adj. Popular annual festival in Japan, usually observed July 13-15, in honor of the spirits of deceased family members and of all the dead. As at the New Year festival, the dead are believed to return to their birthplaces. Memorial stones are cleaned, dances performed, and paper lanterns and fires are lit to welcome the dead and to bid them farewell when their visit ends. adj. Indigenous religion of Tibet. It was originally concerned with magical propitiation of demonic forces, and its practices included blood sacrifices. It later developed a cult of divine kingship (with kings regarded as manifestations of the sky divinity), reformulated in Tibetan Buddhism as the reincarnation of lamas. Bon's order of oracular priests had their counterpart in Buddhist soothsayers, and its gods of air, earth, and underworld in the lesser Tibetan Buddhist deities. Though its religious supremacy ended in the 8th century, Bon survives in many aspects of Tibetan Buddhism and as a living religion on Tibet's northern and eastern frontiers. adj. Bon Marché Le Bon Gustave Cape Bon Peninsula
(Tib) Term used in various senses for aspects of pre- and non-Buddhist religion in Tibet The main senses are (1) early Tibetan folk religion, before the times of the kings or emperors; (2) court religion of the kings or emperors in the 7th to 9th centuries; the term bon seems to have referred to some of the priests of this cult; (3) "Reformed" Bon, essentially a variant Buddhist order, see BONPO below; (4) derogatory term for black magic, anti-Buddhist practices, folk religion
An NSF initiative to establish a series of research "observatories" around the U S for projects involved in species discovery and other collaborative research of systematists, ecologists and other scientists
A MetaPhysical Orientation as to Tradition, Culture or Preferred Flavour, which is primarily defined, usually selfdefined by it's members and/or adherents holding as the traditional Tibetan teachings prior to their syncretization with Buddhism as a primary or critical parameter of their Spiritual Paradigm
formulae You say `bon voyage' to someone who is going on a journey, as a way of saying goodbye and wishing them good luck. Goodbye! Bon voyage!. used to wish someone a good journey
born May 7, 1841, Nogent-le-Rotrou, France died Dec. 13, 1931, Marnes-la-Coquette French social psychologist. After receiving a doctorate in medicine, he traveled and wrote books on anthropology, but his interests later shifted to social psychology. In The Crowd (1895) he argued that the personality of the individual in a crowd becomes submerged and that the collective crowd mind comes to dominate