Becoming good Buddhists may well be a matter of people becoming something they look as though they might have been but never actually were.
Chogyam Trungpa, the renowned guru, once suggested a definition of Tibetan 'insiders', which included the features that: they should speak some variant of the Tibetan language, follow the Buddhist faith, and eat tsampa. 'Tsampa-eaters' is an evocative designation for ethnic Tibetans, but it has certain limits; not all Tibetans eat tsampa (and many tsampa-eaters are, of course, not Tibetan). By the same token, not all Tibetans are Buddhist, and so, resorting to linguistic categories, the rather clumsy term 'Tibetan-speakers' is probably the least unsatisfactory term English has to designate the totality of ethnic Tibetans within and outside the frontiers of the modern Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).
Grossly, there are three main populations of Tibetan-speaking peoples. First, those in the TAR and neighbouring provinces under Communist rule. Second, the inhabitants of the High Himalaya, extending from Pakistan to Bhutan in a long band that blurs at the edges into less distinctly Tibetan cultures. And, lastly, the refugees, living primarily in Southasia. The cultural variations within each of these groups is almost legendary, but this triple division does represent three more-or-less distinct political climates and sets of cultural possibilities. While it would be a hopelessly rash undertaking to predict the future of the Tibetan-speaking peoples, it is worth at least considering some of the cultural possibilities by examining a few past and present trends.
Indigenous Bon