Seven Buddhist monks from Tashi Kyil monastery in India visited DePauw last week to build a sand mandala in the Union Building lobby as part of their 2013 U.S. tour.
Founded by Siddhartha Gautama around 520 B.C., Buddhism is a karmic religion that originated in India. Tashi Kyil is a small refugee monastery that houses 120 to 200 Tibetan Buddhist monks annually and that follows the teaching of the Dalai Lama.
Buddhists hope to attain liberation from earthly suffering, or to become enlightened, through several techniques believed to create good karma and shorten the path to enlightenment. The construction of mandalas is one of those techniques.
“It’s my understanding that mandalas can be constructed with a variety of images to represent a variety of concepts,” said Kate Smanik, director of the Spiritual Life Center. “We asked for one that represents peace.”
First-year Kainat Akmal was eager to watch the mandala take shape.
“I’m taking a Buddhism class and learning about this stuff,” Akmal said. “Now I’m actually seeing it. It’s cool that DePauw can bring something like this to campus.”
Monks from Tashi Kyil have visited DePauw twice now. Their first visit was in 2011 when a group constructed a similar mandala in the Hub cafeteria during their first U.S. tour. The tours are organized by the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center in Bloomington, Ind. and the center contacted DePauw when they were organizing the 2013 tour. The Center for Spiritual Life (CSL) agreed to host the monks again.
“Religious diversity is an important aspect of the diversity on campus,” Smanik said. “The monks’ visits are one way for the CSL to teach the DePauw community about a religion that isn’t as common in the U.S.”
The monks rely on the tours to raise the money needed to run their monastery because they do not receive aid from the Indian government. The monks are refugees from Tibet who left their homeland in the 1950s when China invaded.
“Their traditional ways of supporting themselves have been disrupted [by conflict],” said religious studies professor Geoffrey Goble. “Now they use the mandala as a way to support themselves.”
The week-long process began last Tuesday, Sept. 24, with an opening ceremony. During the ceremony, the monks gathered around their work place and sang a prayer. They also constructed an alter to the Buddha that included a picture of the Dalai Lama, their religion’s leader.
The monks began the process by drawing a pencil outline of the image on the board. For the rest of the week, they worked 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. arranging colored sands to create the masterpiece – an intricate circular design with a world at its center.
During last Saturday’s closing ceremony that capped the week, the sand used to create the mandala was poured into the stream outside Prindle Institute for Ethics. In Buddhism, it’s believed that the peace of the mandala will be carried throughout the land as the water sweeps the sands away.
The Center for Spiritual Life hoped the monks’ visit would help bring to life Buddhism in a way the classroom cannot.
“You can learn as much as you want about any religious tradition,” Smanik said, “but there’s something about experiencing it that’s mystical.”