2026 Theses Doctoral

Dancing Tantra: Body, Text, and Performance in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism

Lignos, Constantine

This dissertation examines tantric dance in Tibetan Buddhism as a ritual technology through which religious knowledge is produced by means of embodied action rather than textual belief alone. Challenging text-centered approaches in Religious Studies that have marginalized dance as decorative, derivative, or decadent, it asks how Tibetan tantric dance has functioned historically, how it has been transmitted, and what Tibetan dance texts themselves reveal about indigenous theories of performance.

Drawing on an archive of Tibetan dance manuals spanning from the 13th century to the present, alongside ethnographic fieldwork and learning from monastic dancers in India and the United States, this dissertation combines historical analysis, textual interpretation, and performance-based methodology. It traces a longue durée history of tantric dance in Tibetan Buddhism, demonstrates that dance texts operate as deliberately incomplete mediators that authorize lineage and activate embodied memory, and recovers a Tibetan Buddhist performance theory in which ritual action leaves durable ontological residues beyond the moment of performance.