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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Mark Kendall
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Editor: Mark Wood
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Fax: (909) 621-8203
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Fax: (909) 621-8535
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The monks of Gaden Shartse stress that the
mandala, like all things, is impermanent...
Grains of Sand
Skrit-skrit-skrit-a-skrit
The sound echoed through the hallways of the Smith Campus Center, a
siren call inviting foot traffic to investigate the spectacle in the
building’s Harry and Grace Steele Forum. Monks from the Gaden Shartse
Monastic College in Southern India, clad in saffron and crimson robes,
were hunched over a table rubbing sticks against worn brass funnels (“chak-purs”)
to apply thin, steady streams of brightly colored sand to an intricate
design they had outlined
within a 30-inch circle. Behind them, their palette of naturally dyed,
hand-ground granules was heaped into Tupperware bowls and arranged in
front of a picture of the Dalai Lama. Their week’s stay at Pomona
College was primarily consumed by the making of this ceremonial sand mandala.
 Emphasis on the making. The monks consider the mandala to be an act of
meditation rather than a work of art. The artifact is merely a
by-product—a de facto, symbolic roadmap of the creators’ inner journey
from the physical world through paths of enlightenment toward a perfect
balance of mind-body energies.
Groups of Gaden Shartse monks routinely leave their 588-year-old
monastery, which has been relocated to India since the Chinese take-over
of Tibet in 1959, to raise awareness about their exile and to offer
lessons about their religion and culture.
Concern for the plight of Tibetan monks is nothing new to Pomona student
Kristl Dorschner ’05. She has been involved with the Free Tibet movement
since childhood, a cause she shares with her activist parents. She was
dismayed, then, to arrive at Pomona and find no Free Tibet movement and,
to her way of thinking, a shortage of organized student activism in
general. She approached Associate Professor of Asian Languages and
Literatures Kyoko Kurita, who coordinates the Asian Studies Program, and
other faculty members with the idea of bringing monks to campus. Kurita
agreed to seek funding, arrange the visit and work with her colleagues
to integrate the visitors into Claremont classrooms. “We are bringing
Tibetan monks to broaden our scope of what ‘Asia’ means to us,” Kurita
said. “Our focus has been mostly China and Japan, but Asia is a very
complex world within itself.”
 The monks offered several demonstrations and discussions during their
residency, attended by students and faculty, as well as members of the
community and groups from area secondary schools. Each session began
with a purification ritual. Octave intervals from a Tibetan horn filled
Edmunds Ballroom; the monk behind the long copper cylinder began with
seemingly impossible bass notes only to drop down to even lower tones
that positively rumbled. Chanting, dancing and discussions followed, led
by Lobsang Dun Don, a young Tibetan monk, and Lobsang Wang Chuk, an
older Western monk who worked to secure visas for fellow monks, often
remarking with wry irony that history had yet to record a war instigated
by a Buddhist nation.
Interaction with the monks was respectful but often curiously distant;
language and cultural barriers were a factor, and the young monks, most
of whom were still students themselves, could only offer a brief glimpse
into the religion and lifestyle that they will spend 25 years mastering.
Pomona students seemed primarily curious about the differences in their
shared experiences as scholars. Monks in the Gaden Shartse Monastic
College follow a centuries-old course of study that can entail up to 18
consecutive hours of instruction followed by a ritualistic six-hour
Socratic question-and-answer session that is both physically and
mentally rigorous.
 The monks joined Visiting Instructor Huitzu Liu’s Religious Traditions
of China class to talk about Tantric teachings, inviting students to
openly challenge them—an idea that is important to their belief system
and a kind of discourse that had been notably absent from a week of
polite exchange. A young woman accepted the challenge and questioned how
one could follow a Buddhist teaching of loving all creatures equally and
fully sharing in their joy and sorrow without forming “messy” emotional
entanglements. The monks explained that principles of the karmic cycle
meant all beings had been mother to each other. This could not go
unaddressed by one of the class’s non-traditional students who—thanks to
some unreliable daycare—held her young daughter on her lap. “But you’re
celibate,” she offered, “how can you possibly know the bond you form
when you have a child?”
Mandala—a Sanskrit word meaning circle—is a reminder of the cycle of
life and death. The monks stress that the mandala, like all things, is
impermanent, and its dissolution is as much a part of the ritual as its
creation. Lobsang Dun Don led the closing ceremony as hundreds of
onlookers gathered, filling the Forum, the stairs to the second floor
and the balconies all around. The monks took small tools in hand that
looked like palette knives. They cut the manadala as if cutting a large
pizza. Each then took a small broom and swept a section toward the
center. As the bright colors mixed, they assumed the neutral dun one
expects of sand. The intricately detailed mandala, the result of days of
intensive labor, quickly became a dull mound, no larger than the
contents of a small sand pail.
The monks dispersed the remains among the onlookers, using Styrofoam
cups and plastic spoons from the Coop Fountain to scoop the sand into
small plastic baggies. The small pile that remained, per the ritual,
would later be placed in a body of water, spreading energies for global
healing.
—David Scott |
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