Most choreographers meet the challenge of making a new piece by heading into the studio and working through their ideas with the dancers – usually against the unwelcome pressure of a deadline.

The route taken by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui when he was preparing Sutra was strikingly different. He spent several months in China's Henan province, joining in the daily life of the Buddhist monks at the Shaolin temple, where martial arts training is as integral to the disciplines of their faith as prayers and meditation.

Cherkaoui had fallen in love with kung fu when he was a child, awed and intrigued by the moves – the high-flying kicks, somersaults and rapid-fire fists – he saw in the Bruce Lee blockbusters. Shaolin monks are acknowledged worldwide as masters of that martial art, so observing and learning from them seemed an ideal way to combine some much-needed downtime with researching new directions in movement. The eventual outcome would be Sutra, a box-office hit when it premiered in 2008 and a global success since. Now touring again, the piece comes briefly to Scotland and is at Edinburgh's Festival Theatre this weekend.

The literal meaning of sutra is a thread or line that holds things together – you can catch its drift in a word like "suture". For Cherkaoui, that sojourn in the chilly high altitudes of Shaolin initiated a series of connections that were as brilliantly bold as they were unexpected. Instead of creating a new work for Western dancers, Cherkaoui found himself collaborating with the monks, recruiting several of them as performers in a work graced by a design from the Turner Prize-winning sculptor Antony Gormley. On paper, the combination of Buddhist monks, some of them as young as 10, and Gormley's vision of moveable coffin-sized wooden boxes might have seemed a recipe for clunky choreography (if not downright disaster and physical injury). On-stage, that frisson of danger is embraced as an element of our own journey through life, with the sheer prowess of the monks in handling the boxes feeding into the symbolic and contemplative dynamics of Sutra's spectacular artistry.

For Belgian dancer Ali Thabet, who shared the Shaolin experience and the subsequent choreographic process with Cherkaoui, the ongoing interaction – on-stage and off – with new groups of Shaolin monks means that, five years after Sutra premiered, he still enjoys performing in it. Thabet's role on-stage is as The Westerner: his box is made of metal. "It's made of a different material," he says "because I am, too. One of the first things Larbi and I learned at Shaolin was that you really have to give your whole life to being there. A few months won't make you into a Shaolin monk." He laughs, remembering the bone-biting cold, the early-to-rise and early-to-bed routine and the rigorous daily rituals that train the minds and bodies of monks young and old.

"Looking back, you can feel a kind of happy nostalgia," he says. "There is such calmness and serenity at Shaolin. The place is high in the mountains, really beautiful, but the truth is, it's a tough, hard life. Even the little monks, some of them only five or six years old, live in a very disciplined way.

"In the West you think: 'that must be so terrible for a child'. In fact, these little monks seemed so much happier than a lot of children anywhere. They can be very playful, very mischievous. A lot of the young monks, in their teens and 20s are the same, and it was that playful quality that helped us work out how to use Antony's design and bring it into the choreography."

Gormley's boxes move a lot, pushed and lifted by the monks into lines and stacks that resemble the petals of a lotus flower one moment, a city-scape of skyscrapers the next. Walls, boats and beds are all conjured up with as much seeming ease as the pieces in a toy game played – as happens in the choreography – by a Western man and a little monk.

Audiences worldwide have gasped and applauded at the melding of Zen precision with fierce, fast movement. Those wooden boxes take on life and energy, as the monks dart and scamper with a degree of brinkmanship that only works because of their Shaolin-honed aesthetic that balances athleticism with a concentrated philosophical focus.

As Thabet explains, those boxes also represent something mystical and profound. "You could call it personal space, not just in a physical way but also the privacy of the mind and the individuality of the soul," he says.

"Sutra is very spectacular, but it is also a very spiritual piece. It has to be, because of who the monks are. Even when they are touring with us, going to so many Western cities, they still retain their Shaolin purpose.

"The box embodies that, and if it looks like a coffin, it could also be seen as a portal to another life. Larbi and I shared in so much of what is the everyday practice of Shaolin, but we're choreographers and dancers. We brought our movements to Shaolin and exchanged ideas, came closer to the philosophy that is the true power within kung fu.

"And the monks, even the young ones in Sutra, meet the challenges of our contemporary art form with a technique and a wisdom that is centuries old."

Sutra is at Edinburgh's Festival Theatre tomorrow and Saturday.