A Dance Written Down: The Chams Yig and the Monastic Manual

Cham is unusual among religious dances in being a written tradition. Each monastery holds a chams yig, a dance manual setting out the sequence of movements, the number of steps, the placing of the feet, the masks to be worn and the ritual texts to be recited alongside. The dance is therefore not learned by watching alone but from a text, in the same way as any other liturgy, and a monastery can restore a dance after a break by reading its own manual. That written basis is why cham survived the destruction of monasteries in the twentieth century in more than one place: the manual travelled with the exiles even when the masks did not.

The dance developed in Tibet within tantric Buddhism and in the Bon tradition alongside it, and the traditional accounts tie its beginnings to the eighth century and to Padmasambhava, who is said to have subdued the local deities of Tibet and bound them to the protection of the teaching. Whether the dance itself is that old is not something the sources settle, and the atlas does not assert it. What is clear is that by the later monastic period the great annual cham had become the visible face of the monastery to the lay population, the one day in the year on which the interior life of a walled institution was performed in a courtyard where anyone could stand and watch.