An icebreaker
Before Buddhism reached Tibet, a native religion of ritual specialists and spirit-mediation already shaped the land. Bon survives today as a living tradition with its own monasteries and ordained monks, not just a memory of what came before.
Trained in a Bonpo monastery before becoming an academic, he argued organized Bon should be read on its own terms, as a tradition with a real founder and doctrine, rather than dismissed as a leftover shamanism.
Working from Bon's own scriptures, he concluded the living tradition was neither a plain copy of Buddhism nor a straight continuation of the old pre-Buddhist religion, but a distinct path with its own doctrine and history.
Reviewing decades of textual and field research, he traced how organized Bon built a monastic canon and institutions closely mirroring Tibetan Buddhism's own, while insisting on a separate lineage and founder.
As head of the Tibetan government-in-exile in the late 1970s, he accepted the appeal of Bon representatives and recognized the tradition as a major school of Tibetan spiritual life, alongside the four Buddhist schools.