While many believe Bon to be Tibet’s indigenous pre-Buddhist religion, recent scholarship suggests a more nuanced picture (Kvaerne & Rinzin Targyal, 1993; Miner, 2024). Believing that Bon is Tibet’s indigenous religion links Bon to the core of Tibetan identity, but Tibetologists now suspect a more complex history. Evidence suggests the existence of a forgotten (and arguably earlier) belief system, distinct from both Bon and Buddhism (Stein, 1962/1972). I call this belief system “folk religion.” This blog post delves into the history of uncovering this lost folk religion. I will explore the challenges of identifying, naming, and describing this tradition. Finally, I will examine the key Tibetologists and manuscripts that have shaped modern scholarly understanding of this ancient belief system.

Overview of the study of old Tibet’s folk religion

Over the past 70 years, Tibetologists have slowly reconstructed this lost religious tradition. They identified current practices and beliefs that do not align neatly with either Buddhism or Bon (Stein, 1962/1972; Tucci, 1980/2012), but disentangling ancient cosmologies and primary deities remains a formidable challenge. Although there is general consensus that a religion distinct from Buddhism and Bon existed, comprehensive research on its cosmologies and deities is still scarce. And few have published in-depth studies on these aspects. Because both Buddhism and Bon incorporated the deities and rituals of the lost religion, teasing out its beliefs has been difficult.

Naming old Tibet’s folk religion

Naming the religion has also proven challenging , with many Tibetologists resorting to arbitrary labels (which I also do). Tibetan texts from between 1000 and 1500 AD offer several names for this folk religion, including the “Most Secret Way” (ཡང་གསང་ལུགས་), the “Most Secret Terang” (ཡང་བ[ག]སང་ཐེ་རང་), “the way of the non-humans” (མི་མིན་ལུགས་), and the “peoples’ religion” (མྱི་ཆོས; Beckwith, 2011, p. 174; Haarh, 1969, pp. 217–218). “The way of the non-humans” likely refers to the beings that preceded humans in early Tibetan mythology (Haarh, 1969).

As for Tibetologists, Turrell Wylie (1963) simply called the third religion “the earliest tradition.” Giuseppe Tucci (1980/2012) characterized it as the “folk religion,” while Rolf Stein (1962/1972) dubbed it the “nameless religion.” Personally, I prefer Tucci’s (1980/2012) version. Therefore, in my blog posts and discussions, I refer to this third stream of religion (distinct from Buddhism and not Bon) as the folk religion.

Naming the folk religion was difficult for Tibetologists in part because the folk religion’s adherents did not conceptualize it as a unified entity until it was confronted by Buddhism.

The various ritual practices and associated beliefs that existed in Tibet before the advent of Buddhism were not conceptualized as a unit and referred to by a single term at the time. It was only when the Buddhists began to propagate their religion in Tibet, and compose polemics against competing practices and beliefs that it became possible to conceive of them as a whole and lump them together under a single name. (van Schaik, 2013, p. 240)

Sam van Schaik (2013) translated a Dunhuang document, IOL Tib J 1746, which he believed dated back to the Imperial Period (600–900 AD). In this text, a Buddhist missionary critiqued what they called “the old religion of Tibet” (བོད་ཀྱི་ཆོས་རྙིང་པ་; van Schaik, 2013, p. 238). The complication of naming the folk religion is not a new one.

Defining old Tibet’s folk religion

Some may understand the term ‘folk religion’ as primarily referring to Tibetans’ modern day practices aimed at mitigating the harmful effects of malevolent spirits and enlisting spirits’ help in contrast to Buddhist practices aimed at influencing karma or practicing compassion. When I write of folk religion, I am referring to a religion or religions that encompassed a hierarchy of deities extending beyond local terrestrial gods and included origin stories and cosmologies.

Contributing Tibetologists

Tibetologists Erik Haarh (1969), Ariane Macdonald, (1971), Rolf Stein (1971, 1962/1972, 1985/2010, 1988/2010), and Guiseppe Tucci (1949, 1955/2003, 1980/2012) made the most significant contributions to the study of the folk religion. In chronological order, Tucci (1949), from Italy, began to explore the idea that an ancient stream of religion existed beyond the boundaries of Bon. Macdonald (1971), a French Tibetologist, and Haarh (1969), a Dutch Tibetologist, wrote concurrently and were consequently unable to interact meaningfully with each other’s works. Nonetheless, they arguably made the most substantive contributions to understanding the early religion. Stein (1985/2010), another French Tibetologist and a contemporary of Macdonald (1971) and Haarh (1969), fine-tuned their advances. He was the consummate critic of Macdonald (1971).

Of the four authors, Macdonald made the greatest case for an independent and fully developed alternative religion. Her significant contribution came in 1971 when she authored a chapter that could easily be a standalone book, spanning a substantial 159 pages. In it, she explored a number of Dunhuang documents written in Tibetan.

Tibet’s folk religion in the Dunhuang documents

The Dunhuang documents represent the earliest extant Tibetan manuscripts, dating from the period between the inception of Tibetan script and the closure of the Dunhuang caves (600–1000 AD). “The Dunhuang cave was closed at the beginning of the eleventh century” (van Schaik, 2013, pp. 229–230).

Macdonald’s proposition: A structured religion

Macdonald (1971) believed that she had found evidence for a structured religion in the Dunhuang documents. She wrote her chapter in French and to my knowledge no English version is available. When quoting her, I provide her original text in French and an English translation.

Macdonald (1971) stated that the folk religion was “donc pas un amalgame de notions magico-religieuses anarchiques et dispersées que le bouddhisme a rencontré au Tibet, mais une religion dont les pratiques et les rites étaient enracinés dans un système structure” (p. 367), which can be translated as saying that the folk religion was not an amalgamation of anarchic and scattered magical-religious notions that Buddhism encountered in Tibet, but a religion whose practices and rites were rooted in a structured system (p. 367). In other words, Macdonald conceptualized a developed religion with reinforcing logic. Although she thought the folk religion was for the most part indigenous to Tibet, she also saw parallels between Chinese and Indian thought and suspected some influence from these traditions.

Stein’s critique: Macdonald imagined structure

Stein (1985/2010), writing later, resisted Macdonald’s (1971) attempts to delineate a clear religious stream based on her findings in the old texts. Macdonald had already passed away when Stein responded:

The corpus extracted by A.M. [Ariane Macdonald] is not, like the great religions, an ensemble of sacred texts vetted by priests. It is only the fruit of the chance preservation of a certain number of documents and of a voluntary choice by A.M. [Ariane Macdonald], in which archaic texts and others are combined without distinction. (1985/2010, p. 124)

Bjerken (2001), in his excellent summary of Stein, stated

For Stein … the indigenous traditions associated with divine kingship cannot be adequately described as Bon or gtsug [གཙུག་, Order]. In fact, these unsystematic traditions really have no name, so he refers to them under the general rubric of the “nameless tradition,” an appropriately vague term for describing a shapeless jumble of native elements. (p. 219)

Stein (1985/2010) carried considerable authority in the field. For the most part, Tibetologists have accepted his critiques of Macdonald (1971) and do not believe that a separate stream of religion existed apart from Buddhism and Bon. However, their acceptance seems dictated by their definitions of religion, which demand that adherents to that religion identify the religion as something separate. In other words, it is inadequate for outsiders alone to label a religion as such.

A middle way

My perspective lies between Macdonald (1971) and Stein (1985/2010). Perhaps the folk religion was a fully orbed religion identifiable as a separate stream of thought distinct from Buddhism and Bon. More likely, the folk religion was a mixture of ideas that ebbed and flowed along with Bon and Buddhism in an ocean of blending themes and rituals.

Even if the folk religion was a separate stream of religious thought, at some point it merged into Buddhism and Bon. As Buddhist and Bon foundational doctrines gradually replaced the foundational doctrines of the folk religion, there was interplay between the beliefs and rituals of the different streams of religion. Consequently, today “the boundaries between Buddhism, Bon and the folk (or ‘nameless’) religion can hardly be fixed” (Bjerken, 2001, p. 151). Complicating current understandings about the folk religion is the tendency to relegate “all that is not specifically Buddhist or Bon” to this residual category (Bjerken, 2001, p. 151).

Stein (1988/2010), most helpfully, cautioned against employing the terms pre-Buddhist or pre-Bon in Tibetan studies. He argued that since the written Tibetan script was brought by Indian Buddhists, no Tibetan text can predate Buddhism or Bon. One might believe that the contents of a manuscript are pre-Buddhist, but “this will never be anything other than a hypothesis” (Stein, 1988/2010, p. 232). He wisely opted for “non-Buddhist” rather than “pre-Buddhist”.

However, Stein (1985/2010) was too harsh towards Macdonald (1971), and his critiques need to be held in tension with Macdonald’s (1971) views. Her discoveries of order (which I will explain later) in the Dunhuang texts revealed significant aspects of Tibetan thought divergent from current Tibetan perspectives. Stein’s (1985/2010) critiques serve as cautions not to imagine that early Tibetans conceptualized folk religion as a unique, self-identifying religion that rivaled Bon or Buddhism. The battle lines had not yet been clearly drawn. While refraining from calling the folk religion a full-fledged, self-identified religion, it nevertheless needs a label if people are going to communicate about it. Tibetans themselves wrote about it, even assigning a name.

Later manuscripts referencing old Tibet’s folk religion

Hints of the folk religion can be patched together from inscriptions and Dunhuang texts dating between 600–1000 AD. But, as Stein (1985/2010) pointed out, these documents make little distinction between various streams of religious thought; formal differentiation came later. Most of the evidence for the existence of a folk religion comes from three later texts, potentially based on early documents that have since disappeared from the historical record. Following are some details about those three texts.

The Deucheu Chung

The Deucheu Chung, (ལྡེའུ་ཆོས་འབྱུང་, Wylie: lde’u chos ‘byung) is a Buddhist manuscript concerned primarily with the history of Buddhism. Its author drew extensively from a set of five documents known as Jannga (ཅན་ལྔ་, Wylie: can lnga), that have been lost. While the precise dating of these documents remains uncertain, the Deucheu Chung itself was probably finished by the mid-thirteenth century (Karmay, 1998; Martin, 1997). The Deucheu Chung “is the only work that contains a relatively detailed account of origin myths” (Karmay, 1998, p. 291). It contains three competing origin stories, one from each of the three primary traditions: folk, Bon, and Buddhist. Unfortunately, I could not find an English translation of this document necessitating reliance on Karmay’s (1998) summary and my own translations.

The Chronicles of the Ministers

The second document providing insights into the folk religion is the Chronicles of the Ministers (བློན་པོ་བཀའི་ཐང་ཡིག, Wylie: blon po bk’i thang yig). Haarh (1969) believed this fourteenth-century work was based on now lost sources written between 600–900 AD. The Chronicles of the Ministers was one of five works comprising the Five Chronicles (བཀའ་ཐང་སྡེ་ལྔ་, Wylie: bka’ thang sde lnga). The Five Chronicles was a biography of Guru Rinpoche (Tibetan) or Padmasambhava (Sanskrit), a Buddhist missionary from India credited with founding Tibetan Buddhism in the eighth century.

Shezeu Yishin Norbu

The third document that contains content about the folk religion is the Shezeu Yishin Norbu (བཤད་མཛོད་ཡིད་བཞིན་ནོར་བུ་, Wylie: bshad mdzod yid bzhin); hereafter, Shezeu. Dating to the fifteenth-century, the Shezeu also claims to derive from earlier works and provides information on all three traditions: Buddhism, Bon, and the folk religion.

Ironically, although Haarh (1969) relied heavily on the Chronicles of the Ministers and the Shezeu, Macdonald (1971) dismissed the “secret tradition,” which she thought lacked support in the old Dunhuang documents (Macdonald, 1971, p. 206). She believed that she had discovered a third stream of religion in the early Dunhuang documents potentially unrelated to the “secret tradition” (ཡང་གསང་ལུགས་)—the Tibetan word for what I am calling the folk religion.

In contrast to Macdonald (1971), I have equated her third religious stream in early Tibet with the secret tradition of the Deucheu Chung, Chronicles of the Ministers, and the Shezeu. My merging of the two traditions must serve as a provisional solution until further scholarship can more definitively discern between the two. It is certainly true that “the name and form of Tibet’s native religion continues to be debated” (Bjerken, 2001).

Conclusion

This essay has delved into the complexities of uncovering Tibet’s lost folk religion (ཡང་གསང་ལུགས་). Evidence points to a belief system distinct from both Bon and Buddhism, yet challenges arise in identifying, naming, and describing it. Pioneering Tibetologists like Macdonald and Haarh, alongside crucial manuscripts like the Dunhuang texts and the Deucheu Chung, have played pivotal roles in building understanding of this enigmatic tradition.

While scholarly debate persists regarding the precise nature and terminology, the existence of a non-Buddhist and non-Bon religious current in Tibet appears increasingly likely. The term “folk religion” serves as a useful placeholder for future discussions, allowing for effective communication about this fascinating aspect of Tibetan history.

In my next post, I will challenge the traditional view of Bon as Tibet’s indigenous religion. And I will argue that Bon emerged from the transmission of Buddhism through Central Asia. By positing an old folk religion and Bon as a form of Buddhism, I hope to paint a more accurate picture of the old Tibetan religious landscape than what many have understood.

Stay tuned!

Timothy Miner

I adapted the above from my dissertation Similarities between Early Tibetan Deities and the Christian God at Biola University in 2022.

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