Dancing Divinities: Embodied Knowledge and Tibetan Buddhist Tantric Dance (Cham)

This proposal is for the session entitled "The embodied artist; the artist as text".  

I invite the reader to dance: Take a step forward with the right leg, then step the left leg toward the right; step the right leg toward the left and the left leg toward the center. In all likelihood, there will be as many variations in the execution of this choreography as there are readers of this text. That is because the related acts of writing and reading stand at odds with the act of performing, of dancing. After all, there are myriad interpretations of the simple directive to “take a step forward with the right leg, then step the left leg toward the right…” How far forward, or how far to the right, should the legs step? Does the left leg step in front of or behind the right leg? How slowly or quickly should the steps be done? Language does little to capture the intricacies and indeterminacies of bodily movement. Yet, this preceding choreography for the “Four-Fold Lotus Step” is drawn directly from a a dance ritual manual written in the 17th century by Lochen Dharmashri, a renowned Tibetan Buddhist scholar at Tibet's famed Mindroling Monastery.  His text stands as one example from a vast corpus of literature detailing the choreography of Tibetan Buddhist tantric dances called *cham* performed by monks who don elaborate costumes and larger-than-life masks to execute the intricate choreography of the deities of the Tibetan pantheon in the outdoor courtyards of Tibet's monasteries. 

Though the choreography of *cham* dances are written in a number of dance ritual manuals, called *cham yig* in Tibetan, spanning from the 13th century to the present, these texts are intended as notes on the dances to be used as an aid in recalling the proper choreography of the dances.  In practice, the dances are mostly learned through the monks' early exposure to their choreography from a young age or with the help of the *cham pon*, or ritual dance master.  In this way, the dances are co-realized in a constant interplay between the textual tradition of the *cham yig* and the physical bodies of the dancing monks. Monks refer to *two* texts: one inscribed on paper by monks throughout Tibetan history and one inscribed in space by contemporary monks whose bodies become another kind of text.

In January 2024, I was fortunate enough to spend a month at Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in Bylakuppe, India, working with a monk named Tenzin Lhakpa, the *cham pon* for the monastery responsible for their *gutor cham* dance, a ritual dance performed before the Tibetan new year to release negative energies from the previous year and welcome positive energies for the coming year.  I watched him maintain a visualization of the dance’s principle deity, mutter the deity’s mantra, and perform his mudra, or the bodily postures of the deity, all while recalling the choreography of a dance performed along with strict drum beats.  “How do you do it, Tenzin la? How do you remember all of these different parts of the dance?” I asked him, after struggling myself to execute even a single moment of the ritual’s choreography which he had just taught me.  He shrugged, waving my question off, before pinching and holding the skin on his forearm, “It’s all here in my skin.” Later, when he struggled to remember a particular dance step, he said, "I have to get it in my bones." For Tenzin, the dance becomes embodied, his body becomes a writing implement which inscribes in the ritual dancing ground the text of the ritual’s choreography, the language of the divinity.

Yvonne Daniel, in her book, *Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Condomble*, studies three types of drum dances across the three syncretic belief systems of Vodou, Yoruba, and Condomble to see knowledge which is “enacted as well as disseminated” by the dancing ritual body (Daniel 59). In her study of these rituals is a critique of “intellectual knowledge without concomitant integration of somatic, intuitive understanding and the spiritual wisdom their combination yields” (Daniel 57).  She argues that performance, or more broadly aesthetics, are often eschewed by scholars who seek only objective quantitative data. She says that studying the aesthetic “system,” as she calls it, cross-cuts other domains of belief, economy, politics, and society: “Dance (and other aesthetic systems) crosscuts the full range of social organization” (Daniel 57). For Daniel, the body both houses rich knowledge through the performance of bodily practices and also expresses it.  The body is a text which cannot be read the way one reads a ritual manual; it must be read differently.  My paper looks to the *cham* dance as embodied art to think about how physical acts of religious piety can be studied in a way that considers both written and embodied textual traditions.  Furthermore, what theories and methods in the study of religion help us think about the body as a legitimate site of knowledge production and dissemination? How can we see the “full range of social organization” differently; not through disembodied intellectual knowledge, but through the integration of embodied religious practices?