Histories of Buddhism are usually told through texts, monuments and philosophy. Yet movement—so central to Buddhist practice—has rarely been treated as evidence in its own right. At the upcoming International Academic Conference on the Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan, dance scholar Joseph Houseal will argue that ritualised movement is not a cultural byproduct but a vital source of historical knowledge.
His focus is Gandhara, the ancient crossroads of northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. Known for its Buddhist sculpture and monastic centres, Gandhara was also a landscape of disciplined movement: ritual walking, mudras, processions, warrior dances and theatrical forms shaped by centuries of cultural exchange. Houseal suggests that when viewed through the lens of movement, Gandhara’s history looks strikingly different.
Buddhism itself, he notes, is better understood as a practice of mind and body than as a “religion” in the Western sense. The Yogacara school, developed by Asanga and Vasubandhu in the fourth and fifth centuries, emphasised perception as conditioned and transformable. Its insights were inseparable from embodied discipline—posture, breath, gesture and walking meditation. Liberation was enacted through practice, making movement foundational rather than ornamental.
Gandhara’s position made it uniquely receptive to such ideas. Greek culture, introduced after Alexander’s campaigns, brought ritual drama, bodily discipline and theatrical embodiment of myth. Gandharan sculpture reflects this fusion: contrapposto stances, flowing drapery and muscular depictions of the Buddha reveal a visual logic rooted in Greek ritual movement. At the same time, indigenous traditions such as the Pashtun Attan—a warrior dance still performed today—added layers of martial rhythm and collective intensity.
Houseal argues that Gandharan art can be read as a movement archive. A standing Buddha with raised hand preserves a bodily configuration designed to focus attention. Seated meditation images embody choreography reduced to stillness. Narrative panels of circumambulation capture cognition in motion. Even guardian figures like Vajrapaṇi, modelled on Herakles, display coiled energy anticipating later ritual dynamism.
This convergence of Greek, local and Buddhist movement practices laid the groundwork for later Vajrayana Buddhism. Padmasambhava, associated with Gandhara’s Swat region, integrated Yogacara’s analysis of perception with tantric ritual technologies of embodiment. The masked dances known as cham, flourishing in Tibetan and Himalayan cultures, represent the culmination of this arc—cosmology made visible, ethics kinetic, metaphysics communal.
For Houseal, dance is not decoration but evidence. It shows how Buddhism evolved as a practice of the body, shaped by centuries of cultural interaction, and how movement itself became a means of knowing and transforming reality.
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