There are many still-living dance traditions connected to the earthly travels of Padmasambhava. Also known as Guru Rinpoche, the legends associated with him include that he journeyed from his homeland of Swat among the Afghans, through India to Kathmandu, to Nabji, Bhutan, and finally to Samye, Tibet, where, in the eighth century, he established Tantric Buddhism in Tibet by means of a danced ritual. Here, I am connecting real dances to prevalent legends. Accordingly, the story goes, Padmasambhava consequently initiated the yogic, meditative dance, cham, as an essential practice of the first Tibetan Buddhist monastic order, the Nyingma. Attan is the Afghan dance Padmasambhava would have grown up with.
Merely connecting these dances—Pashtun attan and Buddhist cham—to the eighth century means that they are at least 1,200 years old. In fact, the dances and dancing cultures that Padmasambhava encountered along the way, and the mystical training he was also accumulating, are much older. One of these dance traditions—a naked dance with Paleolithic origins—is on the brink of extinction. The other three are robust and long-lasting, but also endangered, as much ancient intangible culture is today. Is it the consciousness-transforming qualities of these dances that has contributed to their longevity? Were techniques of mental transformation transmitted and evolved through diasporas and the assimilation of dances?
I will introduce the attan tradition here to allow readers to begin to gain a sense of the actual dances Padmasambhava encountered and probably assimilated. A word about dancing cultures: there are cultures, unlike our own, where dance is an integral expression of life, including spiritual life. Cultures where everybody can dance at the drop of a hat, or on singing a song. Cultures where—if you grew up there or lived there for any length of time—you would inescapably know of the dances and probably how to do them. A simple search on the internet for “attan” will provide examples of dances by children, men, and women.
There are many types of attan, reflecting its widespread use for different occasions. This ceremonial dance is performed at weddings, festivals, and historically, particularly, during periods of strife and war. The attan is often performed with handkerchiefs and swords, serving as a reminder of the performers’ glorious and victorious warrior past. In recent decades, it has been performed with guns. Some regional types include: Kabuli Attan; Wardaki Attan; Paktia/Khosti Attan; Kochyano/Kuchi; Khattak Dance/Warrior Dance; Waziri Attan; and Mehsud Attan. The attan appears, now in many forms, where the Afghan diaspora traveled.
The region surrounding Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Swat-Waziristan) includes Kashmir, Gilgit, Ladakh, Balochistan, and Chitral. Throughout the area, I’ve been told again and again, there is an extremely old dance—locals say 5,000 years old—that still today permeates the entire region. It is the attan. There is no way that Padmasambhava grew up in Swat, near and among the Pashtun people, and did not know how to do the attan. Everybody can do the attan, and it has endless variations and purposes, from the chaste to the seductive, from the familial to the mystical, celebratory and ritual. It would have suited Padmasambhava’s wizardly tendencies. At the attan’s core is a unique and unusual dance step where the dancer turns on the spot multiple times in one direction, and then immediately turns again the opposite direction, all the while advancing a large circle of dancers. What is provocative about discovering this step is that it is also a characteristic step of Buddhist cham dance, established by Padmasambhava, who came from Swat. This is no coincidence, methinks.
What we think of as Muslim cultures in the central Asian regions of Gilgit and the Khyber Pass, Peshawar, Waziristan, and Swat Valley, are much older than Islam or the advent of Islam there in the 11th century. Most societies in the area practice both Islam and their tribal religions. That means dancing. There has also been a tug-of-war with the attan, and dancing in general, being banned during different periods. The Pashtun people, combining Greek and Central Asian gene pools, are the origin of the word “Afghan,” which was used to describe them from them earliest times. Afghanistan, as a place and a culture, derives from the Pashtun, but today is comprised of many tribes. The Taliban forcefully tried to ban attan as un-Islamic, coarse, and forbidden, just as they did with music. But the popularity and cultural identity of the attan won out, survived the Taliban, and now even has representation in pop music thanks to Coke Studio in Pakistan, which features traditional artists in modern ways. The attan is said to have derived in part from the dance of the chorus in Greek tragedy, which dates to 500 BCE.
Alexander the Great invaded Afghanistan in 330 BCE, and stayed there for three years. A settlement of Greeks remained. This Greek element continues to define the ancient cultural milieu melding Central Asian, Buddhist, and Greek traditions. There is a record in Afghanistan’s Ghandaran art (100–300 CE) of Buddhist figures and practices, as well as of Greek tragedy, Dionysian rituals, and vernacular theater. No doubt early Buddhists in Afghanistan encountered Dionysian rites and theater. Some scholars believe “attan” comes from “Athens” or “Athena.”
Just as with the study of Buddhism, dance may hold a key to unlocking certain cultural encounters and assimilations. The attan is a pyrrhic dance, designed for battle. It builds into a wild frenzy, displaying extraordinary feats of physical and mental control. It is a male dance, full of jumps and turns, and skillful agility. Young men with long hair dance attan all night, transforming the entire gathering into a magical and mystical generation of spiritual transport, not wholly unconnected to Sufi dervish spinning. In these geographic regions, Sufi dancing is related to attan. It is certainly a dance every Sufi can do.
The characteristic repetition of alternating turns to the right, followed by turns to the left, while forming a large circle of dancers, characterizes both attan and cham, and indeed also the basic movement of strophe/anti-strophe in Greek choral verse and dance. There is reason for further exploration. It is an uncanny similarity. This is the choreography I noticed that gave birth to my idea that Padmasambhava used attan to create cham, along with other dances and tantric practices. Or, more plainly, that attan influenced the choreography and basic steps of cham. In this case, dance research supports the idea that Padmasambhava came from Swat.
Discussing geography needs historical explanation. Of course, Pakistan was created in 1948 and did not exist in the eighth century, when it was a land of Afghans and Pashtuns and other dancing tribal cultures. Padmasambhava is introduced to Westerners as “Indian” and this whole vast region as “India,” and much of it is today. But imagining Padmasambhava as “Indian” is not helpful to understanding his cultural roots. The people who lived, and still live, in these diverse mountainous areas are distinct races, never Hindu, but tribal. This region’s ancient dance forms and religious practices reveal the cultural intersections of early Buddhism with indigenous esoteric traditions. This grafting of movement forms can be understood as Buddhism connecting to much older religious practices, without the filter of Hinduism. The dances of Buddhism can be understood as repositories of pre-Buddhist techniques, practices, and even deity groups.
The short examples of attan shared here could as well be a collection of other types of attan—there are so many. Here, I’ll highlight two main aspects of attan: everybody does it, and, for boys, it is part of growing up. There is the late-night, outdoor, all-male version of the dance, where young men dance themselves into transport, trance, and frenzy. It seems not all that different from Buddhist cham in many respects, although it is wilder and not predictable. Like Buddhist cham, attan performances can last for hours and hours, all night long. This long duration of dancing itself, while often overlooked, is consciousness-altering. Buddhist cham, too, has clear martial elements and purposes, and there are many stories of cham being used in battles and warfare. Pyrrhic frenzy is one use, sword-stroke practice and fighting is another. Until the 20th century, cham was always performed with real weapons.
Ferocious frenzy to instill fear, astonishing skills to display martial finesse, and physical superiority characterize pyrrhic dances. Attan is all of these. I have had the good fortune to see many attan performed in the flesh. There used to be more “authentic” attan available to see online, but much has been removed and a search for “attan” today will likely yield a lot of wedding attans, some performed with guns, most recorded for social media. Today, handsome men in skintight Western suits perform attan at weddings as celebratory performances. Women perform the attan now—everybody does attan—but women’s dances in this region have their own choreography, more feminine and curvaceous.
Please enjoy these several short videos of attan. They are offered to feature the remarkable turns and extreme head rolls, also executed in both directions. Traditionally performed by men in societies where the genders were largely separated, it is clear that the attan was an ecstatic dance, inducing young men into trance states and bringing their bodies into physical states of exaltation and transportive endurance. This type of attan dance connects to Sufi dervish spinning, which, notably, turns in only one direction; and also with erotic dance entertainments, using attan as a choreographic and musical base for endless variations.
Exploring parallels and even similarities between dance traditions in Swat Valley, Kathmandu, Bhutan, and Tibet provides a broader lens on the diffusion of Guru Rinpoche’s influence. Local legends, indigenous mystical mind-body techniques, and pre-Buddhist practices coalesced into evolving Buddhist dance forms. The Swat Valley’s folk traditions of attan, an ecstatic, trance-inducing warrior dance, resonate with tantric dance practices attributed to Guru Rinpoche. Accelerative rhythms, spiraling footwork, and the taking on of divine virtues as part of a mystical and metabolic transformation—aspects shared by attan and cham—help to trace continuities between Central and South Asian esoteric traditions, through time and the Himalayan landscape, making an inherent sense expressed as long-lasting dance traditions.
By weaving together dance ethnography, cultural philosophy, textual readings, and visual art study with actual tantric practices, we can construct a richly layered understanding of how living dance traditions embody and perpetuate the myths of Guru Rinpoche. This comprehensive approach situates these dances not merely as performative relics but as dynamic, living expressions of spirituality and tantrism, alive with the transformative power of their original ritual sources. Such is the ancient and still vital dance called attan.
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I am exploring the attan, along with Newar Buddhist Charya Nritya, the Nabji naked dance, and Buddhist monastic cham with fellow researcher Karen Greenspan in an ongoing course through 18 May. Please join in!
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Related features from BDG
Padmasambhava’s Buddha-field of Tantric Dances: Re-establishing Dance in the Narrative of Guru Rinpoche
Who is Padmasambhava?
Precious Guru: Tracing the Wild and Sacred Legacy of Padmasambhava
Mystical Dances in the Kingdom of Bhutan, Part 1: A Black Magic Dance at the Core of Bhutan’s Founding
