Completed Sand Mandala

The article below is taken from www.gyuto.va.com.au
The photos were taken by Maya, Jennifer Harris and Leon Woods during a sacred ceremony in Hazelwood Park, South Australia, in July 2007.

GYUTO MONKS OF TIBET

The life of a Gyuto Monk is a life of practice - of loving kindness and compassion for the benefit of all. The monks do this by the practice of the Tantric arts, including harmonic chanting, butter sculpture and the creation of sand mandalas.

One of the two great monasteries of the Gelug-pa lineage in Tibetan tantric Buddhism, Gyuto Tantric University was established by Jetsun Kunga Dhondup in 1475 and flourished in Lhasa, Tibet, until 1959 when their famous Ramoche temple was desecrated and the population of 900 monks decimated.

About 60 monks escaped to India with the Dalai Lama and throughout the past 30 years, enduring serious privation as refugees, they have nurtured and preserved the ancient rituals and traditions and carefully rebuilt the monastic community to today's population of over 500.

The unique sound of their chanting occasioned an invitation to the monks to visit the West for the first time in 1967, and since then they have regularly conducted tantric arts programs around the world, showing the colour, beauty, complexity and magic of this ancient endangered culture.

Such visits have been integral to the financial survival and regeneration of monastery life, as the old monks pass on 500 years of wisdom to the young refugee monks still pouring into the monastery from Tibet - as well as from the Tibetan diaspora - all of whom need food, accommodation and care.

The Gyuto Monks have been coming to Australia annually since 1994 to spread awareness of Tibetan culture. They are not academics or theorists, but practitioners - of kindness and compassion shared with others.

SAND MANDALA

The Sand Mandala is regarded within Tibetan Buddhism as sacred and, until 40 years ago, was rarely seen outside the monasteries. Architectural in structure, their complex and richly coloured designs have remained unchanged for over 500 years, the skills and secret meanings passed faithfully down through the generations from teacher to student

The monks make these exquisite mandalas from memory, approaching the task within the framework of ancient ceremonial Tantric ritual, and bringing to the process extraordinary patience and concentration.

The Sand Mandala is built from coloured sand, ground from rock from the Himalayas, and then poured precisely onto the mandala design using a 'chak-pu', a cone-shaped, fine-tipped metal funnel. To adjust the sand once it is on the blueprint, a metal scraper called a 'gyud-ti' (tantric knife) is used.

The mandala is constructed from the center outwards. Once the mandala is completed, it is then dismantled, first by the removal of each of the deities represented in the mandala and then with a 'dorje', the head lama cuts through the main lines, thus cutting the energy of the mandala. The remaining sand is then swept up into the center of the mandala and placed in an urn.

In a ritual procession, the monks then carry the sand to the nearest moving water, where the sand is symbolically scattered to demonstrate life's impermanence.

The mandala is, in essence, a visualization tool, a symbol of a perfect world in which we are all perfect beings practicing the pure loving kindness and compassion that is innate in all living beings. Visualizing oneself in the center of this perfect world of the mandala creates the conditions for us to behave towards others with kindness and compassion, which in turn, causes them to develop a similar outlook and leads to the creation of such a perfect world.

As for the Sand Mandala itself, it is regarded that all who see it will be blessed.

CHANTING

The Gyuto Monks of Tibet are the unique masters of a deep harmonic overtone chanting. Trained over many years, each monk has the capacity to chant in three octaves at once.

A subject of fascination by ethnomusicologists the world over, the sound has been compared to the resonance of a drum or didgeridoo and is reputed to have a transformative effect on the physical as well as emotional body.

The ancient harmonic chanting of the Gyuto Monks is a deep recitation of the Buddha's teachings, which form a secret and mysterious pathway to tantric transformation.

Monk dismantling the Sand Mandala

Sweeping up the Sand Mandala

Scooping the sand into an urn

Detail view of previous photo

Here I am receiving some of the sand from a monk
- which I now sprinkle on my paintings

Monks blowing horns during ceremony

Monks chanting during ceremony

Pouring the sand into First Creek at Hazelwood Park