Report from the fieldEntering the Kingdom of Zhangzhung

14 May 2024

Photo: Agnieszka Helman-Ważny

The Menri Monastery is hidden in the Himalayas. It is home to the largest collection of manuscripts on the Bon tradition, but hardly any scholar from the West gets access to it. This April, Agnieszka Helman-Wazny and a group of colleagues accepted a very special invitation.

Agnieszka Helman-Wazny

The Bon literary corpus comprises several thousand volumes on a wide range of topics, representing a complex range of world views. Followers of Yungdrung Bon believe that the coherence of these teachings is warranted by their common originator: Tonpa Shenrab, the founder of the religion, who is believed to have lived 18,000 years ago. From a scholarly point of view, which is always limited to tangible evidence, the timeline starts much later, roughly 2,000 years ago, and has many gaps. Western scholars have been gathering evidence to develop a more complete understanding of the history of the Bon tradition.

Much Western research has focused on the ancient kingdom of Zhangzhung in western and northwestern Tibet and beyond. It is here that the Bon religion has influenced the philosophies and practices of Tibetan Buddhism. For a long time, the areas once ruled by the Zhangzhung kings were inaccessible for fieldwork. It is only in recent decades that some archaeologists have been granted access, making it possible to study this rich material culture. In addition, over the past two decades, extensive collections of Bon manuscripts have been discovered in Gansu and Sichuan, China, which bear some similarities to the Dunhuang texts. Although found in a different location, these new discoveries may help us to better understand the development of this tradition. In fact, many collections of Bon manuscripts have not yet been studied. One of these is the collection in the Tibetan Yungdrung Bon Library at the Pal Shenten Menri Monastery in Dolanji, a remote, hard-to-reach village in the Himalayan foothills of India.

Today, this monastery holds the world’s largest collection of manuscripts relating to the Bon tradition, originating from various places in Tibet, Nepal, and India. 62,854 pages of manuscripts and 479 initiation cards relating to Bon in the holdings of this library were digitised and catalogued by the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library (EAP687-1), led by Edward Proctor. Kept at centuries-old Bon monasteries in Tibet, these unique materials were rescued from being destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (1966–69). Still, this collection has not yet been systematically researched.