Kalsang Norbu Gurung completed his early education at the Menri Bonpo Monastery in Northern India and the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in Varanasi. He received his PhD from Leiden University in 2011 and thereafter taught Tibetan language and literature at University of Bonn (Germany). From 2012 to 2019, he worked in two consecutive ANR-DFG-funded projects (Social History of Tibetan Societies) studying the Tibetan legal documents of the Ganden Phodrang, and focusing mainly on the Tibetan tax system up to the mid-20th century. From 2016 to 2022, he worked for the project Union Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts in Germany (KOHD) at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. 

In this ERC PaganTibet project, he explores further the myth of Pha jo sTon pa gShen rab using new resources that have become accessible since 2018. His focus in this project is to study of ritual and myths based on these newly accessible manuscripts from the Eastern Himalayas, which contain more than two hundreds texts of varying sizes, including themes about rituals performed in non-monastic Bon and Buddhist communities, cosmogonic narratives, short accounts of the founder of Bon, sTon pa gShen rab mi bo, and other related mythical personalities.