The class of demons known as sri  are among the most complex and intriguing in the entire scheme of autochthonous Tibetan supernatural entities. In the myth of royal origins, sri are expressly mentioned by the future king gNya’ khri btsan po as one of five reasons why he is reluctant to descend to earth. Etymologically, the term sri is cognate with the srid (pa), meaning “to exist” or “to come into existence” and, as a noun denoting a class of gods from whom humans are descended. A passage in the text presented here implies that the sri are the polar opposite of the srid pa, the nadir opposed to the zenith. Sri, and particularly the diminutive form sri’u, may also mean “child”, and some texts reveal an ambiguity about the identity of the sri insofar as they are either demons that prey on children, or demons that take the form of children. This notion is reinforced by a term that is apparently synomymous with sri, found both in lDe’u chos ’byung and appearing twice in the present text: sri can, literally “having/possessed with a sri”.

As so often in Bonpo literature, there is no single, authoritative etiology for the sri. According to the fourteenth-century gZi brjid, there are ten categories of these demons. The text presented here lists nine, and only three of these coincide with the list given in the gZi brjid. In the latter work, the sri are one of the first categories of fiends to appear during the cosmogony, when they emerge from the residual particles of one of the primordial eggs, the Grey Egg of Lightlessness. The origin myth narrated in the text presented here tells a very different story.