/lit/ - Literature

>>21650880
There’s actually reputed to sometimes be a split between Tibetan Bönist shamans, witch-doctors and the like (those who more heavily preserve the ancient shamanic customs and see the Buddhists as intruders on their land and culture) and the Buddhists in Tibet (lamas, tulkus and their disciples).

The core of Tibetan Buddhism is Indian Buddhist teachings brought to Tibet by Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava, as well as a heavy admixture of Indian tantric teachings, practices, icons, symbolism and terminology adapted into the Tibetan language. Hence the tantric aspect of Tibetan Buddhism, why it’s sometimes called Tantric Tibetan Buddhism.

However there is also a large subset of Bön which fused with the Tibetan religion and didn’t keep so strictly to its native Tibetan shamanistic and animistic roots, now incorporating all these Buddhist and tantric teachings, hence creating a strange gray area, as if in the Americas we were to have a lot of Christianized shamans who kept something like shamanism culture and practices and heritage undergoing but into a Christian framework (with saints, miracles, prophesying, angels etc. as described in the Old and New Testaments explaining and incorporating their tradition), and these shamans were accepted by a settling Church as part of this Church, while yet other shamans disliked and distrusted the Christian settlers and kept more closely to their native roots. Not a perfect analogy but nothing is.

The “wrathful deities” are no more demons, than Jesus Christ in the Book of Revelation is a demonic figure for returning in full glory and triumphant power as a wrathful judge against the evil and a savior for the good and faithful, but of course I don’t expect you to understand or credit this if you’re already hard-wired, for whatever reason, against doing so. Every religion and culture has its quaintnesses and anthropological quirks and oddities which can be solely portrayed to make it seem like a grotesque sect, but often these are simply the outer layers, how it feels to a crude grasp of the thing.