Unearthing Bon Treasures: Life and Contested Legacy of a Tibetan Scripture Revealer, With a General Bibliography of Bon

The subject for this study, the Tibetan "treasure revealer" Gshen-chen Klu-dga', is a crucial figure in the development of "Bon" as an organised religion after the eleventh century. Here for the first time he is situated in the context of what was happening in Buddhism at the time. By scrutinizing his life and "gter-ma" ("treasures"), that were to be of much controversy in later ages, Dan Martin sheds light on the mechanism of Tibetan polemical tradition and the ways in which sectarianism accords itself legitimacy by resurrecting ancient arguments in a subtly distorted manner. The "exhaustive annotated bibliography of previous works about Bon," forming the second part of the work, can rightly be seen as a legacy of Gshen-chen. Both parts taken together make this an indispensable guide to any student of Bon.