A confusion of sounds: the gurgle of two-stroke engines, big-truck roars, bicycle bells, the crunch of pickaxes breaking earth. A band of musicians sits in a line on the roadside playing flute, tabla, and tambourines. A traffic policeman yells instructions into a bullhorn. Speakers installed on lampposts carry sounds from the main prayer ground: the sombre drone of Tibetan monks in chant, or more upbeat Indian Buddhist prayers, returning every few minutes to the Dalai Lama's deep voice, audible everywhere, explaining what the monks have just chanted or dispensing life advice, occasionally breaking into that famous good-natured laugh. During the final four days of the fortnight's proceedings, between 10 and 14 January, 2017, the Dalai Lama delivers the Kalachakra empowerment, a series of esoteric tantric initiations and visualisations which hardly anyone can understand but everyone is here for. His words are clipped, as if spoken in meter. The reverb on the PA system saturates the careful pauses in his speech with cascading trails of the previous syllables, like after-images from an intensely bright light.
The Cham dance
After the preliminary teachings end, a day is set aside for the propitiatory Cham dance. Weighed down in richly brocaded costumes, with silver ornaments and ritual instruments in their hands, a group of monks walks on stage with great gravity. Unlike on other days, the Dalai Lama is seated to one side: the Cham is to be the main act. The monks take their positions, commence a sonorous chant; they raise their right legs, angle their instruments just so; with a clash of cymbals, the dance begins. They are erecting an invisible vajra fence which will prepare the ground for the main Kalachakra empowerment. Arms trace magical shapes with hypnotic regularity. The figures move from one formation to another. Their chant swells, then ebbs, again and again. The air comes alive; some energy is shifting.
Meanwhile brightly costumed people begin to assemble in one corner of the enormous tent. In groups they take to the stage and begin to perform. The monks are relegated to the back of the stage but they continue their movements with unabated intensity, their chanting drowned out now by a succession of less holy tones: an uptempo call-and-response song of the people, the women's voices raised in glassy chorus, a flute piece by a Vietnamese monk, a farmer's song from Eastern Tibet. A group from the Russian republic of Kalmykia leap frenziedly around, accompanied by an orchestral pop number. On the big screens mounted around the tent, we see a monk standing backstage, dressed in workaday maroon robes, holding up his mobile phone to record the spectacle: the Cham dancers struggling to keep focus, their gaze slipping again and again to the leaping Kalmyks in front of them. Despite the tantric gravity of the Cham, the crowd laughs out loud at the absurdity of what we are seeing. Performers come and go, from Nepal, Bhutan, different parts of Tibet, Mongolia, the Russian Republic of Buryatia, and so on. Some are professionals, others untrained pilgrims, all wishing to represent their countries in front of the Dalai Lama.