Drenpa’s Proclamation: The Rise and Decline of the Bon Religion in Tibet

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Drenpa's Proclamation, dating from the 12th century C.E.. is the earliest known coherent account, told from the perspective of the Bön religion, of how and why it came to pass that Buddhism was introduced into Tibet during the Tibetan Empire (a period that ended in 842 C.E.). Bön emerged in the 10th-11th century C.E. in Central Tibet, in the context of the 'Later Propagation' of Buddhism in Tibet in the same period, but was viewed by its adherents as distinct from Buddhism and as having flourished in Tibet for centuries before the advent of Buddhism.

Drenpa's Proclamation is here translated in its entirety for the first time. It contains unique insight into how Tibetans in the 12th century envisaged the religion of their ancestors, and a wealth of information about cosmological, mythological, and ritual topics.

Keywords: Bön religion, early kings of Tibet, cosmology, rituals.

PER KVÆRNE (b. 1945), Professor Emeritus, occupied the Chair of History of Religions at the University of Oslo 1977-2007. His research focuses on late Indian Buddhist literature, the Tibetan Bön religion, and contemporary Tibetan secular art. His books include An Anthology of Buddhist Tantric Songs. A Study of the Caryagiti (1977); Tibetan Bon Religion: A Death Ritual of the Tibetan Bonpos (1985); The Bon Religion of Tibet: The Iconography of a Living Tradition (1995). He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Oslo, and Accademia Ambrosiana, Milano.

DAN MARTIN (b. 1953) is author of two books, Mandala Cosmogony and Unearthing Bon Treasures. His research is mainly in the areas of the literary, religious, and cultural history of Tibet from the late tenth century to the present. He has taught in various universities, and was a fellow at two Institutes for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem and Oslo. He has also compiled Tibetan Histories: A Bibliography of Tibetan-Language Historical Works, recently revised and posted on the internet.

The present volume contains the first complete translation of a Tibetan text entitled Drakpa Lingdrak (bsGrags pa gling grags, or GLG), dating, in all probability, from the second half of the 12th century C.E. The unknown author of this text presents a coherent narrative of how, and why, it came to pass that Bön - regarded by its adherents in the 12th century (and still today) as the ancestral religion of Tibet, and, indeed, as a timeless and universal religion of all mankind was suppressed by the Tibetan King T'risong Detsen (Khri- srong IDe-btsan) in the 8th century C.E. The historical narrative literature of the Bön religion remains to be systematically explored, but there is no doubt that the GLG, the earliest known example of this genre, has played a pivotal role in this literary tradition up to the present.

The first scholar in the West to make use of the GLG was Samten G.. Karmay in his study and translation of a part of Shardza Tashi Gyeltsen's (Shar- rdza bKra-shis rGyal-mtshan) Treasury of Good Sayings (Legs bshad mdzod). published in 1972.1 The Bön monk Sangye Tenzin Jongdong - later to become the abbot of the Bön monastery at Dolanji in Himachal Pradesh, India, under the name of Lungtok Tenpé Nyima-stayed in Oslo from 1967 to 1969. Thanks to Per Riis, the librarian in charge of the Oriental Manuscript Collection of the University of Oslo Library, he obtained a photocopy of the GLG manuscript preserved there. Being well aware of its importance, he shared this copy with Samten G. Karmay, who included it in the Bibliography of his book, and it is therefore due to these two Tibetan scholars that the GLG gradually became known to scholars in the West.

In the early 1970's, I undertook to edit a catalogue of the collection of non- canonical Tibetan texts in the Oslo University Library. These texts had been brought to Norway in the 1920's by the Norwegian missionary Theo Sorensen, and I decided to include the GLG manuscript although it was not, strictly speaking, part of that particular collection. The catalogue was published in 1973. A vague ambition to translate the GLG had already taken hold at the back of my mind, and I eventually made a typewritten transliteration of the Oslo University Library manuscript. Some years later I obtained a copy of what in the present volume is called the Dolanji manuscript. The first non-Tibetan scholar to study the GLG in depth was, however, Anne-Marie Blondeau. The beginning of her interest in what was known collectively as the bsGrags byang texts - including the Oslo manuscript - dates to the early 1980's. She published an initial report of her study of the GLG, of which the only available copy at the time was the Oslo manuscript, and other related texts, in 1981. In 1990 she published an article of great importance for all later studies of these texts, in which is to be found for the first time an overview of the contents of the GLG (Oslo ms.) and related texts, and their connection with the Ma (rMa) family." In 1989, I published the first of a number of articles containing short excerpts focusing in whole or in part on the GLG, sometimes containing short- and in one or two cases longish - excerpts from the text. Gradually a number of other scholars have also made use of the text, especially John V. Bellezza.

Although I had made a preliminary translation some years previously, it was only in 2015 that I could make a serious effort to produce an annotated translation of the GLG together with an edition of the Tibetan text, of which several manuscripts were available by that time. This project only became possible, however, when Dan Martin agreed to co-author the Translation and subsequently also provided the bulk of the annotations to that part of the volume, as well as the greater part of the Bibliography.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages