The origins of Bon unfold on two intertwined levels: the historical and the mythic. From a historical perspective, Bon is rooted in the pre-Buddhist indigenous religious traditions of Tibet, especially those associated with the western region often identified as Zhangzhung. These early practices involved the veneration of mountain and sky deities, serpent spirits, and a wide range of local gods, together with rituals of divination, healing, protection, and funerary rites. Such cults and practices formed a religious substratum that long predated the formal arrival of Buddhism in Tibet. Over time, later Bon narratives gathered these diverse elements into a single, more unified religious identity and projected that identity back into a remote antiquity.

Within Bon’s own self-understanding, this ancient heritage is personified in the figure of Tönpa Shenrab Miwoche, regarded as the founding teacher. He is said to have lived many thousands of years ago in a western land associated with regions around Mount Kailash, where he is credited with revealing a complete system of doctrine and ritual. These traditional accounts present Bon as an already fully formed spiritual path long before Buddhism appeared in Tibet. Modern scholarship, however, tends to treat such dates and detailed biographies as mythological rather than historically verifiable, while still recognizing that they encode memories of very old religious currents in western Tibet and neighboring areas.

Historically, the form of Bon recognizable today emerged through a long process of interaction with Tibetan Buddhism. As Buddhism spread from about the early Tibetan imperial period onward, non-Buddhist ritual specialists and their lineages were increasingly reinterpreted within a Bon framework. From roughly the medieval period, Bon scriptures were compiled and “revealed,” its doctrines were organized into structured systems comparable to Buddhist sutra, tantra, and contemplative teachings, and monastic institutions were established. In this way, Bon did not simply resist Buddhism; it reshaped itself in dialogue and competition with it, adopting similar philosophical and institutional forms while preserving its own deities, myths, and ritual emphases.

From a contemplative standpoint, Bon can thus be seen as both ancient and newly articulated. It arises from deep indigenous roots in Tibetan and Zhangzhung religious life, yet it crystallizes as a self-conscious, organized religion only after sustained encounter with Buddhism. The tradition’s mythic narratives of timeless origin and its historical evolution as a systematized path are not mutually exclusive; rather, they illuminate different dimensions of how a living religion remembers, reshapes, and sanctifies its own past.