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Monk Dancers of Tibet. By MATTHIEU RICARD. Translated by CHARLES HASTINGS. Boston: Shambhala, 2003. 125 pp. $29-95 (cloth).
Tibetan Sacred Dance: A Journey into the Religious and Folk Traditions. By ELLEN PEARLMAN. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2002. v, 192 pp. $29-95 (paper).
Over the last decade, Tibetan religious dances ('cham) have attracted a fair interest among audiences concerned with Asian performing arts. Several groups of monks living in exile in India or Nepal have toured the West with condensed two-hour shows, and among the general Western public 'cham now stands as one of the marketable hallmarks of the monastic culture of Tibet, alongside sand mandalas and overtone chanting. However, in their original Tibetan setting, these dances have very little to do with shows. They last for a whole day or even several consecutive days, and they are merely the public part of a much larger tantric ritual, or rather a system of tantric rituals, serving a double purpose: the expulsion of evil from the local community and the presentation of cosmological notions on the ultimate nature of phenomena as a tool for meditation. On the whole, they can be conceived of as the dramatization of the mandala of a particular deity, whose emanations, attributes, and retinue are transposed into space and enacted by dancers wearing spectacular costumes and masks and treading to slow, haunting music.
Matthieu Ricard's Monk Dancers of Tibet, faithfully translated by Charles Hastings from the French (Moines danseurs du Tibet [Paris: Albin Michel, 1999]), is more than an introduction to the subject. It is an insider's perspective that brings the reader directly to the core of the dances and inside the world of Tibetan tantric ritual. The author, who renounced a promising scientific career to become a Buddhist monk in the 1970s, is one of the best-known, respected, and active exponents of Tibetan Buddhism for Westerners. He has engaged in both distinguished translations for specialists and coffee-table books for a wider readership. This book pertains to the latter category, though it also provides useful novel information here and there. The first half of the book consists of three chapters. The first one presents the traditional viewpoint of Tibetan lamas on the history and transmission of these dances, in which the visionary experiences...