Sacred Dances

Cham

Also Known As Cham Dance The form the name usually takes in English writing. · Chaam

Masked

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Cham." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://divinity.interactivelion.com/sacred-dances/cham.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Cham. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://divinity.interactivelion.com/sacred-dances/cham

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-cham,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Cham},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://divinity.interactivelion.com/sacred-dances/cham},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Cham is the masked dance performed by monks of the Tibetan Buddhist and Bon traditions in monastery courtyards, most often at the great annual festivals that close the old year or open the new one. Dancers wear heavy brocade robes and carved masks of protector deities, wrathful figures, the skeleton lords of the charnel ground and the stag and yak forms of tantric myth, and move in slow measured circles to cymbals, long horns and drums. The dance is a practice rather than a performance put on for spectators: it is understood as a ritual enactment in which obstacles to the teaching are subdued and the ground is purified, and the monks who dance it train in it as in any other liturgical discipline. Choreography, costume and sequence are set down in written manuals held by each monastery, and lineages differ from one another in the detail.

Facts

Disputed

Historical Origin

Traditional accounts trace the dance 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 1Tibetan Buddhism

This is the tradition's own account of its origin. The surviving dance manuals are very much later, and scholarship cannot establish how much of the eighth century attribution is history. The atlas records the claim as the tradition makes it and does not assert it as fact.

Practice

Mode of Transmission

From a written monastic dance manual, the chams yig, held by each monastery, alongside oral instruction from the monks who danced it before 1Tibetan Buddhism

Origins

Origin Region

Tibet, and the Tibetan Buddhist and Bon monasteries of the Himalaya, Mongolia and the Tibetan diaspora 1Tibetan Buddhism

Use

Occasion

The great annual monastic festivals, most often at the turn of the year, at Losar or at a tsechu 1Tibetan Buddhism

Learn More

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.

Masks of the Protectors and the Work They Do

The masks are carved wood or moulded papier mache, often larger than a human head, and they are consecrated objects rather than costume. They show the wrathful protector deities of the tantric pantheon, the stag headed and bull headed forms, the citipati or skeleton lords who guard the charnel ground, and figures of the lineage teachers. Monks who wear them are understood to take on the deity's function for the duration of the dance, which is why the training is a religious discipline: the point is not that the audience should believe a deity is present, but that the dancer should perform the visualisation correctly while moving.

What the dance does, in its own terms, is clear an obstruction. A common structure has the dancers describe a slow circle to cymbals, drums and the long dungchen horns, subduing the forces hostile to the teaching, after which an effigy standing for those forces is destroyed at the close of the sequence. The pace is deliberate and heavy, closer to a procession than to anything quick, and the great festivals at which it is performed fall around the turn of the year in most traditions, at Losar or at the tsechu observances held in Bhutan and elsewhere. Lay people attend for merit and for the year ahead, and the occasion is a fair as well as a rite. Individual monasteries differ in sequence, mask and detail, and none of them regards the others as wrong.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Padmasambhava

The tradition attributes the origin of the dance to Padmasambhava. The atlas records the attribution as the tradition's own and does not assert it as history.

Source Tibetan Religious Dances: Tibetan Text and Annotated Translation of the Chams YigRene de Nebesky-Wojkowitz

Tibetan Buddhism

Cham is performed by monks of the Tibetan Buddhist schools and of the Bon tradition alongside them.

Source Tibetan Religious Dances: Tibetan Text and Annotated Translation of the Chams YigRene de Nebesky-Wojkowitz