Bon or Bn (Tibetan: , Wylie: bon [p (n)]), also Bonism or Benism (Chinese: , Bnji digenous religion of Tibet, pre-dating the

introduction of Buddhism. It influenc ed Tibetan Buddhism and is still practiced as a minority religion. The scholarly history of Bon is difficult to clearly ascertain because the earli est surviving documents referring to the religion come from the 9th and 10th cen turies, well after Buddhists began the suppression of indigenous beliefs and pra ctices. Moreover, historian Per Kvrne notes that "Bon" is used to describe three distinct traditions: the pre-Buddhist religious practices of Tibetans and Tibetic peoples of Nepal th at are "imperfectly reconstructed [yet] essentially different from Buddhism" and were focused on the personage of a divine king; a syncretic religion that arose in Tibet and Nepal during the 10th and 11th cent uries, with strong shamanistic and animistic traditions. This shamanic indigenou s religion is not Buddhism, but is sometimes regarded by scholars as a substrate form of Buddhism. a set of popular beliefs in which local shamans try to heal people using ideas s ometimes ascribed to Bon. Shamans may divine deities' wishes, have supernatural fights with deities, or be possessed by deities. These shamanic practices are co mmon in the Tibeto-Burman speaking ethnic groups, such as Magar, Tamang, Tibetan , etc. However, other scholars do not accept the tradition that separates Bon from Budd hism. Christopher Beckwith calls Bon "one of the two types of Tibetan Buddhism" and writes that "despite continuing popular belief in the existence of a non-Bud dhist religion known as Bon during the Tibetan Empire period, there is not a shr ed of evidence to support the idea... Although different in some respects from t he other sects, it was already very definitely a form of Buddhism." Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, recognizes the Bon tradition as the sixth pr incipal spiritual school of Tibet, along with the Nyingma, Sakya, Kagyu, Gelug a nd Jonang schools of Buddhism, despite the long historical competition between t he Bon tradition and Buddhism in Tibet. In 1978 the Dalai Lama acknowledged the Bon religion as a school with its own practices after visiting the newly built B on monastery in Dolanji." The syllable -po or -pa is appended to a noun in Tibetan to designate a person w ho is from that place or performs that action; "Bonpo" thus means a follower of the Bon tradition, "Nyingmapa" a follower of the Nyingma tradition, and so on. ( The feminine parallels are -mo and -ma, but these are not generally appended to the names of the Tibetan religious traditions.)