Nepal's Ancient Bon Village Faces Existential Threat from Climate Change

Lubra, Nepal — "It has been 20 generations since the great monk, Trashi Gyaltsen, founded Lubra,” says Lama Tsultrim, speaking from the basement of his home in the Nepali Himalayas.

His basement door is open, letting in both a cool wind and warm rays of sunlight. The spiritual leader is wearing a maroon chuba (traditional Tibetan coat) and an orange belt. He passes a set of prayer beads through his fingers as he speaks. From the door, one can see the old village below, nestled between the valley’s steep slopes and a wide, dry riverbed.

“Long ago, Trashi planted two pine needles and promised that if one grew into a tree, he would establish a village in this place,” Tsultrim explains, gesturing down to the village.

“He covered the seeds with two baskets, and within seven days, one had risen off the floor. Underneath, a walnut tree was growing.”

The 76-year-old squints his bloodshot eyes and pinpoints the walnut tree that survives among the houses below.

Tsultrim is describing the founding of Lubra, a Himalayan village in remote northwest Nepal, set in a rugged valley in the culturally Tibetan area of Mustang. The 16 families who live here make up one of the oldest Nepalese settlements to follow Bon, an ancient religion of Tibet. Here, unique beliefs, rituals and social patterns have endured for centuries, and Tsultrim is the latest in a long line of Bon lamas (spiritual practitioners) in the village.

He walks down the steep, twisting path to the crooked walnut tree. Medium height and stocky, Tsultrim moves steadily, hands clasped behind his back.

Deep crevices line the tree’s thick bark, like the wrinkles of a centenarian. Its big, gnarled roots are tangled into the foundations of nearby homes. Despite its age, hundreds of young branches, fresh with new buds, are sprouting from a long trunk and a few venerable boughs. Just metres from the tree is Tsultrim’s old house. It has three floors, and its clay walls are trimmed with an ochre-red pigment.

Above is a steep, semicircular hollow, filled with whitewashed houses. Built of clay and wood, the buildings are almost on top of each other. Each flies a vertical flag with the sacred elemental colours of Tibet, the colours tied to the five elements in Tibetan cosmology and the Bon religion, topped with sprigs of sacred juniper. Below, the river is a mere trickle. Across the valley, the black mouths of caves dot the landscape. Eroded spires of sandstone tower over rocky slopes.

Once far from the river, the walnut tree is now right at its edge, Tsultrim explains. So is his former home.

“I left this house two years ago because of flooding,” he says, pointing to it.

After a decade of worsening floods, Tsultrim's home and several others in the village remain empty, and the small wooden doors stand closed behind piles of sediment. Where there were fields, a mud flat has formed, littered with rocks. The stone walls of agricultural terraces are collapsing into the mud.

These are all signs that the historic village of Lubra is endangered by the worsening effects of climate change. For the past 10 years, destructive floods have plagued the village during the monsoon season, forcing four families to abandon their ancestral homes.

Scarce farmland is also being lost. The monsoon floods have washed away the village’s apple trees, one of its main income sources, along with crops grown for local consumption, such as potatoes and buckwheat.

But it is not only homes and land at stake in Lubra; a distinct culture that has survived centuries of upheaval is now facing an unprecedented threat.

The story Tsultrim tells is not just local folklore, but part of the ancient tradition that still shapes life in Lubra.

Tibet’s Indigenous religion

Bon is considered the Indigenous religion of Tibet. Its exact historical origins are unclear, but it is thought to include influences from Persia, Central Asia and China, as well as ancient Tibet.

A Bon village looks very similar to a Buddhist one. Chortens, reliquary monuments that often contain a lama’s remains or ashes and sacred objects, dot the paths, and mani walls hold stacks of stones engraved with prayers. Indeed, the practice of today’s Bon, called Yungdrung Bon, resembles Buddhism in many ways, with enlightenment being the main objective.

A closer look, however, reveals small but distinctive details that mark the practice of Bon. Tsultrim’s maroon robe is trimmed with blue, a colour worn only by Bon monks. He circles the village chortens anti-clockwise, the opposite direction to Buddhists, as a form of physical prayer.

Lubra’s monastery is home to Bon’s own pantheon of deities, including Tonpa Shenrab Miwo, the teacher revered as the founder of Bon. Shenrab is said to have been born in the mythical land of Olmo Lungring, thousands of years before the birth of the Buddha. The religion also retains many unique, pre-Buddhist rituals and its own story of the creation of the universe.

Very few people practise Bon in western Nepal today, says Charles Ramble, an anthropologist and expert on Bon and Tibetan studies.

“Lubra is unique because it is the first Bonpo monastery to be founded in Nepal, and it’s the only one that’s still alive in Mustang. It is extremely unusual,” he says.

There are a few other families following the faith in other parts of Mustang, but Lubra is the only village where everyone still practises Bon today, he explains.

Mustang was once part of Zhangzhung, an ancient kingdom of western Tibet, where an early form of Bon was widely practised. In the 7th century CE, the Yarlung, the first Tibetan dynasty, conquered and subsumed Zhangzhung into the first Tibetan empire. As Buddhism arrived and found royal favour, many Bonpos [followers of Bon] fled to outlying regions such as the Himalayan borderlands of Mustang, seeking refuge from forced conversion and religious persecution.

Lubra was settled in the 11th century CE by families of Bonpos, most of whom came from northern Mustang, according to Ramble. It is a village of noncelibate lamas who are often called “householder monks”. This means the eldest son of each family becomes a lama, taking on the family’s religious duties while also working, marrying and having children.

Close to religious centres in Tibet, Lubra has welcomed many visiting lamas as teachers over the centuries, so religious practice has become deeply entwined with village life.

Both Lubra and the wider Bon faith were impacted by the takeover of Tibet by Chinese Communists. With the closure of the border in 1959, lamas no longer travelled from Tibet to Lubra, and monks in Tibet were again forced to flee.

Menri, Tibet’s main Bon monastery, was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and re-founded in northern India in 1967. In India, however, Bonpos were marginalised within the broader Tibetan resistance movement, which was dominated by Buddhists. It was not until 1979 that the Dalai Lama recognised Bon as a Tibetan religion and awarded leaders seats in the Tibetan Parliament in exile.

Few Bon centres survived the Cultural Revolution inside Tibet. Therefore, Lubra and the handful of other Bon villages in Nepal are some of the few communities to have survived these turbulent decades.

Today, however, the same landscape that preserved Lubra’s traditions is becoming a source of risk, threatening their survival.

At the mercy of a changing climate

Yangchen Gurung was in her home the day her house flooded in 2021. Her home was at the bottom of Lubra — the one closest to the river.

“It had rained without stopping for many days,” she remembers. “Someone living high up the valley with his animals saw the flood and used his satellite phone to warn us.”

Yangchen and her family scrambled together a few belongings and ran to safety.

“The floods are ferocious. They bounce off the cliffs across the valley, churning, and plough into everything in the way,” she says.

Yangchen and her husband, Palsang Tsering, now live in a new building higher in the valley.

The floods are ferocious. They bounce off the cliffs across the valley, churning, and plough into everything in the way.

by Yangchen Gurung, Lubra resident

In her mid-30s, with long brown hair and light freckles, Yangchen wears a dark blue down jacket and huddles on a low stool in the kitchen below rows of silver ladles hanging from the shelves. She pours hot water from a large, Chinese-made flask.

The area has always been susceptible to flooding, Yangchen says.

The narrow shape of the valley means flooding is a phenomenon the residents are accustomed to. Flooding has even been woven into their local folklore.

Yangchen giggles as she shares stories about the curses, in the form of floods, laid on the village by powerful Buddhist lamas. But for the last decade, the floods have been much bigger and more destructive.

“Big floods now happen every few years,” she says. “But the flooding in 2021 had never been seen by the old people.”

“The first time the water came, we lost a bit of land. The second time, we lost more land. Then the worst flood hit, and it buried our house.”

“We had to move out and stay with relatives until we built a new place to live,” she adds, showing photos of her old home inundated with a thick, grey sludge. “Only half of the building is left.”

The 2021 floods also washed away the village’s water defences. A couple of solitary gabions — mesh walls built with inorganic materials to manage soil erosion — remain, but the mangled frames of others are buried in mud.

“The government gave a budget of 1 crore 20 lakh rupees (about $80,000), and we spent a month building the gabion wall. Then, in one day, it was destroyed,” Palsang, Yanghen's husband, says.

“It’s climate change,” says Yangchen.

“Before, in winter, there used to be so much snow you couldn’t leave the house,” she says, gesturing to her waist. “But these days it barely snows.”

The first time the water came, we lost a bit of land. The second time, we lost more land. Then the worst flood hit, and it buried our house.

by Yangchen Gurung

“For three years, it hasn’t snowed at all,” she adds. “Before, it wasn’t this warm; it was a lot colder. And in the monsoon, it used to rain steadily. Now it won’t rain for a long time, then when it rains, it rains really heavily. Then there is flooding.”

‘Now there is only grey’

The people of Lubra believe the lack of snow in winter is causing previously frozen ground, higher in the mountains, to soften, and for the slopes to dry out. This, they say, means rain more easily erodes the fine clay and soil of Mustang’s arid, treeless slopes.

This then mixes with river water to create a thick, cement-like sludge.

The worst floods occur when this sludge dams up and then bursts, as it did in 2021. It happened again in 2023, in a neighbouring valley, when a flood brought huge destruction to the Buddhist village of Kagbeni, wiping away more than a dozen homes.

Worsening sediment-laden floods are being seen across the Himalayas, according to Anima Maharjan, a livelihood and migration specialist at the International Centre of Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu.

“There is scientific evidence that these extreme rainfall events are increasing in frequency,” Maharjan says.

Scientific research has also found that climate change is increasing erosion and sediment transport in river waters across the Tibetan Plateau. This, the research shows, has the potential to reshape landscapes.

Lubra’s landscape is indeed being reshaped. As the monsoon retreats, layers of clay and debris are left behind, hardening into mud that raises the height of the riverbed.

“We used to look down at the river; now the village is right by its side,” Yangchen says.

Recent research estimates that the Lubra riverbed has risen 12 metres (39 feet) over the last decade.

Yangchen’s family understood the valley’s changing landscape was leaving the village more exposed to future flooding, so they took action.

“It is only a matter of time before there is another flood, so we decided to move, permanently,” she says.

But the land around them is also affected. From her home’s flat roof, Yangchen points to a large white rock, partially buried in the mud halfway across the riverbed.

“Fields used to extend out to there,” she says.

“They were destroyed seven or eight years ago. And on the other side of the river, we had fields where we grew garlic,” she now.

Yangchen explains how local people depend on rearing animals, growing apples and plums to sell, and harvesting potatoes, vegetables and buckwheat for themselves.

“Before there used to be snow all over those mountains. Now there is only grey,” she says, looking to the west. The grey rocky ridges hold only the faintest veins of white.

“It’s really difficult. There is no water for the fields,” Yangchen notes.

As a traditional solution for water shortages, the community has relied on ponds, or zings, that capture the water from glacial melt and feed it to fields through a system of earthen canals.

“In the past, the water used to overflow from the ponds, but nowadays, they can’t be filled. There is little water now, little snow, little snowmelt,” says Yangchen.

This irrigation system, which has been relied upon for centuries, is increasingly vulnerable as it is being washed away by the heavy rains.

The people of the southern Mustang region are now considering climate change when making livelihood decisions, says Maharjan, the livelihood and migration specialist.

“Locals are constantly thinking, ‘Do I want to invest here?’ Whenever they are talking about future risk, and future investments and returns, they are massively taking climate into account,” she explains.

This is a shift seen only over the last two or three years, she says.

An ancient practice under threat

Still, in the face of many challenges, the people of Lubra are holding on to their culture, all too aware of its importance. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Chasey Kengtse Hostel, a boarding school for children from Lubra and other remote Bon villages in northwest Nepal.

The school was set up 25 years ago to stem the migration of children leaving the area for an education in Kathmandu. It sits atop a strenuous path through terraced fields that are sprouting with the first shoots of spring.

Long wires, strung over poles, are covered with drying clothes. Children run around brushing teeth and combing wet hair. Nyima Dhundul Gurung, a Bon monk from Lubra, runs the school. Unlike Lama Tsultrim, who, alongside his ritual duties, lives with his family and farms the land, 36-year-old Nyima is a celibate monk. His long maroon robes and short, light brown hair indicate his different standing.

“We will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the hostel in September 2026. It will be a three-day celebration,” Nyima says, noting that the hostel now has 105 children from Lubra and other places in northwest Nepal.

“One of t