http://tinyurl.com/agmpgv

It’s by Hoong Teik Toh of the Academia Sinica, and has the title, “Ch. Qiong ~ Tib. Khyung; Taoism ~ Bonpo — Some Questions Related to Early Ethno-Religious History in Sichuan.” It only costs 10 dollar, so maybe we should order a copy. I haven’t seen it yet.

Sino-Platonic papers are listed here:

http://www.sino-platonic.org/

It’s no. 146 in the list. Some of these titles may be downloaded as PDFs for free.

I haven’t heard of any such studies. There are interesting things going on at the places where Tibetans touch on and intermingle with other nationalities. There are some ‘shared’ pilgrimage sites, in which each pilgrim sees things relevant to his or her own religion, while largely ‘missing’ the significance of the same sites to other religions. (Omei Shan, Wutai Shan, Shar Dung-ri in Amdo, etc.) I see possibilities for influences under these circumstances. Daoists see the Kunlun Mountains that frame the northern Changtang as a very holy place. So we could say that there are some Daoist holy places in Tibet, and some Bön holy places in China.

Or to attack the question in a different way. Yes, very many Bön sources do believe that they represent a broad international religious movement in rather ancient times that ended up influencing religions all over Asia.
There is one Bön scripture (the only one directly used by Thu’u-bkwan in writing, in 1801, his famous anti-Bon polemic) called the Rdzong-’phrang that was actually rediscovered by an unknown tertön in China that tells about a conference of ancient Bönpo stages from practically every country of Asia during those times, including Zhangzhung, Khotan, Persia, India, China, etc. This is just one example of such a text out of very many.

There are lots of studies of Buddhist influences on Daoism, of course. But no, none concerning Bön (or even of Tibetan Buddhist) influences on Daoism as far as I know. Do you know of any? Will you write one?

Yours,
Dan

I don’t think it’s especially likely that Daoism, even much less than Confucianism, had much impact on Tibetan culture at any point in history. But I do think somewhere far in the prehistoric past there were certain areal (perhaps also arial?) religious phenomena that were broadly shared in that general part of the world… that could go on to feed into and influence the area’s religions.

What do you think?

Anyway its interesting that in the Sutra of the Eight Manifestations (tib. Snang brgyad, chi. Bawang jing), which was translated into Tibetan from Chinese, the Chinese word for non-Buddhist sorcerors, xie shi was translated with bon po. I’m just paraphrasing Stein’s Tibetica Antiqua I here (see pp.163, 171). Does this mean anything more than that the early Tibetan Buddhists called all heretics ‘Bonpo’? And could this xie shi possibly be behind the Tibetan word Zin-shing?

I seem to be in the mood for questions today. Don’t feel you have to answer any of them.

(By the way, the translation of xie shi with bon po is only found in the Dunhuang versions, of which there are many. The relevant entry in the Dalton/van Schaik catalogue is here.)

In M. Kapstein’s contribution to the 2004 book he edited for Univ. of Chicago Press, “The Presence of Light,” at p. 155, note 37, he calls attention to Le’u-tshe in the Sba-bzhed (p. 14 of the 1980 edition).

The passage is a difficult one, but I imagine you would be equal to it. Not that it has much to do with ‘Phags-pa, just that it’s interesting to contemplate those rare occasions when Chinese cultural heroes like Confucius and Laotzu do pop up in classical Tibetan sources.

Also, I’ve been meaning to try and get my hands on this peculiar publication:
HOONG TEIK TOH
Ch. Qiong ~ Tib. Khyung; Taoism ~ Bonpo — Some Questions Related to Early Ethno-Religious History in Sichuan. Sino-Platonic Papers, no. 147 (March 2005)

It apparently does equate Daoism with Bön.

Much more interesting, actually, are the footnotes to this paragraph, with much discussion about the Sensin, but also a significant summary of some still earlier expositions on the Tibetan Bön religion. The justification for this was the suggestion by some that the Sensin might be the Tibetan Bönpos (and others who had suggested that Bön and Taoism are the same, or have the same founder).