Tibetan Studies > Finding Texts > Bonpo Kangyur & Tengyur Text Finding Aids

Bonpo Kangyur & Tengyur Text Finding Aids

Contributors: Jann Ronis.

For our purposes here, the Bön religious community is a sect of Tibetan Buddhism. Their origins as such lie in the tenth and eleventh centuries and their sectarian and doctrinal formation is intertwined, or at least parallels, that of the Nyingma. The B̈ön also possess massive canons of religious texts entitled Kangyur and Tengyur. The past decade has seen explosive growth in the fields of Bön textual preservation and publication, on the one hand, and major international cataloguing projects of this material, on the other.

As of yet there are no electronic search engines of the Bön canons in the public domain, yet the amount and quality of the reference materials in print are impressive. Here you will find bibliographic information on editions of the Bön canons as well as those on relevant reference materials.

• Theg chen g.yung drung bon gyi bka' 'gyur Bön Kangyur (179 vol.). khreng tu'u, China: si khron zhing chen par khrun lte gnas par 'debs khang, 1999
• G.yung drung Bon gyi bka’ 'gyur rin po che Bön Kangyur (154 vol.) microform. Chengdu: Nationalities Research Institute, 1985.
• Bon brten ’gyur Bön Tengyur (320 vol.). Chengdu: Tenpai Nyima, 2001
• Martin, Dan, Yasuhiko Nagano, Per Kværne, and Kokuritsu Minzokugaku Hakubutsukan. A Catalogue of the Bon Kanjur. Vol. 40., Senri Ethnological Reports. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 2003.
• Karmay, Samten G., Yasuhiko Nagano, and Kokuritsu Minzokugaku Hakubutsukan. A Catalogue of the New Collection of Bonpo Katen Texts. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 2001.

This short page of tips on how to find texts in the four Tibetan canonical collections is intended as an introduction to doing research in these repositories of Indic, Central Asian and, most of all, Tibetan literature and the arts. After you gain some experience working with these materials you will quickly come to see the limitations in this page.