Yungdrung Bön: The most ancient spiritual tradition of Tibet
Yungdrung Bön (Eternal Bön) is the native spiritual and cultural tradition of Tibet and its Himalayan borderlands. It originated in Central Asia and has played a significant role in its history since prehistoric times. Eventually, it took root in what is now the land of Tibet.
The teachings of Yungdrung Bön were revealed by Tonpa Shenrab Miwo, a fully realized buddha, thousands of years ago. Since then, the ancient knowledge has been transmitted from teacher to student in an unbroken lineage, ensuring that the tradition flourishes up to the present times.
Rather than being a religious doctrine, Bön reveals the essence of all phenomena and deals with the fundamental base of human nature that is shared by all.
Alongside higher spiritual teachings, its doctrines hold the knowledge of the Five Sciences, which include detailed texts on art, poetry, medicine and astrology.
History and origin
Bön precedes written records. It represents the oldest known form of so-called Tibetan Buddhism and may be considered one of the world’s most ancient organized traditions. Being Tibet´s cultural ground, Yungdrung Bön and Tibetan Buddhism share much in common, yet maintain their own unique features. The origin of many Tibetan Buddhist traditional rituals as well as philosophy and healing practices can be traced back to ancient practices of Bön.
Bön: A term of broad meaning
The history of the word bön is as old as the history of Tibet itself. Possibly deriving from the old verb form bond-pa, meaning “to invoke the gods”, it carries different cultural references.
In many contexts, there were indigenous pre-Buddhist shamanistic and animistic cultures of Tibet referred to as Bön, possessing characteristics shared with other shamanic tribal cultures of Central Asia and Siberia, cultures based on the central figure of a practitioner known as a shaman who, through altered states of consciousness, functioned mainly as a healer. There were elaborate ritual animal sacrifices for pacifying gods, deities and local spirits, as well as for maintaining power, that formed part of the common practices of these cultures. There are areas in which such practitioners are known as bön or bönpo. However, these ritual systems have no relation with the tradition of Yungdrung Bön, the ancient system of spiritual teachings that originated in the land of Zhang Zhung from the enlightened master Buddha Tonpa Shenrab.
The great kingdom of Zhang Zhung
The Zhang Zhung kingdom was one of the biggest kingdoms of early times, and recent discoveries prove that it represented one of Asia’s major Iron Age civilizations.
It encompassed the Tibetan Plateau, the northern Himalaya, parts of China, northern India, Gilgit, Ladakh, Nepal and the Great Steppe. Its borders reached what is now known as western and northern Tibet, and Tibet itself was only the central part. It was from here that Yungdrung Bön spread into the neighboring lands of Central Tibet.
Bön historians believe that Bön was widespread in Central Asia before Islam came to dominate the cultures there, and that many of the antiquities uncovered in that area and assumed to be Buddhist are actually Bön.
Until the eighth century, the time of the rule of Tibet’s 38th king Trisong Deutsan, Bön was thus the predominant religious culture over an extremely wide land range of Asia. This changed when the Zhang Zhung empire collapsed under the invasion of Trisong Deutsan. After he introduced Indian Buddhism as a new state religion, Bön suffered major persecution. However, despite its banishment, it continued to exert a powerful influence on the Tibetan nation and indeed, to this very day, it still permeates the language, customs, folklore, medicine, and architecture of Tibet and the surrounding regions.
This has been recognized by H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama, who has emphasized “The importance of preserving the Bön tradition, as representing the indigenous source of Tibetan culture, and acknowledging the major role it has had in shaping Tibet’s unique identity”.