The year 2002 happened to be the year of the iron horse by the traditional Tibetan calendar, time for ethnic Tibetans to travel to the sacred Mt. Gangdis in the southwest of the Tibet Autonomous Region for worshipping. By following the tradition, worshippers walk round the mountain for blessing.Instead of going there for pictures, I went to the Tsedrug Monastery in Tinghkin County in eastern Tibet, which is the most holy shrine of the indigenous Bon religion, on invitation from its living Buddha or presiding monk. An elaborate range of religious activities was held at the monastery on June 24, 2002, which coincided with fifteenth day of the fifth months of the year of the iron horse. The event should have featured a performance of religious dancing staged by naked dancers. The Monastery’s Democratic Management Committee, however, decided to cancel the performance, fearing that it would lure too many local people away from what they must do in this busiest season of the year - shearing wool, harvesting Chinese caterpillar fungus (a traditional herbal material) and making barley butter. The dancing is performed every 12 years at this monastery. I was really sad for its cancellation, not knowing whether I could come back again that many years later.
    Here I was at the monastery on Mt. Tsedrug that rises 4,785 meters above sea level, the largest and the most sacred Bon shrine in Tibet, where religious rituals left over from many centuries ago are largely preserved. Greeting my eyes were clusters of caves dug into precipitous cliffs, in which ancient Bon masters practiced austerities in isolation. I just couldnÕt help marveling at their devotion to the belief - in fact at the religion itself. Long before Buddhism made its way into Tibet 1,400 years ago, Bon had already been practiced. Today the religion is still there, despite religious strife and even bloodshed that occurred in ancient times. Many people in southern and eastern Tibet are devoted to Bon, even though the Tibetan school of Buddhism dominates the entire snow-clad plateau region, the “roof of the world”.