Bön tradition · a storybook in 5 pages
Tönpa Shenrab as Bön tells it, Bön's disputed 'pre-Buddhist' roots, and how it became a recognized school of Tibetan spiritual life.
As Bön tells it, Tönpa Shenrab is the tradition's founding teacher, who brought its teachings into the world long before Buddhism reached Tibet. Bönpo hold him the way Buddhists hold the Buddha: not a myth, but the source of the whole path.
Early accounts describe ritual specialists mediating with local and ancestral spirits, performing funeral rites and divination, in Tibet before Buddhism arrived in the 7th and 8th centuries. How much of that older practice organized Bön actually carries forward is genuinely disputed.
Around the 10th and 11th centuries, Bön reorganized into a monastic religion with its own scriptures and teaching, closely paralleling Tibetan Buddhism in structure while keeping its own founder and lineage. Scholars say it is neither pure survival nor a simple copy.
In the late 1970s, the 14th Dalai Lama, as head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, accepted an appeal from Bön representatives and recognized Bön as a major school of Tibetan spiritual life, alongside the four Buddhist schools.
Some archaic practices — like calling back a person's fortune or soul — still exist in Himalayan folk ritual, kept by local specialists called pawo or lhapa, generally separate from the organized monastic religion that carries the Bön name today.