Bon has never been large relative to the Buddhist schools, and has often been in a defensive position, but it has continuous institutions.
Menri, founded in 1405 in Tsang, became the tradition's principal monastery and set the standard for monastic discipline and the academic curriculum, including the long philosophical training that culminates in the geshe degree, which Bon confers on its own authority. Bon communities have been concentrated in eastern Tibet, particularly Amdo and Gyarong, in the far west around Mount Kailash, and in Himalayan areas including Dolpo in Nepal, where Bon village practice continues.
The twentieth century was as damaging for Bon as for every other Tibetan tradition. Monasteries were closed or destroyed after 1959 and during the Cultural Revolution, and the tradition was in a worse position than the Buddhist schools to survive the loss because its numbers were smaller and its literature less widely copied outside Tibet.
Exile institutions rebuilt it. A community settled at Dolanji in Himachal Pradesh from 1967 and established a new Menri there, with a monastic college, a library and a programme of publishing that put a large part of the Bon canon into print for the first time. In 1978 the fourteenth Dalai Lama visited Dolanji and recognised Bon as a distinct Tibetan religious tradition alongside the four Buddhist schools, with representation in the exile assembly, a significant shift, since Bon had frequently been treated as heterodox in earlier Tibetan usage. Monasteries have also been rebuilt and reoccupied inside Tibet, and Bon has a small following in Europe and North America, chiefly for its Dzogchen and its dream and sleep practices.
The living tradition is therefore two things at once: a monastic and scholastic system closely comparable to the Buddhist schools, and a village-level repertoire of ritual for land spirits, illness, weather and the dead that has often been the reason ordinary people call on a Bonpo at all.