The mandala was an artwork created with a most unusual intention: Upon completion, it would be destroyed.
For hour after hour I watched as the grains of sand were poured, slowly and with unbelievable care, into the emerging mandala. Students and faculty came by to watch the process, some staying a few minutes, other hanging around for hours. One female student watched the monks work for much of an afternoon. Thinking back to my own college days, I teased the student that she appeared to be spending as much time in class as I had -- which wasn’t much. The young woman insisted that she didn’t have a class that afternoon, which I took as the truth. It’d be seriously bad karma to tell a lie in the presence of 10 monks.
The making of the mandala began at noon on Thursday; by noon Saturday it was completed. The monks held a ceremony to bless the mandala, and I was moved to see the emotion the moment stirred in those from the local Buddhist community who were in attendance.
A monk held a gold, palm-sized ceremonial object called a vajra in hand. Though I understood that the ritual we were witnessing was leading up to the destruction of the mandala, I was startled nevertheless when the monk leaned over the mandala and -- as easy as you please -- pushed his fingers through the sand, erasing the design first from one direction, then another. Three days’ worth of painstaking work was undone in a matter of a minute.
Leah used her snapshot camera to shoot a close picture that I like of the monk’s hand. Many onlookers in the crowd recorded the moment with cameras in their cell phones. It was 2500 years ago that the Buddha traveled around India, I suspect on foot, and began to share his insights on impermanence and other philosophical concepts. I thought it was interesting to note that today the ceremonies that dramatize Buddhist philosophy are recorded on digital pixels, then passed from cell phone to cell phone by way of instant messaging. Everything changes. Nothing is permanent.
Later about 25 onlookers joined the 10 monks on the shoreline of Tacoma’s Commencement Bay. In drizzling rain, a monk poured the sand that had once been the mandala into the water. The monks offered a prayer that the now-sacred grains of sand would spread peace throughout the waters of the Pacific Northwest, and eventually the world.
