国外苯教研究数目.docVIP

Bon Bibliography in the?THL Bibliographies Overview of Subject B?n is the alternative Tibetan religion that may or may not have existed in any systematic way prior to the introduction of Buddhism in Tibet. It is certain that numerous elements of modern Tibetan Buddhism and B?n find their pedigree in folk customs and practices stretching back into Tibets prehistory, but as of this writing there is considerable doubt about these indigenous elements having found expression in so coherent an organization as modern B?n before Buddhism arrived. In the Renaissance period (10th-13th centuries C.E.), a counter-Tibetan identity coalesced around these folk practices and around the Zhang Zhung ethnicity that comprised the kingdom of the same name in western Tibet prior to its undoing at the hands of the Tibetan king Trisong Detsen (khri srong lde btsan). This movement mirrored many of the sensibilities of Nyingma (rnying ma) Buddhism, including most notably an emphasis on treasure texts as the primary textual authority and Dzokchen (rdzogs chen) as the driving philosophy, to the extent that it is superficially difficult to distinguish the two. This is not just because of B?ns adoption of Buddhist principles. Indeed, the difficulty in extracting one from the other relates as much to Buddhisms appropriation of B?npo elements as vice versa. The strongest argument for the distinctiveness between the two is the fact that both parties assert it. Regardless of whether we can identify concrete dissimilarities, B?npos claim a different history, ethnicity, deities, and practices, and Buddhists do likewise, even while they all agree that the fundamental teachings are the same. State of Scholarship Prior to David Snellgroves?The Nine Ways of B?n?(1967), in which the author collaborated with B?npo monk-scholars to present fairly the teachings and character of B?n, the majority of Western scholarship treated B?n as a shamanic derivative that plagiarized Buddhism. In the time since Snellgrov