Bon presents itself as older than Buddhism in Tibet and as having a different source of authority: not the Buddha Shakyamuni and India, but the enlightened teacher Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, who taught in a land called Olmo Lungring, generally located to the west or north-west of Tibet, in a remote antiquity that the tradition dates far earlier than the historical Buddha.
That teaching is said to have reached Tibet through Zhangzhung, a kingdom in the west of the plateau with its own language and its own religious learning, and to have been the established religion of the Tibetan court before Buddhism was adopted. The tradition holds that it was suppressed under King Trisong Detsen in the eighth century, when royal patronage shifted to Buddhism, and that practitioners concealed their texts so that they could be recovered later. From the tenth and eleventh centuries a large body of scripture duly reappeared as terma, treasure discovered by named finders, a mechanism the Nyingma school of Buddhism uses in the same way and over the same period.
The doctrinal content of the developed tradition, Yungdrung Bon or eternal Bon, is extensive: a graded path to enlightenment, monastic ordination and philosophical training, tantric practice, and Dzogchen, the great perfection, which Bon regards as its highest teaching and holds independently of the Nyingma transmission of the same name. Alongside this sits a large practical repertoire in ritual, divination, astrology, medicine, funerary rites and the management of local gods and spirits of land and water.
The emblem is the yungdrung, a left-facing swastika signifying indestructibility, corresponding to the vajra in Buddhist use. Practitioners circumambulate counter-clockwise, the reverse of Buddhist practice, and Bon has its own liturgical language elements traced to Zhangzhung.
Bonpos do not regard themselves as a variant of Buddhism, and object to being described as one.