Tradition · masked monastic festival · India
Hemis Tsechu
Two days in the Tibetan fifth month at Hemis, the largest monastery in Ladakh, honouring Padmasambhava's birth. Monks in brocade and painted papier-mâché masks dance the cham in the courtyard — the Guru Tsengye, his eight manifestations, and the black-hat dance that subdues obstructing spirits — to shawm, long horn and cymbal. Every twelfth year, in the year of the monkey, the monastery's great thangka of Padmasambhava is unrolled down a wall.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 33.913, 77.703
Worth knowing
The cham is not performance but liturgy: the dancers are ordained, the steps are prescribed in texts, and the masks are treated as the deities they depict rather than as costume.
Connections (3)
- Shrine within cityHemis Monastery, Ladakh
Hemis is the largest monastery in Ladakh and the Tsechu is what it is for, twice over: the cham danced in its courtyard in the Tibetan fifth month for Padmasambhava's birth is liturgy performed by ordained monks to prescribed steps, and every twelfth year, in the monkey year, the monastery's great appliqué thangka of Padmasambhava is unrolled down the wall. The building exists to house the rite, and the rite is how the building addresses the valley.
- Shared sacred geographyParo Taktsang
One figure, two ends of the Himalaya, and the same claim made about him. Hemis dances the eight manifestations of Padmasambhava for his birthday; Taktsang was built around the Paro cave where he is said to have meditated after flying there on a tigress. Between Ladakh and Bhutan he is the single thread of Himalayan Buddhism — an Indian tantric master from Oḍḍiyāna, which is usually placed in the Swat valley, remembered across two thousand kilometres of mountains that never had a common state.
- In the same set asLosar
The Tibetan calendar's reach can be read off these two. Losar is kept as the new year in Ladakh, Spiti, Sikkim, Tawang and the Nepal highlands; the Hemis Tsechu falls in the fifth month of the same calendar. Ladakh, though, keeps Losar two months early, by the order of a fourteenth-century Namgyal king who wanted his army to celebrate before marching — so one military timetable permanently moved a new year that the rest of the Tibetan world still keeps on time.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Hemis Monastery”. Ladakh Buddhist Association records; René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz on cham and the protective deities.
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