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Konchok Rinchen, 11, right, sitting next to the author, Lamayuru Monastery, 2001. Image courtesy of the author

I met Konchok Rinchen when he was 11 years old. I was 40. We both arrived at Lamayuru Monastery on the same day, although for very different reasons. My teacher, Sonam Kunga Rinpoche, had sent me to witness the monastery’s cham dances. Rinchen had recently been orphaned. We became friends almost immediately. Twenty-five years later, we still are.

During this summer of 2026, Core of Culture, the organization I direct, has been working with three monasteries in Ladakh to reconstruct their Cham Yig, or ritual dance manual, which now is only fragments and parts of ancient manuscripts. Our work covered three monastic cham dance ceremonies that required three days each to complete. 

Central to the Drikung Kagyu dance ceremonies is the destruction of the linga, a ritual effigy, by the powerful protector deity Heruka. This symbolizes the eradication of evil by one of the main protectors of the order. It is a dramatic and sometimes shocking enactment of dismemberment. As I watched this long cham dance—about an hour—preceded and followed by other hour-long dances, I noticed with what precision and unity the monks were performing. It is sometimes scrappier. This was elegant and beautiful.

Here, the leader somehow instilled a decorum among the 32 dancers, even masked, as they all were. There was an awareness permeating the whole scene, of dancers aware of each other; of a collective awareness that a sacred space, a mandala, had been formed by the dance, the perfect locus for an appearance by the deity, Heruka. 

Heruka is among the great tantric protector deities, a wrathful embodiment of awakened wisdom who destroys obstacles—not people, but ignorance itself. 

The whole dance, led by a dancer wearing the enormous wrathful Heruka mask, was stately and impressive, a shimmering masked danced mandala. 

It was at once a personal meditative act by each monk and a collective mandala image forming, upon which the devout could meditate. It was perhaps the best performance of this Heruka Deity Cham I have seen in several decades. It was transporting.

My colleague Thinles Dorje came up the stairs to the platform where I was sitting: “Joseph!” he said, “Look at Heruka!” I told him I was looking at Heruka and how beautifully I thought the whole cham looked. “Joseph,” he said, “Heruka is Rinchen.”

I was astonished. 

I had watched this dancer for nearly an hour without recognizing him. I saw only Heruka. When Thinles told me who stood beneath the enormous wrathful mask, the dance changed instantly. The deity became my old friend.

It was not surprising that Rinchen was dancing, but that he was performing a major deity role in one of the apex dances of the whole canon. I was further amazed because Rinchen was so exceptionally good, not only as a dancer but as a leader. When did he get so good? How did he move up to this exalted role? His yogic cultivation was obvious.

 Kashmir by boat, 2015. Photo by Konchok Rinchen for Core of Culture

Rinchen has accompanied Core of Culture on a number of important projects. He has photographed for us in Kashmir, and in Spiti Valley, where he assisted in distributing the dance treatise The Snow Lion’s Attributes. 

It was in Spiti, at Dankar Monastery, where we had a remarkable encounter with the dance master of that monastery belonging to the Gelug order. In that monastery, the appointed dance master, champon, is required to spend a year in a solitary cave retreat, practicing the deity yoga of the principal cham deities, usually Heruka, or Palden Lhamo. After one year practicing this tantric deity yoga of visualized embodiment, the yogi emerges spiritually and energetically transformed, and goes on to lead the dances, inspiring and imbuing all the dancers with his tantric empowerment.  We were fortunate to meet Lama Tipa Tshering Tobden, who had only recently concluded his one-year champon retreat.

Dankar Monastery, Spiti Valley. Photo copyright Shivam Gupta

But Tsering Tobden was amused by how extraordinary I thought this conditioning for dance was: “We’ve been doing this every year for hundreds and hundreds of years. It is not extraordinary to us, it is just what we do. Now—having a foreign dance specialist in a mustard-colored suit come to visit us—that’s unusual.” 

He went on to explain that the deity yoga for Heruka is the basic meditation visualization technique, and the other protective deities are variants of that well-known deity yoga. I’ve learned over the years that different orders and monasteries teach cham differently, and so too are their inner teachings that inspire and spiritualize the dance taught differently.

Lama Tipa Tshering Tobden of Dhankar Gompa sharing a laugh with Core of Culture director Joseph Houseal and field associate Dechen Lundup outside the Dalai Lama’s chambers, 2016. He was amused that we thought his extreme meditation requirements were exceptional. Photo by Konchok Rinchen for Core of Culture

In a simple way, some monasteries teach deity yoga as a practice for meditating monks, whether or not they will lead the dance. In these cases, it is easy to see how cham is a form of tantric yoga: it is deity yoga, plus. Once the deity is embodied as a tantric visualization, cham shows how the adept, in a trance-like state, can move, can perform deity actions, such as purifying the grounds and taming the mind. Cham shows how the deity (a monk in a trance-like state) can dance. 

Some monasteries teach cham to young boys, so the movement is learned easily and becomes second nature. Then, teaching the meditation aspect when they are older is not at all obstructed by having to learn the dance at the same time. Tantric yoga becomes the focus of the act, not the dance and pacing steps. Other monasteries teach the inner condition of the dancing monk variously. The inner teachings of the dance are also variously recorded, or not, in the Cham Yig dance manuals that underpin the dances and their continuity. 

In the Drikung Kagyu order, meditative visualizations empower the dancing monks. Their didactic inclusion in cham practice has fallen away, but is being revived these days. 

Where Rinchen attained his composure as a dancer, and his energetic abilities to conduct and lead 32 dancers in his retinue, was, I deduced, an outcome of being a good and devout monk for many years, for practicing all his transmitted monastic acts with humility and clarity; all of a piece; part of a monk’s life. Clearly, he has a talent for understanding this ancient esoteric form of movement and, clearly, he has a talent to lead a large group in a concentrated, danced, ritual act. Great cham dancers are not simply trained in choreography. They are formed by years of monastic life. The dance grows out of the discipline rather than existing apart from it.

Rinchen was selected as a dancer when he was younger, and over time he has mastered and performed ever more complicated and important dances—such as the stag dance, a fast and partially improvised dance that includes high speed and quick changes of direction. It depicts the brilliant energy of an active mind. But learning a technically complex dance is far away from leading a whole mandala of 32 dancers with dignity and ritual propriety. This included the fundamental bearing of the monk dancers. Rinchen has an ability to impart and conduct this level of awareness and discipline. It is rare. 

Konchok Rinchen dances the Stag, Lamayuru Monastery, 2017. He dances with intention. Image courtesy of Konchk Rinchen

We have asked Konchok Rinchen to accompany us as we work on our Cham Yig Project. During the next four years, Rinchen will accompany us as we reconstruct the Cham Yig. Our workshops bring together monks, scholars, musicians, dancers, and fragile manuscripts. Each has preserved a different part of the tradition.

It is a harmonious synergy, designed to encounter those places in the ritual dances where texts do not agree, or are unclear; where music may be missing; and where the oral tradition of transmitting dances person-to-person, over the decades and centuries, sustains a living tradition as it rebuilds its textual basis. Witnessing my old and dear friend Rinchen, whose disciplined and joyful life as a monk has resulted in him leading an ancient esoteric dance, was a highlight of my work this year.

Konchok Rinchen performing Heruka, along with his retinue. Lamayuru Monastery, 2026. Photo by Core of Culture

Something of a full circle. Rinchen’s mastery of this dance position has lined him up for greater responsibility at the monastery in years to come: he will likely become a champon, or dance master, and there are murmurs that he will become the dorje lopon, or master of all rituals, in due time. Humble and hardworking, it is all part of his life as a monk. I made sure he heard the words I realized I had carried for years, having watched 25 years unfold, “Rinchen, I am so proud of you.” 

Konchok Rinchen, left, with Dr. Thinles Dorje during the 2026 Cham Yig Project. Behind the wrathful mask of Heruka is the smiling monk and longtime colleague I first met as an 11-year-old novice. Image courtesy of the author

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The post Becoming Heruka appeared first on Buddhistdoor Global.

Robert Thurman in 2006. From wikimedia.org 

I had the good fortune to meet Robert Thurman in 2002 or 2003—I can’t remember the exact year—in New York City. To my great surprise he called me at my home in Chicago. These were days before the widespread use of the Internet, and smartphones as we know them today didn’t yet exist. We’d never met, but I was not unknown in New York, having performed there on any number of occasions, even being reviewed in the The New York Times twice—once by Jennifer Dunning, something I am proud of. I moved in dance circles and in the world of Asian art, but not in Buddhist circles. To this day, I don’t how he heard of me, or Core of Culture, or how he found my number, although I was listed in the telephone directory.

Robert told me he had heard of my non-profit organization, Core of Culture, which I had only just established after working with monks at Lamayuru Monastery in Ladakh, thanks to my wonderful teacher Sonam Kunga Rinpoche. I still direct Core of Culture today, and recently embarked on a five-year project with Drikung Kagyu monasteries in Ladakh. Core of Culture is dedicated to safeguarding intangible culture, with an emphasis on endangered dances, and movement traditions in healing, meditation, and martial arts. 

Robert asked if we could meet at Tibet House US during my next trip to New York City, and I said yes, of course. I knew who he was, and everyone pretty much knew about Tibet House, a fixture of the downtown Manhattan scene.

The day came and I went to Tibet House to meet him. Robert walked out to greet me. I am surprised, after reading any number of tributes to him and his extraordinary life, that no one mentioned what a mountain of a man he was: charismatic, kind, and huge. He reached out to shake my hand, and I stopped in my tracks. I had never seen such magnificent hands: enormous, masculine hands. He saw my astonishment and smiled. I took my left hand and held his fifth finger, and my right hand took his thumb, and I just marveled for a minute. 

Then he said, “So, you’re the dance guy?”

I laughed a bit and replied, “Yeah, I suppose I am.” 

“No,” he said firmly, “You’re the dance guy.” 

This seemed a bit a strange, but he was very kind, and I answered, “Okay, I’m the dance guy.” 

“No,” he insisted, his voice quite direct. He took his two enormous hands, and wrapped my small, folded hands in his. Holding them, he said more strongly, “You’re the Dance Guy.” He was still holding my hands in his, and we were looking eye-to-eye. This meant he was looking down and I was looking up. 

He continued, “You’re the Dance Guy. You’re not the Dalai Lama guy, you’re not the Free Tibet guy, you’re not the government-in-exile guy, you’re not the humanitarian guy, you’re not the academic guy. You’re the Dance Guy. Be the Dance Guy.” 

Still looking intently at each other, I said, “I will. I’ll be the Dance Guy.” 

He let go of my hands and said, “Good. We need one. We don’t have one.” 

He then went on to deliver his scheduled talk that day, and I had a chance to hear his legendary ability to speak, and teach, and captivate an audience. 

I have never forgotten what he directed me to do, in such an offbeat way, well-suited to my own offbeat character. It was so wise and necessary. I still conduct my work according to his great guidance in bringing total focus to what I do best, undistracted by anything else. This little encounter is the merest footnote to his outsized life, but I am sure that I am not the only one to whom he provided guidance and clarity.

Why would he even care to reach out to meet me to tell me this? It was a great act of kindness and concern. I will never forget it. I will never forget him and his enormous hands. Robert Thurman clarified the direction my life’s work. I am so grateful to him.

The Dance Guy (Joseph Houseal). Once I was a Willow, Full moon performance, East Hampton, New York, 1998. Image courtesy of the author

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Robert Thurman in 2006. From wikimedia.org 

I had the good fortune to meet Robert Thurman in 2002 or 2003—I can’t remember the exact year—in New York City. To my great surprise he called me at my home in Chicago. These were days before the widespread use of the Internet, and smartphones as we know them today didn’t yet exist. We’d never met, but I was not unknown in New York, having performed there on any number of occasions, even being reviewed in the The New York Times twice—once by Jennifer Dunning, something I am proud of. I moved in dance circles and in the world of Asian art, but not in Buddhist circles. To this day, I don’t how he heard of me, or Core of Culture, or how he found my number, although I was listed in the telephone directory.

Robert told me he had heard of my non-profit organization, Core of Culture, which I had only just established after working with monks at Lamayuru Monastery in Ladakh, thanks to my wonderful teacher Sonam Kunga Rinpoche. I still direct Core of Culture today, and recently embarked on a five-year project with Drikung Kagyu monasteries in Ladakh. Core of Culture is dedicated to safeguarding intangible culture, with an emphasis on endangered dances, and movement traditions in healing, meditation, and martial arts. 

Robert asked if we could meet at Tibet House US during my next trip to New York City, and I said yes, of course. I knew who he was, and everyone pretty much knew about Tibet House, a fixture of the downtown Manhattan scene.

The day came and I went to Tibet House to meet him. Robert walked out to greet me. I am surprised, after reading any number of tributes to him and his extraordinary life, that no one mentioned what a mountain of a man he was: charismatic, kind, and huge. He reached out to shake my hand, and I stopped in my tracks. I had never seen such magnificent hands: enormous, masculine hands. He saw my astonishment and smiled. I took my left hand and held his fifth finger, and my right hand took his thumb, and I just marveled for a minute. 

Then he said, “So, you’re the dance guy?”

I laughed a bit and replied, “Yeah, I suppose I am.” 

“No,” he said firmly, “You’re the dance guy.” 

This seemed a bit a strange, but he was very kind, and I answered, “Okay, I’m the dance guy.” 

“No,” he insisted, his voice quite direct. He took his two enormous hands, and wrapped my small, folded hands in his. Holding them, he said more strongly, “You’re the Dance Guy.” He was still holding my hands in his, and we were looking eye-to-eye. This meant he was looking down and I was looking up. 

He continued, “You’re the Dance Guy. You’re not the Dalai Lama guy, you’re not the Free Tibet guy, you’re not the government-in-exile guy, you’re not the humanitarian guy, you’re not the academic guy. You’re the Dance Guy. Be the Dance Guy.” 

Still looking intently at each other, I said, “I will. I’ll be the Dance Guy.” 

He let go of my hands and said, “Good. We need one. We don’t have one.” 

He then went on to deliver his scheduled talk that day, and I had a chance to hear his legendary ability to speak, and teach, and captivate an audience. 

I have never forgotten what he directed me to do, in such an offbeat way, well-suited to my own offbeat character. It was so wise and necessary. I still conduct my work according to his great guidance in bringing total focus to what I do best, undistracted by anything else. This little encounter is the merest footnote to his outsized life, but I am sure that I am not to only one to whom he provided guidance and clarity.

Why would he even care to reach out to meet me to tell me this? It was a great act of kindness and concern. I will never forget it. I will never forget him and his enormous hands. Robert Thurman clarified the direction my life’s work. I am so grateful to him.

The Dance Guy (Joseph Houseal). Once I was a Willow, Full moon performance, East Hampton, New York, 1998. Image courtesy of the author

See more

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Robert Thurman, Buddhist Scholar and Co-founder of Tibet House US, Has DiedAmerican Buddhist Scholar Robert Thurman to Receive India’s Padma Shri Award
The post So You’re the Dance Guy? Remembering Robert Thurman appeared first on Buddhistdoor Global.

La famille de Saltimbanques, “Acrobat Family.” 1905, oil on canvas. Picasso. Image courtesy of the author

Human beings continually create small worlds to sustain impossible arts. One of my close friends is August Tye. She is Ballet Mistress at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Her parents are sculptors. Her husband is an operatic baritone. She has three children. The eldest, Georgia, I have known since she was a baby. Now 25, she is a choreographer and photographer. Her husband is a Peruvian magician. Of course he is. They are a family of artists and performers. The kids are doing what mom and dad do. Their lives are unimaginable to most people, carried out upholding the arts of ballet, opera, magic, and music.

Dancers and musicians at Dorje Drak Monastery in Simla. 2020. Their demonstration for us was superb, and we told them so.  As this photo so sweetly shows, these monks are shy and not accustomed to praise and acknowledgement. Photo by Jonathan Greet for Core of Culture

I have always been drawn to Picasso’s several paintings of the La famille de Saltimbanques, otherwise known as The Acrobat Family. The name saltimbanque includes all traveling performers, itinerant acrobats, fortunetellers, dancers, circus folk, freaks, and their ilk. A kind of tribe that has always walked the earth for as long as recorded history can tell. Shaolin monks and Vajrayana Buddhist monks very much share this organization—a dedicated community at the edge of society, not living by the usual social norms, but having a way of life specifically designed to master and transmit sophisticated mental and body practices that result in amazing physical and psychic feats such as tantric yoga, gong fu, and Buddhist cham dance. The gallery of images offered with this article shows grand similarities among dedicated distinct artist societies. They are meant to provide a warm feeling, an intimate look at the stewards of secrets.

Kashmiri Bhand Pather clan at a garden performance, 2016. Photo by Gerard Houghton for Core of Culture

These performers aren’t produced in colleges or institutions, but in communities of people living according to a way of life that defines them. Monks are always on the move between monasteries, religious events, and staying connected to their families. Monks also travel the world. It is their whole way of life, which sustains precious ancient teachings of body and mind over hundreds, even thousands of years. These performers occupy a mythic zone between ordinary life and another reality. They live unordinary lives.

Shaolin monks, fresh from the monastery, in a theatrical performance in Dubai, 2017. From timeoutdubai.com

Kashmiri Bhand performers are traveling artists dating to the Mughal Empire. Very few remain. They dance, sing, recite poetry, tell jokes, play music. They are all men, and female roles are played en travesti. Bhand Pather performers are hereditary. They have also been bone-setters and dentists, and they delivered services available only when they were performing in a town. They can be bawdy and hilarious, or somber and spiritual. They know Arabian Nights by heart and can enact many scenes from the book of extravagant fables. They are a small society within society, once with a more integrated relationship to popular culture.

The Ballet Class, 1875, oil on canvas, Edgar Degas. Musee D’Orsay. From wikimedia.org

These acrobats and monks are not merely “dance communities”—which they are—but hereditary or liminal orders of embodied transmission; people who preserve difficult arts by living partially outside ordinary society. When I talk about Buddhist dances such as cham, I emphasize that is it different from the prevalent notions of dance in the West. One difference is that the monk-dancers live a different kind of life. An old lama once told me, “If you want a good monk-dancer, start with a good monk.” Monks are made in monasteries, living according to a monastic code. They are a family. They perform mystical dances in the same place where they live, and sleep, and eat, and play, and meditate, and grow up, and grow old.

A traveling Noh family performs Ikarikazuki. Woodblock print. Tsukioka Kogyu, from “100 Noh Plays,” 1897. Image courtesy of the Lavenberg Collection

Picasso’s La famille de Saltimbanques is a powerful entry point into the liminal lives depicted because the painting shows moods at the same time tender yet melancholy, the raw trappings of a poor, itinerant community of highly disciplined performers, keepers of amazing feats, but aloof and spiritually estranged from bourgeois society. It shows a family. Indeed, a completely other society and way of life. They belong. Picasso sees this belonging. Life is organized around the transmission of the arts. In one version sits a monkey. The monkey is perfect, a plain fact, a companion in the circus life.

A young monk watches a cham dance ceremony in anticipation of dancing one day, 2001. Photo by Gerard Houghton for Core of Culture

This gallery of images is not merely portraits of performers, but revelations of enclosed worlds of transmission. Certain arts survive because entire human communities organize themselves around preserving them. Magic isn’t just entertainment; it sparks something ancient within us. These marginalized performers keep secrets. Old secrets. Sometimes initiate secrets. The monastery is not merely a place where dances are occasionally performed. It is an entire ecosystem that protects rituals, dances, mudra, music, and costumes. It sustains oral transmission and a behavioral disciple of daily monastic movement. It preserves techniques of sculpting and painting, and above all, preserves ancient techniques of meditation. 

Traveling performances, circus folk, freak shows, and the earliest forms of drama usually included something paranormal: spirit possessions, ghost stories, seances, psychics, mind-reading, fortunetellers, people in trances, blessing from the ancestors. It made for a richer variety show, appealing to people’s superstitions and fascination with workings of the unknown and the afterlife. No doubt some of these performers were capable of mental, physical, and psychic actions not available to most people. Monks certainly have minds trained beyond the imagination of most people. Noh actors as well, have advanced mental capacities, in part by performing in states of sensory limitation.

Commedia dell’arte troupe, 1710, oil on canvas, Franck Baptiste Paris. Pierrot on the left. Harlequin on the right, and fair Columbine in the center. From wikimedia.org

The same is true of circus folks, commedia dell’arte families, traveling Noh troupes, and Kashmiri Bhand Pather clansmen. Shaolin monks have always routinely performed in Chinese opera performances, and in modern performances, still living the elevated life of a Shaolin monk. Even with classical ballet, the painter Degas shows us an ancient style of master-disciple teaching; a highly disciplined artisan training within a larger bourgeois society. The lives of ballerinas haven’t always been ones of respect and honor, but they have always been vessels of one of the most beautiful arts known to man. They appear superhuman, doing incredibly beautiful things most humans can’t do. You can’t go to college to become a ballerina. You must go to a ballet academy, a privileged type of archaic training unto itself. A lifestyle.

Young monks support their friend, who is dancing for the first time. Obstacle Clearing Ritual, Dorje Drak Monastery, Simla, 2020. Photo by Jonathan Greet for Core of Culture

Cham is performed in important Buddhist religious ceremonies. But it survives in the spaces between performances; in the very lives of the monks, who are intentionally outsiders to mainstream society, highly disciplined, meditation adepts. Picasso understood something similar about acrobats: his real subject is not their astonishing tricks, but the life required to sustain the impossible art. Itinerant, poor, humble, disciplined vessels of ancient transmission at the edge of society. Everything about it is precious.

Kashmiri Bhand Pather. A young man en travesti dances the roles of a woman and a snake, 2015. Photo by Gerard Houghton for Core of Culture

In closing this meditation on those who live lives designed for the transmission of ancient practices, I leave you two more paintings by Picasso, titled the same as the lead image above, La famille de Saltimbanques, all painted the same year, 1905.

La famille de Saltimbanques, “Acrobat Family.” 1905, oil on canvas. Picasso. Image courtesy of the author

La famille de Saltimbanques with a monkey, 1905, collage, gouache, watercolor, pastel, India ink on cardboard. Picasso. Image courtesy of the author

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La famille de Saltimbanques, “Acrobat Family.” 1905, oil on canvas. Picasso. Image courtesy of the author

Human beings continually create small worlds to sustain impossible arts. One of my close friends is August Tye. She is Ballet Mistress at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Her parents are sculptors. Her husband is an operatic baritone. She has three children. The eldest, Georgia, I have known since she was a baby. Now 25, she is a choreographer and photographer. Her husband is a Peruvian magician. Of course he is. They are a family of artists and performers. The kids are doing what mom and dad do. Their lives are unimaginable to most people, carried out upholding the arts of ballet, opera, magic, and music.

Dancers and musicians at Dorje Drak Monastery in Simla. 2020. Their demonstration for us was superb, and we told them so.  As this photo so sweetly shows, these monks are shy and not accustomed to praise and acknowledgement. Photo by Jonathan Greet for Core of Culture

I have always been drawn to Picasso’s several paintings of the La famille de Saltimbanques, otherwise known as The Acrobat Family. The name saltimbanque includes all traveling performers, itinerant acrobats, fortunetellers, dancers, circus folk, freaks, and their ilk. A kind of tribe that has always walked the earth for as long as recorded history can tell. Shaolin monks and Vajrayana Buddhist monks very much share this organization—a dedicated community at the edge of society, not living by the usual social norms, but having a way of life specifically designed to master and transmit sophisticated mental and body practices that result in amazing physical and psychic feats such as tantric yoga, gong fu, and Buddhist cham dance. The gallery of images offered with this article shows grand similarities among dedicated distinct artist societies. They are meant to provide a warm feeling, an intimate look at the stewards of secrets.

Kashmiri Bhand Pather clan at a garden performance, 2016. Photo by Gerard Houghton for Core of Culture

These performers aren’t produced in colleges or institutions, but in communities of people living according to a way of life that defines them. Monks are always on the move between monasteries, religious events, and staying connected to their families. Monks also travel the world. It is their whole way of life, which sustains precious ancient teachings of body and mind over hundreds, even thousands of years. These performers occupy a mythic zone between ordinary life and another reality. They live unordinary lives.

Shaolin monks, fresh from the monastery, in a theatrical performance in Dubai, 2017. From timeoutdubai.com

Kashmiri Bhand performers are traveling artists dating to the Mughal Empire. Very few remain. They dance, sing, recite poetry, tell jokes, play music. They are all men, and female roles are played en travesti. Bhand Pather performers are hereditary. They have also been bone-setters and dentists, and they delivered services available only when they were performing in a town. They can be bawdy and hilarious, or somber and spiritual. They know Arabian Nights by heart and can enact many scenes from the book of extravagant fables. They are a small society within society, once with a more integrated relationship to popular culture.

The Ballet Class, 1875, oil on canvas, Edgar Degas. Musee D’Orsay. From wikimedia.org

These acrobats and monks are not merely “dance communities”—which they are—but hereditary or liminal orders of embodied transmission; people who preserve difficult arts by living partially outside ordinary society. When I talk about Buddhist dances such as cham, I emphasize that is it different from the prevalent notions of dance in the West. One difference is that the monk-dancers live a different kind of life. An old lama once told me, “If you want a good monk-dancer, start with a good monk.” Monks are made in monasteries, living according to a monastic code. They are a family. They perform mystical dances in the same place where they live, and sleep, and eat, and play, and meditate, and grow up, and grow old.

A traveling Noh family performs Ikarikazuki. Woodblock print. Tsukioka Kogyu, from “100 Noh Plays,” 1897. Image courtesy of the Lavenberg Collection

Picasso’s La famille de Saltimbanques is a powerful entry point into the liminal lives depicted because the painting shows moods at the same time tender yet melancholy, the raw trappings of a poor, itinerant community of highly disciplined performers, keepers of amazing feats, but aloof and spiritually estranged from bourgeois society. It shows a family. Indeed, a completely other society and way of life. They belong. Picasso sees this belonging. Life is organized around the transmission of the arts. In one version sits a monkey. The monkey is perfect, a plain fact, a companion in the circus life.

A young monk watches a cham dance ceremony in anticipation of dancing one day, 2001. Photo by Gerard Houghton for Core of Culture

This gallery of images is not merely portraits of performers, but revelations of enclosed worlds of transmission. Certain arts survive because entire human communities organize themselves around preserving them. Magic isn’t just entertainment; it sparks something ancient within us. These marginalized performers keep secrets. Old secrets. Sometimes initiate secrets. The monastery is not merely a place where dances are occasionally performed. It is an entire ecosystem that protects rituals, dances, mudra, music, and costumes. It sustains oral transmission and a behavioral disciple of daily monastic movement. It preserves techniques of sculpting and painting, and above all, preserves ancient techniques of meditation. 

Traveling performances, circus folk, freak shows, and the earliest forms of drama usually included something paranormal: spirit possessions, ghost stories, seances, psychics, mind-reading, fortunetellers, people in trances, blessing from the ancestors. It made for a richer variety show, appealing to people’s superstitions and fascination with workings of the unknown and the afterlife. No doubt some of these performers were capable of mental, physical, and psychic actions not available to most people. Monks certainly have minds trained beyond the imagination of most people. Noh actors as well, have advanced mental capacities, in part by performing in states of sensory limitation.

Commedia dell’arte troupe, 1710, oil on canvas, Franck Baptiste Paris. Pierrot on the left. Harlequin on the right, and fair Columbine in the center. From wikimedia.org

The same is true of circus folks, commedia dell’arte families, traveling Noh troupes, and Kashmiri Bhand Pather clansmen. Shaolin monks have always routinely performed in Chinese opera performances, and in modern performances, still living the elevated life of a Shaolin monk. Even with classical ballet, the painter Degas shows us an ancient style of master-disciple teaching; a highly disciplined artisan training within a larger bourgeois society. The lives of ballerinas haven’t always been ones of respect and honor, but they have always been vessels of one of the most beautiful arts known to man. They appear superhuman, doing incredibly beautiful things most humans can’t do. You can’t go to college to become a ballerina. You must go to a ballet academy, a privileged type of archaic training unto itself. A lifestyle.

Young monks support their friend, who is dancing for the first time. Obstacle Clearing Ritual, Dorje Drak Monastery, Simla, 2020. Photo by Jonathan Greet for Core of Culture

Cham is performed in important Buddhist religious ceremonies. But it survives in the spaces between performances; in the very lives of the monks, who are intentionally outsiders to mainstream society, highly disciplined, meditation adepts. Picasso understood something similar about acrobats: his real subject is not their astonishing tricks, but the life required to sustain the impossible art. Itinerant, poor, humble, disciplined vessels of ancient transmission at the edge of society. Everything about it is precious.

Kashmiri Bhand Pather. A young man en travesti dances the roles of a woman and a snake, 2015. Photo by Gerard Houghton for Core of Culture

In closing this meditation on those who live lives designed for the transmission of ancient practices, I leave you two more paintings by Picasso, titled the same as the lead image above, La famille de Saltimbanques, all painted the same year, 1905.

La famille de Saltimbanques, “Acrobat Family.” 1905, oil on canvas. Picasso. Image courtesy of the author

La famille de Saltimbanques with a monkey, 1905, collage, gouache, watercolor, pastel, India ink on cardboard. Picasso. Image courtesy of the author

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Cover of The Snow Lion’s Attributes. Image courtesy of the author

Among the ritual dance traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, the Vajra dances of the Drikung Kagyu order are legendary for their length, meditative intensity, and spiritual ambition. Some last more than two hours, unfolding over several days of annual ceremonies. According to an important Drikung dance treatise, “dance is the apotheosis of mystical attainment.” This rare treatise is The Snow Lion’s Attributes, An Introduction to the Essence of the Drikung Kagyu Vajra Dances, with material dating to the 12th century. This treatise is finding new currency today. 

The Drikung Kagyu is a sub-order of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. Their dances, and their unique history, are commemorated by this volume, which has had three printings to date: the original, then in 1992, and a revised edition in 2016. A second printing of the revised edition is in progress now. The Snow Lion’s Attributes is in both Tibetan and English. 

Unique characteristics distinguish the Drikung Kagyu dances. They are longest dances among the Tibetan Buddhist orders. Beyond their length, dances are understood to be analogs of the meditative experience itself: a great danced metaphor for meditating, performed in a trance-like state, including advanced visualization and tantric meditation techniques. 

The English text of this dance treatise is an adaptation of a Tibetan original by His Holiness Chetsang Rinpoche, head of the Drikung Kagyu order. Based on ancient texts, it was prepared especially for the guests of the inaugural ceremonies of the Drikung Kagyu Institute, Jangchubling Monastery, in November 1992. Jangchubling Monastery is the main seat-in-exile of the Drikung  Kagyu order. 

This inaugural event recreated another from 1669, when the Drikung Kagyu monks performed all of their dances for the Dalai Lama, who wished to see before him the most authoritative ritual dance traditions of Tibet as he consolidated the ceremonial culture of the Gelug order within his newly established political and religious sphere. In fact, the Gelug order—a later school of Tibetan Buddhism associated with the Dalai Lamas—may have only introduced cham during the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama in the 17th century. The other orders had been dancing cham for many hundreds of years. The Cham Yig of the Gelug order, probably begun around 1647, was completed and published in 1712, only after the Fifth Dalai Lama witnessed all the dances of the Drikung Kagyu. 

In 1992, His Holiness Chetsang Rinpoche sought to consecrate this new moment in political and religious reality, by inviting the 14th Dalai Lama to Dehradun, India, as a guest, not as a host, to witness in front of him the entire repertory of the Drikung Vajra dances. The 1992 act was a mirror image of the 1669 act; reversed. It was a gracious, creative, and sustaining act, in a time of turmoil, highlighting the fundamental role of dance as a protective energy. Traditional teaching among the Kagyu order, tells that early after the establishment of Tantric Buddhism in Tibet, lamas and yogis ensconced cham dance as a protective energetic forcefield around Tantric Buddhism. Circular movements and trance-like pacing transform the consciousness of the dancer and the atmosphere of experience. 

Mandala dance diagrams for the Heruka deity cham. Image courtesy of the author

In our own time, a project has recently begun to fortify the illustrious tradition of Drikung  Kagyu cham. Called The Cham Yig Project, it is the brainchild of an eminent Buddhist scholar, Khenpo Choswang, who has overseen authoritative research and publications to provide monks with the scriptural and manuscript resources required by monastic life. Khenpo is an outstanding and original researcher who, after preparing so many sacred manuscripts, is devoting his attention to restoring the full manuscript of the Drikung Kagyu dances, the Cham Yig. A Cham Yig is a dance manual: essentially, a ritual yogic dance instructional manual for monasteries.

In the Drikung Kagyu order, at least 32 monk dancers are required in order to perform all the dances correctly. Khenpo Choswang is also an excellent dancer, and this is where the organization I direct, Core of Culture, (CoC) comes in. Together with Ladakh CoC director Dr. Thinles Dorje, we will assist Khenpo Choswang in the monumental task of reconstructing a new Cham Yig from centuries of surviving remnants; scattered folios, fragmented and damaged dance manuscripts. The late explorer-linguist Rene de Nebsky-Wojkowitz, who, in the 1950s before the occupation of Tibet by China, translated the Cham Yig of the Gelug order, claimed that the tradition of comprehensive written instructions for the dance rituals accounted for the astonishing purity of transmission of Vajrayana monks for more than a thousand years. Many dances remain fundamentally unchanged after transmission over succeeding generations. Today, the scriptural rudder of the exalted dance tradition of the Drikung Kagyu is being rebuilt, and the dances themselves revived.

A monk dancer rehearses in winter. Photo by Nathan Whitmont

Cham is next level meditation, moving meditation, a whole mind-body embodiment of a deity in a danced, trance-like state. Accordingly, the Cham Yig provides instruction in dance, music, meditation, and ritual design. The purity of motivation among all involved in The Cham Yig Project is a pleasure to experience, and a high-minded way of working. Scholars and dancers from three Ladakhi monasteries—Lamayuru, Phyang, and Shachukul—have committed to a five-year collaboration to rebuild the document. Centuries of orally transmitted choreography will help restore sections where manuscripts are incomplete or lost. Many of the scholars can dance, many of the dancers are scholars. All of them practice meditation.

The Cham Yig Project is produced by Core of Culture, with lead funding from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global, and with support from the Kipper Family Foundation and Jeffrey R. Costello. The project is carried out in close cooperation with academic director Khenpo Choswang, implementation director Thinles Dorje, and monks from three monasteries. It is a five-year project dedicated to reconstructing and transmitting the Cham Yig of the Drikung Kagyu lineage in Ladakh. Cham Yigs, dance manuals that encode choreography, ritual meaning, and lineage continuity, are essential to the performance of monastic dances, cham.

An example of monastic music notation. Image courtesy of Khenpo Choswang

The aim of this project is to create, for the first time in living memory, a complete Drikung Kagyu Cham Yig through a process that unites living dance transmission with scholarship. The project brings together monks of different generations, scholars, dancers, musicians, and senior ritual leaders to reconstruct, document, and disseminate a new, complete Cham Yig. The result will be both a practical manual for performance within the Drikung Kagyu tradition and a model for how lost ritual traditions might be revived in other Buddhist lineages. Over five years, this collaborative effort will reconstruct the text, confirm its ritual accuracy through performance and teaching, and publish it for both internal and wider audiences. The new Cham Yig becomes an historical record that will stand the test of time.

For the opening of this five-year project, in June 2026, a ceremony will be held at Lamyuru Monastery, acknowledging everyone involved in this monumental endeavor. The 15 scholars will receive new monk robes. The 96 dancers—32 from each monastery—will receive new shoes as well as robes. Everyone will be given a copy of The Snow Lions Attributes, a rare Tantric Buddhist dance treatise, now, remarkably, in its third printing. In an age when many ritual traditions struggle simply to survive, the Drikung Kagyu dances are entering a new cycle of transmission. Ancient manuscripts are returning to life through memory, scholarship, meditation, and movement itself.

Khenpo Choswang shares some of the nearly 500 pages of a pecha manuscript volume. It is the gathered dance research of several decades, covering hundreds of years of dance manuscript documents and fragments. These ancient documents contain archaic scripts, various types of Tibetan grammar and syntax, and whole vocabularies for dance and its instruction that are not used today. The next task will be to transliterate the entire 484 pages here into universal Tibetan, which anyone can read, making the ancient documents available for the first time. Video courtesy of Khenpo Choswang

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Early Explorers and Their Encounter with Buddhism, Part Three: Dance InsightPadmasambhava’s Buddha-field of Tantric Dances: Re-establishing Dance in the Narrative of Guru RinpocheThe AttanTantric TransformationMonastic Dance Courtyards in Ladakh and Zanskar

More from Ancient Dances by Joseph Houseal

Cover of The Snow Lion’s Attributes. Image courtesy of the author

Among the ritual dance traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, the Vajra dances of the Drikung Kagyu order are legendary for their length, meditative intensity, and spiritual ambition. Some last more than two hours, unfolding over several days of annual ceremonies. According to an important Drikung dance treatise, “dance is the apotheosis of mystical attainment.” This rare treatise is The Snow Lion’s Attributes, An Introduction to the Essence of the Drikung Kagyu Vajra Dances, with material dating to the 12th century. This treatise is finding new currency today. 

The Drikung Kagyu is a sub-order of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. Their dances, and their unique history, are commemorated by this volume, which has had three printings to date: the original, then in 1992, and a revised edition in 2016. A second printing of the revised edition is in progress now. The Snow Lion’s Attributes is in both Tibetan and English. 

Unique characteristics distinguish the Drikung Kagyu dances. They are longest dances among the Tibetan Buddhist orders. Beyond their length, dances are understood to be analogs of the meditative experience itself: a great danced metaphor for meditating, performed in a trance-like state, including advanced visualization and tantric meditation techniques. 

The English text of this dance treatise is an adaptation of a Tibetan original by His Holiness Chetsang Rinpoche, head of the Drikung Kagyu order. Based on ancient texts, it was prepared especially for the guests of the inaugural ceremonies of the Drikung Kagyu Institute, Jangchubling Monastery, in November 1992. Jangchubling Monastery is the main seat-in-exile of the Drikung  Kagyu order. 

This inaugural event recreated another from 1669, when the Drikung Kagyu monks performed all of their dances for the Dalai Lama, who wished to see before him the most authoritative ritual dance traditions of Tibet as he consolidated the ceremonial culture of the Gelug order within his newly established political and religious sphere. In fact, the Gelug order—a later school of Tibetan Buddhism associated with the Dalai Lamas—may have only introduced cham during the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama in the 17th century. The other orders had been dancing cham for many hundreds of years. The Cham Yig of the Gelug order, probably begun around 1647, was completed and published in 1712, only after the Fifth Dalai Lama witnessed all the dances of the Drikung Kagyu. 

In 1992, His Holiness Chetsang Rinpoche sought to consecrate this new moment in political and religious reality, by inviting the 14th Dalai Lama to Dehradun, India, as a guest, not as a host, to witness in front of him the entire repertory of the Drikung Vajra dances. The 1992 act was a mirror image of the 1669 act; reversed. It was a gracious, creative, and sustaining act, in a time of turmoil, highlighting the fundamental role of dance as a protective energy. Traditional teaching among the Kagyu order, tells that early after the establishment of Tantric Buddhism in Tibet, lamas and yogis ensconced cham dance as a protective energetic forcefield around Tantric Buddhism. Circular movements and trance-like pacing transform the consciousness of the dancer and the atmosphere of experience. 

Mandala dance diagrams for the Heruka deity cham. Image courtesy of the author

In our own time, a project has recently begun to fortify the illustrious tradition of Drikung  Kagyu cham. Called The Cham Yig Project, it is the brainchild of an eminent Buddhist scholar, Khenpo Choswang, who has overseen authoritative research and publications to provide monks with the scriptural and manuscript resources required by monastic life. Khenpo is an outstanding and original researcher who, after preparing so many sacred manuscripts, is devoting his attention to restoring the full manuscript of the Drikung Kagyu dances, the Cham Yig. A Cham Yig is a dance manual: essentially, a ritual yogic dance instructional manual for monasteries.

In the Drikung Kagyu order, at least 32 monk dancers are required in order to perform all the dances correctly. Khenpo Choswang is also an excellent dancer, and this is where the organization I direct, Core of Culture, (CoC) comes in. Together with Ladakh CoC director Dr. Thinles Dorje, we will assist Khenpo Choswang in the monumental task of reconstructing a new Cham Yig from centuries of surviving remnants; scattered folios, fragmented and damaged dance manuscripts. The late explorer-linguist Rene de Nebsky-Wojkowitz, who, in the 1950s before the occupation of Tibet by China, translated the Cham Yig of the Gelug order, claimed that the tradition of comprehensive written instructions for the dance rituals accounted for the astonishing purity of transmission of Vajrayana monks for more than a thousand years. Many dances remain fundamentally unchanged after transmission over succeeding generations. Today, the scriptural rudder of the exalted dance tradition of the Drikung Kagyu is being rebuilt, and the dances themselves revived.

A monk dancer rehearses in winter. Photo by Nathan Whitmont

Cham is next level meditation, moving meditation, a whole mind-body embodiment of a deity in a danced, trance-like state. Accordingly, the Cham Yig provides instruction in dance, music, meditation, and ritual design. The purity of motivation among all involved in The Cham Yig Project is a pleasure to experience, and a high-minded way of working. Scholars and dancers from three Ladakhi monasteries—Lamayuru, Phyang, and Shachukul—have committed to a five-year collaboration to rebuild the document. Centuries of orally transmitted choreography will help restore sections where manuscripts are incomplete or lost. Many of the scholars can dance, many of the dancers are scholars. All of them practice meditation.

The Cham Yig Project is produced by Core of Culture, with lead funding from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global, and with support from the Kipper Family Foundation and Jeffrey R. Costello. The project is carried out in close cooperation with academic director Khenpo Choswang, implementation director Thinles Dorje, and monks from three monasteries. It is a five-year project dedicated to reconstructing and transmitting the Cham Yig of the Drikung Kagyu lineage in Ladakh. Cham Yigs, dance manuals that encode choreography, ritual meaning, and lineage continuity, are essential to the performance of monastic dances, cham.

An example of monastic music notation. Image courtesy of Khenpo Choswang

The aim of this project is to create, for the first time in living memory, a complete Drikung Kagyu Cham Yig through a process that unites living dance transmission with scholarship. The project brings together monks of different generations, scholars, dancers, musicians, and senior ritual leaders to reconstruct, document, and disseminate a new, complete Cham Yig. The result will be both a practical manual for performance within the Drikung Kagyu tradition and a model for how lost ritual traditions might be revived in other Buddhist lineages. Over five years, this collaborative effort will reconstruct the text, confirm its ritual accuracy through performance and teaching, and publish it for both internal and wider audiences. The new Cham Yig becomes an historical record that will stand the test of time.

For the opening of this five-year project, in June 2026, a ceremony will be held at Lamyuru Monastery, acknowledging everyone involved in this monumental endeavor. The 15 scholars will receive new monk robes. The 96 dancers—32 from each monastery—will receive new shoes as well as robes. Everyone will be given a copy of The Snow Lions Attributes, a rare Tantric Buddhist dance treatise, now, remarkably, in its third printing. In an age when many ritual traditions struggle simply to survive, the Drikung Kagyu dances are entering a new cycle of transmission. Ancient manuscripts are returning to life through memory, scholarship, meditation, and movement itself.

Khenpo Choswang shares some of the nearly 500 pages of a pecha manuscript volume. It is the gathered dance research of several decades, covering hundreds of years of dance manuscript documents and fragments. These ancient documents contain archaic scripts, various types of Tibetan grammar and syntax, and whole vocabularies for dance and its instruction that are not used today. The next task will be to transliterate the entire 484 pages here into universal Tibetan, which anyone can read, making the ancient documents available for the first time. Video courtesy of Khenpo Choswang

See more

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Related features from BDG

Early Explorers and Their Encounter with Buddhism, Part Three: Dance InsightPadmasambhava’s Buddha-field of Tantric Dances: Re-establishing Dance in the Narrative of Guru RinpocheThe AttanTantric TransformationMonastic Dance Courtyards in Ladakh and Zanskar

More from Ancient Dances by Joseph Houseal
The post The Snow Lion’s Attributes appeared first on Buddhistdoor Global.

A Bhutanese Atsara mask for a ceremonial jester, pre-painting, by Yeshe Dorji, Thimphu, Bhutan. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

Graham Shackell is trained in masked performance styles, including the Renaissance form, Commedia dell’arte, by Antonio Fava at his international school in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and in Japanese Noh performance by Kita master Matsui Akira. He is also a seasoned experimental theater performer, and he teaches stage combat. He is currently choreographing the stage combat for a timely production of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. 

Graham has a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology, specializing in the archaeology of performance. He is also a professional field archaeologist working with the leading independent heritage organization Oxford Archaeology, as well as teaching at Southampton University. He explores: “What can we learn from our ancient past and ways of representing ourselves?”

Graham is a performer, a scholar, a theorist, and a mask-maker who has crafted traditional Noh masks under the guidance of Sensei Kitasawa Hideta. He has researched the great antiquity of mask use and representation worldwide, and perhaps believes more in their ephemeral animated performance power than in their abstract study, but is trained in both. 

As a prelude to this interview, I spoke with Graham about a public mask-making course he offers to those healing from grief and trauma. I share the excerpt here as his explanation reveals much about the holism of his person and practice:

The course came about because . . . I was making a stone mask based on the 9,000-year-old “Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic B culture.” I was using flint tools (they weren’t really proper tools just some bits of worked flint I had found on archaeological sites that no one wanted), and they kept breaking and so did the stone. After my father died, I inherited his chisels, and tool bag—which it turns out has a much deeper family history—and while they were only carpenter’s chisels and not really for stone, they were enough to finish the mask. In the process, I found that making the mask, transforming the stone, was having a transformative effect on me also.

There is a kind of conversation between carver and source material. The material, whether wood or stone, quite often tells you what it wants to be, or in my case I can often “hear” it shouting at me: “What are you doing?! What do you want me to do?! Just tell me and I will help you!.” So we transform the material, and it transforms us—a mutual intersection and transformation, and then of course because it’s a mask, when you wear it, when you perform it, there is another transformation. 

Added to this, we participants in the mask-making course, go for walks together to look at some “Places of Significance” throughout time, and through this, the course looks at the creation of Place within a “Landscape of Places” (human interaction—or intersection—with terrain being a mnemonic database of significance), and how Place/Landscape also transforms over time. So basically whatever difficulties you are having right now, its only temporary because, as the Persian poet said, “This too shall pass.” And this personhood of Place (a particular Place that has meaning to someone) is embedded in the mask.

Anyway, the short version is that I realized mask-making was helping me in my grief, and thought it might do the same for others. . . . 

A mask in progress from the current round of “Face about the Place” mask-making project for folks living with depression, anxiety, and/or persistent grief complex. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

BDG: You work in both practical and theoretical aspects of mask-making and mask research. How do these complement each other in your study of masks?

Graham Shackell: I spoke with a group of digital future artists. That was in the evening, and in the daytime I’d been excavating a Saxon cemetery. So I’d come back from being covered in bone dust to talk about masks, and in a very theoretical way. It’s quite an interesting kind of dichotomy, really: you have this very practical aspect, literally people’s DNA under my fingertips; and then talking about the theory of masks and how that might relate to people’s performances in the past and even in the present. 

For me, it’s always been about both—a dual pathway as a performance archaeologist; there are very few of us. I don’t know if we have an advantage or a disadvantage, but we have something different to other people: we have an understanding of performance on a practical level as well as a theoretical level. 

Putting the two together is quite a difficult path to tread in some ways, because performance is ephemeral. It exists in a certain temporality and then it’s gone. So you can’t even capture performance, because even a recording or a cave painting or a soundtrack of a performance is not the performance. It’s a way of recording it, but it isn’t the thing itself. Once the thing has happened it’s gone forever, you know?

But you can try to decode a performance from its surviving materiality, such as mask. Or if you’re looking at the ground, you might be able to determine a dance platform or a dance ground, where the earth is very compressed. You can’t prove something conclusively; you’re having to use interpretation, which is all archaeology is anyway: interpretation.

Kokushiki-Jo has a sad, thoughtful moment perambulating around Hollingbury Iron Age hill fort, from The Perambulations of Kokushiki-Jo Project’. Character and mask by Graham Shackell. This is one of the oldest masks in Noh, based on one of the oldest masks in the world, emanating from Siberia. The split jaw, tied by strings, indicates great antiquity in masks.* Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

Of the different projects that I’m focusing on, one is returning to Bhutan.

There is a cultural risk in Bhutan now. It’s changing fast. And it’s going to change even faster when GMC (Gelephu Mindfulness City) comes online. That’s going to open the doors to all sorts of things. A lot of international culture coming in. Already in the rural areas there are a lot of smartphones, and so there’s a lot of young people looking at cultures from outside Bhutan.

There is a huge amount of rural migration to the city. The demographic that this mostly hits is between 15 and 65 years old. This is partly for training, partly for work. But it impacts the primary group of participants in the rural festivals and dance rituals.

They’re losing the rituals by losing the ritual participants. They’re losing the numbers. Some villages are already unable to put on dances because they don’t have enough people to do so. People were losing interest a bit, you know?

Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Stone Mask 1; practical performance test. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

BDG: I had this time-transcending medieval experience in Bhutan, before it was a democracy, start to finish. Bhutan was always held up as a pristine environment of cultural expression, and this was when Core of Culture worked there from 2003–08. Few roads, and bad ones at that. 

I believe this is why the Fourth King wanted a dance survey and documentation conducted during the final five years of the monarchy, while dance was still comfortably ensconced in villages all over the kingdom—a theocracy and true kingdom. 

Now, you would say that Bhutan’s social and, therefore, ritual cohesion is really under threat?

GS: Yes. Although they are working hard; I think the government and the king are quite keen to protect their identity. But they are also keen to give a lot of opportunity to international ways of doing business, let’s say. So I think there will be social and cultural fallout.

Opportunities are coming up and I think there are going to be a lot of people going abroad, encountering other cultures and bringing that back, and it’s also coming in through smartphones. So, yes, I think that rural traditions are seriously at risk.

Some villages can’t put on dances anymore. And at the moment, they are storing the masks; they’re still keeping the masks, but it’s tenuous. This depends on individual village leaders, and monks, and villagers.

A mask from the Fighting with Ghosts Project, embodying the personhood of place of Hollingbury Woods, Brighton, UK—specifically Elm disease, Ash dieback, and graffiti carved over many years onto Hollingbury Woods trees. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

BDG: In the countryside, really every village has a set of masks. Very often in the countryside, the dancers are not monks, they’re gomchen—farmers who take on the roles of monks—and they’re often very good dancers. 

As you’ve said, this is the precise age group that either goes to school or doesn’t, goes to college or doesn’t, wants a job as a farmer or doesn’t, upholds rituals or doesn’t, moves to the city or doesn’t. But as far as masks go, almost every little village will have a set of dance masks, often very old.

GS: Yes, and I think that’s what’s at risk. That’s my concern.

BDG: Of being sold, or being taken away, or being stolen and put on the art market . . . ?

GS: Or just lost, mislaid, if they’re not being used. It depends on the locals. If they have an interest in maintaining the masks, then they’re fine. But otherwise, there’s potential for them to be lost one way or another.

Unlike Core of Culture’s Bhutan dance survey and dance database, the masks are not registered or recorded in any kind a countrywide system of analyzing the masks. There is no data on these masks. And I think there must be at least, probably, 25,000 masks in Bhutan.

BDG: I would agree, and hearing that from a mask specialist, an expert, is interesting. Adding it up, there are more than 200 dance festivals in monasteries and village temples in Bhutan. You noted between 32–80 masks at each village, and the large state monasteries have hundreds of masks, so 25,000 masks is a good estimate for the total number in Bhutan.

GS: And then there is variation in masks, different lineages, and also very individual masks, such as local deities. About those masks, there is nothing—there is no detail. No one is looking at them, no one is making records. 

BDG: Do you want to do that?

GS: Yes, I’m trying to secure the funding to do it.

It will be gone, you know? And some of these masks, like the local deity masks, we will have no idea. If we don’t act now, the people that danced in those masks will also be gone—they’re all moving away, or, if they’re older, they’re dying. So it feels like in the next five years or so, things will be really different for dancers and masks in Bhutan.

Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Stone Mask 2; practical performance test. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

The Zhabdrung unified Bhutan in 1616, going back more than 400 years, with much of the dance and mask culture older, some going back to the eighth century. That’s a long time for a performative code to be more or less intact. As a performance archaeologist, that is really interesting, and rare, and coupled with a parallel mask tradition that can be studied and possibly decoded.

Masks enable us to look backwards in time, into the past, through looking at an object in the present. And there’s a generation after another that goes into the masks, and then suddenly, there isn’t a generation that goes into the masks. Then there’s no longer the integration of the mask with the person who’s part of it, who animates it, who is shaped by it, who uses it a vehicle of metamorphosis. This is one example of a process where culture becomes extinct.

BDG: Thank you, Graham, for your illuminating and urgent observations on vanishing Buddhist culture, seen through the lens of masks. Your words are a call to action.

A treasure dance or tercham. Bhutanese cham and protector deity mask, from Buddhist Dances, Movement & Mind by Joseph Houseal. Motilal Banarsidass, 2025, Delhi. Image courtesy of the author

* See: Okina, an Endless Blessing from Long Ago (BDG) and The Very Long Life of Bugaku (BDG)

See more

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Ancient Dances TodayMessengers of Mind, Cultural Explorers and the Encounter with Buddhism, Part One: A Gallery of ExplorersMystical Dances in the Kingdom of Bhutan, Part 1: A Black Magic Dance at the Core of Bhutan’s FoundingTantric Bodies, Tantric Dance

More from Ancient Dances by Joseph Houseal

A Bhutanese Atsara mask for a ceremonial jester, pre-painting, by Yeshe Dorji, Thimphu, Bhutan. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

Graham Shackell is trained in masked performance styles, including the Renaissance form, Commedia dell’arte, by Antonio Fava at his international school in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and in Japanese Noh performance by Kita master Matsui Akira. He is also a seasoned experimental theater performer, and he teaches stage combat. He is currently choreographing the stage combat for a timely production of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. 

Graham has a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology, specializing in the archaeology of performance. He is also a professional field archaeologist working with the leading independent heritage organization Oxford Archaeology, as well as teaching at Southampton University. He explores: “What can we learn from our ancient past and ways of representing ourselves?”

Graham is a performer, a scholar, a theorist, and a mask-maker who has crafted traditional Noh masks under the guidance of Sensei Kitasawa Hideta. He has researched the great antiquity of mask use and representation worldwide, and perhaps believes more in their ephemeral animated performance power than in their abstract study, but is trained in both. 

As a prelude to this interview, I spoke with Graham about a public mask-making course he offers to those healing from grief and trauma. I share the excerpt here as his explanation reveals much about the holism of his person and practice:

The course came about because . . . I was making a stone mask based on the 9,000-year-old “Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic B culture.” I was using flint tools (they weren’t really proper tools just some bits of worked flint I had found on archaeological sites that no one wanted), and they kept breaking and so did the stone. After my father died, I inherited his chisels, and tool bag—which it turns out has a much deeper family history—and while they were only carpenter’s chisels and not really for stone, they were enough to finish the mask. In the process, I found that making the mask, transforming the stone, was having a transformative effect on me also.

There is a kind of conversation between carver and source material. The material, whether wood or stone, quite often tells you what it wants to be, or in my case I can often “hear” it shouting at me: “What are you doing?! What do you want me to do?! Just tell me and I will help you!.” So we transform the material, and it transforms us—a mutual intersection and transformation, and then of course because it’s a mask, when you wear it, when you perform it, there is another transformation. 

Added to this, we participants in the mask-making course, go for walks together to look at some “Places of Significance” throughout time, and through this, the course looks at the creation of Place within a “Landscape of Places” (human interaction—or intersection—with terrain being a mnemonic database of significance), and how Place/Landscape also transforms over time. So basically whatever difficulties you are having right now, its only temporary because, as the Persian poet said, “This too shall pass.” And this personhood of Place (a particular Place that has meaning to someone) is embedded in the mask.

Anyway, the short version is that I realized mask-making was helping me in my grief, and thought it might do the same for others. . . . 

A mask in progress from the current round of “Face about the Place” mask-making project for folks living with depression, anxiety, and/or persistent grief complex. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

BDG: You work in both practical and theoretical aspects of mask-making and mask research. How do these complement each other in your study of masks?

Graham Shackell: I spoke with a group of digital future artists. That was in the evening, and in the daytime I’d been excavating a Saxon cemetery. So I’d come back from being covered in bone dust to talk about masks, and in a very theoretical way. It’s quite an interesting kind of dichotomy, really: you have this very practical aspect, literally people’s DNA under my fingertips; and then talking about the theory of masks and how that might relate to people’s performances in the past and even in the present. 

For me, it’s always been about both—a dual pathway as a performance archaeologist; there are very few of us. I don’t know if we have an advantage or a disadvantage, but we have something different to other people: we have an understanding of performance on a practical level as well as a theoretical level. 

Putting the two together is quite a difficult path to tread in some ways, because performance is ephemeral. It exists in a certain temporality and then it’s gone. So you can’t even capture performance, because even a recording or a cave painting or a soundtrack of a performance is not the performance. It’s a way of recording it, but it isn’t the thing itself. Once the thing has happened it’s gone forever, you know?

But you can try to decode a performance from its surviving materiality, such as mask. Or if you’re looking at the ground, you might be able to determine a dance platform or a dance ground, where the earth is very compressed. You can’t prove something conclusively; you’re having to use interpretation, which is all archaeology is anyway: interpretation.

Kokushiki-Jo has a sad, thoughtful moment perambulating around Hollingbury Iron Age hill fort, from The Perambulations of Kokushiki-Jo Project’. Character and mask by Graham Shackell. This is one of the oldest masks in Noh, based on one of the oldest masks in the world, emanating from Siberia. The split jaw, tied by strings, indicates great antiquity in masks.* Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

Of the different projects that I’m focusing on, one is returning to Bhutan.

There is a cultural risk in Bhutan now. It’s changing fast. And it’s going to change even faster when GMC (Gelephu Mindfulness City) comes online. That’s going to open the doors to all sorts of things. A lot of international culture coming in. Already in the rural areas there are a lot of smartphones, and so there’s a lot of young people looking at cultures from outside Bhutan.

There is a huge amount of rural migration to the city. The demographic that this mostly hits is between 15 and 65 years old. This is partly for training, partly for work. But it impacts the primary group of participants in the rural festivals and dance rituals.

They’re losing the rituals by losing the ritual participants. They’re losing the numbers. Some villages are already unable to put on dances because they don’t have enough people to do so. People were losing interest a bit, you know?

Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Stone Mask 1; practical performance test. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

BDG: I had this time-transcending medieval experience in Bhutan, before it was a democracy, start to finish. Bhutan was always held up as a pristine environment of cultural expression, and this was when Core of Culture worked there from 2003–08. Few roads, and bad ones at that. 

I believe this is why the Fourth King wanted a dance survey and documentation conducted during the final five years of the monarchy, while dance was still comfortably ensconced in villages all over the kingdom—a theocracy and true kingdom. 

Now, you would say that Bhutan’s social and, therefore, ritual cohesion is really under threat?

GS: Yes. Although they are working hard; I think the government and the king are quite keen to protect their identity. But they are also keen to give a lot of opportunity to international ways of doing business, let’s say. So I think there will be social and cultural fallout.

Opportunities are coming up and I think there are going to be a lot of people going abroad, encountering other cultures and bringing that back, and it’s also coming in through smartphones. So, yes, I think that rural traditions are seriously at risk.

Some villages can’t put on dances anymore. And at the moment, they are storing the masks; they’re still keeping the masks, but it’s tenuous. This depends on individual village leaders, and monks, and villagers.

A mask from the Fighting with Ghosts Project, embodying the personhood of place of Hollingbury Woods, Brighton, UK—specifically Elm disease, Ash dieback, and graffiti carved over many years onto Hollingbury Woods trees. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

BDG: In the countryside, really every village has a set of masks. Very often in the countryside, the dancers are not monks, they’re gomchen—farmers who take on the roles of monks—and they’re often very good dancers. 

As you’ve said, this is the precise age group that either goes to school or doesn’t, goes to college or doesn’t, wants a job as a farmer or doesn’t, upholds rituals or doesn’t, moves to the city or doesn’t. But as far as masks go, almost every little village will have a set of dance masks, often very old.

GS: Yes, and I think that’s what’s at risk. That’s my concern.

BDG: Of being sold, or being taken away, or being stolen and put on the art market . . . ?

GS: Or just lost, mislaid, if they’re not being used. It depends on the locals. If they have an interest in maintaining the masks, then they’re fine. But otherwise, there’s potential for them to be lost one way or another.

Unlike Core of Culture’s Bhutan dance survey and dance database, the masks are not registered or recorded in any kind a countrywide system of analyzing the masks. There is no data on these masks. And I think there must be at least, probably, 25,000 masks in Bhutan.

BDG: I would agree, and hearing that from a mask specialist, an expert, is interesting. Adding it up, there are more than 200 dance festivals in monasteries and village temples in Bhutan. You noted between 32–80 masks at each village, and the large state monasteries have hundreds of masks, so 25,000 masks is a good estimate for the total number in Bhutan.

GS: And then there is variation in masks, different lineages, and also very individual masks, such as local deities. About those masks, there is nothing—there is no detail. No one is looking at them, no one is making records. 

BDG: Do you want to do that?

GS: Yes, I’m trying to secure the funding to do it.

It will be gone, you know? And some of these masks, like the local deity masks, we will have no idea. If we don’t act now, the people that danced in those masks will also be gone—they’re all moving away, or, if they’re older, they’re dying. So it feels like in the next five years or so, things will be really different for dancers and masks in Bhutan.

Levantine Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Stone Mask 2; practical performance test. Image courtesy of Graham Shackell

The Zhabdrung unified Bhutan in 1616, going back more than 400 years, with much of the dance and mask culture older, some going back to the eighth century. That’s a long time for a performative code to be more or less intact. As a performance archaeologist, that is really interesting, and rare, and coupled with a parallel mask tradition that can be studied and possibly decoded.

Masks enable us to look backwards in time, into the past, through looking at an object in the present. And there’s a generation after another that goes into the masks, and then suddenly, there isn’t a generation that goes into the masks. Then there’s no longer the integration of the mask with the person who’s part of it, who animates it, who is shaped by it, who uses it a vehicle of metamorphosis. This is one example of a process where culture becomes extinct.

BDG: Thank you, Graham, for your illuminating and urgent observations on vanishing Buddhist culture, seen through the lens of masks. Your words are a call to action.

A treasure dance or tercham. Bhutanese cham and protector deity mask, from Buddhist Dances, Movement & Mind by Joseph Houseal. Motilal Banarsidass, 2025, Delhi. Image courtesy of the author

* See: Okina, an Endless Blessing from Long Ago (BDG) and The Very Long Life of Bugaku (BDG)

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The post 25,000 Bhutanese Masks: A Conversation with Graham Shackell appeared first on Buddhistdoor Global.

Scattering cherry blossom petals, Japan.  Image courtesy of the author

A Zen question was once posed to Zeami Motokiyo, the 14th-century founder of Noh, playwright, poet, actor, and theorist:

“What is the essence of transience?”He answered, “Scattering petals, falling leaves.”Then he was asked, “What is the essence of eternity?”He replied, “Scattering petals, falling leaves.”

This Zen exchange distills something essential in Japanese aesthetics. Spring is not merely a season. It is a revelation of time itself. The falling cherry blossom is both the most fragile and the most enduring image in Japanese culture. In its falling, it embodies impermanence; in its annual return, it suggests continuity beyond the human span. Nowhere is this paradox more fully realized than in the classical arts of Noh, poetry, and seasonal ritual, where beauty and sadness unite nature and emotion.

Yuya in her blossom-viewing carriage, woodblock print. Image courtesy the National Noh Theater

Among the most refined treatments of spring in Noh is the play Yuya. The story is simple, almost delicate in its emotional architecture. Yuya, a courtesan dancer in the service of Taira no Munemori, a samurai of the Heike clan, is summoned to attend a cherry-blossom viewing at Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, and be carried about and along the way in a beautiful carriage. Yet she has received news that her mother is gravely ill. Duty compels her toward the cherry blossoms, a natural spectacle of impermanence. The entrancing scenery along the way reflects Yuya’s changing emotions. Filial love pulls her toward an impermanence of a more intimate kind.

This parallel of nature’s impermanence with human life itself, enriches the seemingly simple story and poetry to become a profound expression of the human condition. In many traditional Japanese performing arts, there is no “technical training” apart from learning the art itself. The beginner student begins with a simple dance, a simple chant—an actual Noh play, not practicing steps and singing scales. Yuya is often the first Noh dance a student learns. Yuya is fundamental as formal art and essential to the rarified character of Noh. This play is so popular it is said that the play Yuya, the play Matzukaze, and cooked rice are the same: you never grow tired of them.*

The tension of the play is not dramatic in a modern sense. There is no outburst, no confrontation. Instead, we celebrate beauty and sadness, witness the refinement of feeling—what the Japanese call kokoro, heart-mind—under seasonal pressure, this time, the briefness of the season of cherry blossom viewing, an art in itself, called hanami.

Sitting with her samurai, as the blossoms scatter, Yuya composes a poem:

If I must leaveThe blossoms at their height,Let them scatter—For in this worldNothing remains.

Noh performance, Yuya. Here Yuya reads her poem to Taira no Munemori. Photo by Moita Toshiro. From the-noh.com

The blossoms become mirror and measure. Their falling reflects the mother’s impending death, Yuya’s own sorrow, and the evanescence of worldly attractions. Yet the scene is not tragic. It is luminous, cosmic, inviting wisdom, and in its subtlety speaks to her warrior lord, as compassion carries the day and he releases her to go to her mother. Yuya travels to her mother in a blossom-viewing carriage. It is a beautiful scene, and the beauty is quietly powerful. Loss does not break the spirit, loss awakens it. Wisdom tempers, beauty emerges.

Noh mask, ko-omote, young woman, often used for Yuya, as well as masks of women who are beautiful and older, such as Zo-Onna. This mask is a faithful early Edo period (1600s) copy of a famous mask from the late Momoyama period. (early 1500s). From wikimedia.org  

In Noh, movement is minimal but charged. Yuya is the simplest of dances. A slow turn beneath imagined blossoms; a sleeve lifted as if catching falling petals; a step that traces the arc of descent; a hand that catches shedding tears in the face of nature’s cascade. The body does not imitate nature—it becomes a vessel for its rhythm. Scattering petals are not props; they become a temporal atmosphere. This is Zen aesthetics at work; Buddhism transforming art forms. Emotion as poetry couched in nature. Spring here is not youthfulness or rebirth; It is poignancy, an awareness of transience, mono no aware. Spring is the scenery for compassion.

Noh performance, Yuya. Here Yuya is in her blossom-viewing carriage on a Noh stage under blooming cherry trees. Photo by Morita Toshiro. From the-noh.com

Hanami, the custom of viewing cherry blossoms, is both festive and philosophical. Families and colleagues gather beneath blooming trees; sake flows; laughter rises. Yet everyone knows the blossoms will last only days. Wind or rain may strip them overnight. Some cherry trees are very old and are revered as kami, nature divinities.

This fleeting nature is not accidental to the pleasure—it is the source of it. The Heian court poets, whose sensibilities shaped classical aesthetics, wrote of spring not as an object but as a visitation. Blossoms are guests. One receives them fully, knowing they will depart. This cultivated awareness matured into the aesthetic principle called mono no aware—the sadness of things, the suchness of things. The Heian poet Ki no Tsurayuki (872–945 CE) wrote a poem found in a great anthology, the Kokinshu: 

In the tranquil lightOf a spring day—Why do blossomsScatter so restlessly?

Later, the term mono no aware was famously re-articulated by Edo period scholar Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), who saw in classical literature that a deep emotional connection to the ephemeral was the highest refinement of feeling. Aware is not sadness alone. It is the pure recognition that beauty and loss are inseparable. To sit beneath falling blossoms in a park or temple is to experience that collectively. The petals brush one’s sleeve; they gather in the hair; they drift across sake cups, they cover the ground. Yuya is aware that soon, petals will cover her mother in the ground. Sometimes the falling petals are so many they are called haru no yuki, or spring snow, causing a flurry, then vanishing as quickly as snowflakes.

Zeami’s double answer—that transience and eternity are both revealed in scattering petals—echoes through his treatises. In works such as the actor’s notebook Fushikaden, he speaks of the “flower” (hana) of performance: the fleeting moment of beauty and awareness that appears and disappears in the actor’s art. Hana is the essence of Noh, the creation and bringing-to-be of a distilled and expanded moment: transience as form; eternity as pattern. The flower cannot be held. It is not technique alone. It arises when timing, season, audience, and performer align. It is experiential and vanishing, particular to a moment in time, unrepeatable. But Zeami also writes of cultivating “true flower” that deepens with age. Youthful beauty—waka no hana—fades; mature beauty ripens. The performer, like the cherry tree, participates in cycles.

Here the Japanese sense of time differs from linear Western tragedy. In Noh, death often leads not to annihilation but to transformation. Spirits linger; memories condense into presence. The past becomes audible. Spring, then, is not naïve renewal. It carries winter within it. Blossoms emerge from bare branches. Ancient stories are recalled to mind with each year’s blooms. The beauty is intensified because it follows austerity. Yuya’s poem about the transience of life and nature, becomes time-transcending, immortal. 

In Yuya, the samurai, Taira no Munemori, ultimately releases her from her duty so that she can visit her dying mother. The granting of permission is as important as the sorrow itself. Buddhist compassion enters the social order, as transience takes on a more subtle and spiritual context. The blossoms scatter as Yuya departs. The stage image is spare: the pine backdrop, the bridge-way, the rhythm of drum and flute. Yet in that restraint lies profundity. The audience completes the scene inwardly. Petals fall in the imagination. In Noh, sorrow is not painted on the face. It resides in the angle of a mask; the perception of the audience, the inner reality of the Noh actor; the abstraction of the forms.

The pine tree backdrop painting of a Noh stage, evoking the great Yogo pine tree at Kasuga Shine in Nara, where Noh’s first performances took place. It symbolizes the eternal evergreen nature of the art of Noh. Image courtesy of the author

What we witness in Yuya is not simply a woman torn between obligations. We witness spring as an ethical atmosphere. The awareness of impermanence softens authority. It couches death. It tempers command with mercy. This may be why cherry blossoms have also served martial and samurai symbolism in Japan.  Impermanence—death—was always around the corner for samurai, and hence the “Chrysanthemum Warrior” was an ideal. Noh was popular among samurai, who studied and performed it. Yet in the earlier classical arts, the meaning of mono no aware is gentler. It reminds rulers and dancers alike that grace and power, too, will scatter.

For those who work with dance traditions, spring in Noh offers something especially subtle. The scattering petal is a kinetic idea. It is a downward spiral, a wavering descent. It is asymmetrical. It is light yet irrevocable. In Noh choreography, sleeves trace arcs that suggest drifting. Steps are measured but not rigid. The tempo breathes. Silence is active; pregnant. If eternity is present here, it is not permanence of form but recurrence and animation of pattern. Petals fall; leaves fall; generations of people fall. The cyclic pattern continues. The abstract dances of Noh are proper structures to contain and convey this realization of the transience of life.

To feel mono no aware is not to despair. It is to awaken. It is an enlightenment. In Buddhist thought, impermanence is a fundamental mark of existence. But in Japanese aesthetics, this insight is not presented intellectually. It is embodied in seasonal phenomena, as well embodied in the performing Noh actor. The falling blossoms teach without speaking, and the Noh play Yuya, through poetry and dancing, presents spring as a contemplative practice. This is the genius, the high art, of Zeami and Noh.

Cherry blossoms in bloom along Kyoto’s famous Philosopher’s Path. Image courtesy of the author

* Matsukaze: Wind in the Pines (BDG)

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