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Tibetan mythology comprises the traditional and religious stories of UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}}, both pre-Buddhist and Buddhist. While the country may be part of China now, it still maintains it's own distinct culture and mythology from that of China, and elements from Tibetan mythology have managed to break through and become mainstream to the West.

to:

Tibetan mythology comprises the traditional and religious stories of UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}}, both pre-Buddhist and Buddhist. While the country may be part of China now, it still maintains it's its own distinct culture and mythology from that of China, and elements from Tibetan mythology have managed to break through and become mainstream to the West.
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Everythings Better With Monkeys has been turned into a disambiguation. Zero Context Examples and examples that don’t fit existing tropes will be removed.


* EverythingsBetterWithMonkeys: Pha Trelgen Changchup Sempa, the mythical monkey-ancestor of the Tibetan people and one of the most important figures in Tibetan culture.
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Contrary to popular beliefs Tibetan culture at its core is closer to the steppe and Siberian cultures of Inner Asia, rather than Chinese or Indian as popularly thought. For more interesting info on the folklore and mythologies of the other East Asian cultures, see the pages on the [[Myth/ChineseMythology Chinese]], [[Myth/KoreanMythology Koreans]], [[Myth/AltaicMythology Mongols]] and [[Myth/JapaneseMythology Japanese]], and for the folklore and mythology of the other countries in the Himalayas, see Myth/HinduMythology.

to:

Contrary to popular beliefs Tibetan culture at its core is closer to the steppe and Siberian cultures of Inner Asia, rather than Chinese or Indian as popularly thought. For more interesting info on the folklore and mythologies of the other East Asian cultures, see the pages on the [[Myth/ChineseMythology Chinese]], [[Myth/KoreanMythology Koreans]], [[Myth/AltaicMythology Mongols]] and [[Myth/JapaneseMythology Japanese]], and for the folklore and mythology of the other countries in the Himalayas, see Myth/HinduMythology.

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Tibetan mythology comprises the traditional and religious stories of UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}}, both pre-Buddhist and Buddhist. While the country may be part of China now, it still maintains it's own distinct culture and mythology from that of China, and elements from Tibetan mythology have managed to break through and become mainstream to the West. When we speak of Tibetan mythology, we must differentiate between the mythology of the indigenous Bon religion and that of the later Buddhism, although the two sometimes flow together.

Spirits are classified as peaceful or wrathful and further divided by type: Klu (water spirits), Nan (spirits of trees and stones), Sadag (earth spirits), Tsan (sky spirits usually found atop mountains)

The myths of the Bon religion are almost always associated with origins, beginning with ‘O-lde spu-rgyal, said to have been sent to rule humans by the gods above. Origin myths were told in order to make any ritual effective. If a person was sick, the curing ceremony involved a recitation of origins or creation. Marriage ceremonies included the retelling of the first marriage—that between the goddess who was daughter of the god of the world, and a human man, Ling-dkar. Arguing with the reluctant god for his daughter’s hand, the man suggests that the union of man and the gods should mean worship for the gods and protection for humans. Upon leaving Heaven, the goddess is given a third of her parents’ inheritance (her brother, as a male, receives two-thirds). Her father gives her the masculine arrow and her mother gives her the feminine spindle. In actual Bon wedding ceremonies each action is tied to this origin myth. For instance, the priest presents the groom with a piece of gold and the bride with a piece of turquoise, and then the priest and the couple sing the story of the arrow and the spindle. They sing of how at the beginning of time the union of two immortals resulted in three eggs. From a golden one came a golden male “arrow of life” with turquoise feathers. From a turquoise egg came a turquoise arrow of the female with golden feathers. From a white egg came a golden spindle. And from the sky and the ocean mist came Bon.

There are many variations of Tibetan myths of creation via a cosmic egg or eggs. One tells how in the beginning the elements became a giant cosmic egg. On its shell was the white cliff of the gods, and within it was a lake with a yolk containing the six classes of life. Out of this center came eighteen smaller eggs, one of which was a white one that produced of its own accord the various parts of a being who became a man who named himself King Ye-smon.

Other cosmogonic themes in Tibet include an animistic one of creation from the actual body of a primordial goddess. It is said that the Klu Queen who made the world was a child of the Void, that the sky came from her head, the planets from her teeth, the moon from her right eye, the sun from her left, and so forth. It was day when she opened her eyes and night when she closed them. Her voice was thunder, her breath clouds, her tears rain.

Some Tibetan myths say the original being was the “uncreated blue toad of turquoise”; some say it was a tigress. In some stories, creation comes from the killing of a primordial being by a young *hero, sometimes, especially in Ladakh, named *Gesar, whom Buddhists would see as an incarnation of Avalokiteshvara. Finally, there are indigenous myths that see creation as coming from the struggle between the powers of light (“Radiance”) and those of darkness (“Black Misery”). In this model, the black lord creates all that is antiexistence out of a cosmic egg, while the white lord creates all that is good. Until Buddhism became dominant in Tibet in 842 C.E., the people were ruled by a dynasty of sacred kings who traced their ancestry to gNya’khri btsan-po, who came down from the land of the gods as rain that impregnates the earth. All nature celebrated his arrival. After his return to Heaven, this first king was invoked by each of his successors to ratify their divine inheritance. In a sense, the rise of Lamaism in Tibet is a continuation in a Buddhist context of this earlier practice.

Lamaism, the Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet, takes its name from the importance it attributes to lamas, the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. The temporal (until the Chinese invasion of 1952) and spiritual leader of Tibet is the Dalai Lama. The next important figure in the Tibetan hierarchy is the Panchen Lama, an emanation of the Buddha Amitabha (Amida Buddha). The closeness of the two lamas is indicated by the fact that Avalokiteshvara is himself an emanation of the Buddha Amitabha. Lamaism is deeply influenced by the Tantric aspect of Buddhism (Vajrayana), which is itself tied to the tradition of Sutrayana, in which one identifies with the suffering of others and works toward the liberation not only of the self but of others. Vajrayana stresses the possibility of liberation in this life and is a much faster process than Sutrayana alone. It is said that Buddhism was introduced to Tibet by the Chinese and Nepalese wives of King Songsten Gampo (Song-sen-gam-po), who reigned in Tibet in the seventh century C.E. He was, in a sense, the first Dalai Lama, as he is considered to have been, like the Dalai Lamas of later periods, an incarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the most important of Tibetan bodhisattvas. But it was later in the century that King Trisong Detsen actually adopted Buddhism as the state religion. Later kings turned against Buddhism and persecuted its adherents. It was not until the eleventh century that Buddhism returned in force to Tibet, very much under Indian rather than Chinese influence and with a character all its own, brought about by its Vajrayana characteristics and its partial assimilation of the indigenous shamanistic and animistic Bon religion.

One of the most obvious aspects of Tibetan Buddhism is its reliance on works of art. At the center of this tradition is the depiction of the endless cycle of birth and death known as samsara in the Wheel of Life. The wheel is held up by Shinje, the Lord of Death and, therefore, the determiner of Life. The “machine” that turns the wheel is made of ignorance, desire, and hatred, represented by a pig, a cockerel, and a snake. Contained in the Wheel of Life paintings is a rich symbolism depicting the causes of existence and the various possibilities of existence—god, part god, human, animal, ghost, Hell. The Wheel suggests symbolically that it is only through birth as a human that the individual can move beyond Hell, ghost, and animal and begin to achieve liberation from the domain of Death. As noted above, the Bon and Buddhist traditions openly blend together in certain myths. One such myth sees the Tibetans as descendants of a monkey and an ogress. The monkey was sent to Tibet by the Bodhisattva Avalo-kiteshvara. There, as he meditates on the virtues of the bodhisattva, he is confronted by an ogress who takes the form of a woman and asks him to marry her. If he refuses, she will unite with a demon and produce a race of life-destroying demons. The monkey returns to Avalokiteshvara and asks for advice. The bodhisattva, with the assent of the goddess Tara, releases his disciple from his vows of chastity and orders him to marry the ogress, prophesying the coming of Buddhism to Tibet. The union of monkey and goddess results eventually in a tribe of monkeys who then become so populous that they are starving, until Avalokiteshvara, from the sacred Mount Meru, digs grains that he scatters in the world of monkeys, providing crops. Gradually the monkeys lose their tails and learn to walk upright, to talk, and to wear clothes. Their descendants are the Tibetans. In some versions of this myth, the first monkey’s name is Ha-lu-ma-da, which could well be related to the Indian monkey god Hanuman. In any case, the monkey is sometimes associated with Avalokiteshvara and worshipped himself as a bodhisattva. There is also a Buddhist tradition that Gautama Buddha had been a monkey in one of his former lives.

The title Bardo Thotrol (Bar-do’i-thos-grol), or Tibetan Book of the Dead, refers to the brief period between death and rebirth, the intermediate state (bardo) during which the soul remains near the body seeking release into a form of enlightenment and/or moves along a path toward rebirth. The book says that a person’s last thought affects his or her future birth and presents the opportunity for enlightenment. If the soul fails to achieve enlightenment, as is the case with most people, it remains in the physical world as an unhappy ghost of sorts until it passes into a second, intermediate state, in which it comes face to face with peaceful and angry deities who represent aspects of the person’s own mind. Enlightenment is still possible at this stage. Having failed to achieve enlightenment, the dead person moves to a third bardo, that of the search for rebirth. Here the individual’s past life is assessed. This process is represented by the Lord of the Otherworld weighing the person’s good deeds as white pebbles against the bad deeds as black pebbles. The dead person tries to reestablish contact with family members but fails and is led by karma to an appropriate womb for rebirth.

Gesar (“Lotus Temple”) was ordained by the gods to be born of an egg and to live a life of heroic adventure against the evils of the world caused by the curse of negative forces. In the eleventh-century Tibetan epic of the King of Ling, the story becomes the national epic of Ladakh as the Gesar Saga or Kesar Saga. At his birth, Gesar announces his identity as the Lion King. He will inevitably confront the evil Trotun, who has long ravished the kingdom. To avoid his prophecied defeat at the hand of a magical king, Trotun convinces the nobles of the land to exile Gesar, and the hero spends time wandering with his mother in the mountain wilderness. During this period, the beautiful Brougmo (Cho-cho-dogur-ma in Ladakh) is growing up in Ling. Eventually she finds the exiled hero, and together, on magical horses, they overcome evil and bring unity and prosperity to the kingdom of Ling.

Under the influence of Buddhism, Gesar was seen as an incarnation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. At the end of his life he was said to have undergone a period of meditative purification on the holy mountain of Margye Pongri before he ascended to Heaven. Gesar Khan was an extraordinarily popular hero in the legends of Inner Asia. Everyone from Turks in the West to Mongols in the East to Manchurians in the North sang their own variants. Gesar.

When our world was young, it was terrorized by countless demon kings. The three Dharma Kings opposed them and were able to chase them into the far reaches of the world. It was an age of darkness before Lord Padmasambava. Gesar Khan’s birth was miraculous: sometimes he is born of a virgin Naga’s (Buddhist/Hindu snake-people) head through Padmasambava’s aid, sometimes a mortal woman drinking magic water, sometimes human royalty, and sometimes the union of a sky god with an underworld goddess. Whatever his origin he is prepared to save the world because he specifically requests the tools he will need up in heaven from the sky gods and buddhas before incarnating. At age 12 Gesar wins a bride and kingship of Ling in a horse race against a misery old sovereign and wages wars against different demonic overlords. He saves his wife from a flesh eating demon king from the north, reclaims his kingdom disguised as a blacksmith when it is stolen from him by his uncle, fights various enemies of the Tibetans from Turks to Chinese to Muslims, slays a tiger demon, slays a demon pretending to be a Lama, slays a volcano demon, slays a sun devouring demon, slays giant animals like rats/mosquitoes, slays steel ravens, and conquers an army of giants among other misadventures.

to:

Tibetan mythology comprises the traditional and religious stories of UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}}, both pre-Buddhist and Buddhist. While the country may be part of China now, it still maintains it's own distinct culture and mythology from that of China, and elements from Tibetan mythology have managed to break through and become mainstream to the West. When we speak of Tibetan mythology, we must differentiate between the mythology of the indigenous Bon religion and that of the later Buddhism, although the two sometimes flow together.

Spirits are classified as peaceful or wrathful and further divided by type: Klu (water spirits), Nan (spirits of trees and stones), Sadag (earth spirits), Tsan (sky spirits usually found atop mountains)

The myths of the Bon religion are almost always associated with origins, beginning with ‘O-lde spu-rgyal, said to have been sent to rule humans by the gods above. Origin myths were told in order to make any ritual effective. If a person was sick, the curing ceremony involved a recitation of origins or creation. Marriage ceremonies included the retelling of the first marriage—that between the goddess who was daughter of the god of the world, and a human man, Ling-dkar. Arguing with the reluctant god for his daughter’s hand, the man suggests that the union of man and the gods should mean worship for the gods and protection for humans. Upon leaving Heaven, the goddess is given a third of her parents’ inheritance (her brother, as a male, receives two-thirds). Her father gives her the masculine arrow and her mother gives her the feminine spindle. In actual Bon wedding ceremonies each action is tied to this origin myth. For instance, the priest presents the groom with a piece of gold and the bride with a piece of turquoise, and then the priest and the couple sing the story of the arrow and the spindle. They sing of how at the beginning of time the union of two immortals resulted in three eggs. From a golden one came a golden male “arrow of life” with turquoise feathers. From a turquoise egg came a turquoise arrow of the female with golden feathers. From a white egg came a golden spindle. And from the sky and the ocean mist came Bon.

There are many variations of Tibetan myths of creation via a cosmic egg or eggs. One tells how in the beginning the elements became a giant cosmic egg. On its shell was the white cliff of the gods, and within it was a lake with a yolk containing the six classes of life. Out of this center came eighteen smaller eggs, one of which was a white one that produced of its own accord the various parts of a being who became a man who named himself King Ye-smon.

Other cosmogonic themes in Tibet include an animistic one of creation from the actual body of a primordial goddess. It is said that the Klu Queen who made the world was a child of the Void, that the sky came from her head, the planets from her teeth, the moon from her right eye, the sun from her left, and so forth. It was day when she opened her eyes and night when she closed them. Her voice was thunder, her breath clouds, her tears rain.

Some Tibetan myths say the original being was the “uncreated blue toad of turquoise”; some say it was a tigress. In some stories, creation comes from the killing of a primordial being by a young *hero, sometimes, especially in Ladakh, named *Gesar, whom Buddhists would see as an incarnation of Avalokiteshvara. Finally, there are indigenous myths that see creation as coming from the struggle between the powers of light (“Radiance”) and those of darkness (“Black Misery”). In this model, the black lord creates all that is antiexistence out of a cosmic egg, while the white lord creates all that is good. Until Buddhism became dominant in Tibet in 842 C.E., the people were ruled by a dynasty of sacred kings who traced their ancestry to gNya’khri btsan-po, who came down from the land of the gods as rain that impregnates the earth. All nature celebrated his arrival. After his return to Heaven, this first king was invoked by each of his successors to ratify their divine inheritance. In a sense, the rise of Lamaism in Tibet is a continuation in a Buddhist context of this earlier practice.

Lamaism, the Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet, takes its name from the importance it attributes to lamas, the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. The temporal (until the Chinese invasion of 1952) and spiritual leader of Tibet is the Dalai Lama. The next important figure in the Tibetan hierarchy is the Panchen Lama, an emanation of the Buddha Amitabha (Amida Buddha). The closeness of the two lamas is indicated by the fact that Avalokiteshvara is himself an emanation of the Buddha Amitabha. Lamaism is deeply influenced by the Tantric aspect of Buddhism (Vajrayana), which is itself tied to the tradition of Sutrayana, in which one identifies with the suffering of others and works toward the liberation not only of the self but of others. Vajrayana stresses the possibility of liberation in this life and is a much faster process than Sutrayana alone. It is said that Buddhism was introduced to Tibet by the Chinese and Nepalese wives of King Songsten Gampo (Song-sen-gam-po), who reigned in Tibet in the seventh century C.E. He was, in a sense, the first Dalai Lama, as he is considered to have been, like the Dalai Lamas of later periods, an incarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the most important of Tibetan bodhisattvas. But it was later in the century that King Trisong Detsen actually adopted Buddhism as the state religion. Later kings turned against Buddhism and persecuted its adherents. It was not until the eleventh century that Buddhism returned in force to Tibet, very much under Indian rather than Chinese influence and with a character all its own, brought about by its Vajrayana characteristics and its partial assimilation of the indigenous shamanistic and animistic Bon religion.

One of the most obvious aspects of Tibetan Buddhism is its reliance on works of art. At the center of this tradition is the depiction of the endless cycle of birth and death known as samsara in the Wheel of Life. The wheel is held up by Shinje, the Lord of Death and, therefore, the determiner of Life. The “machine” that turns the wheel is made of ignorance, desire, and hatred, represented by a pig, a cockerel, and a snake. Contained in the Wheel of Life paintings is a rich symbolism depicting the causes of existence and the various possibilities of existence—god, part god, human, animal, ghost, Hell. The Wheel suggests symbolically that it is only through birth as a human that the individual can move beyond Hell, ghost, and animal and begin to achieve liberation from the domain of Death. As noted above, the Bon and Buddhist traditions openly blend together in certain myths. One such myth sees the Tibetans as descendants of a monkey and an ogress. The monkey was sent to Tibet by the Bodhisattva Avalo-kiteshvara. There, as he meditates on the virtues of the bodhisattva, he is confronted by an ogress who takes the form of a woman and asks him to marry her. If he refuses, she will unite with a demon and produce a race of life-destroying demons. The monkey returns to Avalokiteshvara and asks for advice. The bodhisattva, with the assent of the goddess Tara, releases his disciple from his vows of chastity and orders him to marry the ogress, prophesying the coming of Buddhism to Tibet. The union of monkey and goddess results eventually in a tribe of monkeys who then become so populous that they are starving, until Avalokiteshvara, from the sacred Mount Meru, digs grains that he scatters in the world of monkeys, providing crops. Gradually the monkeys lose their tails and learn to walk upright, to talk, and to wear clothes. Their descendants are the Tibetans. In some versions of this myth, the first monkey’s name is Ha-lu-ma-da, which could well be related to the Indian monkey god Hanuman. In any case, the monkey is sometimes associated with Avalokiteshvara and worshipped himself as a bodhisattva. There is also a Buddhist tradition that Gautama Buddha had been a monkey in one of his former lives.

The title Bardo Thotrol (Bar-do’i-thos-grol), or Tibetan Book of the Dead, refers to the brief period between death and rebirth, the intermediate state (bardo) during which the soul remains near the body seeking release into a form of enlightenment and/or moves along a path toward rebirth. The book says that a person’s last thought affects his or her future birth and presents the opportunity for enlightenment. If the soul fails to achieve enlightenment, as is the case with most people, it remains in the physical world as an unhappy ghost of sorts until it passes into a second, intermediate state, in which it comes face to face with peaceful and angry deities who represent aspects of the person’s own mind. Enlightenment is still possible at this stage. Having failed to achieve enlightenment, the dead person moves to a third bardo, that of the search for rebirth. Here the individual’s past life is assessed. This process is represented by the Lord of the Otherworld weighing the person’s good deeds as white pebbles against the bad deeds as black pebbles. The dead person tries to reestablish contact with family members but fails and is led by karma to an appropriate womb for rebirth.

Gesar (“Lotus Temple”) was ordained by the gods to be born of an egg and to live a life of heroic adventure against the evils of the world caused by the curse of negative forces. In the eleventh-century Tibetan epic of the King of Ling, the story becomes the national epic of Ladakh as the Gesar Saga or Kesar Saga. At his birth, Gesar announces his identity as the Lion King. He will inevitably confront the evil Trotun, who has long ravished the kingdom. To avoid his prophecied defeat at the hand of a magical king, Trotun convinces the nobles of the land to exile Gesar, and the hero spends time wandering with his mother in the mountain wilderness. During this period, the beautiful Brougmo (Cho-cho-dogur-ma in Ladakh) is growing up in Ling. Eventually she finds the exiled hero, and together, on magical horses, they overcome evil and bring unity and prosperity to the kingdom of Ling.

Under the influence of Buddhism, Gesar was seen as an incarnation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. At the end of his life he was said to have undergone a period of meditative purification on the holy mountain of Margye Pongri before he ascended to Heaven. Gesar Khan was an extraordinarily popular hero in the legends of Inner Asia. Everyone from Turks in the West to Mongols in the East to Manchurians in the North sang their own variants. Gesar.

When our world was young, it was terrorized by countless demon kings. The three Dharma Kings opposed them and were able to chase them into the far reaches of the world. It was an age of darkness before Lord Padmasambava. Gesar Khan’s birth was miraculous: sometimes he is born of a virgin Naga’s (Buddhist/Hindu snake-people) head through Padmasambava’s aid, sometimes a mortal woman drinking magic water, sometimes human royalty, and sometimes the union of a sky god with an underworld goddess. Whatever his origin he is prepared to save the world because he specifically requests the tools he will need up in heaven from the sky gods and buddhas before incarnating. At age 12 Gesar wins a bride and kingship of Ling in a horse race against a misery old sovereign and wages wars against different demonic overlords. He saves his wife from a flesh eating demon king from the north, reclaims his kingdom disguised as a blacksmith when it is stolen from him by his uncle, fights various enemies of the Tibetans from Turks to Chinese to Muslims, slays a tiger demon, slays a demon pretending to be a Lama, slays a volcano demon, slays a sun devouring demon, slays giant animals like rats/mosquitoes, slays steel ravens, and conquers an army of giants among other misadventures.
West.

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Tibetan mythology comprises the traditional and religious stories of UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}}, both pre-Buddhist and Buddhist. While the country may be part of China now, it still maintains it's own distinct culture and mythology from that of China, and elements from Tibetan mythology have managed to break through and become mainstream to the West. For more interesting info on the folklore and mythologies of the other East Asian cultures, see the pages on the [[Myth/ChineseMythology Chinese]], [[Myth/KoreanMythology Koreans]], [[Myth/AltaicMythology Mongols]] and [[Myth/JapaneseMythology Japanese]], and for the folklore and mythology of the other countries in the Himalayas, see Myth/HinduMythology.

to:

Tibetan mythology comprises the traditional and religious stories of UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}}, both pre-Buddhist and Buddhist. While the country may be part of China now, it still maintains it's own distinct culture and mythology from that of China, and elements from Tibetan mythology have managed to break through and become mainstream to the West. When we speak of Tibetan mythology, we must differentiate between the mythology of the indigenous Bon religion and that of the later Buddhism, although the two sometimes flow together.

Spirits are classified as peaceful or wrathful and further divided by type: Klu (water spirits), Nan (spirits of trees and stones), Sadag (earth spirits), Tsan (sky spirits usually found atop mountains)

The myths of the Bon religion are almost always associated with origins, beginning with ‘O-lde spu-rgyal, said to have been sent to rule humans by the gods above. Origin myths were told in order to make any ritual effective. If a person was sick, the curing ceremony involved a recitation of origins or creation. Marriage ceremonies included the retelling of the first marriage—that between the goddess who was daughter of the god of the world, and a human man, Ling-dkar. Arguing with the reluctant god for his daughter’s hand, the man suggests that the union of man and the gods should mean worship for the gods and protection for humans. Upon leaving Heaven, the goddess is given a third of her parents’ inheritance (her brother, as a male, receives two-thirds). Her father gives her the masculine arrow and her mother gives her the feminine spindle. In actual Bon wedding ceremonies each action is tied to this origin myth. For instance, the priest presents the groom with a piece of gold and the bride with a piece of turquoise, and then the priest and the couple sing the story of the arrow and the spindle. They sing of how at the beginning of time the union of two immortals resulted in three eggs. From a golden one came a golden male “arrow of life” with turquoise feathers. From a turquoise egg came a turquoise arrow of the female with golden feathers. From a white egg came a golden spindle. And from the sky and the ocean mist came Bon.

There are many variations of Tibetan myths of creation via a cosmic egg or eggs. One tells how in the beginning the elements became a giant cosmic egg. On its shell was the white cliff of the gods, and within it was a lake with a yolk containing the six classes of life. Out of this center came eighteen smaller eggs, one of which was a white one that produced of its own accord the various parts of a being who became a man who named himself King Ye-smon.

Other cosmogonic themes in Tibet include an animistic one of creation from the actual body of a primordial goddess. It is said that the Klu Queen who made the world was a child of the Void, that the sky came from her head, the planets from her teeth, the moon from her right eye, the sun from her left, and so forth. It was day when she opened her eyes and night when she closed them. Her voice was thunder, her breath clouds, her tears rain.

Some Tibetan myths say the original being was the “uncreated blue toad of turquoise”; some say it was a tigress. In some stories, creation comes from the killing of a primordial being by a young *hero, sometimes, especially in Ladakh, named *Gesar, whom Buddhists would see as an incarnation of Avalokiteshvara. Finally, there are indigenous myths that see creation as coming from the struggle between the powers of light (“Radiance”) and those of darkness (“Black Misery”). In this model, the black lord creates all that is antiexistence out of a cosmic egg, while the white lord creates all that is good. Until Buddhism became dominant in Tibet in 842 C.E., the people were ruled by a dynasty of sacred kings who traced their ancestry to gNya’khri btsan-po, who came down from the land of the gods as rain that impregnates the earth. All nature celebrated his arrival. After his return to Heaven, this first king was invoked by each of his successors to ratify their divine inheritance. In a sense, the rise of Lamaism in Tibet is a continuation in a Buddhist context of this earlier practice.

Lamaism, the Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet, takes its name from the importance it attributes to lamas, the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. The temporal (until the Chinese invasion of 1952) and spiritual leader of Tibet is the Dalai Lama. The next important figure in the Tibetan hierarchy is the Panchen Lama, an emanation of the Buddha Amitabha (Amida Buddha). The closeness of the two lamas is indicated by the fact that Avalokiteshvara is himself an emanation of the Buddha Amitabha. Lamaism is deeply influenced by the Tantric aspect of Buddhism (Vajrayana), which is itself tied to the tradition of Sutrayana, in which one identifies with the suffering of others and works toward the liberation not only of the self but of others. Vajrayana stresses the possibility of liberation in this life and is a much faster process than Sutrayana alone. It is said that Buddhism was introduced to Tibet by the Chinese and Nepalese wives of King Songsten Gampo (Song-sen-gam-po), who reigned in Tibet in the seventh century C.E. He was, in a sense, the first Dalai Lama, as he is considered to have been, like the Dalai Lamas of later periods, an incarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the most important of Tibetan bodhisattvas. But it was later in the century that King Trisong Detsen actually adopted Buddhism as the state religion. Later kings turned against Buddhism and persecuted its adherents. It was not until the eleventh century that Buddhism returned in force to Tibet, very much under Indian rather than Chinese influence and with a character all its own, brought about by its Vajrayana characteristics and its partial assimilation of the indigenous shamanistic and animistic Bon religion.

One of the most obvious aspects of Tibetan Buddhism is its reliance on works of art. At the center of this tradition is the depiction of the endless cycle of birth and death known as samsara in the Wheel of Life. The wheel is held up by Shinje, the Lord of Death and, therefore, the determiner of Life. The “machine” that turns the wheel is made of ignorance, desire, and hatred, represented by a pig, a cockerel, and a snake. Contained in the Wheel of Life paintings is a rich symbolism depicting the causes of existence and the various possibilities of existence—god, part god, human, animal, ghost, Hell. The Wheel suggests symbolically that it is only through birth as a human that the individual can move beyond Hell, ghost, and animal and begin to achieve liberation from the domain of Death. As noted above, the Bon and Buddhist traditions openly blend together in certain myths. One such myth sees the Tibetans as descendants of a monkey and an ogress. The monkey was sent to Tibet by the Bodhisattva Avalo-kiteshvara. There, as he meditates on the virtues of the bodhisattva, he is confronted by an ogress who takes the form of a woman and asks him to marry her. If he refuses, she will unite with a demon and produce a race of life-destroying demons. The monkey returns to Avalokiteshvara and asks for advice. The bodhisattva, with the assent of the goddess Tara, releases his disciple from his vows of chastity and orders him to marry the ogress, prophesying the coming of Buddhism to Tibet. The union of monkey and goddess results eventually in a tribe of monkeys who then become so populous that they are starving, until Avalokiteshvara, from the sacred Mount Meru, digs grains that he scatters in the world of monkeys, providing crops. Gradually the monkeys lose their tails and learn to walk upright, to talk, and to wear clothes. Their descendants are the Tibetans. In some versions of this myth, the first monkey’s name is Ha-lu-ma-da, which could well be related to the Indian monkey god Hanuman. In any case, the monkey is sometimes associated with Avalokiteshvara and worshipped himself as a bodhisattva. There is also a Buddhist tradition that Gautama Buddha had been a monkey in one of his former lives.

The title Bardo Thotrol (Bar-do’i-thos-grol), or Tibetan Book of the Dead, refers to the brief period between death and rebirth, the intermediate state (bardo) during which the soul remains near the body seeking release into a form of enlightenment and/or moves along a path toward rebirth. The book says that a person’s last thought affects his or her future birth and presents the opportunity for enlightenment. If the soul fails to achieve enlightenment, as is the case with most people, it remains in the physical world as an unhappy ghost of sorts until it passes into a second, intermediate state, in which it comes face to face with peaceful and angry deities who represent aspects of the person’s own mind. Enlightenment is still possible at this stage. Having failed to achieve enlightenment, the dead person moves to a third bardo, that of the search for rebirth. Here the individual’s past life is assessed. This process is represented by the Lord of the Otherworld weighing the person’s good deeds as white pebbles against the bad deeds as black pebbles. The dead person tries to reestablish contact with family members but fails and is led by karma to an appropriate womb for rebirth.

Gesar (“Lotus Temple”) was ordained by the gods to be born of an egg and to live a life of heroic adventure against the evils of the world caused by the curse of negative forces. In the eleventh-century Tibetan epic of the King of Ling, the story becomes the national epic of Ladakh as the Gesar Saga or Kesar Saga. At his birth, Gesar announces his identity as the Lion King. He will inevitably confront the evil Trotun, who has long ravished the kingdom. To avoid his prophecied defeat at the hand of a magical king, Trotun convinces the nobles of the land to exile Gesar, and the hero spends time wandering with his mother in the mountain wilderness. During this period, the beautiful Brougmo (Cho-cho-dogur-ma in Ladakh) is growing up in Ling. Eventually she finds the exiled hero, and together, on magical horses, they overcome evil and bring unity and prosperity to the kingdom of Ling.

Under the influence of Buddhism, Gesar was seen as an incarnation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. At the end of his life he was said to have undergone a period of meditative purification on the holy mountain of Margye Pongri before he ascended to Heaven. Gesar Khan was an extraordinarily popular hero in the legends of Inner Asia. Everyone from Turks in the West to Mongols in the East to Manchurians in the North sang their own variants. Gesar.

When our world was young, it was terrorized by countless demon kings. The three Dharma Kings opposed them and were able to chase them into the far reaches of the world. It was an age of darkness before Lord Padmasambava. Gesar Khan’s birth was miraculous: sometimes he is born of a virgin Naga’s (Buddhist/Hindu snake-people) head through Padmasambava’s aid, sometimes a mortal woman drinking magic water, sometimes human royalty, and sometimes the union of a sky god with an underworld goddess. Whatever his origin he is prepared to save the world because he specifically requests the tools he will need up in heaven from the sky gods and buddhas before incarnating. At age 12 Gesar wins a bride and kingship of Ling in a horse race against a misery old sovereign and wages wars against different demonic overlords. He saves his wife from a flesh eating demon king from the north, reclaims his kingdom disguised as a blacksmith when it is stolen from him by his uncle, fights various enemies of the Tibetans from Turks to Chinese to Muslims, slays a tiger demon, slays a demon pretending to be a Lama, slays a volcano demon, slays a sun devouring demon, slays giant animals like rats/mosquitoes, slays steel ravens, and conquers an army of giants among other misadventures.

Contrary to popular beliefs Tibetan culture at its core is closer to the steppe and Siberian cultures of Inner Asia, rather than Chinese or Indian as popularly thought.
For more interesting info on the folklore and mythologies of the other East Asian cultures, see the pages on the [[Myth/ChineseMythology Chinese]], [[Myth/KoreanMythology Koreans]], [[Myth/AltaicMythology Mongols]] and [[Myth/JapaneseMythology Japanese]], and for the folklore and mythology of the other countries in the Himalayas, see Myth/HinduMythology.
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[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/tibet.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:350:Tibet's origin myth]]
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%%* TheShangriLa: The mythical kingdom of Shambala is the UrExample.

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%%* * TheShangriLa: The mythical kingdom of Shambala is the UrExample.UrExample. It is said to have been built by 20,000 followers of Surya Samadhi (solar worship) who were expelled from Tibet by king Manjuśrīkīrti in 159 BC when they refused to follow Kalachakra Buddhism, and it is prophesied that when the world declines into war and greed, and all is lost, the 25th Kalki king will emerge from Shambhala with a huge army to vanquish Dark Forces and usher in a worldwide Golden Age, with the date of this final battle being prophesied for the year 2424 or 2425 (in the 5,104th year after the death of Buddha).
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%% * BigfootSasquatchAndYeti: The Yeti is the TropeCodifier and one of the [[TropeNamer Trope Namers]].

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%% * BigfootSasquatchAndYeti: The Yeti is the TropeCodifier and one of the [[TropeNamer Trope Namers]].Namers]]. The name "Yeti" is derived from the Tibetan words for "rocky", "rocky place" and "bear", the Lepcha people worshiped a "Glacier Being" as a God of the Hunt, and it was once believed by followers of the Bön religion that Yeti blood had use in certain mystical ceremonies, with the being itself being depicted as an apelike creature who carries a large stone as a weapon and makes a whistling swoosh sound.

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* BigfootSasquatchAndYeti: The Yeti is the TropeCodifier and one of the [[TropeNamer Trope Namers]].

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* BigfootSasquatchAndYeti: The Yeti is the TropeCodifier and one of the [[TropeNamer Trope Namers]].



* TheShangriLa: The mythical kingdom of Shambala is the UrExample.
* TheTrickster: Akhu Tönpa.

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* %%* TheShangriLa: The mythical kingdom of Shambala is the UrExample.
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Tibetan mythology comprises the traditional and religious stories of UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}}, both pre-Buddhist and Buddhist. While the country may be part of China now, it still maintains it's own distinct culture and mythology from that of China, and elements from Tibetan mythology have managed to break through and become mainstream to the West. For more interesting info on the folklore and mythologies of the other East Asian cultures, see the pages on the [[Myth/ChineseMythology Chinese]], [[Myth/KoreanMythology Koreans]], [[Myth/AltaicMythology Mongols]] and [[Myth/JapaneseMythology Japanese]].

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Tibetan mythology comprises the traditional and religious stories of UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}}, both pre-Buddhist and Buddhist. While the country may be part of China now, it still maintains it's own distinct culture and mythology from that of China, and elements from Tibetan mythology have managed to break through and become mainstream to the West. For more interesting info on the folklore and mythologies of the other East Asian cultures, see the pages on the [[Myth/ChineseMythology Chinese]], [[Myth/KoreanMythology Koreans]], [[Myth/AltaicMythology Mongols]] and [[Myth/JapaneseMythology Japanese]].Japanese]], and for the folklore and mythology of the other countries in the Himalayas, see Myth/HinduMythology.
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Tibetan mythology comprises the traditional and religious stories of UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}}. While the country may be part of China now, it still maintains it's own distinct culture and mythology from that of China, and elements from Tibetan mythology have managed to break through and become mainstream to the West. For more interesting info on the folklore and mythologies of the other East Asian cultures, see the pages on the [[Myth/ChineseMythology Chinese]], [[Myth/KoreanMythology Koreans]], [[Myth/AltaicMythology Mongols]] and [[Myth/JapaneseMythology Japanese]].

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Tibetan mythology comprises the traditional and religious stories of UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}}.UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}}, both pre-Buddhist and Buddhist. While the country may be part of China now, it still maintains it's own distinct culture and mythology from that of China, and elements from Tibetan mythology have managed to break through and become mainstream to the West. For more interesting info on the folklore and mythologies of the other East Asian cultures, see the pages on the [[Myth/ChineseMythology Chinese]], [[Myth/KoreanMythology Koreans]], [[Myth/AltaicMythology Mongols]] and [[Myth/JapaneseMythology Japanese]].
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Tibetan mythology comprises the traditional and religious stories of UsefulNotes/{{Tibet}}. While the country may be part of China now, it still maintains it's own distinct culture and mythology from that of China, and elements from Tibetan mythology have managed to break through and become mainstream to the West. For more interesting info on the folklore and mythologies of the other East Asian cultures, see the pages on the [[Myth/ChineseMythology Chinese]], [[Myth/KoreanMythology Koreans]], [[Myth/AltaicMythology Mongols]] and [[Myth/JapaneseMythology Japanese]].
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!!Tibetan mythology provides examples of:
* BigfootSasquatchAndYeti: The Yeti is the TropeCodifier and one of the [[TropeNamer Trope Namers]].
* CoolHorse: The Wind Horse, which acts as the pivotal element in the center of the four animals symbolizing the cardinal directions and a symbol of the idea of well-being or good fortune, and is also a symbol of the human soul in shamanism.
* EverythingsBetterWithMonkeys: Pha Trelgen Changchup Sempa, the mythical monkey-ancestor of the Tibetan people and one of the most important figures in Tibetan culture.
* MineralMacGuffin: Cintamani, a wish-fulfilling jewel that is said to be one of four relics that came in a chest that fell from the sky during the reign of king Lha Thothori Nyantsen.
* OurGhostsAreDifferent: Hungry ghosts, who have tiny throats too thin to pass food and huge stomachs with a [[BigEater never-ending appetite]] to match, tulpas, which are [[YourMindMakesItReal created through mental effort, purely from the thoughts of its creator or creators]], and are not self-aware at first but may gradually acquire awareness and [[BecomeARealBoy go on to become a normal human being]], and gyalpo spirits, a class of spirits who have either white (peaceful) or red (wrathful) forms, with nervousness and confusion provoking them. It is believed that one can be protected against gyalpo spirits by means of appropriate rituals.
* OurZombiesAreDifferent: The ro-langs, whose name literally means "a risen corpse", and who come in two varieties: the VoodooZombie tantric type, which are raised from the dead through a ritual for personal reasons, such as to serve a necromancer, and the PlagueZombie demonic type, which are created by either a gdon spirit that has broken its oath and become evil or a bgegs spirit which are already evil, who enter the body before burial and have the power to infect other humans by touching them on the head. They signal to their victims by wagging their tongue back and forth, and cannot speak, bend over or bend any joints, making them walk with a [[ZombieGait stiff-armed lurch]].
* PantheraAwesome: The Snow Lion, which represents the snowy mountain ranges and glaciers of Tibet and may also symbolize power, strength, fearlessness, joy, east and the earth element, is referred to as the "king of beasts", is the emblem of Tibet and is one of the Four Dignities along with the tiger, dragon and Garuda.
* TheShangriLa: The mythical kingdom of Shambala is the UrExample.
* TheTrickster: Akhu Tönpa.

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