2 · 5
Preface
I created tibetanmyth.com to gather the small, scattered field of Bön research — reports divided across Tibetan, English, and Chinese sources — into one trilingual collection that can be read collectively and conveniently. The English Works section contains research and study only, with no creative literature; every study presents myth narrative, scholarship, archaeology, and modern interpretation in clearly separated layers. My role is to gather, organize, translate, and edit these studies, not to claim authorship of the original research, which belongs to the scholars and institutions credited in each paper.
Preface
I created tibetanmyth.com out of a practical need — my own.
The study of Bön, Tibet's ancient religious tradition, is still a small and scattered field. Research reports exist, but they are dispersed: some are written in Tibetan, some in English, some in Chinese. They live on different shelves, in different languages, in different corners of the internet — separated from one another and difficult to consult together. Anyone who wishes to gain a fuller picture of Bön — its origins, its scriptures, its sacred geography, its place in Tibetan civilization — must chase fragments across languages and sources, and assemble the puzzle alone.
This website exists to gather those fragments into one place. Its purpose is to bring Tibetan, English, and Chinese research papers and study reports together under a single roof, so that they can be read collectively and conveniently — each study available in three languages, side by side, rather than scattered across the world.
What you will find under English Works
The English Works section contains research and study only. You will find no creative literature here — no poems, no novels, no creative writings of any kind. Those belong to the Tibetan and Chinese pages of this website. The English pages are reserved for one thing: the careful, documented study of Bön and Tibetan mythology.
How the studies are written
Every study gathered on this website is presented according to a simple editorial principle, which I ask the reader to keep in mind. Four things are kept in clearly separated layers, never mixed and never presented as one another:
- The tradition's own narrative — what Bön itself says about its founders, its scriptures, and its sacred history, rendered faithfully and respectfully as the religious self-account that it is;
- Scholarship — textual research, manuscript dating, and the findings of academic study;
- Archaeology — what excavation and material evidence actually show;
- Modern interpretation — clearly marked wherever a contemporary reading goes beyond the evidence.
A religious chronology is not presented as history. A hypothesis is not presented as fact. Keeping these layers distinct is, to me, a matter of honesty — toward the tradition, toward the scholars, and toward the reader.
Acknowledgment
None of this work stands on its own. It draws upon the hard labor of many scholars, professors, and institutions whose research made these studies possible. My own role has been to gather, organize, translate, and edit these studies into the collection you see here — I am not the original researcher of each work, and I make no claim to be. The scholars' contributions are acknowledged where they belong: every paper and study on this website lists its sources and quotations in full, so that the reader can trace each claim back to its origin and judge it independently.
If this collection helps even a few readers see Bön more clearly — as a living tradition with its own voice, and as a subject worthy of serious, careful study — then it has fulfilled its purpose.
— Tselo Thar
October 2026