This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Naxi tradition traces the origin of its dongba priesthood to a Bon shaman named Dongba Shilo, said to have carried the teaching east from Tibet, and the priesthood's ritual costume and vocabulary still carry that inheritance forward: dongba headgear depicts Bon deities, and invocations recorded in the pictographic manuscripts call on spirits that Tibetan Bon ritual would recognize as its own. A dongba is not primarily a reader of scripture in the ordinary sense; he is trained over years, usually within a family or a master to student line, to conduct the funerals, exorcisms and rites of protection the Naxi community needs, using the pictographic manuscripts as a memory aid for chants that are performed rather than silently read. That makes the dongba priesthood the primary living transmitter of Naxi traditional culture, not only of the religion's ritual content but of the literature, cosmology and history the manuscripts preserve alongside it. Some accounts describe an earlier generation of female ritual specialists, called llu-bu, active before the Bon descended, male dominated dongba office became dominant, though the documentary record of that earlier layer is thin. A complete annotated translation of the ancient Naxi Dongba manuscripts, running to about one hundred volumes, stands as one of the largest single translation projects ever undertaken for a still practiced ritual literature, and it exists because dongba priests were willing to read the manuscripts aloud for scholars rather than because the pictographs are legible on their own. The atlas describes what the priesthood is and where its ritual language came from without reproducing manuscript content, which remains the priesthood's own to interpret and transmit.