The oracle bone script (甲骨文) is the earliest attested form of Chinese writing, dated to the Late Shang dynasty in the second millennium BCE. The inscriptions were carved on the underside of turtle and tortoise shells called plastrons, or on ox scapulae as part of divination rituals that were a kind of scapulimancy or blade-bone reading. After heating, the cracks were “read” and divined. The inscriptions recorded both the query and the diviner’s interpretation. These ritual objects of divination, collected, are known in China as oracle bones. As such, the oracle bone script is one of the earliest known forms of written language, a ritual use for language, where an image—a pictograph of a person dancing—is language itself. We see a dancer holding feathers or branches in a ritual to communicate with the divine: another dimension of reality. There is a shamanic aspect to this glyph.
The petroglyph that forms the basis for the Core of Culture logo is Indian and, much older than any written script, nevertheless uses dancers as drawn language. In the oracle bone script for dance, the evolution from picture drawing to abstract use as language-symbol is evident. How fascinating that at this earliest phase of language-making, the very image of the body dancing in a ritual is present, bringing notions of mental transformation and the sacredness of dance as a communicating medium.
Over time, those pictographic forms developed into bronze script, seal script, clerical and regular script, and so on. Many oracle characters began as pictographs or simple ideographs, but by the Late Shang period they had already become partially conventionalized and abbreviated into use as written characters. So when we talk in artistic terms about an “oracle-bone form” of dance, we are often reconstructing from variant graphs found in excavated bones, on bronzes, and in early manuscripts. Today there is a calligraphy style called “Oracle Bone.”
Doctoral work conducted by the late Taiwanese choreographer-scholar Liu Feng Shueh (1925–2023) in London at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, and at Cambridge University, examined the frequency and contextual range of the oracle bone script for dance, and its significance as a marker of the magical profundity of communication at ever-deeper levels of existence. This is similar to the Newar Buddhist understanding in Kathmandu, where the word dance means meditation. What is so valuable that it is to be divined, to be interpreted, to be inscribed, and recorded as words? What action is this? It is the divine action of expression at the core of one’s essence; one’s purpose and action in the world.
I was fortunate to know Mme. Liu Feng Shueh from my own studies at the Laban Centre of Movement and Dance, to read her thesis, and to see her choreographies performed. I was shown many reconstructions from the Tang dynasty in her studio theater in Taipei, and also even earlier Confucian dances, noble and geomantic. Madame Liu believed that the rigor and nobility of Chinese dance emanate from the oracle bone script for dance. Without the truth of the meaning of the glyph being alive in a danced performance, something critical is missing. Whether modern dance, the dances of Taiwanese indigenous people, or bringing to new life the dances of archaic times, Liu Feng Shueh taught and created a connection to the oldest expression of dance. She is considered one of the pioneers of Chinese modern dance.
What a delight to see recently for sale a most unusual scroll, dating probably to the 1970s. I purchased it and it hangs in my study. It is in the standard literary form of four characters. Modern script and the artist’s Buddhist name appear smaller on the left side. The scroll is as much poetic and philosophical as it is rhetorical and imagistic. It is meant to hold much meaning, beyond words, elusive and poetic. It evokes the spirit and time the Oracle Bone period, and in that, it carries a ritual weight, a seriousness of action. This modern calligraphic scroll written in oracle-bone script declares: Dance is the complete practice.
What at first looks archaic, paleographic, and indecipherable becomes a living statement of ritual, spirituality, and art—reminding us that dance is not mere performance, but the fulfillment of wholeness; a practical way to become what Daoists call “a real human.” Dance is moving in more than one world at once, gracefully gamboling between them all, the consummate picture of self-awareness even as selflessness is the end state of the ritual dance. According to a 12th century Drikung Kagyu Buddhist dance treatise, The Snow Lion’s Attributes, “Dance is the apotheosis of mystical attainment.” This meaning is not far from the scroll we are examining.
This is my reading of the scroll, although there are others, as with any translation, and surely regarding any symbolic divinatory image. Oracle bone script was the language of ritual and communication with the divine. The emphasis of dance as the first character on this scroll and using the oldest known written glyph for dance underscores the spiritual sobriety and the awesome magical power of dance, summoned and extolled anew. Plain, powerful, unfancy. And a bit postmodern, relying on bold classical forms for a modern anachronistic effect.
This scroll was offered to me by an art dealer whom I know. What caught my attention immediately was the character for dance, written in oracle-bone script. I knew that glyph, with its raised arms and feathers, a remnant of the earliest ritual dances carved on turtle plastrons more than 3,000 years ago. I bought the scroll not knowing what the other characters meant, drawn only by the presence of dance in its archaic form.
The inscription turned out to be four characters: 舞之全業. At first glance one might translate this as, “All dance,” or, “The complete art of dance.” But in English that phrase sounds more like a survey—a book cataloguing styles and histories; or an introductory book for dance students. The scroll, however, is saying something very different. A more faithful and serious rendering would be: “Dance is the complete practice.” In other words, dance is not fragment, not entertainment, not even just art, but a wholeness—a practice that encompasses body, mind, offering, and discipline. The dance image used is that of a ritual dancer—the original purpose of dance.
The scroll is modern, written in a revivalist oracle-bone style by a calligrapher signing as Yiru (One Suchness), a pen name drawn from Buddhist thought. It is not a relic of antiquity but a personal creation, a high-minded, poetic, and mystical self-invention, placed in the great tradition of Chinese calligraphy. The brushstrokes themselves move like some ancient pace: bold, archaic, enigmatic, embodying the mystery of what they declare, while the artist’s anonymity is shrouded in a spiritual and poetic name. Ink painting and calligraphy are sometimes discussed as dance.
To Western readers, this idea is unusual. Dance is usually thought of as performance or entertainment, sometimes as art, but rarely as spiritual practice. In many Asian and ancient traditions, however, dance is never merely symbolic—it is effective and purposeful. Monks, wizards, and shamans danced to consecrate space, to invite deities, to protect the community, or to transmit teaching.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the great cham dances are not merely spectacles but ritual offerings. The dancers embody protective deities, and the steps themselves renew time and purify the environment. In Daoist ritual, meditation, and martial practice, the Pace of Yu is a sacred choreography taught to align the practitioner with cosmic order. In Japan, Zeami wrote of the dance in Noh as “writing calligraphy in the air,” a striking reminder that movement can be both art and experiential revelation. Across these traditions, dance was understood as complete practice: effective, transformative, and integral, embodying all aspects. Alive and so expressing life; elemental and so, universal.
The calligraphy on this scroll does not describe dance, it declares it. Dance is the complete practice—whole, capable of carrying body, mind, and spirit together. The character for dance itself shows this: hands holding feathers, feet in motion, a figure dancing in embodied ritual presence. When written in oracle script, the ancient meaning is visible again: dance as invocation, as communication with the unseen.
What is remarkable is the simplicity of the inscription. Four characters, written in an archaic style, yet carrying a truth that entire treatises struggle to express. This is in the spirit of the literati: to take brush and ink and make of them not only art but a way of living. The boldness here is in its clarity. It does not embellish or argue. It simply says: dance is the complete practice.
In this way the striking scroll is more than decoration. It is a living statement of ancient ethics and philosophy in our own time, a reminder that art can still be a vessel of truth. The calligraphy itself finds its flow, moving between ancient oracle script and a modern hand, holding a mystery while speaking clearly. It stands as a small but profound example of how artistic tradition and personal spirituality meet, how practice can be inscribed in the simplest of forms.
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