the buddhist way into tibet 327
men”, as the indigenous religious tradition is called in later Buddhist
sources. This mi-chos should not be confused with the Bon religion
which often is claimed to be identical with the indigenous religion of
the Tibetans. The religion we (and also the Tibetans) today call “Bon”
was introduced to Tibet in the tenth and eleventh centuries, from the
country the Tibetans call Zhang-zhung. In the titles of bon-po texts a
large vocabulary of the so-called “Zhang-zhung language” is preserved.
For a long time considered a ctitious language, linguists have now
found out that the words of the Zhang-zhung language show close links
with Himalayan languages like Kinnauri and Eastern Tibeto-Burmese
dialects like Gyarong in Sichuan. The linguistic evidence points to the
origins of the Bon religion in a Tibeto-Burmese environment, prob-
ably in Western Tibet, around the Kailash mountain. The doctrines
of the Bon religion reveal striking similarities with Tibetan Buddhist
doctrines, a fact which led many Western scholars to accuse the Bon-
po of plagiarism. Nowadays, it is, however, a well established fact that
quite a few bon-po texts have been copied by the Buddhists and not the
other way round. In short, the history of the Bon religion is in many
aspects still unknown to us, and further research in the early history
of the encounter of Bon and Buddhist beliefs will probably shed some
new light on this early period of Tibetan history.
Returning to our subject, the “nameless religion”, as R. A. Stein^42
has called the traditional beliefs, they seem to have concentrated on the
person of the king, as already elaborated. Especially important were the
funeral rites, performed at the royal court by the bon-po. Contrary to
the later meaning of the word, bon in this early period probably desig-
nated the of ciating priest. The bon-priests were concerned with guiding
the soul of the deceased safely to the land of the dead. Animal sacri ces
were necessary to safeguard the souls because they were supposed to be
guided by animals, such as sheep, horses, yaks etc. The funeral rites for
the kings were performed with sacri cial offerings of their servants and
ministers, who accompanied their lord to the realm of the dead. The
world of the ancient Tibetans was populated by a host of spirits, who
constantly had to be appeased because generally they were supposed
to have an ambivalent, if not malevolent, character. This traditional
belief in ghosts and spirits was, as we shall see, used by the Buddhist
missionaries as a means to convert the Tibetan people.
(^42) Stein 1972, p. 191.