Hemis Festival: Sacred Cham Dances That Offer Liberation in Ladakh

The Hemis Festival is a two-day annual gathering at Hemis Monastery in Ladakh's Leh district, one of the largest and wealthiest monasteries in the Drukpa Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. Celebrated on the tenth day of the fifth Tibetan lunar month to mark the birth anniversary of Guru Padmasambhava, the eighth-century Indian master who brought Tantric Buddhism to Tibet, the festival is centred on the Cham dance, a sacred masked dance performed by the monastery's monks that enacts the defeat of negative forces and offers the assembled audience a direct transmission of Tantric Buddhist teaching through visual and sensory experience. Every twelve years, a massive thangka painting of Guru Padmasambhava is unfurled on the monastery's facade in a ceremony that draws pilgrims from across Ladakh, Tibet, Bhutan, and the global Buddhist world. The festival combines the highest expressions of Himalayan musical tradition, textile and mask-making craft, and Tantric ritual philosophy in a gathering whose significance extends from the devotional to the cosmological.

The Massive Monastic Music and Cham Dances of the Hemis Gathering

The road to Hemis from Leh follows the Indus river southward through a landscape that operates at a scale that human beings are not evolutionarily prepared to process comfortably. The mountains on either side are not simply large. They are of a different category of largeness from anything in most of India, bare rock faces rising thousands of metres above the valley floor in colours of ochre and rust and grey that change character entirely as the sun moves through the high-altitude sky.

Hemis Monastery sits back from the road in a side valley, invisible from the main highway until a turn in the approach road reveals it suddenly, a cluster of white-walled buildings with red-painted upper stories pressed against the base of a cliff that rises almost vertically above it. The monastery has been here, in some form, since 1672. The cliff has been here considerably longer.

On the two days of the Hemis Festival each summer, this quiet compound transforms. The courtyard that is ordinarily a space of meditative stillness becomes the stage for one of the most extraordinary ritual performances in the Buddhist world. Monks who have spent months preparing their roles emerge in masks and costumes of breathtaking complexity and begin to move to the sound of the longest horns, the deepest drums, and the most penetrating cymbals in the Himalayan musical tradition.

They are not monks, in these moments. They are deities. And what they are doing, in the theology of the Drukpa Kagyu school that Hemis represents, is offering every person present the possibility of liberation.

Padmasambhava and the Birth That Changed the Buddhist World

The Hemis Festival exists to celebrate a birth. Not the birth of a human being in any ordinary sense, but the birth of Guru Padmasambhava, called Guru Rinpoche, the precious teacher, by the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, whose arrival in the eighth century CE transformed the religious landscape of the Himalayan world so completely that it has never recovered its prior shape.

Padmasambhava was born, according to the tradition, not from a womb but from a lotus flower, on a lake called Dhanakosha in the Swat Valley of what is now Pakistan. The date of his birth in the Tibetan lunar calendar is the tenth day of the fifth month, Tsechu, and this is the day that the Hemis Festival commemorates, the tenth day of the fifth month, every year.

The historical Padmasambhava was an Indian Tantric master, siddha, and scholar who was invited to Tibet by King Trisong Detsen in the eighth century to overcome the obstacles that were preventing the establishment of Buddhism in Tibet. These obstacles were understood in the Tantric framework as the resistance of indigenous Tibetan spirits and demons to the arrival of the dharma, and Padmasambhava’s role was to subjugate these forces, not by destroying them but by converting them into protectors of the Buddhist teachings. The Cham dance that is performed at Hemis enacts this subjugation in ritual form, and it is therefore not simply a celebration of a birthday but a re-enactment of the foundational act through which Buddhism established itself in the Tibetan cultural world.

The biography of Padmasambhava as recorded in the Tibetan tradition is not a historical biography in the Western sense. It is a hagiography of enormous scope and symbolic complexity, attributed to his consort Yeshe Tsogyal and concealed as a terma, a treasure text, to be discovered at an appropriate future time. The Padmasambhava of this biography performs miracles, defeats demons, teaches the highest Tantric doctrines to a circle of twenty-five principal disciples, and leaves Tibet after establishing the dharma on a firm foundation, promising to return to help sentient beings whenever they call on him with sincere devotion.

This promise of return is directly relevant to the festival. When the monks of Hemis perform the Cham dance on the tenth day of the fifth month, they are not simply commemorating a past event. They are creating the conditions for Padmasambhava’s continued presence in the world, enacting the ritual through which his blessings are renewed and distributed to every being present. The festival is an act of invocation as much as it is an act of commemoration.

The Drukpa Kagyu and Hemis Monastery

Hemis Monastery is the largest and wealthiest monastery in Ladakh and one of the most important institutions of the Drukpa Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. Understanding the Drukpa Kagyu tradition and its particular characteristics is essential to understanding what the Hemis Festival expresses and why it takes the specific forms it does.

The Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism traces its lineage through the Indian mahasiddha Tilopa to his disciple Naropa, and from Naropa through the great Tibetan translator Marpa to the yogi Milarepa, one of the most beloved figures in the entire Tibetan Buddhist tradition. The Kagyu school is known for its emphasis on direct, experiential transmission of Buddhist teachings through the relationship between teacher and student, and on the practice of Mahamudra, the direct recognition of the nature of mind, as its central meditative teaching.

The Drukpa Kagyu is a sub-school of the Kagyu tradition that takes its name from the dragon, druk in Tibetan, whose thunder was heard at the founding of the tradition’s primary monastery in Tibet in the twelfth century. Bhutan’s national name, Druk Yul, the land of the thunder dragon, reflects the Drukpa Kagyu’s centrality to Bhutanese Buddhist culture, and the school’s presence in Ladakh through institutions like Hemis Monastery connects the Ladakhi Buddhist world directly to the Bhutanese and Tibetan religious landscapes.

Hemis Monastery was established in its current form in 1672 under the patronage of the Ladakhi king Sengge Namgyal, who invited the Drukpa Kagyu master Stagtsang Raspa Nawang Gyatso to establish a monastery in the Hemis valley. The royal patronage that has sustained Hemis across three and a half centuries remains active today through the Namgyal dynasty of Ladakh, whose relationship with the monastery continues in various ceremonial and supportive forms.

The monastery’s wealth, which is considerable by the standards of Himalayan monasteries, reflects centuries of accumulated royal and lay patronage and has allowed Hemis to maintain a large monastic community, an extensive library of Buddhist texts, a remarkable collection of thangka paintings and ritual objects, and the material resources required to produce the elaborate costumes, masks, and musical instruments that the Cham dance requires.

The research and documentation of Hemis Monastery’s history, collections, and ritual traditions has been supported by institutions including the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology in Sikkim, whose published scholarship on Himalayan Buddhist traditions provides some of the most authoritative academic resources available on the institutional and artistic history of monasteries like Hemis.

The Cham Dance and Its Tantric Philosophy

To watch the Cham dance at Hemis without understanding its theological foundation is to witness something beautiful and somewhat bewildering. To watch it with even a basic understanding of Vajrayana Buddhist philosophy is to encounter something of extraordinary intellectual and spiritual density, a form of teaching so complete in its use of the full sensory apparatus of the human being that its ancient practitioners could reasonably claim that liberation itself is available through it.

The Cham dance, called simply Cham in Tibetan and sometimes Chaam or Lama dance in colloquial description, is a sacred masked dance performed by trained monks at major festivals across the Himalayan Buddhist world. It exists in different forms at different monasteries, each tradition preserving its own choreography, its own set of masks, and its own specific theological narrative. The Hemis Cham is specific to the Drukpa Kagyu tradition and is performed in the form that Stagtsang Raspa established for the monastery in the seventeenth century.

The theological foundation of the Cham dance lies in the Vajrayana understanding that the enlightened mind is not separate from the phenomenal world but is expressed through and within it. The deities of the Tantric Buddhist pantheon are not external beings separate from the practitioner’s own mind but are manifestations of the mind’s enlightened qualities, appearing in specific forms to communicate specific aspects of the awakened state to beings who have not yet recognised their own Buddha nature.

When a monk wears the mask of a wrathful deity during the Cham dance, he is not pretending to be that deity. He has spent months in meditation on that deity’s form, mantra, and essence, meditating on himself as inseparable from the deity, dissolving the boundary between the practitioner and the deity of the practice. By the time he dances, the monk and the deity are understood to be the same, and the masked figure moving through the monastery courtyard is understood as a genuine manifestation of enlightened presence in the world.

This is the mechanism through which the Cham dance is understood to transmit liberation to those who witness it. Seeing the form of an enlightened deity, even in the context of a ritual performance, is understood in Vajrayana teaching to plant a seed of liberation in the mindstream of the witness. The seed may not ripen in this lifetime. It may take many lifetimes to come to full fruition. But the planting has occurred, and the eventual liberation of the witness is thereby made more certain. The monks dance so that everyone who sees them, whether monk or layperson, Buddhist or non-Buddhist, Ladakhi or tourist, moves closer to freedom from suffering.

This is an extraordinarily generous theological position. The Cham is not performed for an exclusive audience of the already initiated. It is performed in public, in the monastery courtyard, for whoever comes. The teaching is given to everyone because liberation, in the Buddhist understanding, is the eventual destination of every sentient being, and every opportunity to advance that destination is an act of compassion.

Shadows and Forms: The Masks and Their Meaning

The masks worn by the monks during the Hemis Cham are among the most remarkable objects in the Himalayan artistic tradition, and understanding their specific forms and their theological meaning is essential to understanding what the dance communicates.

The most immediately striking of the Hemis Cham masks are the wrathful deity masks, enormous constructions of painted papier-mache, yak hide, and metal ornamentation that can weigh several kilograms and require significant neck and shoulder strength to wear through a full performance. These masks represent the Dharmapala, the protectors of the dharma, and other wrathful manifestations of enlightened awareness whose fierce expressions communicate not anger in any ordinary human sense but the fierce compassion of a mind that has completely overcome the obstacles to liberation and is determined to cut through the delusions that keep other beings trapped in suffering.

The wrathful deities of Tibetan Buddhism, with their bulging eyes, their bared teeth, their skull crowns and flame halos, are frequently misunderstood by Western observers as demonic or frightening in a straightforwardly negative sense. In the Vajrayana theological framework, their fierceness is a form of love. They are wrathful because they are confronting the forces of ignorance, aggression, and craving that cause suffering, forces that require fierce energy to overcome rather than the gentle persuasion appropriate to less entrenched obstacles. The Cham dancer wearing the wrathful mask is not frightening the audience. He is demonstrating, in the most vivid possible form, the power of enlightened awareness to overcome what cannot be overcome by ordinary means.

The Stag masks, worn by the deer-headed attendants of Yama, the lord of death, are among the most visually distinctive elements of the Hemis Cham. Yama himself appears in the dance in his form as Dharmaraja, the king of dharma and the lord of death, flanked by his attendants and preceded by the offering of a human-shaped torma, a ritual dough figure, that represents the ego and its attachments. The ritual destruction of this torma figure during the dance enacts the cutting through of the fundamental delusion of a fixed, permanent self that Buddhist philosophy identifies as the root cause of suffering.

The Black Hat dancers, called Shanag in Tibetan, are among the most celebrated figures in the Hemis Cham and throughout the Tibetan Cham tradition. They wear large black felt hats with wide brims and long silk streamers, and their dance is the most sustained and meditative of the Cham sequences, involving slow, precise movements that communicate the quality of undistracted awareness that characterises meditative absorption. The Black Hat dance traces its origin to the historical episode in which a Buddhist monk concealed a weapon in his Black Hat to gain access to the anti-Buddhist Tibetan king Langdarma and assassinate him, ending a period of persecution of the sangha. The dance commemorates this act while also functioning as a meditation teaching about the nature of decisive action arising from compassionate motivation.

The construction of the Hemis Cham masks is itself a devotional practice requiring months of work by skilled craftspeople within the monastic community. The specific forms of each mask are prescribed by the iconographic texts of the tradition, but within those prescriptions considerable artistic judgment is exercised in the selection of colours, the modelling of expressions, and the decoration of the mask’s surface with the symbolic objects appropriate to each deity’s iconographic identity.

The Music That Holds the Space

The musical accompaniment of the Hemis Cham is not background sound. It is a participant in the ritual, as theologically active as the dance itself, functioning to maintain and deepen the sacred space of the performance and to create specific energetic conditions within that space that support the transmission the dance is intended to deliver.

The primary instruments of the Hemis Cham music are the Dungchen, the Gyaling, the Kangling, the Rolmo, and the Damaru. Each carries specific symbolic and functional significance.

The Dungchen is the long ceremonial trumpet of Tibetan Buddhism, typically between two and four metres in length, played in pairs to produce a deep, resonant drone whose vibration is felt in the body as much as heard by the ears. The sound of the Dungchen in a mountain valley at high altitude is one of those specific acoustic experiences that does not translate into any other context. It is simultaneously enormous and intimate, filling the entire valley with a sound that seems to come from inside the rock rather than from a human instrument. In the theological understanding of the tradition, the Dungchen’s sound represents the primordial sound of the dharma, the vibration of reality itself, calling all beings to attention.

The Gyaling is a double-reed oboe-like instrument whose penetrating, high-pitched sound cuts through the Dungchen’s drone with the clarity of a blade. If the Dungchen represents the ground of being, the Gyaling represents the arising of specific forms within that ground, the emergence of distinct phenomena from the undifferentiated field of primordial awareness. Together, the two instruments model the relationship between emptiness and form that is central to Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy.

The Kangling is a trumpet made from a human femur bone, or in most contemporary practice from metal shaped to replicate the original form. Its use in Vajrayana ritual reflects the tradition’s engagement with death and impermanence not as subjects to be avoided but as teachers to be engaged directly. The Kangling’s sound is associated with the calling of the consciousness at the moment of death and with the practices designed to guide that consciousness toward liberation rather than confused rebirth.

The Rolmo are large cymbals that mark the rhythmic structure of the Cham dance, their crashes defining the transitions between movements and maintaining the energetic intensity of the performance space. The Damaru, the small double-headed drum whose two striking balls are attached to the drum on strings, is the instrument most directly associated with Padmasambhava himself and with the Tantric tradition he embodies. Its rapid, rattling sound is understood as the sound of awakened awareness cutting through confusion.

The monks who play these instruments have typically spent years learning their roles, both the technical dimension of playing the instruments and the contemplative dimension of understanding what the music is for and how to bring meditative presence to the performance of it. The music of the Cham is not performed. In the same sense that the dance is not performed, it is enacted by practitioners who understand themselves as participants in a living transmission rather than as musicians entertaining an audience.

The documentation of Hemis and Ladakhi Buddhist musical traditions has been supported by ethnomusicological research through institutions including the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, whose archives contain significant recordings and analyses of Himalayan ritual music that provide scholarly grounding for understanding the musical dimension of festivals like Hemis.

The Twelve-Year Thangka

Every twelve years, corresponding to the Tibetan astrological cycle of the monkey year in which Padmasambhava is said to have been born, the Hemis Festival includes a ritual that occurs at no other time and that draws pilgrims from across the Himalayan Buddhist world: the unfurling of the great thangka.

The thangka is an enormous painted scroll depicting Guru Padmasambhava in his primary form, surrounded by the figures of his eight manifestations, his twenty-five principal disciples, and the protective deities of the Drukpa Kagyu tradition. Its dimensions are extraordinary, covering a significant portion of the Hemis Monastery’s facade when fully unfurled, and it is too large to be displayed inside any interior space.

The painting of the thangka was completed over several years by master thangka painters working within the strict iconographic guidelines of the Tibetan Buddhist artistic tradition. The pigments used are traditional mineral and organic colours, and the gold used in the deity’s ornaments and in the decorative borders is genuine ground gold applied with the precision that the tradition requires. The iconographic accuracy of every figure, every mudra, every symbol of every depicted object is a matter of religious seriousness, not aesthetic preference, because the thangka is understood as a support for meditation and a vehicle for the deity’s presence, and its accuracy determines its efficacy as a devotional object.

The unfurling of the thangka at the twelve-year festival is accompanied by the most complete version of the Cham dance, with all figures represented and the full ritual sequence performed in its most elaborate form. The combination of the enormous painted presence of Padmasambhava on the monastery’s facade and the living enactment of his teachings through the Cham creates a simultaneity of visual and kinetic sacred content that practitioners describe as an experience of unusual intensity and openness.

The last twelve-year thangka unfurling occurred in 2016, drawing pilgrims from across Ladakh, Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, and the global Buddhist community. The next will occur in 2028.

The Ladakhi World the Festival Inhabits

The Hemis Festival exists within and expresses the specific cultural world of Ladakh, whose Buddhist civilisation is one of the most complete and most distinctive surviving expressions of Himalayan culture anywhere in the world. Understanding the Ladakhi cultural context is essential to understanding what the festival means to the people for whom it is not an event to attend but a dimension of the world they live in.

Ladakh’s Buddhist civilisation developed in relative geographic isolation, protected by the Himalayan ranges that separate it from the plains of northern India and the plateaus of Tibet. This isolation, which was never complete but was always significant, allowed a specific synthesis of Indian, Tibetan, and Central Asian cultural and religious influences to develop into a distinctive Ladakhi cultural identity that is expressed in every dimension of life from architecture to agriculture to the ritual calendar that structures the year.

The Hemis Festival is the largest and most celebrated event in that ritual calendar, the moment when the entire community’s relationship with the Drukpa Kagyu tradition, with Padmasambhava, and with the monastery that has been the spiritual centre of Ladakhi life for three and a half centuries finds its most complete public expression. Ladakhi families travel from distant villages to attend. Nomadic communities from the Changthang plateau make the festival a destination in their seasonal movements. The Ladakhi diaspora in Leh, Delhi, and beyond returns when possible.

For Ladakhi Buddhists, attending the Hemis Festival is not comparable to attending a cultural event or even an ordinary religious festival. It is an encounter with the tradition’s living heart, a renewal of the relationship between the community and its primary protective deity, and an opportunity to receive the specific blessing of Padmasambhava’s presence that the Cham enacts and that is understood to accumulate over lifetimes of devotional contact.

The Ladakhi cultural world has been under increasing pressure from the same forces of rapid modernisation that are transforming other Himalayan communities, accelerated in Ladakh’s case by the region’s strategic military significance, its growing importance as a tourism destination, and the 2019 reorganisation that made Ladakh a Union Territory directly administered by the central government. The specific challenges that these pressures present to Hemis Monastery, to the monastic community that performs the Cham, and to the Ladakhi Buddhist civilisation that gives the festival its meaning are the subject of active concern among scholars, practitioners, and community leaders.

The Hemis Festival itself, paradoxically, has grown in scale and international visibility during precisely the period of greatest external pressure on Ladakhi culture. The thousands of Indian and international tourists who attend the festival each year bring economic resources to the region and attention to the Ladakhi cultural world that has some positive effects on its visibility and institutional support. The question of whether this tourism-related visibility strengthens or dilutes the festival’s essential character is one that the monastic community navigates with the same pragmatism that Buddhist institutions have brought to the challenge of maintaining dharmic integrity in changing conditions across fifteen centuries of the tradition’s history.

The Hemis Monastery’s official documentation and the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council’s cultural heritage programmes provide institutional frameworks for the preservation and promotion of the festival that complement the monastery’s own stewardship of the tradition.

The Tourist and the Pilgrim

The Hemis Festival today draws two distinct types of visitor whose experience of the same event differs so fundamentally that they might almost be attending different occasions. The distinction between the tourist and the pilgrim is not a moral one. Both are welcome. But the difference between what they receive from the festival, and what the festival means to each, illuminates something important about what the Cham dance is actually for.

The tourist who comes to Hemis typically arrives with a camera, which is to say with an instrument for converting experience into image, and experiences the Cham primarily as a visual spectacle of remarkable richness. The masks, the costumes, the music, the dramatic movements of the dancers, the extraordinary mountain setting of the monastery, all of this is genuinely spectacular and justifies the journey from wherever the tourist has come from on purely aesthetic grounds.

What the tourist typically receives from the Hemis Festival is a vivid sensory experience and a set of images that will populate their memory and their social media feed with the particular combination of the exotic and the beautiful that drives contemporary cultural tourism.

What the Ladakhi Buddhist pilgrim receives is categorically different, not because they have access to something hidden from the tourist, but because they bring to the same event a framework of understanding that transforms its meaning entirely. They know who Padmasambhava is, not as a historical figure of academic interest but as the living presence whose blessings are available to them in this moment, renewed by the Cham that is being performed. They know what each mask represents and what the destruction of the torma figure means. They know that the music is not accompaniment but transmission. They know that being present at the Cham, with whatever quality of faith and attention they can bring to it, plants a seed of liberation in their mindstream that will bear fruit across however many lifetimes it takes.

This difference in what is received does not make the tourist’s experience less real or less valuable. Genuine aesthetic encounter with great art, which the Hemis Cham undeniably is, has its own forms of value. But the festival was not made for the tourist. It was made for the pilgrim. And understanding what it was made for is the condition for understanding what it actually is.

The scholars of Tibetan Buddhism whose work provides the most rigorous academic framework for understanding the Cham dance and its Tantric philosophical foundations include Geoffrey Samuel, whose research published through academic presses including Cambridge University Press has examined the relationship between Tantric ritual, embodied practice, and the transmission of Buddhist teaching in the Himalayan context with exceptional scholarly depth.

What the Mountains Hold

The Hemis Festival happens at 3600 metres above sea level, in a valley of the Indus that receives less than ten centimetres of rainfall per year, surrounded by mountains that were ancient before the first Buddhist teaching was given. The landscape is not incidental to the festival. It is one of its most active participants.

The thin air of Ladakh does something specific to consciousness. Not something dramatic or hallucinatory, but something real: a mild, persistent quality of heightened clarity, of edges being slightly sharper and distances being slightly more present than they are at lower altitudes. The Ladakhi Buddhist tradition has always understood this quality of Himalayan atmosphere as conducive to meditation, and the placement of monasteries at altitude reflects in part a practical understanding that the physical environment of the high mountains supports the interior work that the tradition requires.

When the Dungchen sounds at Hemis and its drone fills the valley, the mountains are not simply a backdrop to the sound. They receive it, reflect it, transform it. The sound that a tourist records on a phone in the Hemis courtyard and the sound that the same phone plays back in a city apartment at sea level are acoustically similar and experientially incomparable. Something happens to that sound in the specific physical conditions of that valley that cannot be reproduced anywhere else.

This is what the monks who have spent their lives at Hemis understand that visitors discover for the first time and carry home as the festival’s most indelible gift. The mountains are part of the teaching. The altitude is part of the practice. The cold air on the face in the June morning before the Cham begins is part of what makes the Cham what it is.

Padmasambhava promised to return whenever sentient beings call on him with sincere devotion. On the tenth day of the fifth Tibetan month, in the courtyard of Hemis Monastery, in the valley of the Indus, at 3600 metres above sea level, the monks of the Drukpa Kagyu tradition have been calling on him every year for over three centuries.

He has never stopped coming.

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Curious Indian: Fast Facts

• The Hemis Monastery was established in its current form in 1672 under the Ladakhi king Sengge Namgyal and is considered the largest and wealthiest monastery in Ladakh, housing a monastic community that has continuously performed the Cham dance and maintained the Drukpa Kagyu liturgical tradition for over three and a half centuries.
• The Hemis Festival commemorates the birth anniversary of Guru Padmasambhava on the tenth day of the fifth Tibetan lunar month, a date called Tsechu, and the word Tsechu meaning tenth day has become synonymous with the major masked dance festivals held across the Himalayan Buddhist world on this date.
• The great thangka of Hemis Monastery, depicting Guru Padmasambhava in his primary form surrounded by his eight manifestations and twenty-five principal disciples, is unfurled on the monastery’s facade only once every twelve years in the Tibetan monkey year, and its next unfurling after the 2016 ceremony will occur in 2028.
• The Dungchen, the long ceremonial trumpet played at the Hemis Festival, can reach lengths of up to four metres and is always played in pairs, producing a deep resonant drone whose vibration is experienced physically in the body and is understood in the tradition as representing the primordial sound of the dharma filling all of space.
• The Kangling, a trumpet made from a human femur bone used in the Hemis Cham ritual music, reflects the Vajrayana tradition’s direct engagement with death and impermanence as teachers rather than subjects to be avoided, and its sound is associated with the practices designed to guide consciousness toward liberation at the moment of death.
• The Black Hat dancers of the Hemis Cham, called Shanag in Tibetan, trace their specific dance form to the historical episode of the assassination of the anti-Buddhist Tibetan king Langdarma in the ninth century CE, making their performance simultaneously a commemoration of a historical event and a meditation teaching about compassionate decisive action.
• Guru Padmasambhava is understood in the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition not only as a historical eighth-century master but as a living presence whose blessings are continuously available to sincere devotees, and the Hemis Festival is understood as creating the specific conditions through which his living presence is renewed and made accessible to every being present at the Cham.
• The Hemis Festival is the largest tourist draw in Ladakh’s annual calendar and typically attracts tens of thousands of visitors, including large numbers of international travellers, who come specifically for the two-day festival from locations across India and the Buddhist world.
• The Ladakhi cultural world within which Hemis Festival is embedded has been under increasing pressure since the region’s reorganisation as a Union Territory in 2019, and the specific challenges this creates for the maintenance of the Drukpa Kagyu monastic tradition and the Buddhist educational institutions that train the monks who perform the Cham are subjects of active concern among scholars and community leaders.
• The relationship between the Hemis Monastery and the Namgyal royal dynasty of Ladakh has been continuous since the monastery’s founding in 1672, making it one of the longest-standing royal-monastic patronage relationships surviving in active form anywhere in the Indian Himalayan region.

Conclusion

The monks of Hemis put on their masks every year and become the deities they have spent months meditating upon. They move through the monastery courtyard to the sound of instruments that were ancient when the monastery was founded, in costumes that have been repaired and renewed across three and a half centuries of continuous use, performing a dance that was choreographed to transmit the most essential teachings of Vajrayana Buddhism to every being willing to witness it.

They do this because Padmasambhava asked them to. Not in any metaphorical sense, but in the direct sense that the tradition he established prescribed these specific practices at these specific times, and the monks of Hemis have honoured that prescription without interruption since 1672.

The tourists who come to photograph the Cham receive something real, the beauty of the masks, the drama of the music, the extraordinary visual richness of the performance in that extraordinary landscape. The Ladakhi Buddhist pilgrims who come to receive the blessing receive something different, the renewal of their connection to Padmasambhava’s living presence, the planting or deepening of the seed of liberation in their mindstream, the specific transmission that the Cham was designed to deliver.

Both are welcome. The teaching is given to everyone. That is the point.

The Dungchen will sound again next summer on the tenth day of the fifth Tibetan month. The masks will be brought out of their storage rooms and examined and repaired and prepared. The monks will have spent the preceding months in the meditation practice that will make them, on the day of the festival, something more than monks.

The mountains will receive the sound of the horns as they have always received it, without comment, without diminishment, without any indication that anything happening in the courtyard below them is anything other than the most natural thing in the world. Which, from the mountains’ perspective, it is.

Padmasambhava was born on this day. He promised to return whenever he is called with sincerity. The monks of Hemis are calling. In the theology of the tradition, he is already here.

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