Tibetan monks speak volumes with sand mandala

A group of children are escorted into the Carrboro ArtsCenter on a sunny summer afternoon, wily and energetic as they cross the parking lot.

“We’re going to see the monks,” their chaperone said, herding the group together. “You haven’t seen anything like this before.”

As the children enter the Nicholson Art Gallery and gaze upon the three monks sitting aligned in a circle, the room silent aside from the clacking of the metal sand funnels called chak-pur, their demeanors gradually change.

The children, like the rest of the room, become silently contemplative, sitting neatly around the assumed boundary of the monks.

“I find it so beautiful,” said bystander Carol Klein, a Chapel Hill resident. “It’s such a good way to learn how to be present in the moment.”

The room is peaceful.

On Monday, the Tibetan Buddhist Monks of Drepung Gomang Monastery started creating a sand mandala to show their compassion and loving kindness for the ongoing support of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro community. This visit will mark the fifth time the monks have visited Carrboro.

The stop is part of their larger Sacred Art Tour of the United States, in which the monks have four main goals: participate with the local community to create world peace, share Tibetan Buddhist culture, raise international support for Tibet under China’s rule and raise money for the 2,000 monks of the Drepung Gomang Monastery through the sale of merchandise.

They do so in part by using the art of sand painting, as used in Tantric Buddhism, laying down a spiritual design through colored sand from memory, grain by grain.

The mandala will be finished on Friday; on Saturday, in accordance with tradition, the intricate design will be washed away.

“When they’re working on this beautiful piece of art, it’s almost like a cosmic piece of art because it has in a way no man-made lines — it’s all very circular and based off of cosmic patterns, sacred geometry and things like that,” said ArtsCenter marketing director Adam Graetz.

“I think it’s almost like watching them meditate and get lost in this trance while they’re working on it and being hyper-focused on it and hyper-aware of what’s going on.”

On their tour of the United States, each location’s host is allowed to pick the mandala. The mandala chosen for the ArtsCenter expresses compassion, the same mandala chosen by Baltimore when the monks visited after the Baltimore riots.

“The monastery has come here for several years, so people in Carrboro and Chapel Hill have shown incredible generosity and support,” said Geshe Lharampa Yonten Gyatso, the most senior monk, through his translator, Dawa Tsesing.

While the mandala is a gift to the community, Gyatso finds a gift in the support America continues to provide.

“I would like to thank, on behalf of the monastery, all of the Americans in different cities that the tour has been coming to for several years. And the people are very supportive and welcoming,” Gyatso said. “When I return, I can take from America the sense of generosity and altruistic approach toward helping others.

“For that, I would like to thank America from the bottom of my heart.”

arts@dailytarheel.com