Prayer flag
Tibetan religious item
A Tibetan prayer flag is a colorful rectangular cloth, often found strung along trails and peaks high in the Himalayas. They are used to bless the surrounding countryside and for other purposes.
Prayer flags are believed to have originated within the religious tradition of Bon. In Bon, shamanistic Bonpo used primary-colored plain flags in Tibet. Traditional prayer flags include woodblock-printed text and images.
History
Nepal Sutras, originally written on cloth banners, were transmitted to other regions of the world as prayer flags. Legend ascribes the origin of the prayer flag to the Gautama Buddha, whose prayers were written on battle flags used by the devas against their adversaries, the asuras. The legend may have given the Indian Bhikṣu a reason for carrying the heavenly banner as a way of signifying his commitment to ahimsa. This knowledge was carried into Tibet by 800 CE, and the actual flags were introduced no later than 1040 CE, where they were further modified. The Indian monk Atisha (980–1054 CE) introduced the Indian practice of printing on cloth prayer flags to Tibet and Nepal.
“Prayer flag” enters the record as tibetan religious item. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Prayer, flag and Tibetan can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Prayer flag” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Prayer, flag and Tibetan provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1422079. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1040 and 1054.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prayer flag” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.