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| Tibetan monks build a sand mandala |
It is likely that modern sand mandalas use sand that has had color added. In Tibet, though, there are places where colored sands are found naturally. To gather the sands is part of the process. Eliot Pattison, the author of several detective novels set in Tibet, describes this in Bone Mountain.
"Nyma could not stop smiling as the inhabitants of the hermitage sat with her ten minutes later, encircling the pouch of sand she had brought from the glacier. 'The stream was frozen,' she said, explaining why she had been gone several days longer than expected. 'So I sat and waited. . . . . On the second day a warm wind came, and the ice began to melt. On the third, I watched as a hole opened, just big enough for my hand to fit through.'
. . .
"Nyma's contribution was the perfect offering for completing their work, made all the more powerful by the reverence she had shown the mountain. She had not taken the vermilion sand, but had waited for the ice to melt, had waited for the mountain to offer it to her."
As I am writing this, there is another kind of waiting, in a place called Times Square. It is a waiting for a sparkling electronic structure to move to signal the modern world's mark on time. It is noisy, mechanical, precise, and essential to all commerce, warfare, transporation systems, banking --- every system of our era. There are truncated conversations about events since the nearest previous such event. But there is something missing. It does not feed my soul. For Tibetans, to be human is to have an inner deity, which is the most precious aspect of any part of creation. Mountains have deities, glaciers have deities, frozen streams have deities. The purpose of life is to honor one's own inner deity and allow the deities of all creation to instruct it, to guide it, to hold it in relationship.
After a sand mandala is created, it is always, with great respect and seriousness, destroyed and the sand is swept up. This is an essential teaching about compassion often called impermanence. It is a lesson about time, and perhaps even more, a lesson about care for the tiniest and most vulnerable. Can there be a piece of a mountain smaller than a grain of sand?
The mandala sand is not wasted, though. Some of it may be shared out to people as a reminder of the process, a reminder of the teaching of compassion. The rest is returned to the earth, to a lake, a stream, to become part of the source once again.
Like the sand, the passage of time becomes part of the flow of eternity, and it is this which heals. It is this which permits com-passion, passion with, all of creation, and one's own inner deity.The marking of time using the lunar calendar, the rhythms of nature, and the marking of time called Losar in Tibet is more nourishing for my spirit, my inner deity.
One contemporary lama explains Losar:
During Losar, the Tibetan celebration of the new year, we did not drink champagne to celebrate. Instead, we went to the local spring to perform a ritual of gratitude. We made offerings to the nagas, the water spirits who activated the water element in the area.
. . . . Our way of relating to the elements originated in the direct experiences by our sages and common people of the sacred nature of the external and internal elements.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche (2002). Healing with Form, Energy, and Light. Ithaca, New York: Snow Lion Publications.And so, this moment, as people are huddled together where the bright lights no longer provide much in the way of useful warmth, I wait for the ice to melt, as my inner deity salutes your inner deity. And will do so again as the earth moves through space toward another solstice and the tectonic plates shift and the mountains grow and the deity of the frozen river waits to meet the deities who will honor the vermilion sand. Namaste.
