Following is a transcript of the author’s address for Buddhistdoor Global’s 30th Anniversary Symposium in Vancouver, Canada, held on 3–4 September 2025.
This month marks the 10th anniversary of Ancient Dances, my monthly column for Buddhistdoor Global. I’ve never missed a month, always considering it an honor and an edifying discipline to produce this column for BDG. It has become a personal yoga. Through these 120 monthly essays, over a decade, my column has attracted a steady international readership. This is not because all the readers are dancers, although there are a solid number of dancers who read my work. It’s because people enjoy good writing about things that they don’t know, or never had a chance to explore.
I was a contributor to Ballet Review in New York, for 34 years. It featured excellent writers. Many subscribers did so because the writing was good, whether or not they had a passion for the dance. They had a desire for good writing. A fine arts journal in classic B5 size, Ballet Review ceased publishing in 2020, after 55 years. Those 34 years of quarterly accumulation contain some of my best writing. I have had similar good fortune with BDG: like with Ballet Review, I have a very good editor. I’m a team player. I bring the best I’ve got and allow it to speak a language of shared values. Journalism is a perilous enterprise and I admire the editorial and production teams at Buddhistdoor Global for continuing to bring forth good writing, provocative topics, and intelligent perspectives. I am grateful for the platform from which I advocate for endangered ancient dances and movement forms in the healing, meditation, and martial arts. Buddhist practices uphold much ancient knowledge; Buddhist dances are repositories of knowledge.
I view my professional life, working with dancers from all parts of the world, as a kind of social contract: because I am afforded the opportunity to work in a way not open to most, I have a responsibility to share my experiences, discoveries, and research with others, as much as to assist the practitioners with whom I work. I am here to uphold the art of dance and the community of dancers; as well as the practice of exploration and the community of explorers. Writing is a basic way I share my work and experiences. But in fact, it is as an artist that I experience most things, and it is my dance-based skills in producing, directing , rehearsing, and documenting that make me useful to practitioners of ancient dances who negotiate their own continuity as a way of life: a constant re-alignment with tradition and modernity, as generations pass, and generational knowledge reveals its repositories for a role in future generations, or not. Writing facilitates my usefulness as a dance professional.
In my earliest encounters with Tantric Buddhism, I was struck by the initiatory story of Guru Rinpoche subduing malevolent energies with a dance at Samye monastery, thereby establishing Tantric Buddhism in Tibet in the eighth century. I wondered ardently for years: “Why did Guru Rinpoche use dance as the first act of Tantric Buddhism in Tibet?” I asked many people, lamas, dancers, scholars. Finally, the Je Khenpo, patriarch of Buddhism in Bhutan, answered plainly to me, “Because people like dancing.” I agree. My column for BDG treats the subject of dance, in its broadest sense, and people like dance. Dance draws people in and demonstrates an order beyond a mundane reality, beyond words, a whole-body response and engagement. Buddhism has an amazing legacy of dances connected to mystical visions, as well as dance as an advanced tantric yoga. Buddhist dances are remarkably resilient, many lasting centuries without serious disruption, others evolving in ways that sustained the thread of dance. Buddhist dance is philosophy in motion, mental cultivation in action. My writing intends to invite people to see and know more about dance, connect it to their own lives, and be welcomed as they encounter new ideas and expressions in form. Buddhist dance is embodied metaphysical cosmology, and can be viewed in many different ways. I like to bring the practicalities of dance and dancers into the story.
Another reason this column has attracted readers is that people are keen to see how dance is a vehicle for Buddhist principles, and other driving creative forces. We have witnessed over more than 2,000 years, that dance succeeds in its malleability. Dance—this performed and embodied alchemy of person, being, shape, and inner disposition—exhibits endless variation, each exemplary, and usually, deeply human in endeavor. That is what I have tried to show in these essays—in particular, that creative artists of all ages have taken principles, cosmologies, techniques of mental cultivation, along with techniques of choreographic innovation, and created epochs of cultural importance. Driven by an essential intention toward the truth of danced expression of a transformed state of mind, ancient sacred dances reveal characteristics not found elsewhere. This is how Guru Rinpoche established a radically empowered dance—cham—as a central characteristic of Tibetan Buddhism in the eighth century, and also how the recently deceased avant-garde theater director, the visionary Robert Wilson, transformed what opera, dance, and theater could be in a tapestry of art forms each re-invigorated by an Eastern principle, often robed and adorned in light.
Robert Wilson’s avant-garde masterpiece, Einstein on the Beach, in 1976, was an “abstract opera” composed by Phillip Glass, also a Buddhist, and a practicing Jew, with interests in Daoism and Hinduism. This production, choreographed by Lucinda Childs, revolutionized theater internationally, and became a touchstone of the global avant-garde, ushering in what would become one of the great ages of international avant-garde performance.
Robert Wilson explained his aesthetic approach when producing a museum show of Chinese imperial masterpieces. “In order to see this work, we need to empty our heads. Get the daily life and activities out of our minds so we can focus on something else. John Cage had a great influence on my thinking. He was one of the Western people that brought us closer to Eastern ideas. After having read Cage’s book on silence, my life was forever changed.”
In my column for Buddhistdoor Global, it is about the transformative power of Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian ideals on each other, and as understood by groundbreaking dance artists who experimented with the application of Buddhist principles in their own work, and in their own lives. Antony Tudor, one of the greatest Ballet choreographers of the 20th century, lived as a practicing Zen Buddhist all his life, dying where he lived; at the first Zen Institute of America in New York, the Buddhist community to which he belonged. His epoch-making ballet Jardin aux lilas, (The Lilac Garden), was the world’s first “Zen ballet” by design. Maude Lloyd Gosling, the South African ballerina who debuted the lead role in this ballet in 1936, described her artistic goal as “expressing the Zen of unspoken heartbreak.”
Learning these astonishing facts and statements of artistry fuel my sense of exploration and discovery, because the application of spirit, self, and principle always creates something new, something worth noticing for the evolution it portends. A master artist can uplift this newness into transformations that impact art forms, dance forms, whole cultural epochs. Sharing compelling examples of artists and explorers, practitioners and dancers resonates over time and the mind’s eye. Each with profound individual understandings, the application of higher principles to their lives and art, results in something new, revitalizing the human spirit. Inviting people into ancient and esoteric dances and the states of being they engender will remain the purpose of this column, Ancient Dances, for more years to come. Thank you for reading my column.
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