Shenlha Okar
Tibetan diety
Shenlha Ökar (Wylie: gshen lha 'od dkar) or Shiwa Ökar (Wylie: zhi ba 'od dkar) is the most important deity in the Yungdrung Bon tradition of Tibet. He is counted among the "Four Transcendent Lords" (Wylie: bde bar gshegs pa) along with Satrig Ersang (Sherab Chamma), Sangpo Bumtri, and Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche.
Name and biography
Shenlha Ökar means "wisdom gshen of white light;" the variant Shiwa Okar means "peaceful white light." The Bon term gShen can mean "priest or shaman" or possibly in this case "deity who is a priest." In some accounts he is considered the sambhogakāya form of Tonpa Shenrab Miwoche, the founder of Bon (the nirmāṇakāya aspect). In other accounts, he is visited by Shenrab Miwoche when Miwoche is in a prior incarnation known as Salwa. Additionally, some categorize him as "corresponding exactly to the Buddhist category of dharmakāya."
Shenlha Okar is said to have created the world with the help of nine brother gods or nine cosmic gods (Wylie: srid pa'i lha) who appear as war gods or drala (Wylie: dgra bla). He is also considered a god of compassion with many parallels to Chenrezig and also with Amitābha.
Depiction
Shenlha Okar is depicted with a white body "like the essence of crystal," holding a hook in his right hand (and sometimes a lasso in his left), and seated in a throne supported by elephants.
Shiwa Okar in the terma of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Shiwa Okar featured in a work composed by the influential Tibetan Buddhist lama Chögyam Trungpa, particularly a long verse epic composed in Tibet called The Golden Dot: The Epic of the Lha, the Annals of the Kingdom of Shambhala, and in terma he revealed beginning in 1976. The Golden Dot was lost in Trungpa Rinpoche's flight from Tibet in 1959.Trungpa Rinpoche began to reconstruct the original text after escaping Tibet, and it is this later work to which we refer. The first chapter describes the creation of the world by nine cosmic gods (shrid[sic] pa 'i lha) who appear in the form of native Tibetan deities known as drala (dgra bla), or war gods.
The public source identifies “Shenlha Okar” as tibetan diety. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Shenlha, Okar and Tibetan.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shenlha Okar” 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.