Choreographing the Cosmos: Tibetan Buddhist Tantric Dance Masters as Performance Theorists

What happens when we read Tibetan Buddhist dance masters not as informants about a local ritual practice, but as performance theorists whose conceptual frameworks challenge foundational assumptions about performance? To engage with this question, this paper turns to cham yik ('cham yig), or dance manuals, a genre of Tibetan Buddhist ritual literature devoted to monastic tantric dance.  Though they are most often thought of as choreographic notations, I argue that cham yik can also be understood as discursive arenas in which Tibetan scholars theorized performance itself. Reading them this way means not requiring the imposition of any Western theoretical grammar to draw out or make sense of these theories.  Rather, it only requires extending to them the same critical attention we have long given to canonical figures in the fields of religion and performance studies and that we remain open to having our assumptions unsettled in the process.