Antecedents of Bon: On rMa Folks and the Origins of gShen Ritual Specialists

There is no or desperately little reliable early evidence to support the historicity of the grand pre-Buddhist Bon Zhang zhung Empire of later Bon po sources and their western aficionados. Imagination is nonetheless plentiful. In the PIATS 2016, I discuss the oldest historical textual sources relevant to a heartland of Bon, which is variously conceptualised as Zhang zhung, Ta zig and 'Ol mo lung ring, with special reference to a central stronghold and main seat of power in Zhang zhung: the so-called Silver Castle of Garuḍa Valley or Khyung lung Dngul dNgul mkhar. If one carefully examines the genealogy of knowledge and the history of invention of that grand Zhang zhung Bon Empire and its legendary Khyung lung castle, one cannot help but notice that our ideas about them derive from surprisingly late discourse, which postdates any relevant historical and geographical realities by a long stretch. The later Bon Zhang zhung literary construct is to be distinguished clearly from a probably historical and probably also small principality by the name of Zhang zhung, that is located west of Central Tibet, roughly centred on the Kailash area and that seems to have had a northern extension as well. But, interestingly, that historical Zhang zhung in its descriptions carries no significant Bon po associations and in time also significantly precedes Bon traditions as we know them now. ... In the following, we will examine the earliest evidence for a ‘location’ of the origin of Bon, or at least for the origin of its narratives. We find those in non-Buddhist ritualistic narratives of the Dunhuang period. For an overview and analysis of Dunhuang historical narratives, I refer to PIATS 2006 (but see also Macdonald 1971). The analysis of ritualistic narratives is significantly more involved than that of historical sources. It requires fragile attempts at connecting clusters of narrative elements that in Dunhuang sources appear loosely assembled around important names and locations to the earliest, self-consciously Bon sources, such as the mDo ‘dus, the Klu ‘bum and other sources, with special attention to those names and locations, of course, that are already familiar from later strata of emerging Bon. The latter begin to emerge in around the 10th–11th century AD and thus may be closely contiguous with the redaction of Dunhuang materials. The nature of the rituals cannot be elucidated here, for reasons of space