A Microcosm of the Bon Religion

Charles Ramble

Bon Deity Trowo Tsochok Khagying

Tibet 15th century

Bon Deity Trowo Tsochok Khagying; Tibet; 15th century; distemper, ink, gold on cloth; 31 × 26 in. (78.7 × 66 cm); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gift of Carlton Rochell, in honor of John Guy, and in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2018; 2018.890; CC0 – Creative Common (CC0 1.0)

Summary

Anthropologist Charles Ramble introduces the indigenous Tibetan religion of Bon focusing on the image of this deity with the entourage of warlike and half-animal gods. Bon refers to the many pre- or non-Buddhist ritual practices of Tibet, as well as the organized monastic religion that developed in dialogue with Tibetan Buddhist traditions from the tenth century on. This thangka shows a Bon deity and his consort in a tantric embrace, at the center of a mandala with fierce local gods from Tibetan myths.

Key Terms

Bon

Bon is an indigenous religion of Tibet. Originally, Bon were a group of non-Buddhist ritual specialists in the court of the Tibetan emperors. From the eleventh century onward, an organized religion called Yungdrung Bon, or “Eternal Bon,” took shape. Yungdrung Bon developed in dialogue with Buddhism, incorporating deities called buddhas, scriptures modeled on the Buddhist canon, monks, and the establishment of monasteries. Followers of Yungdrung Bon trace their own origins to a founder called Tonpa Shenrab, who arrived from the semi-mythical land of Zhangzhung in western Tibet. The word “Bon” can also refer to the many non-organized indigenous religious practices, including the worship of mountain deities and making namkha. A follower of Bon is called a Bonpo.

iconography

In the Himalayan context, iconography refers to the forms found in religious images, especially the attributes of deities: body color, number of arms and legs, hand gestures, poses, implements, and retinue. Often these attributes are specified in ritual texts (sadhanas), which artists are expected to follow faithfully.

mandala

In Vajrayana Buddhism or Bon, a mandala refers to a cosmic abode of a deity, usually depicted as a diagram of a circle with an inscribed square that represents the deity enthroned in their palace, surrounded by members of their retinue. Mandalas can be painted, three-dimensional models, architectural structures, such as temples or stupas, or composed as arrangements of images within a temple. The instructions for creating and visualizing mandalas are usually found in ritual texts, such as tantras and sadhanas. Mandalas can be used in initiation ceremonies, visualized by a practitioner as part of deity yoga, consecrated and used to represent the divine presence within ritual space, offered to the deities as representations of the entire universe. A similar concept in Hinduism is a yantra.

swastika

The swastika is an ancient Eurasian symbol, found in rock carvings since prehistoric times. In Hinduism, Buddhism, and Bon, the swastika is a common and auspicious decorative design, symbolizing the motions of the sun, the wheel of reincarnation, and the eternal nature of the teachings. In Tibetan, it is yungdrung (“Eternal”), the principal religious symbol of the Bon religion, and the organized system of Bon that emerged in dialogue with Buddhism is generally referred to as Yungdrung Bon. The strongly negative association of this design in Western countries is due to its appropriation by the twentieth-century Nazis as a symbol of their racial theories.

tantra

Tantra was a religious movement in India around the fifth to seventh centuries, and its practices are part of Buddhism and Hinduism. The word tantra also refers to texts which transmit tantric practices. In Buddhism, tantra is also called Vajrayana, “The Vajra Vehicle.” Tantric ritual and art are characterized by deity yoga, mandalas, mantras, abhisheka (initiation), wrathful deities, and ritual sexual union. In Hinduism, tantrism was often associated with the worship of Shiva and various goddesses (shakti). A practitioner of tantra is called a “tantrika.” Tantra is also a genre of texts that have been variously categorized. Most common is the division of tantras into four categories: Kriya Tantra, Charya Tantra, Yoga Tantra, and Highest Yoga Tantra.

torma

In Tibetan Buddhism and Bon, a torma is a sculpture made from butter and barley dough that is usually dyed. Tormas are used for a variety of purposes in rituals, and can be offerings to the gods, or consecrated as receptacles of divine power. In exorcistic rituals, evil forces are invited into the tormas, which are then brought outside of the settlement and destroyed. These tormas can be understood as ransom in exchange for victims plagued by spirits, or as a substitute for animal sacrifice. Some monasteries have traditions of making huge, beautifully decorated tormas, which are viewed by pilgrims at festivals like the Monlam Chenmo. Tormas can be figurative (images that depict the gods or other scenes), or they can be aniconic (symbolic shapes).

The central figure in this (scroll painting) is one of the most important divinities of the religion of Tibet: Trowo Tsochok Khagying, “The Wrathful One, the Supreme Lord Stretching across the Sky.” He is in union with his consort, Khala Dukmo, “Fierce Lady in the Sky,” surrounded by their entourage. While this arrangement suggests a typical tantric Buddhist configuration, a closer examination reveals that it is associated not with but with the Bon religion. One immediate clue is the on the chest of the figure in the center of the lowest row: the arms of the swastika point counterclockwise, which, in post-eleventh-century Tibetan , is generally an indication that the image is associated with Bon. Before undertaking an examination of the thangka, however, a few words should be said by way of introduction to this religion.

What Is Bon?

As Per Kvaerne has pointed out, “Bon” denotes at least three different things: First, the religion that prevailed in Tibet before Buddhism became the official faith in the late eighth century; second, an organized system with a monastic component that emerged in the tenth to eleventh centuries, and generally referred to as Yungdrung (“Eternal”) Bon; and third, a plethora of cults consisting of mythic narratives and rituals for the protection and prosperity of local communities. These cults, which exhibit significant continuities with the earliest form of Bon, are found throughout Tibet but persist especially in the Himalayan borderlands. Since there is no indigenous term for this mosaic of local cults, we may call it “pagan” Bon, since each one is concerned with the well-being of a local territory (pagus in Latin, the origin of the term “pagan”). The followers of Yungdrung Bon, known as Bonpos, consider themselves the heirs of the pre-Buddhist religion. They do not, however, recognize any kinship with pagan Bon, which sometimes involves animal sacrifice, a practice anathema to Yungdrung Bon. Confusingly, the term bonpo is often also applied to priests and shamans of pagan Bon.

Bonpos believe that everything in Yungdrung Bon derives from the teaching of the religion’s legendary founder, Shenrab Miwo, who is believed by followers of the religion to have lived sixteen thousand years ago, but for whom no historical sources are available. This name is understood to mean “the great man who is an excellent priest,” but may also, with a slightly different orthography, mean “the great man of the Shen clan,” a form that is found especially in older sources.

As different as these three types of Bon may be, they are not completely isolated from one another. Yungdrung Bon shares with Buddhism the techniques and principles that underpin their , , and philosophical systems. However, it has cosmological concepts and divinities that predate the arrival of Buddhism, and it shares with pagan Bon a range of non-Buddhist rituals. These rituals, as well as the animal divinities that they feature, are an enduring reminder of the close relationship between Bon and the natural world.

All the Buddhist schools look to India as the source of their fundamental tenets, and to as the main language from which their scriptures were translated. For the Bonpos, the land from which their teachings came was , once an actual polity in the western part of the Tibetan Plateau and beyond, but accorded fantastic dimensions in Bon religious histories. The language from which the scriptures were translated is believed to have been not Sanskrit but the language of Zhangzhung. Historically, then, the complex system that Bonpos attribute to a single founder figure may be the pooling of influences from several provenances: India, Central Asia, Tibet, and the Himalayan region, and also China, which was the source of certain divinatory traditions.

Fig. 2. Key to the thangka of Bon Deity Trowo Tsochok Khagying; Tibet; drawing by Olga Helman

The Composition of the Thangka

The texts relating to Tsochok Khagying are broadly in agreement about the main figures represented in this thangka (fig. 2), which may be summarized briefly. Tsochok himself (A1 in the key to the thangka) has three faces, six arms, and two legs, and his consort, Khala Dukmo, has two arms and two legs. The double triangle in her right hand is a golden thunderbolt, and with her left hand she feeds a heart to the lord. In the innermost circle (B) are four manifestations of the lord himself, the Four Wrathful Ones who Avert Evil. Outside these, in two columns (C), are eight further manifestations called the Wrathful Ones of Awareness. Below each of these columns are two figures who form a group known as the Manifested Wrathful Ones (D), identifiable by the half-man half-bird creature called shangshang that supports the throne of each. These are framed on three sides by twenty-seven divinities known as the Fierce Ladies, comprising three categories: the Nine Zema in a column to our right (E), the Nine Female Champions to the left (F), and the Nine Jinte in a row below them (G). The names Zema and Jinte have no obvious translation. In two columns of five figures each outside these are the Ten Champions (H), who are paired with another set of female animal-headed divinities called the Ten Warlords (J), of whom seven are grouped to our left of the central figure at the base and three to the right, at the level of her head. The last group whose members belong to the entourage of Tsochok are four animal-headed figures in long robes, two to the far left and two to the far right of the row level with the head of the main figure at the base. These are the Four Steadfast Ones (K), who guard the cardinal directions. The other images in the thangka are not part of the Tsochok’s retinue. In the Bon pantheon, Tsochok is one of a triad called Chipung, the “Universal Embodiment,” the other two being Walse Ngampa (L1) and Lhago Tokpa (L2). The central figure below is Sipai Gyelmo, the “Queen of the Universe” (M1), in one of her numerous manifestations, here riding a red mule. Below the animals supporting the throne of Tsochok himself is a row of goddesses (N), each holding a sense offering (fig. 3). The perimeter of the thangka, and a few locations in the interior, are occupied by unidentified divinities, saints, and .

Video

Fig. 3.

Bon Rituals, "Between the Lines: Exorcising the Old Year in a Himalaya Bonpo Village," YouTube, June 19, 2022, 1:20:17, https://youtube.com/watch?v=SqjN_0wRXls

A Fusion of the Different Strands of Bon

This painting admirably represents the cluster of influences that constitute Yungdrung Bon. While the concept of a divinity with his consort and entourage is indebted to the Indian tantric tradition, there is much here that does not have such a straightforward attribution. Sipai Gyelmo was originally an ancestral Tibetan goddess, but over time her iconography and other attributes have converged with those of the Buddhist goddess Palden Lhamo. Most of the members of the entourage are unknown to Buddhism: although the three groups (E, F, and G) of the Twenty-Seven Fierce Ladies, whose chief is Sipai Gyelmo herself, have parallels in Buddhism, they are probably war gods of indigenous or Central Asian origin. Tsochok and his entourage are sometimes pictured in other media: during rituals in which he is the main divinity, often with his benign (zhiwa) counterpart, he is portrayed as a dough-and-butter effigy (torma) (fig. 4). Alternatively, he and his inner circle—including the Fierce Ladies—are depicted in an abstract geometric form as a , where he and his consort are denoted at the center by the interlaced letters A and MA. In another form of the mandala (fig. 5), Tsochok and his inner circle take the shape of ritual daggers and ritual claws, while the Zema, the Female Champions, and the Jinte are embodied respectively by hooks, arrows, and wooden plaques or tablets.

Fig. 4

A large torma (dough-and-butter sculpture) representing Tsochok Khagying and his consort, standing on an altar in front of a clay image of the same pair of divinities, Lubrak Village, Mustang District, Nepal; photograph by Charles Ramble, 2008

Fig. 5

Mandala of Trowo Tsochok Khagying; image after Tenzin Namdak, Yasuhiko Nagano, and Musashi Tachikawa, eds. 2000. Mandalas of the Bon Religion. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 73

All the members of the entourage who fall outside the Fierce Ladies—the Champions, the Warlords, and the Steadfast Ones, as well as others who are not featured in this thangka—do not appear in the inner mandala at all but have their own separate residence, known as the “outer support arrangement” (chitenko) (figs. 6 and 7). This is an assemblage comprising a long vertical spear surrounded by sets of objects: eight smaller spears, with the horns, fangs, and claws of different animals as spearheads; arrows fletched with feathers of different colors; sacks of various substances (grains, minerals, and so forth), posts, cairns, and banners that are all connected to the central spear with cords festooned with the forelegs of animals and stuffed groups of birds, among other things. All these components are the supports of the divinities in the outer reaches of Tsochok’s entourage. Constructions resembling this outer support, sometimes known as “bird perches” (jadang) (fig. 8), are described in older Bon texts and feature in increasingly rare rituals for the propitiation of war gods, independently of any tantric ritual context. Clearly, the cult of Tsochok is a fusion of tantra with the divinities and associated rituals of indigenous divinities who have nothing to do with Buddhism but have been integrated into the complex of Yungdrung Bon.

Fig. 6

Diagram of a chitenko, the support for the divinities in the outermost circles of Trowo Tsochok Khagying’s entourage; image after Tshangs pa bstan ’dzin et al. 2014, 16–17

Fig. 7

Part of a chitenko, Triten Norbutse Monastery, Kathmandu, Nepal; photograph by Anna Sehnalova, 2012

Fig. 8

A jadang constructed as part of a ritual for the propitiation of protective divinities in a house in Thewo, Sichuan, China; photograph by Ngawang Gyatso, 2014

Footnotes

Per Kvaerne, The Bon Religion of Tibet: The Iconography of a Living Tradition (London: Serindia, 1995), 9–10.

For a justification of the use of the term “pagan” in this context, see Charles Ramble, “The Classification of Territorial Divinities in Pagan and Buddhist Rituals in South Mustang,” in Tibetan Mountain Deities: Their Cults and Representations, ed. Anne-Marie Blondeau (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1998), 124.

For two studies of the iconography of Tsochok Khagying based on a thangka and scriptural accounts, see Per Kvaerne, “A Preliminary Study of the Bonpo Divinity Khro Bo GTso Mchog Mkha’ ’gying,” in Reflections on Tibetan Culture: Essays in Memory of Turrell V. Wylie, ed. Lawrence Epstein Wylie and Richard F. Sherburne (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 117–25 and Per Kvaerne, The Bon Religion of Tibet: The Iconography of a Living Tradition (London: Serindia, 1995). For a description of another thangka of this divinity, see Amy Heller, “Three Early Bonpo Thangka and Their Consecration Inscriptions,” in Tibetan and Himalayan Healing: An Anthology for Anthony Aris, ed. Charles Ramble and Ulrike Roesler (Kathmandu: Vajra Books, 2015), 225–32.

Note that the third of the Nine Zema, a “black female with the head of a chough, holding a claw,” who would have been identified in the thangka as F3, has been omitted by the artist.

Tsochok is the main divinity in certain elaborate Bonpo rituals in which both he and members of his entourage are represented by masked dancers. For a film of one such performance from Mustang, in Nepal, see https://youtu.be/SqjN_0wRXls.

Henk Blezer, “The ‘Bon’ DBal-Mo Nyer-Bdun (/Brgyad) and the Buddhist DBang-Phyug-Ma Nyer-Brgyad,” in New Horizons in Bon Studies: Proceedings of a Conference Held in Osaka August 1999, ed. Samten Karmay and Yasuhiko Nagano (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 2000), 121.

For a reproduction of the mandala of Trowo Tsochok Khagying, see Tenzin Namdak, Yasuhiko Nagano, and Musashi Tachikawa, eds., Mandalas of the Bon Religion, Senri Ethnological Reports 12 (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 2000), 43.

Diagrams and a description of this construction are given in Tshangs pa bstan ’dzin et al., Bdud rtsi ’od zer ’khyil ba’i lag len skor (Kathmandu: Triten Norbutse Monastery, 2014), 16–20.

A description of a jadang and associated rituals is given in Lcags mo mtsho, n.d.; I am grateful to Lcags mo mtsho, of the Northwest Minorities University, Lanzhou, for permitting me to consult and refer to this unpublished work.