Within Yungdrung Bon, tantric practice (rgyud) unfolds in a structure that parallels Buddhist Vajrayāna while retaining a clearly distinct identity. The tradition organizes its higher vehicles within the Nine Ways, with the principal tantric systems especially associated with the seventh, eighth, and ninth Ways. Central among these is the Ma rgyud, or Mother Tantra, which, though similar in name to Buddhist Mother Tantras, constitutes a separate corpus with its own cycles and ritual architecture. This framework is not merely a different label for the same material; it expresses a unique cosmology, pantheon, and soteriological vision grounded in Bon’s own scriptural and oral lineages.

The distinctiveness of Bon tantra is perhaps most visible in its deity cycles and the way these deities embody enlightenment. Figures such as Sipa’i Gyalmo, the wrathful queen of existence, Gekho and Walchen Gekho, and the wrathful yidam Trowo Tsochok Khagying stand at the heart of advanced tantric practice, exorcistic rites, and protection rituals. Enlightenment itself is personified not primarily through Śākyamuni or Indian buddhas, but through Shenlha Ökar and the founding teacher Tonpa Shenrab, who serve as central objects of meditation in tantric sādhanas. These deities are embedded in mandalas, visualizations, and empowerments that follow a Vajrayāna-like logic while remaining specific to Bon’s mythic history and doctrinal outlook.

Another hallmark of Bon tantra lies in its integration of elemental forces and indigenous spirit traditions into fully developed tantric systems. Practices working with the five elements and with la, tsel, and yang—life-force, vitality, and prosperity—draw deeply on older Tibeto-Bon cosmologies, yet are articulated through mantras, visualizations, and ritual procedures characteristic of tantra. Elaborate rites for subjugating, harmonizing, or making offerings to local gods and spirits—klu, gnyan, gza’, sa bdag, and others—are preserved with unusual explicitness, so that the tantric path becomes a way of ritually reordering the entire seen and unseen environment. In this sense, Bon tantra does not simply tolerate indigenous spirits; it ritually incorporates them into its soteriological project.

The treatment of death and transition states also reflects this distinctive synthesis. Bon possesses specialized bardo tantras that describe the post-mortem process through its own pantheon and cosmology, centering on Shenlha Ökar and the four transcendent lords rather than on the figures familiar from Buddhist “Bardo” literature. Closely related are soul-retrieval and life-extension tantras, in which the recovery of lost soul-essence and the extension of lifespan are pursued through deity yoga and symbolic narratives unique to Bon. These rites show how concerns that might once have belonged solely to shamanic healing are reframed within a tantric vision of liberation and protection.

Underlying all of this is a mantric and ritual language that marks Bon tantra as its own world. Seed syllables, mantra lineages, and the prominence of the white “A dkar” give its recitational practices a distinct sound and symbolism, while mandala layouts, color schemes, and directional deities follow Bon cosmological patterns rather than Buddhist ones. The entire edifice of initiation, reading transmission, and instruction is traced back to Tonpa Shenrab and the Shen lineage masters, and the vows, protectors, and guardians invoked in these rites are specific to Bon. Taken together, these features show a tradition that shares the general tantric grammar of deity yoga, mantra, and subtle-body work, yet speaks it in a language, imagery, and lineage memory that are unmistakably its own.