No other single school has developed such spectacular and arcane rituals as the esoteric Mahayana school known as the Vajrayana ('The Way of the Adamantine Thunderbolt') practice...

No other single school has developed such spectacular and arcane rituals as the esoteric Mahayana school known as the Vajrayana ('The Way of the Adamantine Thunderbolt') practiced in Tibet, and thence t he other Himalayan countries. Buddhism was introduced into Tibet by the great Indian yogi Padmasambhava in the eighth century, and Vajrayana is a complex mixture of Indian transcendental philosophy and esoteric ritual derived both from Tantric sources of north east India and Tibet's indigenous shamanistic religion of Bon-Po. Linked to and ancient Central Asian tradition, Bon-Po provided much of the vocabulary that expressed the Mahayana vision, including masked spirit dances, rituals using human bones and skull-caps, communal exorcism, liturgical music, and offerings sculpted out of yak butter, one of the country's most treasured commodities.