Photos: Tibetan Sand Mandala

Photos: Tibetan Sand Mandala

Photographs at Arrillaga Alumni Center
Stanford University, October 18-19, 2010

By Peter Y. Chou
WisdomPortal.com

Preface: I first learned about Tibetan Sand Mandala from my poet-friend Denise at Round Table Pizza (1992) after Dick Maxwell's Poetry Workshop at Foothill College. However, it would be years till I saw this sacred artwork. Robert Warren Clark presented a series of six lectures "Tibetan Art: Worlds of Light & Darkness" at Stanford (May 19-June 29 2006). They were so popular that he offered some additional lectures during July and August 2006. His last talk was a two-hour slide show of "Tibetan Sand Mandala", with his personal photographs of this sacred ceremony. It was fascinating watching the preparation of chanting to create sacred space, the patient work of the artisan monks tapping colored granules of sand in creating a symmetrical colorful mandala. After the beautiful mandala was completed, another ritual of chanting accompanied by musical instruments. Then the destruction of the mandala, where the colored sands were placed in a flask and dispersed in a nearby creek of flowing water. On October 17, Susan emailed me about seeing the Sand Painting at Arrillaga Alumni Center. The monks from Drepung Loseling Phukhang Monastery invited her to watch the webcast of Dalai Lama on Friday, October 15. I had forgotten the October 13 email from Stanford Center for Buddhist Studies on "Sacred Arts of Tibet Tour: Creating a Picture of Universal Compassion" that the monks were making a sand painting for world peace at Arrillaga Center on October 14-15, 18-19. Since I was busy assembling Selected Poems 2010 for The Dalai Lama and making 89th birthday greetings for my Cornell Professor Harold A. Scheraga, I didn't get to the Sand Mandala until 4:40 PM on Monday, October 18. I took 16 photos on that occasion. The next day, a friend drove me to Arrillaga Center to see the closing ceremony of defacing the Sand Mandala. I got there at 11:57 am October 19. A larger crowd had gathered in the lobby viewing the finished Sand Mandala. After taking two photos from ground level and four from the balcony, my camera chip ran out of memory. So I didn't take photos of the closing ceremony where five monks chanted, rang bells, clashed cymbals before destroying the mandala. The head monk walked around the Sand Mandala Table six times while chanting. Then he used a dorje and made a cross in the center followed by two diagonals (X), so the resultant figure looked like the 8 directions of a compass. It also reminded me of the Chinese ideogram for rice (

). A second monk then used a flat spatula and made eight spiral curves so the colored sands were mixed into heaps of gray. One portion of the sands was saved in a bottle to be dispersed in San Francisco Bay to promote peace. The rest were collected in small plastic packets and given to the audience. Some CDs of Tibetan chanting were also distributed. After receiving the Mandala Sands and CD, I put three dollars (for Buddha, Dharma, Sangha) and a haiku "Sand Mandala— / granules of sand so small / creating cosmos so big" in the red envelope for their donation box. Below are 21 photos of the Dalai Lama Sand Mandala at Arrillaga taken on October 18-19. As I was watching the beautiful Sand Mandala's destruction, a person next to me said "Why couldn't they spray some chemical fixant on this Mandala and display it in a museum?" I told him that's the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence teaches us that all things die— this mandala, our lives, the sun, and even the universe will perish. After witnessing the Sand Mandala's ceremonial defacement today, I understood at last the ancient passage from Confucian Analects 3.17— Confucius says to Ts'ze: "You love the sheep, but I love the ritual."