April 14, 2025
THIMPHU – In a remote monastery masked warriors resurrect a Vajrayana epic, where every arrow’s strike is a prayer, and a skeptic finds faith in the footfalls of a mythic king
In a remote monastery masked warriors resurrect a Vajrayana epic, where every arrow’s strike is a prayer, and a skeptic finds faith in the footfalls of a mythic king
In Chumey, as autumn’s last warmth surrenders to winter’s crisp breath, the sky hardens into a dome of lapis lazuli—a cobalt expanse stretching uninterrupted over the valley. Below, the bowl-shaped land cradles an emerald expanse, framed by mountains cloaked in pines and hemlocks whose peaks dissolve into the horizon. Orchards of oak and wild cherry spill down slopes, their roots tangled around brooks that chatter like pilgrims sharing secrets.
It was here, amid this symphony of earth and sky, that the 14th-century Tibetan master Longchenpa found refuge during his later years. “A lotus with eight petals,” he called it—an analogy as precise as it is poetic, for in Vajrayana Buddhism the lotus signifies purity rising unstained from mud. Chumey, then, is both geography and allegory: a place where every rustling leaf and murmuring stream becomes an invocation, where the divine feels less abstract than the scent of damp soil after rain.
This past November I stood at Choedeypung Monastery, its whitewashed walls rising like a parchment vignette against the valley’s greens and blues. A 15-minute drive up a gravel road from the highway, the monastery anchors one of Bumthang’s four sacred valleys—Bhutan’s spiritual heartland where Guru Rinpoche the “Second Buddha” once meditated in caves now enshrined as sites like the Kurjey Lhakhang. I had come to witness a rarity—the Gesar Lingdro, a potent Vajrayana dance seldom seen beyond Tibet. Once a star of Ura Yakchoe festival, the dance vanished from its roster in 2016 barely a decade after its debut. Today, Choedeypung stands as its sole custodian in Bhutan. For three days, the monks would channel King Gesar, the mythic warrior-king and guardian of dharma. To observe it, I read, was less like attending a performance than stepping into a living terma—a “hidden treasure” of blessings encoded in movement.
The Gesar epic, a sprawling oral fresco on which the dance is rooted, orbits a divine paradox: a warrior-king born to conquer chaos yet embodying compassion. In Tibet’s 12th century as Buddhist teachings faltered under political fractures, Gesar emerged as Guru Rinpoche’s emissary—a strategist who subdued not with swords but wisdom, pacifying the “demon kings” of the four directions through cunning and mantra. A tonic for the realm, the syllables of the Gesar epic were read daily to Bhutan’s Second King, Jigme Wangchuck—such was his devotion to the text.
Yet the dance’s journey to Choedeypung is a tale of modern diaspora. In 1996, the Tibetan lama Zheetrul Choni Rangshar Rinpoche crossed into Bhutan, seeking refuge in Bumthang’s Tang Valley where he would become Tang Rinpoche. With him came his wife, Khandro Tshedum Lhamo—a polymath of sacred arts, her voice a loom threading gurma hymns through the valley’s breath. Together, they transplanted Gesar Lingdro to Chojam Monastery, training monks in its exacting choreography until the dances pulsed with Bhutanese cadence. In this way, Gesar Lingdro was first performed in Bhutan in Tang. In 2008 the fifth King granted the family citizenship and in 2012 they moved to Choedeypung after its residents gifted Rinpoche their monastery.
My first encounter with Tang Rinpoche unfolded not in the sanctity of a monastery but in the clutter of his Thimphu living room over a decade ago—a meeting orchestrated less by devotion than by marital diplomacy. My atheism then was armor, polished to a sneer: I’d circle stupas counterclockwise, savoring the stricken whispers of pious friends like a connoisseur of heresy. The rinpoche himself remains a blur from that day save for the mournful thrum of an old Tibetan ballad drifting through the room, its notes hanging like incense smoke. What lingered, though, were fragments—the wisp of silver above his lip, curled occasionally into a whimsical handlebar; laughter that began as a ripple before erupting into seismic joy as if the very essence of happiness had taken roots in his ribs; the honeyed cadence of his Tibetan even as their meaning soared past my grasp like cranes into cloud.
Years later when faith found me—not as a thunderclap but as dawn seeping through shutters—I returned to those fragments with softer eyes. Research revealed contours: Tang Rinpoche was a student of late Khenchen Jigme Phuntsok Rinpoche, the terton who resurrected Tibetan Buddhism from the ashes of Mao’s purges; who build the Larung Gar Buddhist Institute believed to be the world’s largest Buddhist school. A lineage bearer himself, Tang Rinpoche was a terton and, among others, an emanation of Jangsey Ela Thokgyur, the mythic mahasiddha who rode alongside Gesar. Most resonant was his birthplace—Golok, Tibet’s eastern cradle, where the soil once bore the hoofbeats of Gesar’s steed.
The Choedeypung lhakhang is a lovely three story edifice located at the foot of the mountain in the picturesque hamlet of the same name. Its dragon-headed eaves coiled as if mid-roar, scales glinting even under November’s leaden sky. Tang Rinpoche had sculpted those gilded spires himself, each curve a testament to his artisan’s precision. To the east a Tara temple rose. Evenings carried the resinous tang of juniper smoke and the monks’ throat-chanting, harmonies so deep they seemed to vibrate from the earth’s core.
The Gesar Lingdro commenced on the sixth day after the monastery’s five-day Vajrakilaya and Gesar drubcho. The air was taut with anticipation. Beneath a sky scrubbed clean of clouds, pilgrims and villagers clustered in the courtyard. A hexagram etched into stone pulsed under the sun. Then—horns groaned, cymbals clashed, a bone flute pierced the stillness. A child’s whimper died mid-air as the dancers surged forth: Gesar in gilded armor, his face a mask of wrathful grace, flanked by warriors whose daggers sliced the light. They stamped, spun, robes swirling like monsoon clouds, their movements neither dance nor battle but a sacrament of motion. When Gesar thrust his palms outward, it felt less like performance than invocation—as though the valley itself held its breath, awaiting the crack between worlds.
The dancers’ regalia glowed like reliquaries: brocaded aprons stitched in crimson and gold, turquoise plumes trembling from headdresses, boots sheathed in silver scales. Yet it was their faces—unmasked, painted in stark whites and blacks, slashes of vermilion arcing like comet trails—that transfixed. Each visage became a mandala of emotion: brows knotted in divine fury, lips curled in triumph, eyes wide as moon discs. Japanese opera meets Vajrayana iconography, I scribbled in my notebook, until I overheard a young monk whisper to an old man sitting near me, “Agay, these are the faces of dralha—the wrathful wisdom protectors. Pray well.”
To the untrained eye the Gesar Lingdro might spiral into sensory overload: silks whirling, horns keening, dancers stamping as though to fracture the earth. But Drungchen Sonam Tharchen, a senior monk, later clarified: “Every gesture is a terma unearthed.” Mudras bloomed like secret handshakes with deities; daggers thrust skyward severed ignorance’s knots; stomps echoed the gallop of Gesar’s mythic steed Kyang Gokar its hooves churning clouds into thunder. Even the dancers’ capes—blood-red cascades—mirrored the warrior-king’s cloak, dyed in the hues of vanquished demons.
Yet interwoven with battle’s ferocity was the Dechen Rolmo, a hymn of ethereal harmony. Monks robed as celestial envoys swayed to the pulse of Gesar songs and chants—a sonic river that coursed through the courtyard, its undertow said to rouse even dormant deities. These melodies, I learned, echoed those that once swirled through Ling, Gesar’s kingdom in Golok, on his coronation day eight hundred years ago.
The climax arrived with the archers—the bow and arrow epitomizing Gesar’s dual conquest: over external foes (enemies, calamities) and the internal specters of ignorance and ego. Gesar and his warriors circled the hexagram—a jet-black mandala inlaid with Mara’s snarling, fanged visage—their jeweled quivers glinting. One by one, they spun into kinetic prayer, bodies arched like crescent moons. A horn blast. A drumroll’s heartbeat. Then—THWACK—an arrow quivered in the hexagram’s heart. The crowd roared, not at the shot’s precision but at its metaphor: a blade slicing through Mara’s existence. When Gesar loosed his arrow, the valley itself seemed to recoil, then exhale—a collective breath held so taut it felt less like observation than participation, as if a thousand Maras had been pinned to the earth, their essence dissolving like frost in sudden sun.
Later, as twilight gilded Choedeypung’s eaves, I found Tang Rinpoche in the courtyard—a silhouette bent over a novice’s hands, adjusting their mudra with the care of a scribe etching sacred text. His laughter, that same seismic eruption I’d heard a decade prior, now mingled with the clatter of dismantled armor and the rustle of monks folding crimson capes. Longchenpa’s lotus, I realized, was no mere metaphor. Here in the mud and chipped gilt of Choedeypung, devotion had taken root, its petals unfurling through exile, reinvention, and the quiet labor of hands. The valley’s brooks still murmured, the pines still held their breath—but something lingered, sharp as the scent of juniper after rain: the unshakable certainty that I’d brushed against the ineffable.