Journal of Himalayan Buddhist Studies · Sacred Ritual Performance
At the foot of the Himalayan foothills in Bomdila, Arunachal Pradesh, something ancient happens each year. Monks in elaborate costumes move through courtyard space that is no longer merely physical. The drums accelerate. The masks shift. And those watching, whether they know it or not, are being shown a map of the mind’s journey through dying, through the intermediate state, and into the next life. This is Bardo Cham, the sacred ritual dance of the intermediate state, performed annually at Gontse Rabgyaling Monastery during the Drubchod Chenmo festival, combined with the regional observance of Bomdila Torgya.
For Western audiences encountering it for the first time, Bardo Cham can appear opaque, even overwhelming. The iconography is unfamiliar, the movements coded, the masks fierce enough to startle. Yet beneath the surface, the dance communicates something profoundly universal: the reality of impermanence, the mechanics of karma, and the radical possibility of liberation at every moment, including the moment of death.
This article offers a scholarly yet accessible introduction, combining Tibetan Buddhist doctrinal context with a practical orientation for those beginning or deepening their contemplative lives.
The term bardo (Tibetan: བར་དོ།) translates, in the most literal sense, as “between two.” Classical Tibetan Buddhist teaching, drawing on texts such as the Bardo Tödrol Chenmo, the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, identifies six bardos: the bardo of waking life, of meditation, of dreaming, of dying, of dharmata (the luminous ground of reality), and of becoming. Bardo Cham takes its name primarily from the last three of these, the transitional experiences that unfold after the cessation of bodily breathing and before the taking of a new birth.
What happens in those intermediate states? According to the Nyingma and Kagyu schools from which much of Bardo Cham’s liturgical tradition derives, consciousness separates from the physical body yet retains the full weight of its karmic imprints. These imprints, accumulated through every thought, word, and action of a lifetime and of countless prior lifetimes, now determine the quality of what is experienced. The peaceful and wrathful deities encountered in the bardo are not external entities. They are, in the deepest sense, the meditator’s own mind appearing to itself.
This is the conceptual revolution at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist eschatology. Death is not a wall. It is a doorway into heightened states of awareness, states that can be navigated skillfully if one has prepared, or stumbled through blindly if one has not.
Cham dances in the Tibetan tradition are not folk performances. They belong to the category of terma transmissions and lineage-held ritual technologies. The movements, the costumes, the sequence of appearances, and even the sounds of the ritual instruments carry doctrinal content that a trained practitioner can read as precisely as a text.
In Bardo Cham specifically, the dramaturgy follows the consciousness of a recently deceased being navigating the intermediate state. The Black Hat dancers (Shanag) represent tantric masters capable of clearing obstacles and performing transference of consciousness. The appearance of Mahakala, the great protector deity, signals the purification of negative karma. The Citipati, the skeleton dancers, embody impermanence itself. Their movement through the courtyard is the movement of death through all conditioned existence.
Central to the dance’s theological architecture is the figure of Yama, the Lord of Death, who holds the wheel of existence and weighs the karmic accounts of the deceased. His presence is not meant to terrify. It is meant to instruct. Karma is not punishment. It is physics: the natural arising of consequences from causes. By witnessing Yama’s judgment enacted in sacred space, practitioners receive an embodied teaching on the accountability of every moment.
The ritual culminates in the destruction of a torma, an effigy representing the ego and accumulated negative karma. This is not symbolic destruction in a weak sense. Within the tantric view, the ritual act genuinely purifies the karmic field of all present, and especially of beings who have recently died and who hover, in the Tibetan understanding, near the sites of their loved ones for a period of forty-nine days
Bardo Cham does not stand alone. It is performed within the sacred container of the Drubchod Chenmo, a “great accomplishment festival” in which intensive group practice over multiple days creates a concentrated field of merit and blessing. The monastery becomes, during this period, a mandala palace in which ordinary distinctions between inner and outer practice dissolve.
Combined with the regional observance of Bomdila Torgya, the festival serves a dual function. On the one hand, it maintains the living transmission of Vajrayana teaching within the monastic community. On the other, it extends the protective and purificatory power of that transmission outward to the lay community, to the deceased of the past year, and to the surrounding environment itself. This outward extension is characteristic of tantric Buddhism’s expansive ethics: practice is never solely for the individual practitioner.
Gontse Rabgyaling Monastery, in Bomdila, occupies a particular position within this broader context. Established by Tibetan refugees following the 1959 diaspora, it carries the living lineage of the Nyingma tradition in exile. The preservation of Bardo Cham at this institution is therefore not merely a cultural act. It is an act of dharmic continuity, ensuring that teachings capable of liberating beings at the moment of death remain available in an unbroken living form.
Source: Nima Tsomzz
For those approaching Bardo Cham without a background in Tibetan Buddhism, it is useful to identify its primary messages plainly. Death is not the end of experience. It is the beginning of an intensified phase of experience, one shaped entirely by the quality of mind cultivated during life. Every moment of genuine kindness, clarity, and non-attachment is a deposit into the account that matters most.
The dance teaches, second, that the beings encountered in the bardo, however terrifying or magnificent they appear, arise from one’s own mind. Fear, in the post-death state, is the failure to recognize one’s own wisdom energies. Recognition is liberation. This is why meditation practice, specifically the cultivation of recognition or rigpa, the naked awareness that underlies all experience, is presented as the essential preparation for dying well.
Third, and perhaps most importantly for those new to this tradition, Bardo Cham insists on the compassionate structure of the entire cosmos. The wrathful deities are not enemies. Yama is not a sadistic judge. The elaborate theater of post-death experience exists, from the Tibetan Buddhist perspective, within the embrace of bodhicitta, the mind of awakening oriented toward the liberation of all beings. Even the wheel of samsara turns within the larger space of Buddha-nature, the fundamental purity that is never absent, never damaged, never lost.
Whether you sit in formal meditation for years or have only recently encountered Buddhist ideas, Bardo Cham offers something rare: a complete doctrinal curriculum delivered through direct aesthetic experience. You do not need to understand every iconographic detail to receive the transmission. Attention, sincerity, and a willingness to confront the fact of impermanence are sufficient entry points.
For beginning practitioners, the dance provides a powerful anchor for the contemplation of death and impermanence, what the tradition calls maranasati in the Pali framework or chi-kha bardo reflection in the Tibetan. Sitting with the reality that this life is finite, that its quality of mind shapes what follows, tends to sharpen motivation considerably. The abstract urgency of dharma practice becomes concrete.
For more experienced practitioners, particularly those with some exposure to Vajrayana teachings, Bardo Cham functions as a living commentary on texts like the Bardo Tödrol and the Guhyagarbha Tantra. The visual appearance of the forty-two peaceful deities and fifty-eight wrathful deities corresponds to the elaborate deity mandalas that practitioners work with in their sadhana. Seeing these deities embodied and moving, rather than pictured in static thangka paintings, can catalyze genuine recognition.
There is also a simpler, more immediate benefit. The sheer scale and seriousness of the ritual, performed by monks who have dedicated their lives to its transmission, tends to interrupt the ordinary momentum of distracted mind. Something in the human nervous system responds to sacred seriousness. The drums speak directly to whatever is oldest in us. And in that moment of interruption, the door that Bardo Cham points toward, the door of present awareness, becomes briefly, vividly visible.
Bardo Cham survives, at Gontse Rabgyaling Monastery and in other Himalayan institutions, because generations of teachers have judged it essential. In a tradition where every element of a living liturgy is preserved only through the devoted labor of human bodies and minds, that judgment carries weight. The dance has crossed the Himalayas in the hands of refugees. It has been maintained in exile, on foreign soil, without the material resources of the homeland. Its continuation is an act of collective intention that we, as observers and potential practitioners, are invited to honor.
You do not need to be Tibetan. You do not need to be Buddhist. You need only to be willing to look honestly at the questions the dance asks: What have I done with this lifetime? What quality of mind will I carry when this body stops? Is liberation possible? Bardo Cham says, with the full authority of a living tradition, that it is. And it says so not in words alone, but in the turning of masked dancers through sacred space, in the sound of cymbals and drums, in the burning of the effigy, and in the silence that follows.
That silence, the silence after the torma is destroyed, the silence in which something has genuinely been cleared, is perhaps the real teaching. It is the teaching the text cannot give. It is the reason the dance exists.
Scholarly Notes
The primary doctrinal source for Bardo Cham’s theology is the Bardo Tödrol Chenmo, attributed to Padmasambhava and revealed as a terma by Karma Lingpa in the fourteenth century. The Nyingma school’s presentation of the six bardos forms the liturgical spine of the dance. The Drubchod Chenmo at Gontse Rabgyaling Monastery represents one of the most complete living performances of this tradition outside Tibet.
Iconographic identification of the deities follows the Guhyagarbha Tantra and its extensive commentary traditions. Readers wishing to pursue the textual dimension further are directed to Chogyam Trungpa and Francesca Fremantle’s translation of the Bardo Tödrol, as well as Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a more accessible introduction to the same doctrinal territory.
GIAO LONG MONASTERY
GIAO LONG MONASTERY
GIAO LONG MONASTERY
GIAO LONG MONASTERY