The following essay is the result of approximately two years of research and fieldwork on the Bon religious community of the Songpan Prefecture in the Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China. The research was carried on between September 1991 to Spring 1993. The candidate uses translations of Tibetan Bon historical texts and information provided during field work by Bonpos informants to summarize the view of the Bonpos and contrast it with the historical data available in Western writings to establish a provisional definition of Bon. Translations from a Chinese historical report on the major events of Tibetan religion in Songpan from the period preceding Liberation to today's situation follow with descriptions of Bon monastic settlements and places of pilgrimage. A summary description of the major Bon religious and meditative practices with references to their corpus of ritual manuals and main commentaries used by monks and hermits then conclude the exposition of modern Bon religion as it is presently practiced in Songpan.

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The Tibetan plateau is a vast, elevated region located in central Asia, which is underlain by the thickest crust known on Earth (up to 90 km). An outstanding question of importance to many fields within geology is how and why did the Tibetan plateau form? Models attribute the growth of the plateau to a consequence of the ongoing India-Asia continental collision, but differ in the details of how the crustal thickening was accommodated: was it by underplating of Indian lower crust or by homogeneous shortening? High-grade metamorphic rocks sampled from the region potentially hold the key to answering this question, as they contain a record of past tectonic events that can discriminate between the various proposed models. This record can be decoded by integrating field, thermobarometric and geochronological techniques, to elucidate a detailed thermotectonic understanding of a region. This methodology was applied to three case studies, each of which targeted rare tectonic windows into the mid-crust of the plateau. These regions comprise Danba in eastern Tibet, Basong Tso in south-eastern Tibet and the Western Nyainqentanglha in southern Tibet. Each case study documents previously unreported metamorphic events that have allowed original interpretations to be made regarding tectonic evolution: in Danba, all metamorphism is shown to be early Jurassic; in Basong Tso, two metamorphic belts are documented that reveal a late Triassic--early Jurassic orogenic event; and in the Western Nyainqengtanglha, Cretaceous--Neogene magmatism is shown to overprint late Triassic metamorphism. Integration of the results has enabled commentary on the large scale evolution of the Tibetan plateau from the Permian until the present day, and even hinted at its future. The results indicate that the closure of the Paleotethys played an important role in the construction of the Tibetan plateau, and suggest that homogeneous crustal thickening is not a viable model for the documented exposure levels.