Bön mainly through books on Tibetan Buddhism, through pilgrimages to Mount Kailash, and through translated books on Dzogchen meditation.
XIVThrough the eyes of feng shui
One thing must be made clear first, because it determines how this whole section should be read: Bön does not teach Chinese feng shui. No Bön text discusses dragon veins in the manner of the Form School, and no Bön master reads the orientation of a house by the Eight Mansions method. This section is the library's own reading through the lens of traditional Vietnamese feng shui, written so that readers familiar with that approach have a point of comparison, not to attribute feng shui to Bön.
Bön has its own ways of examining land and its own calendrical science
That does not mean Bön is unconcerned with land. On the contrary, because the Bön worldview is full of land owners, water spirits and mountain gods, choosing land and asking permission for it are serious matters. On the plateau there is a discipline called sa dpyad ས་དཔྱད་, meaning examination of the land, shared by Bön followers and Buddhists alike, for assessing the lie of a plot before building a monastery or a house. Before breaking ground, people perform a rite of asking the land's permission, in Tibetan sa chog ས་ཆོག་, to inform the sadag and the klu of that place, ask their permission, present offerings and promise to keep their dwelling clean.
Tibetan calendrical science also has a branch of Chinese origin, called nag rtsis, meaning black calculation, which uses eight trigrams called spar kha and nine numbers called sme ba, precisely the eight trigrams and the nine numbers of the Luoshu that students of Vietnamese feng shui know. Buddhists and Bön followers alike use this branch to choose days, assess compatibility by birth year and forecast difficult periods. Bön in particular places divination and calendrical calculation in the first of the Nine Ways, and regards them as disciplines taught by Tonpa Shenrab.
What rules orient a Bön monastery
The honest answer is that Bön has no general rule of orientation like the mosque facing Mecca or the traditional Catholic church facing east. What most determines the layout of a Bön monastery is the shape of the mountain where it is built, the rite of asking permission from the land owners there, and the anticlockwise direction of circumambulation, because the circumambulation paths around the main hall, the stupas and the rows of prayer wheels must be laid out so that people walk in that direction. Many monasteries on the plateau, Bön and Buddhist alike, rest their backs against a mountainside and face the sunny side, but that is an observable tendency in cold mountain regions, not a rule of the religion.
| Feature of Bön | Point of comparison in the Vietnamese manner |
|---|---|
| Mount Kailash and the nine-storey mountain as the axis of the world | Close to the idea of the ancestral mountain, the mother mountain from which the dragon veins radiate, and to the idea of a central axis that keeps a land at peace |
| Sadag, the land owners, and klu under the water and the earth | Close to Thổ công, Thổ địa (the household and local earth gods) and the dragon spirits of Vietnamese belief, all of them powers with their own domain over each plot of land and each watercourse |
| The rite of asking the land's permission before building | Close to the Vietnamese ground-breaking ceremony, which likewise informs the earth god and asks permission before the foundations are dug |
| Prayer flags hung on high passes and mountain tops | The reverse of the feng shui principle of sheltering from the wind and gathering qi: prayer flags need windswept places so that the prayers fly away, while a dwelling in the Vietnamese manner needs a sheltered place so that qi gathers |
| Eight trigrams and nine numbers in calendrical science | These are the very eight trigrams and nine palaces of the Luoshu, from the same mainland root, but Tibetans use them more for assessing compatibility by birth year and choosing days than for reading the orientation of a house |
The first layer, Bön's own. A world with owners, the rite of asking the land's permission, the direction of circumambulation, the sacred mountain as axis. These are teaching and ritual, and within them there is no Chinese feng shui.
The second layer, shared across the plateau. The land examination discipline sa dpyad and the calendrical branch of Chinese origin with its eight trigrams and nine numbers. Bön followers and Buddhists both use them, and that calendrical branch is the real meeting point with the divinatory arts familiar to Vietnamese readers.
The third layer, this library's reading. The comparison table above, meant only to help readers used to the Vietnamese approach picture things. Reading the orientation of a house by the Eight Mansions method is not a Bön practice, just as walking anticlockwise around a mountain is not a feng shui practice.
XVCommon misunderstandings
Bön is a religion rarely written about in Vietnamese, and most of the information reaching Vietnamese readers comes through books on Tibetan Buddhism, travel books and old encyclopedias. This section gathers the most common misreadings.
That is not enough. The description is only partly true of the first meaning of the word Bön, the ancient religion about which history knows very little. Yungdrung Bön today has a canon of about three hundred volumes, monasteries, ordained monks, the geshe degree and a system of Dzogchen meditation.
Bön followers do not accept this. They take refuge in a different Buddha, Tonpa Shenrab, keep their own scriptures and circumambulate in the opposite direction. Some scholars regard Bön as an unorthodox form of Buddhism, others as a distinct tradition. The library records both views and uses the name Bön followers use for themselves.
No. Yungdrung carried the meaning of eternal on the Tibetan plateau from before Buddhism arrived. The Nazi Party emblem stands tilted at forty-five degrees, turns clockwise, and is black in a white disc on a red field. The Bön yungdrung stands upright, turns anticlockwise and means indestructible.
No. The direction only indicates which tradition it belongs to: Tibetan Buddhism uses the clockwise direction, matching its direction of circumambulation, and Bön uses the anticlockwise direction, matching its own. In Vietnam, temples use both directions. Neither side regards the other's direction as a bad omen.
No. In Bön, Tonpa Shenrab is a different Buddha, born in Olmo Lungring, placed by the tradition in 16017 BC, with his own family and lineage. History has no independent document about him, and the library records both the teaching and the historical sources.
No. Bön has rites for neutralising harmful powers, but their purpose is to restore balance, not to worship those powers. The Bön tradition tells that Tonpa Shenrab himself replaced live sacrificial animals with figures moulded from dough, and Bön vows forbid killing.
No. Bön still has monasteries on the plateau, Menri Monastery in Dolanji with more than two hundred monks, Triten Norbutse Monastery in Kathmandu, Bön villages in the mountain regions of Nepal, and practice centres in Europe and the Americas.
No one has been able to locate it. The Bön tradition places Olmo Lungring in the country of Tagzig to the west of Tibet, and scholars have put forward many hypotheses pointing to Central Asia or Persia, but none has convinced the majority. Bön followers understand Olmo Lungring as both a place and a sacred realm.
?Quick Questions
What is Bön?
Bön is the long-established religious tradition of the Tibetan plateau, which has stood alongside Tibetan Buddhism for more than a thousand years. Its followers call it Yungdrung Bön, eternal Bön, and believe it was taught by Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, a Buddha of its own whom the tradition places in 16017 BC. Bön has a canon of about three hundred volumes, monasteries, monks and a system of teaching in Nine Ways whose summit is Dzogchen. The most easily recognised signs are that Bön followers circumambulate anticlockwise and use a swastika turning anticlockwise.
How do Bön and Tibetan Buddhism differ?
The two religions are alike in their broad framework: rebirth, karma, enlightenment, monasteries, tantric practice, Dzogchen. The differences lie in the founder, since Bön followers take refuge in Tonpa Shenrab while Buddhists take refuge in Shakyamuni Buddha, in their separate scriptures, in their opposite directions of circumambulation and of the swastika, in their mantras, and in the division of the teaching into Nine Ways, of which the first four are devoted to divination, rites for well-being, neutralisation and funerals. Scholars still debate the relationship between the two religions, but all note that they have borrowed from each other in both directions.
Is the Bön swastika the Nazi swastika?
No. The Bön swastika is called yungdrung, meaning eternal and indestructible, a word that existed on the Tibetan plateau before Buddhism arrived. It stands upright and turns anticlockwise, matching the Bön direction of circumambulation. The emblem of the German Nazi Party, called the Hakenkreuz, stands tilted at forty-five degrees, turns clockwise, and is coloured black in a white disc on a red flag. The two shapes differ in angle, direction, colour and setting, and are entirely different in meaning.
Who is Tonpa Shenrab?
Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche is the founder of the Bön religion. According to the Bön biographies, he was born in the land of Olmo Lungring, lived as a prince, had a family, renounced worldly life at thirty-one, came to Tibet only once, in pursuit of stolen horses, and died at eighty-two. The standard Bön chronology places his birth in 16017 BC, while another calculation gives 20995 BC. History has no document independent of the Bön texts confirming him as a historical figure.
How many followers does Bön have?
There is no reliable count. The most widely cited figure is up to about 400,000 people across the whole Tibetan plateau, an estimate by some scholars repeated in many reports on world religions since 2012. Pew Research Center, in its June 2025 report with 2020 baseline data, does not list Bön as a separate category. Counting is difficult because the word Bön has several meanings, because Bön followers and Buddhists live within the same layer of folk belief, and because many families invite masters of both religions.
Why do Bön followers walk around Mount Kailash anticlockwise?
Because that is the Bön direction of circumambulation, which Bön followers regard as the purifying direction, and it matches the direction of the yungdrung, the symbol of the religion. Tibetan Buddhists and Hindus walk around Kailash clockwise, so on the same circuit of about 52 to 53 kilometres the pilgrims of the two sides meet each other face to face. For Bön followers, Kailash is the centre of the Zhangzhung region, where Tonpa Shenrab came, and some texts even identify it with the nine-storey mountain Yungdrung Gutseg.
Is Bön present in Vietnam?
No. The library found no organisation or place of worship of the Bön religion in Vietnam. According to figures published by the Ban Tôn giáo Chính phủ (the Government Committee for Religious Affairs) on 1 August 2025, Vietnam recognises 16 religions with 43 religious organisations granted registration to operate, and Bön is not among them. Beyond the Tibetan plateau, Bön is present in India with Menri Monastery at Dolanji, in Nepal with Triten Norbutse Monastery in Kathmandu and the villages of Dolpo and Mustang, and in a number of practice centres in Europe and the Americas.