Drenpas Proclamation The Rise And Decline Of The Bon Religion In Tibet Vajra Academic Vol Iii

The present volume contains the first complete translation of a Tibetan text entitled Drakpa Lingdrak (bsGrags pa gling grags, or GLG), dating, in all probability, from the second half of the 12th century C.E. The unknown author of this text presents a coherent narrative of how, and why, it came to pass that Bön - regarded by its adherents in the 12th century (and still today) as the ancestral religion of Tibet, and, indeed, as a timeless and universal religion of all mankind was suppressed by the Tibetan King T'risong Detsen (Khri- srong IDe-btsan) in the 8th century C.E. The historical narrative literature of the Bön religion remains to be systematically explored, but there is no doubt that the GLG, the earliest known example of this genre, has played a pivotal role in this literary tradition up to the present. The first scholar in the West to make use of the GLG was Samten G.. Karmay in his study and translation of a part of Shardza Tashi Gyeltsen's (Shar- rdza bKra-shis rGyal-mtshan) Treasury of Good Sayings (Legs bshad mdzod). published in 1972.1 The Bön monk Sangye Tenzin Jongdong - later to become the abbot of the Bön monastery at Dolanji in Himachal Pradesh, India, under the name of Lungtok Tenpé Nyima-stayed in Oslo from 1967 to 1969. Thanks to Per Riis, the librarian in charge of the Oriental Manuscript Collection of the University of Oslo Library, he obtained a photocopy of the GLG manuscript preserved there. Being well aware of its importance, he shared this copy with Samten G. Karmay, who included it in the Bibliography of his book, and it is therefore due to these two Tibetan scholars that the GLG gradually became known to scholars in the West. In the early 1970's, I undertook to edit a catalogue of the collection of non- canonical Tibetan texts in the Oslo University Library.