The Bon World Tree and the Nine Levels

The tree is at the center of everything.

In the Bon cosmological vision, the universe is organized vertically: nine levels below the human world, eight levels above it, and the human world precisely in the middle — which is not a position of disadvantage but of centrality. The human realm is where the cosmic drama takes place, where beings have both the capacity for suffering and the capacity for liberation, where the vertical axis of the tree can be climbed or descended.

The tree’s roots extend downward through the nine underworld levels. Each level is inhabited: the uppermost underworld levels are relatively benign, home to the lu — naga-like beings associated with water, rocks, and the ground. The lu are important in Bon practice because they are the most immediately relevant underworld beings to human welfare: offend them by polluting water sources or disturbing rocks, and illness follows. Propitiate them correctly, and they support the vitality and prosperity of the community above them.

The deeper underworld levels grow more formidable. The nine underworld lords are dark but not evil in the Buddhist sense — they are the governors of the lower realms, each with their own domain and their own relationship to the living world above. The Bon shaman — the gshen — who descends to these levels in trance is not visiting hell. He is negotiating with the administrators of the lower cosmos on behalf of the living.

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The tree’s branches rise through eight heavens.

Each heaven is a realm of increasingly subtle beings: the lha who inhabit the sky and the elements, the higher divine beings who govern cosmic cycles, and at the highest levels, the primordial deities whose existence predates the current cosmic cycle. The dralha — warrior spirits — inhabit the middle levels between earth and the divine heavens, accessible to human heroes who have the necessary spiritual connection.

The tree is not static. It is a living exchange — sap flowing up and down, messages passing between levels, the living world at the center continuously in relationship with everything above and below it. The Bon practitioner is not a being who simply inhabits the middle level. They are a being who has access, through practice, to the full vertical range — who can address the lu below and the lha above, who can navigate the underworlds for healing and the heavens for inspiration.

This is the shamanic foundation of Bon: the understanding that the human world is embedded in a cosmic ecology, that the health of the human community depends on maintaining the right relationship with all the levels, and that the practitioner — the priest, the healer, the shaman — is the specialist in maintaining those relationships.

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The world tree is also the practitioner’s own body.

This is the highest teaching in the Bon understanding of the axis mundi: that the macrocosmic tree and the microcosmic body are homologous. The spine is the tree’s trunk. The nine energy centers below the solar plexus correspond to the nine underworld levels. The eight centers above the solar plexus correspond to the eight heavens. The crown of the head is the top of the tree, where it opens into the infinite.

The Bon practice that works with this correspondence — sometimes called the A-tri system or the foundational Bon meditation practices — uses the body as the axis to navigate the cosmic levels. The practitioner who sits with the spine aligned, the energy centered, the awareness clear is standing in the world tree. They are at the center. Everything is accessible from this position.

The nine underworld lords are the nine dense patterns of habitual energy in the body’s lower centers. The eight heavens are the eight qualities of awareness available in the upper centers. The tree that is the center of the universe is the same tree that is the center of the practitioner. The axis mundi and the axis of the body are one.

This is what the Bon tradition knows that Buddhism arrived and found already present in Tibet.