Every now and again, if we are lucky, the daily routine of
life is interrupted by something wonderful. This week Loomis Chaffee was
privileged to host a group of Tibetan monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery
in southern India. They were on campus as part of our focus this year on South
Asia.
For three and a half days, the monks constructed a sand
mandala, or sacred cosmogram, called “Wisdom.” During that time students,
faculty, staff, alumni, parents, and townspeople found their way to Founders
Chapel, again and again, to watch with awe as the monks, usually three or four
at a time, used funnels and colored sand to construct an unbelievably detailed
and beautiful sand painting. We would stand in silent fascination as the
mandala grew ever larger and more complicated and wondering at the patience and
attention to detail that it entailed. The monks use metal funnels filled with
sand that they then vibrate with a metal rod to release the sand in tiny
streams. The noise of the scraping of rod on funnel resembles crickets with
their persistent hum and was an unexpected but pleasant aspect of the process.
The monks, who practice Tantric Buddhism, explained in both
an opening ceremony and an all-school convocation that the construction and
ultimate destruction of the mandala would help to bless and purify our school. Dennis
Robbins, the chair of our Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion Department,
introduced the monks at the convocation and had this to say about them:
The small group of monks we are
privileged to host are not only accomplished artists in various media ranging
from monastic music, ritual masked dancing, multiphonic chanting, and Mandala
Sand Painting, they are also genuine monastics who have committed themselves to
an austere and disciplined lifestyle in order to pursue enlightenment through
meditation and study. Their purpose is threefold: to make a contribution to
world peace and healing through sacred art; to generate a greater awareness of
the endangered Tibetan civilization; and to raise support for the Tibetan
refugee community now living in southern India.
Of course, the monks of Tibet, led by
His Holiness the Dali Lama, did not always live in India. Drepung Monastery was
originally established in Lhasa, Tibet in 1416 B.C.E.: roughly 75 years before
Columbus set sail in quest of a shorter route to the riches of the Indies. There the community flourished until
Tibet was invaded by communist China in the 1950s when the monastery was forcibly
closed and most of its inhabitants either killed or imprisoned. Fortunately,
about 250 monks escaped, making their way over the Himalayas to India, where in
1969 they re-established their monastic institution on the subcontinent where
Buddhism began in the 7th century B.C.E.
My interest in Buddhism began about 15
years ago when an enlightened colleague recommended that I read a collection of
Buddhist writings from a book called Zen
Flesh, Zen Bones. I did so and was enchanted with the subversive and
liberating wisdom I found there. Let me read a story from the book in order to
illustrate my point. It consists
of only nine sentences. It’s
called, “The Moon Cannot Be Stolen”:
Ryokan, a Zen Master, lived the simplest
kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only
to discover there was nothing in it to steal.
Ryokan
returned and caught him. “You may
have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not
return empty-handed. Please take
my robe as a gift.”
The thief was bewildered. He took the robe and slunk away.
Ryokan
sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor
fellow,” he mused, “I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”
Buddhist stories like this are designed
to nudge listeners into looking at the world in a new way, and to begin seeing
it, perhaps, as it really is, for the first time. They are subversive insofar
as they call into question old assumptions. They are liberating insofar as they
invite us to new ways of perception.
Consider the subversive nature of “The
Moon Cannot Be Stolen.” By offering us a portrait of a monk who lives a happy
and fulfilling life without possessions, we are invited to question our
attachment to material comforts. By offering us a portrait of a victim who, in
a gesture of hospitality, gives the robe off his back to the very man who wants
to steal it, we are encouraged to question our definitions of possession,
greed, and retaliation. Finally, by offering us a rather amusing portrait of a
naked hermit sitting in a field, enchanted with the light of the moon, and
wishing there was some way he could give this experience to his assailant, we
are forced to consider the power of individual perception and differences
between real and apparent value.
These are the kinds of things Buddhism
can teach an earnest student.
These are the kinds of things our guests, this group of Tibetan monks,
can teach us, if we allow them to touch our hearts and minds. They are
philosophical royalty. They are emissaries from a higher level of
consciousness. They are here to challenge our perceptions, recalibrate our
values, offer us the possibility of a more enlightened kind of existence, and
gently set us afloat on the tumultuous sea of life on a raft first constructed
by none other than the Buddha himself.
As a community, we all came away a little wiser about
Buddhism, a little closer with one another for having shared the experience of
watching, inspired by the gentle kindness and patience of the monks, and,
perhaps most of all, saddened that this wonderful visit had to come to an end.
I suspect that all of us in the Chapel for the closing ceremony would have
wanted to stay the traditional destruction of the mandala that symbolizes the
ephemeral nature of life. On a grey, overcast day, the monks carefully
deconstructed what they had taken so long to construct—an audible gasp went
through the room—and then distributed some of the sand to the audience. The
rest they carried down to the banks of the Farmington where it was released
back to nature.
Check out our website for more on this fascinating interlude
in the life of the school.
