Photo: Daniel Berounsky
The Project
Buddhism was introduced to Tibet in the 7th century CE and became the official national religion in the 8th. A small percentage of Tibetans are followers of a religion called Bön, which its adherents (Bönpos) and Buddhists alike consider to be the country’s indigenous faith. Bön came to acquire many Buddhist features but retained a strand of more archaic traditions. Since there is no evidence that these traditions were actually called Bön prior to the establishment of Buddhism, we refer to them collectively as Tibetan Pagan religion.
Until now, all we knew about this religion came from a small number of early (mainly 8–11th c.) manuscripts from the Silk Road, a small cache from southern Tibet, and some ritual narratives in the literature of “reformed” Bön. This situation changed dramatically in 2005 with the discovery of a large number of manuscripts constituting the ritual repertoire of a class of priests, called Leyu, in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. Although facsimiles of some 70,000 pages of these manuscripts have been, or are due to be, published in China, few people have worked on them owing to difficulties of script, language and the concepts conveyed. Preliminary investigations suggest that these texts contain genuinely archaic non-Buddhist rituals and narratives closely resembling those of the early sources that are already known. In the light of this background, our main research question is:
“What is the nature of Tibet’s Pagan religion?”
The three main objectives in our reconstruction of Tibetan Pagan religion are:
1. to identify and reassemble the divine, human and animal characters that make up the sacred world of Tibetan Pagan religion, with their dramatic roles and the places they inhabit;
2. to describe and to analyse the structure and content of the myths and rituals contained in the texts, and
3. to arrive at an understanding of the Tibetan world view that emerges from the examination of these sources: a worldview completely different from that of Buddhism, insofar as the dominant concerns are not the achievement of spiritual realisation or a propitious rebirth, but the establishment of a mutually beneficial relationship of exchange with the natural world through the respectful maintenance of boundaries and the appeasement of the earthly powers; ensuring purity, health, security and prosperity in one’s own community; and preserving good relations among social groups.
The volume of the source material now available will require a pluridisciplinary approach, involving textual scholars who have experience with the kind of literature concerned as well as experts in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and digital humanities, to address the objectives outlined above.
The project will proceed along three phases:
1. data selection, collection and curation;
2. annotation and analysis of the collected and pre-processed material, and finally
3. synthesis, in which the central research question and objectives will be addressed and the final results of the project disseminated.