All week long, monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery in India have bent over a raised platform in the grand foyer of the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, carefully pouring vividly colored sand into an elaborate geometric design known as a mandala.
Then tonight, after they perform a dance to promote world peace, they will sweep the sand away, pouring it into the waters of Sarasota Bay as a healing blessing to the world.
It is a ceremony the monks perform again and again as they tour the country, generating awareness of the Tibetan civilization in China and its refugees in India through concerts and creations of the ephemeral mandalas.
“I thought this would be a perfect end to the season because of the spirituality,” said Mary Bensel, the Van Wezel’s executive director, as she watched the monks work Thursday afternoon. New Age enthusiasts and busloads of schoolchildren have paraded through the foyer this week to watch the monks at work.
The monks’ concert performances feature multiphonic singing, where the monks simultaneously intone three notes of a chord, and traditional Tibetan instruments such as 10-foot-long horns called dung-chen. Their CDs have made the top 10 on the New Age charts; their most recent recording, “Compassion,” pairs them with Gregorian chanters of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.
The Buddhist monks have trained for up to three years to create the mandalas, said spokesman Gala Rinpochey. They use narrow metal funnels called chak-pur that are filled with sand, even finer than Siesta Beach’s fabled quartz sand, made from ground white marble and colored with natural plant dyes. The monks rub metal spikes over the ridged surface of the funnels to make the sand flow out like water; the resulting rasping noise sounds like cicadas.
Creating the mandala is a meditative experience, Rinpochey said, and one that the monks prepare for through initiation, retreat and learning to breathe properly; a single sneeze could disturb hours of work. Errors can be erased, however, by gently inhaling through one of the funnels.
The monks’ U.S. tour requires a different kind of discipline, said Rinpochey, as they stay in hotels and dine in restaurants.
“You get to apply it in a practical way,” he said. “There is temptation, especially in the West when you have so many things.”
Westerners, however, are encouraged to yield to temptation. A long table of souvenirs, from jewelry made from the finger bones of monks to satin bags for carrying cell phones, is manned by two monks who take credit cards.
Source : http://www.heraldtribune.com
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