Sometimes the problem isn’t that something has changed. It’s that nobody noticed.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about since coming back to teach is how easily something can be passed from one person to another without anyone really understanding what they’re passing on.

I don’t think this is unique to lion dancing. Growing up Chinese, we had an altar at home. We would light incense and pray. At least, I assume that’s what I was doing. I watched the adults light the incense, hold it in their hands and mumble something quietly to themselves. So when it was my turn, I did the same thing. The problem was that I had no idea what I was supposed to be saying. Nobody had really sat me down and said, “This is what we’re doing, this is why we do it, and this is what these things represent.” I just watched. And then copied. For a long time, that seemed perfectly normal. Until I set up my own little altar at home. It took 2 years after we moved in to get there. And I only have it because, you know, it makes my house look a little more Asian and exotic and it gives me a reason to pass on some of my cultural roots. However, it’s rather basic and it’s missing all the extra paraphernalia that my parents have. There’s no fruit, no electric candle, no little speaker box that has a continuous Buddhist chant. I thought that I could explain all those things away. But I do have incense; and I have two little curious kids who have bluntly asked me, “what are you mumbling?, and why are we lighting incense?; and if it’s to respect our elders, how come we only do it when you remember (I light it about once a fortnight) and not every day like when you make us say good morning and good night to you?” I don’t have real answers to those questions, except that I did it out of habit because that’s how I remembered doing it as I grew up, but now when it’s convenient for me in a setting that looks a little less cluttered visually.

With that example in mind, the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve started asking myself whether copying something is the same as understanding it.

I think lion dancing has some of the same problems.

There are a lot of things that we do because we’ve seen other people do them.

You watch someone bow three times, so you bow three times. Someone else bows nine times, so perhaps you bow nine times. You watch the lions meet another lion and you follow along. You see someone perform an eye-dotting ceremony and you remember roughly what happened.

Eventually, one of those people becomes the senior person in the room. Then somebody asks them why we do something. And sometimes the answer is probably, “That’s just how we do it.”

I’m not saying that everything needs a philosophical explanation. Sometimes there may be a very practical reason that has simply been forgotten. Sometimes different schools may genuinely do things differently. And sometimes the answer might simply be that a particular tradition has been passed down that way for generations. But I think there’s a difference between saying, “This is our tradition and this is why we do it,” and saying, “We’ve always done it this way,” when really what we mean is, “I’ve seen other people do it this way and I never thought to ask.”

I’ve started noticing this in our own lion dancing.

One of the things I watched the students perform recently was the sleeping routine.

It was recognisably the same routine that I knew. The lion went to sleep, woke up and started cleaning itself. But as I watched it, something didn’t quite make sense. The lion would wake up, clean one part of itself and then go back to sleep. A little later, it would wake up again, clean something else and then go back to sleep. It was close enough that I could see where the routine had come from but it had slowly changed. And once I started looking at it as an audience member rather than simply as someone checking whether the students knew the sequence, it seemed strange. A lion doesn’t wake up, clean one eye and then decide it needs another nap. Then wake up again, clean its ear and go back to sleep. At least, not in the version of the story that makes sense to me. It sleeps. It wakes up. It stretches, looks around and starts cleaning itself. Then it gets going.

That may sound like a small point, but I think those small points are often where a performance starts to feel either polished or unfinished. If the students haven’t been taught the full sequence, they have to fill in the gaps themselves. And they’ll usually do that with whatever knowledge they already have. That’s perfectly understandable.

In fact, I think that’s exactly how these things slowly change over time. Someone learns ninety percent of a routine. They forget ten percent. When they teach the next person, the missing parts get replaced with something that seems to make sense. The next generation learns that version. They forget another small piece. Eventually, everyone is still performing what they believe is the same routine, but if you compare it with where it started, there are small changes everywhere.

None of this requires anyone to deliberately change anything. It just happens.

I’ve seen a similar thing with some of the ceremonial aspects of lion dancing. During an eye-dotting ceremony, for example, there are a lot of details things happening that a junior member might simply observe but pay no attention to. There’s the material- cinnabar, the ribbon for the horn, the pomelo leaves (these are usually left out because they can be harder to source), the peacock feathers, and then some sort of a school eye dotting ceremony poem is read, the eyes, facial features and body are dotted and the lions are alive. To the junior member, they might just be observing the ceremony with no need to organise anything or know the order in which things happen. Everything is simply there when they arrive. Someone senior knows what to do. And one day, without really noticing it, the junior person watching is now the senior. Someone else is looking at them. And that’s when you realise that if nobody ever explained it to you, you might not know what to do. So do we just fit in whatever feels right?

I’ve had that experience myself.

There are traditions that I know about because I’ve been taught them. There are others that I’ve done because I’ve watched someone else do them. And there are probably things that I don’t even know that I don’t know. That last category is the dangerous one. If I don’t know something, at least I have the opportunity to ask. If I don’t realise there’s something missing, I’ll never think to ask the question.

One small example came up during an eye-dotting ceremony.

After the lions had been awakened and had eaten the lettuce, the lettuce was tossed and sprayed towards the altar, where incense was burning, rather than placing it in front of the altar as an offering. I don’t think anybody was deliberately trying to do the wrong thing. They were doing what seemed natural. The lion eats the lettuce and scatters it. But that was exactly the point where I realised that some things need to be said explicitly. You don’t throw lettuce into burning incense. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. But if nobody has ever said it out loud, perhaps it isn’t obvious at all.

The student isn’t responsible for knowing something that nobody has taught them. That has probably changed the way I think about my role as a teacher. When I first started, I assumed that if I demonstrated something clearly enough, people would pick up the details. Now I’m less convinced. Some things can be learnt by watching. Others need to be explained. And sometimes the explanation itself is the important part.

I don’t just want someone to know that the lion bows. I want them to understand when it bows, who it is bowing to and why. I don’t want someone to simply remember that the lion eats a lettuce. I want them to understand what that part of the performance is supposed to represent. And if I know why we do something, I want to tell them.

If I don’t know, I’d rather say that too. Because pretending that something is important when I can’t explain it doesn’t really help anyone. I think this is where I differ slightly from how I used to think about tradition. I used to think that preserving a tradition meant keeping everything exactly as I had been taught. I’m not sure I believe that anymore. I think the first step is understanding what you’ve been given. Then you can make a more informed decision about what should stay, what has already changed and what might need to change again.

But you need to know the difference between a tradition and a habit. One has been deliberately handed down whereas the other may simply be something that nobody ever got around to questioning.

And as I start going through our lion dancing piece by piece, I’m finding that there are probably more of those questions than I expected and that’s not necessarily a problem.