Paro Tsechu — the masked dances

Paro Tsechu unfolds over several days in spring in and around the Rinpung Dzong, the fortress-monastery above the Paro valley. The heart of it is the cham, sacred masked dances performed by monks and lay dancers in elaborate carved masks and brocade robes, each enacting an episode of Buddhist teaching — the subjugation of demons, the judgement of the dead, the deeds of Guru Rinpoche and the protective deities. To watch the cham is itself an act of devotion that confers blessing and merit; the dances purify the ground and the onlookers. Between them, the atsara — masked clowns — work the crowd with bawdy humour and keep order, a sanctioned irreverence woven into a solemn rite. The community comes in its finest, the women in the kira and the men in the gho, families spread on the dzong's flagstones for the day. The festival builds to its final morning, when before dawn the monks unfurl the Thongdrel — an immense applique scroll, some thirty metres across, depicting Guru Rinpoche — on the outer wall of the dzong; thongdrel means 'liberation on sight', and simply beholding it is held to cleanse sin. It is rolled away again before the sun can touch it. Tsechus renew the bond between the Buddhist teaching, the monastic body and the Bhutanese people, and the Paro festival is among the largest and most attended in the kingdom.