Tibetan Religious Dances: Tibetan Text and Annotated Translation of the Chams Yig

Rene de Nebesky-Wojkowitz studied Tibetan religious culture in the Himalayan region before his early death, and this Mouton book, published posthumously and edited by Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf, is his translation and study of a Tibetan chams yig, a monastic dance manual, with detailed instructions for cham, the ritual masked dances. Verified as a genuine and still cited scholarly work, its strength is that it works from the tradition's own written choreographic instructions rather than from outside observation alone, explaining the striking uniformity of cham performance across monasteries and periods. Its limit is that it documents one specific dance manual's instructions, so a claim about how a different monastery's cham tradition actually varies from this text needs a source addressing that particular tradition.