Tibetan Monks to Build Mandela at Westminster College
NEW WILMINGTON, Pa. -- A group of Tibetan Buddhist monks from the Gaden Shartse Monastery will visit Westminster College Oct. 13 to 19, Bryan Rennie, chairman of Westminster's department of religion, history, philosoph and classics, announced Wednesday.
The monks will create a sand mandala and offer a series of events free and open to the public, he said. They will construct the mandala on the lower level of McKelvey Campus Center over their week-long visit, and it will be swept up in a ceremonial dissolution.
There are many types of mandalas, Rennie explained, and each represents the architectural layout of the dwelling place of a Buddha or Bodhisattva. There are multi-layered symbolic images throughout the dwelling, where iconography, placement, and color have significance. In addition, a mandala is used during the initiation of a monk into a high form of meditation. To the learned monk, the mandala represents his vision of the universe.
A general performance is scheduled for 7 p.m. Oct. 15 in the Witherspoon rooms in the McKelvey Center. It includes the Dakini dance, performed when someone offers a long life prayer to his Root Guru; the Deer dance, performed to inspire love and compassion; and the Yak dance, performed to celebrate the relationship the Yak has to Tibetan culture.
A healing ritual is scheduled for 7 p.m. Oct. 16 in the Witherspoon rooms. The ritual has three stages: purification and removing of negativities, removing subtle negative imprints and offering protection.
The ceremony when the sand mandala is dissolved is scheduled for 10 a.m. Oct. 19 on the ground floor of the center.
Despite the hours of effort and concentration required to construct the mandela, it is not meant to be preserved, Rennie said, but to be dismantled and ceremonially "dissolved." In upholding the belief that life is transient, the monks sweep up the mandala and place the sand in a river, lake, or ocean as an offering to purify the surrounding environment. In this case, the monks will place the sand in Westminster's Brittain Lake.
Published by The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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