Once a year, in a thousand-year-old monastery called Likir, built on a ridge at almost 12,000 feet, high up a Himalayan valley, surrounded by 20,000 foot peaks, Buddhist monks meditate for almost a month, then perform ceremonies for over a week – from well before dawn until late in the night –during which they invoke protective deities by making ritual offerings and repeating sacred sayings (called mantras) – and they chant and play drums and horns for hours on end, and pray for the liberation of all sentient beings.
Then they dance.
Then they dance.
For two days, filled with love and compassion, visualizing themselves as the deities they’ve meditated on, and wearing centuries-old masks depicting wrathful god’s faces, designed to scare even the fiercest demons, the monks perform intricate dances to draw the evil and destructive energies from the minds of the audience (gathered from all across Ladakh) into an effigy made of barley, shaped like a human body.
All the while an orchestra plays – drums the size of tractor tires, trumpets longer than a human body. Alone and in groups the monks spin and twirl, carefully stepping, or wildly leaping, invoking deities to come to earth and help rid it of evil.
Then the skeletons come, taunting the crowd, offering candy then beating with sticks at any who try to take the sweets, stealing hats which they fling over the courtyard walls, belly-flopping into the crowd, and climbing up the flagpole.
Finally the dance master arrives, transformed from a man into the protective deity itself, wielding the sword of wisdom. He cuts open the dough body, releasing all the evil and negativity gathered within, which he draws into his own body, in order to show the evil the light of truth and peace, thus transforming it to inert, or even positive energy, and purifying the earth of ignorance, anger, ego, attachment, and jealousy.
photos by Nathan Whitmont