A group of Tibetan Buddhist Monks spent a week at Florida Southwestern College in Fort Myers recently as part of the “Mystical Arts of Tibet” tour. The purpose was to share the art and philosophy of their ancient order as they tour the country over the course of a year. They painstakingly constructed a sand mandala, a geometric design, one grain of colorful sand at a time. Then in a traditional ceremony they destroyed their work.
A crowd of students, faculty, and other onlookers crowded around the small ceremonial space with cell phones out to document the scene as seven Tibetan monks continued a tradition believed to date back to the fourth century.
They swept up the thousands of grains of sand that made up a finely detailed and vividly colored sand mandala. It took a week to create. Working in shifts, they gently tapped long metal tubes specially made for this art form to guide the sand which would then trickle into place, carefully aimed by the steady hand of the quiet, meticulous artist. Geshe Loden is one of the visiting monks.
“By making the sand mandala- any mandala- we believe that it brings balance and harmony to the nature which is crucial for the wellbeing of its inhabitants,” said Loden.
There are thousands of kinds of mandalas, all with different designs and symbolism. The one the monks chose to make at FSW represented the medicine Buddha which is believed to promote enlightenment and healing properties.
At points during the ceremony the low, rumbling chants broke out into sounds that remind you of an elephant – sounds which come from the long brass Tibetan horns. Geshe Loden said this gets the Buddha’s attention, to invite him to be part of the ceremony.
The sounds in Building J on the Florida Southwestern Campus are from a world away brought here via a monastery in Atlanta, which has partnered with the Deprung Loseling monastery in Southern India- formerly of Tibet.
Laura Weir is the Executive Director of International Education at the college. She said having the monks here for the week was inspiring to the students.
“This has been a huge success because a lot of our students have never been outside of Florida,” said Weir. “They’ve never been outside their own lives and so this has really opened things up for them to start thinking about things and start asking a lot of questions.”
Hundreds of students visited the monks every day to watch their progress, ask questions, and learn a little about the Buddhist philosophy. More than a hundred people crowded the hall to see the monks’ hard work be dismantled. Geshe Loden said this is the most important lesson this art form teaches.
“It shows the impermanence of all the phenomena,” he said. “Nothing lasts forever. If we have that understanding of impermanence, then we can utilize that understanding, that knowledge in our day to day life. When we are faced with different challenging times, like losing our job, our family, or position or fame. Everything- it is very hard to let it go. But if we have in our heart the lesson of impermanence, then we can utilize it during those difficult situations.”
Draped in their traditional maroon and saffron robes, the monks circled the mandala while chanting and ringing a bell, then the dismantling began with purposeful and ritualistic strokes of a brush, swirling the many colors of sand into a greyish brown heap. Half of it was distributed to the people in attendance in small vials, and the other half was scooped up into one large vessel, carried out the door in a procession to be sprinkled into a moving body of water where the belief is it will be carried out to the sea, taking its healing properties with it.
