The Nine Ways of Bon

Introduction

Bon divides its teachings into nine ways, or vehicles, theg pa. The lowest deal with divination, healing and the spirits of the land. The highest deals with the nature of mind. A practitioner of a higher way may still use the lower ones when the need arises, and the tradition says all nine rest on compassion.

The scheme comes with a claim about origins. Bonpo histories say their teachings did not begin in Tibet, nor even in Zhang-zhung, the kingdom around Mount Kailash where they were first written down, but further west, in Tazig. The history of that name is traced in The Tribe in the Tantra. This essay describes the nine ways themselves and then looks at the arguments over where they came from.

Three treasures, one scheme

Bonpo scripture survived, by its own account, as terma: texts hidden during persecutions and recovered later, beginning with the discoveries of Shenchen Luga in 1017. The nine ways are arranged differently depending on where the texts were found. The Southern Treasures were revealed in Bhutan and southern Tibet, the Northern Treasures in Zhang-zhung and northern Tibet, and the Central Treasures near Samye in central Tibet.

The arrangement described here is the southern one, as it appears in the gZi brjid, the fourteenth-century life of Shenrab Miwo. It reached English through an unusual collaboration. In 1961 David Snellgrove of the University of London brought three Bonpo scholars to England under a Rockefeller Foundation programme: Tenzin Namdak, Sangye Tenzin, who later became abbot of Menri as Lungtok Tenpai Nyima, and Samten Karmay. Tenzin Namdak chose the passages and Snellgrove translated them. The Nine Ways of Bon appeared from Oxford University Press in 1967. It was the first scholarly study of Bon published in the West, and it is still the only extended translation of the nine ways in English.

Snellgrove’s translation is careful. His own conclusions about where Bon came from date from a time when Western scholars knew very little about the tradition, and they read best in that light.

The ways of cause

The first four ways are the Bon of Cause. They deal with this life: illness, misfortune, the dead and the spirits of the land. When writers call part of Bon shamanic, these are the four they mean.

The Shen of Prediction

The first way, phyva gshen, or Chashen, has four methods: divination by lots, mo; astrological calculation, rtsis; ritual, gto; and medical diagnosis, dpyad. Its practitioner works out whether a sick person suffers from an imbalance of energies or from the attention of a spirit, and treats accordingly.

The Shen of the Visible World

The second, snang gshen, or Nangshen, deals with the gods and demons of this world, placating some and overpowering others. Its rites purify, summon prosperity, make offerings to powerful deities and pay ransoms to harmful spirits. In a ransom rite an effigy stands in for the person being protected. It can be life-size and dressed in that person’s clothes, so that the spirit takes the substitute.

The Shen of Illusion

The third, ‘phrul gshen, or Trulshen, holds the rites against enemies of every kind. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche describes its practitioners going to places of wild energy to subdue the spirits that live there and bind them into service, through mantra, mudra and meditation, invoking wrathful goddesses such as Walmo and Chenmo. Snellgrove noted that rites of the same kind appear in Buddhist tantras such as the Hevajra.

The Shen of Existence

The fourth, srid gshen, or Sishen, deals with death. It covers funeral rites, the bar do between death and rebirth, and ways of guiding the dead through it. Wangyal counts eighty-one kinds of death, among them accident, suicide and murder, each needing its own rite.

This way also holds the fullest Bonpo account of the soul. Wangyal distinguishes three things. The la is the karmic trace, stored in the base consciousness. The sem, the thinking mind, follows that trace and produces experiences that are blissful, painful or neutral. The yid is the mind that undergoes them. When a living person’s la is lost or shattered, the Sishen practitioner performs lalu, buying back the soul, or chilu, redeeming the life force.

Wangyal thinks these four ways have something to offer outside Tibet: “if the causal means of shamanism were practiced widely in the world, it would be of great benefit for the environment and the world community. It would be of even greater benefit if all nine vehicles were practiced.”

The ways of fruit

The last five ways are the Bon of Fruit. They are concerned with liberation.

Lay followers and monks

The fifth way, dge bsnyen, sets out the conduct of lay followers who take vows: the ten virtues, the ten perfections, and the building and worship of stupas. Dge bsnyen is the ordinary Tibetan translation of Sanskrit upasaka, the Buddhist lay follower.

The sixth, drang srong, is the way of the fully ordained monk and his rule. Drang srong translates Sanskrit rishi, the seers of India’s past. The Bonpo use it where Buddhists say dge slong, a bhikshu.

The White A and the Primeval Shen

The seventh and eighth ways are tantric. The way of the White A, a dkar, teaches transformation through the mandala and the union of method and wisdom, realised by the practitioner and a consort. The way of the Primeval Shen, ye gshen, deals with finding a qualified master, a suitable partner and a suitable place. It sets out the vows, dam tshig, Sanskrit samaya, that bind a disciple to the master, and the two stages of practice, generation and completion. Its text warns the practitioner not to forget the local gods, the sa bdag, while preparing the mandala, and notes that a perfected sage may behave in ways easily mistaken for madness.

The Supreme Way

The ninth way, bla med, is Dzogchen, the Great Perfection. It uses no antidotes, no ritual and no meditational deity. Its concern is recognising the nature of one’s own mind. In Tibet, Dzogchen is taught only by the Nyingma school of Buddhism and by the Bonpo, the two “old” traditions, and each holds it as its own.

Nine ways and nine vehicles

The Nyingma also count nine vehicles. Their list runs: the vehicles of the shravakas, of the pratyekabuddhas and of the bodhisattvas; the three outer tantras, Kriya, Ubhaya and Yoga; and the three inner tantras, Mahayoga, Anuyoga and Atiyoga, which is Dzogchen. Nyingma teachers group the first six as paths of renunciation and purification and the inner tantras as the path of transformation, with Atiyoga as self-liberation.

Both schemes put tantra near the top and Dzogchen at the summit. They differ at the bottom. The Nyingma list begins with Buddhist monastic and philosophical paths. The Bon list begins with divination, exorcism, ransom and funeral rites, practices Tibetan Buddhism also absorbed but never counted as vehicles. That difference is hard to explain if the Bon scheme were simply the Nyingma one with the names changed.

Priests, bards and riddlers

The Bonpo were not always monks or yogis. Tibetan histories say the early kings were protected by three kinds of specialist: the sgrung, bards and singers of epic; the lde’u, masters of riddles and soothsaying; and the bon, priests and ritual specialists. John Myrdhin Reynolds compares them to the three orders of the Celtic Druids recorded by Greek and Roman writers, the Bards, the Vates and the Druids, singers, soothsayers and magicians. The comparison is only a comparison. It shows how much of the old Bonpo office survives in the four ways of cause.

From Tazig

Bonpo histories say the teachings came into Zhang-zhung from Tazig, carried by white-robed sages long before Buddhism reached central Tibet in the seventh and eighth centuries. In the Bonpo account Shenrab first studied Bon in Olmo Lungring, in Tazig, and vowed to Shenlha Okar, the god of compassion, that he would guide the beings of this world to liberation. Shenlha Okar is also the deity who connects all nine ways (Okar Research). Snellgrove summed up the Bonpo view: the teachings came by way of Zhang-zhung, but “the ultimate source of their teachings is sTag-gzigs, a country situated rather vaguely still further to the west” (Snellgrove 1967).

Bonpo reckonings put Shenrab’s birth anywhere from about 1850 BCE to more than eighteen thousand years ago. Modern readings of his Tazig fall into four camps.

The first, associated with Snellgrove and Giuseppe Tucci, holds that Yungdrung Bon is a stream of Central Asian Buddhism. Buddhism from India took root in the Iranian-speaking lands of the Kushan empire, mixed there with other traditions, and reached the Tibetan plateau from the west before Indian Buddhism arrived from the south.

The second, associated with the Soviet scholars Lev Gumilev and B. I. Kuznetsov, makes Bon a branch of Zoroastrianism or the cult of Mithra, with Shenrab a priest at the court of Cyrus the Great.

The third, long common among Tibetan Buddhist scholars, holds that Bon as it now exists is a copy of Indian Buddhism made after the eighth century.

The fourth is the Bonpo view. Shenrab was a buddha of Tazig in Central Asia, Yungdrung Bon is the original teaching, and its Iranian traces come from that homeland.

Reynolds argues for a version of the first. Zhang-zhung, he writes, had extensive contacts with the Buddhist cultures around it before Indian Buddhism reached central Tibet. Just to its west lay the Kushan world, where Indian Buddhism met Zoroastrian, Zurvanist, Mithraic and Manichaean currents as well as Indian Shaivism and Nestorian Christianity, and the oasis cities of the Silk Road to the northeast were just as mixed. He reads certain strands of Yungdrung Bon as going back to that syncretistic Indo-Iranian Buddhism, and not as tenth-century imitations of Indian Buddhism. He also points out that the Kalachakra itself is said to have come to Nalanda in India from Shambhala in Central Asia.

None of this can be settled from the texts alone. The writings that carry the nine ways were revealed in Tibet from 1017 onward, so the scheme in its present form is medieval, whatever older material it holds. The tradition’s own map points west, toward Central Asia, as steadily as Tibetan Buddhism’s points south to India. The companion essay on Iranians in the Tibetan Empire looks at who actually travelled that road.

Works consulted

• Okar Research. “The Nine Ways of Bon & Iranian Central Asia.”
• Reynolds, John Myrdhin. Essays on the Bonpo tradition and Dzogchen, published at vajranatha.com.
• Snellgrove, David L. The Nine Ways of Bon: Excerpts from gZi-brjid. London Oriental Series 18. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Cited through Okar Research.
• Wangyal, Tenzin. “Shamanism in the Native Bon Tradition of Tibet.”