Bon Is One Of The Basic Cultural Strata Of Tibet. Understanding It Is A Must For A Well Balanced Understanding Tibet. The Book Arises Out Of An International Symposium Entitled New Horizons To Bon Studies Held In Japan In 1999. It Presents The Edited Fruits Of This Symposium Which Are Categorized As-Bon And Its Relationship To Buddhism Dzongs-Chen Doctrines-Myths And Rituals-Monasteries And Lay Communities Bon Is A Wider Context. Has 2 Indexes-General Index And Tibetan Index.
Buddhism is in many ways a visual tradition, with its well-known practices of visualization, its visual arts, its epistemological writings that discuss the act of seeing, and its literature filled with images and metaphors of light. Some Buddhist traditions are also visionary, advocating practices by which meditators seek visions that arise before their eyes. Naked Seeing investigates such practices in the context of two major esoteric traditions, the Wheel of Time (Kalacakra) and the Great Perfection (Dzogchen). Both of these experimented with sensory deprivation, and developed yogas involving long periods of dwelling in dark rooms or gazing at the open sky. These produced unusual experiences of seeing, which were used to pursue some of the classic Buddhist questions about appearances, emptiness, and the nature of reality. Along the way, these practices gave rise to provocative ideas and suggested that, rather than being apprehended through internal insight, religious truths might also be seen in the exterior world-realized through the gateway of the eyes. Christopher Hatchell presents the intellectual and literary histories of these practices, and also explores the meditative techniques and physiology that underlie their distinctive visionary experiences. The book also offers for the first time complete English translations of three major Tibetan texts on visionary practice: a Kalacakra treatise by Yumo Mikyo Dorjé, The Lamp Illuminating Emptiness, a Nyingma Great Perfection work called The Tantra of the Blazing Lamps, and a Bön Great Perfection work called Advice on the Six Lamps, along with a detailed commentary on this by Drugom Gyalwa Yungdrung.
Buddhism is often portrayed as a universalising religion that transcends the local and directs attention toward a transcendent dharma. Yet, wherever Buddhism spreads, it also sparks local identity discourses that, directly or indirectly, root the dharma in native soil and history, and, in doing so, frame ‘the local’ in Buddhist discourse. Occasionally, notably in Japanese Shinto and Tibetan Bön, this localising variety of ‘framing of discourse’—here tentatively termed ‘nativism’—leads to the establishment of independent traditions that break free from Buddhism; yet, in other contexts, localising trends remain firmly embedded within Buddhism. In Challenging Paradigms: Buddhism and Nativism Teeuwen and Blezer offer a comparative study of localising responses to Buddhism in different Buddhist environments in Japan, Korea, Tibet, India and Bali.
The present volume offers a dozen studies of manuscripts of the Tibetan Bon and Naxi Dongba traditions across time and space. While some of the contributions focus on particular features of manuscripts from either tradition, others explicitly bridge the two by considering common codicological and material aspects of selected examples or common themes in the content of the texts. This is the first primarily object-based study to deal with the cultural history and technology of books from the two traditions. It discusses collections of Bon and Naxi manuscripts, the concepts and history of both traditions, the science and technology of book studies as it relates to these collections, the relationship between text and image, writing materials, and the historical and archaeological context of the manuscripts' places of origin. The authors are specialists in different fields including philology, anthropology, art history, codicology and archaeometry. The contributions shed light on trade routes, materials and technologies as well as on reading practices and ritual usage of Bon and Naxi manuscripts.
Politics, history, and religion have long lent Tibet a glamorous air, particularly in the West. But Tibet can be understood in an astonishingly wide variety of other ways, including linguistic, ecological, environmental and climatological, geographical, geological, economic, biologic, sociologic, medicinal. Tibetan Studies in Comparative Perspective touches on all the elements of the Tibet issue, offering invaluable insight to a wide variety of readers, from specialists to those with a general interest in the topic. By putting readers into the shoes of all the stakeholders, from the Dalai Lama in his home in exile and the various Tibetan exile communities, to decision makers in Beijing, New Delhi, Washington and London, the issues at stake come into bold relief. Furthermore, the book examines the potential opportunities that lay ahead, documents where and how Tibetans have been dispersed and offers a glimpse into the social and political undercurrents sending shudders through this exiled nation. With the chasm between exiles and indigenous Tibetans growing ever-larger, what challenges do Tibetans confront just to remain Tibetan? And how will this shape the future of their political movement? The book provides a timely re-examination of the contemporary predicament of Tibetans, both in and out of Tibet. This book was published as two special issues of Asian Ethnicity.
The subject for this study, the Tibetan “treasure revealer” Gshen-chen Klu-dga’, is a crucial figure in the development of Bon as an organised religion after the eleventh century. Here for the first time he is situated in the context of what was happening in Buddhism at the time. By scrutinizing his life and gter-ma (“treasures”), that were to be of much controversy in later ages, Dan Martin sheds light on the mechanism of Tibetan polemical tradition and the ways in which sectarianism accords itself legitimacy by resurrecting ancient arguments in a subtly distorted manner. The exhaustive annotated bibliography of previous works about Bon, forming the second part of the work, can rightly be seen as a legacy of Gshen-chen. Both parts taken together make this an indispensable guide to any student of Bon.
A History of Zhang Zhung and Tibet, Volume One explores ancient Tibet's Zhang Zhung kingdom and Bon religion that preceded the advent of Buddhism in the seventh century. Countering the long-held idea that Tibet's pre-Buddhist indigenous culture was primitive and undeveloped, this book shares the rich cultural origins of the kingdom of Zhang Zhung--the "cradle of Tibetan culture," which encompassed a vast area of Western and Northern Tibet in an area that includes sacred Mount Kailash. Presenting the meticulous research of internationally known Dzogchen Buddhist teacher and scholar Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, the book investigates the mysteries of Zhang Zhung's Bon religion, a set of shamanistic and animistic beliefs and practices only recently studied by a handful of academic scholars. Offering a critical analysis of a vast array of literary and primary sources, Norbu discusses the role of the Bon traditions within Zhang Zhung's lineages, dynasties, and culture. Examining Zhang Zhung's written language, sacred ornaments, rock carvings, healing practices, music, and magical divination techniques, Norbu contributes to an understanding of the roots of Tibetan Buddhist culture and modern-day Bon religion--a practice followed by an estimated ten percent of Tibetans. Table of Contents: Translator's Foreword; A Technical Note about the Translation; I. The Human Generations of Ancient Zhang Zhung; II. The Bon Lineages of Ancient Zhang Zhung; III. The Royal Lineages of Ancient Zhang Zhung; IV. The Written Language of Ancient Zhang Zhung; V. The Civilization of Ancient Zhang Zhung; Indexes--Tibetan and Zhang Zhung Names and Terms, Textual Sources, Sanskrit Names and Terms, Chinese Names and Terms
This book provides an in-depth examination of the Yungdrung Bon religion in light of globalization. In its global dimension, Bon has been attracting a growing number of Westerners, particularly to its Dzogchen teachings and meditation practices. In this expansion, Bon operates in a dynamic context where forces that create changes in the tradition coexist, sometimes in tension and sometimes in tandem, with other forces that aim to preserve it. In tracing the process through which Bon has become a global religion, this monograph narrates the story of the principal figures who initially facilitated this transmission, following their journey from Tibet to India and Nepal. The narrative then moves to explore the dynamics taking place in the transmission and reception of Yungdrung Bon in Western countries, opening up a new viewpoint on the expansion of Tibetan religious traditions into the West and painting a comprehensive picture of the modern history of the Yungdrung Bon religion as narrated by its participants. In so doing, it makes an invaluable contribution to the study of Tibetan traditions in the West as well as to the wider history of religions, social anthropology, psychology, and conversion studies.
Tibet’s Mount Kailas is one of the world’s great pilgrimage centres, renowned as an ancient sacred site that embodies a universal sacrality. But Kailas Histories: Renunciate Traditions and the Construction of Himalayan Sacred Geography demonstrates that this understanding is a recent construction by British colonial, Hindu modernist, and New Age interests. Using multiple sources, including fieldwork, Alex McKay describes how the early Indic vision of a heavenly mountain named Kailas became identified with actual mountains. He emphasises renunciate agency in demonstrating how local beliefs were subsumed as Kailas developed within Hindu, Buddhist, and Bön traditions, how five mountains in the Indian Himalayan are also named Kailas, and how Kailas sacred geography constructions and a sacred Ganges source region were related.
Tantric Revisionings presents stimulating new perspectives on Hindu and Buddhist religion, particularly their Tantric versions, in India, Tibet or in modern Western societies. Geoffrey Samuel adopts an historically and textually informed anthropological approach, seeking to locate and understand religion in its social and cultural context. The question of the relation between 'popular' (folk, domestic, village, 'shamanic') religion and elite (literary, textual, monastic) religion forms a recurring theme through these studies. Six chapters have not been previously published; the previously published studies included are in publications which are difficult to locate outside major specialist libraries.
