Nothing can last in this world, no matter how beautiful or how good the intentions behind its creation.
Fully embodying and accepting this universal truth, the monks of Thubten Dhargye Ling Monastery in Long Beach spent day and night this month toiling over a multicolored sand mandala, knowing that soon they’d be throwing that very same sand into the sea.
In a “dissolution” ceremony on Sunday, May 30, the sand mandala that required daily work since May 3 will be erased and its blessed sand taken to the ocean and scattered.
“It’s nature that everything is part of impermanence. So once you [are] born in this world, you have to die. Once something exists in this world, it has to be [broken] down. This has to be gone. So that’s how, through our ritual, through our ceremony, we are trying to represent that,” Geshe Lharampa Jampa Wangchuk said through a translator.
Creating the sand mandala was no easy feat. After drawing out a complex grid on the flat surface, a small pointed tool is used to siphon different colored sand little by little until every section is filled in.
“Such a hard work, this mandala construction is like almost 21 days, day and night,” Geshe Wangchuk said through a translator.
Sand mandalas are meant to symbolize the homes of deities. It is believed that by recreating their divine environments, their godly traits can be called forth into the human world.
“Once you build the universe of the virtuous deities, universe of Buddha, what we are doing is we are trying to create the atmosphere of compassion, and atmosphere of those perfections, like giving, concentration, morality, and all those perfections, into our world,” Tenzin Lekshey said.
The mandala most recently made at Thubten Dhargye Ling Monastery represents the abode of Heruka Chakrasamvara, who is considered a form of the Buddha. It is believed that the Buddha took on the form of Heruka Chakrasmavara in order to help people fulfill their dharma, or cosmic purpose.
“He transformed this body to help those people who really want to achieve their goal, their approach of dharma,” Lekshey said.
Heruka Chakrasamvara is among various deities referred to as “meditational deities” or Yidam, representing different embodiments of Buddhahood, or the state of enlightenment. Practitioners associate their being with that of the deity during meditation to help achieve enlightenment.
The creation of the Heruka Chakrasamvara sand mandala took place during the lunar month of Saka Dawa, also called Vesak, which is believed to have been a significant time throughout the life of Gautama Buddha, as the month when he was born, was enlightened, and eventually reached Nirvana after passing away.
“For the Buddhist practitioners who follow the Buddhist traditions, they really have a really close belief that in Vesak month if you do something good it would be turned into multiples,” Geshe Wangchuk said through a translator.
A shrine to Heruka Chakrasamvara has been set up within the monastery.
“He can appear in several dozen different forms, from simple to complex and peaceful to wrathful,” a Facebook post by the monastery read.
The deity is depicted with twelve arms, embracing his female consort Vajrayogini with two of them, while the couple is surrounded by a ring of flames.
In front of the image of Heruka Chakrasamvara multiple offerings are placed, including incense, fruit, flowers and elaborately decorated ritual cakes called Torma.
“Many other traditions [sacrifice animals], but in Buddhism we practice non violence so we offer cake to rejoice,” Lekshey said.
The monks of Thubten Dhargye Ling Monastery began working on this mandala on May 3 and finished on Wednesday, May 26 during the full moon.
Cloistered inside their monastery since the beginning of the pandemic, the resident monks have had time to make 16 different sand mandalas since March 2020.
“This year because of the pandemic we can’t go outside, so we’ve been making sand mandalas,” Tenzin Lekshey said.
After a sand mandala is finished, the blessed sand is dispersed into a body of water, showing that destruction and endings don’t have to be viewed negatively.
“We pour this sand by doing a ritual ceremony to the ocean, that in the ocean the creatures can be blessed by that, and so our ecosystem will go well, from land to ocean, ocean to land,” Geshe Wangchuk said through a translator.
Sand mandalas are a practice that belongs to Tibetan Buddhism, a faith that continues to persevere despite continued repression in its homeland of Tibet.
Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, such as Thubten Dhargye Ling Monastery in Long Beach, are regularly destroyed in Tibet by the Chinese government.
Those monasteries that survive are subjected to intense police surveillance, with the Chinese government often building police stations inside of monasteries in order to keep tabs on the clergy within.
“As well as limiting the number of monasteries and nunneries that there are, and limiting the number of monks and nuns that can be in each one, they additionally had a police office built into them as a means of controlling that vitally central social, cultural and political institution for Tibetan people,” Ganden Thurman of Tibet House US, an organization with the goal of preserving Tibetan culture, told the Signal Tribune.
Geshe Wangchuk is among 128,014 Tibetans currently living in exile due to the brutal takeover of Tibet by the Chinese government, according to the Central Tibetan Administration.
According to his biography on the Gaden Shartse Cultural Foundation’s website, Geshe Wangchuk was born in Lhasa, Tibet in 1972 and entered the Gaden Shartse Monastery at 8 years old. As a teenager, in 1986, he fled Tibet and escaped to the Gaden Shartse Monastic University in South India.
After Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China, its army forced its way into Tibet in 1949.
“They came to our country with the message that they were going to ‘liberate’ us,” Geshe Wangchuk said through a translator.
In 1959 the Chinese government insisted that the Dalai Lama, the spiritual Buddhist leader of Tibet, visit the Chinese Headquarters in Lhasa without his bodyguards. Afraid he was about to be kidnapped or assassinated, approximately 30,000 Tibetans flooded the streets of the city to protest.
The Chinese government responded with intense violence, killing thousands of Tibetans.
“In 1959 their goals, their approaches towards us [were] very [unbearable],” Geshe Wangchuk said through a translator.
Since then, Tibetan refugees have regularly tried to escape the oppression in their homeland, trying to avoid bullets as they flee on foot across the Himalayas.
“A lot of countries will shoot people trying to break into their country, but there’s not a huge number of countries, in history or at present times, that will shoot people trying to get out of the country,” Thurman said.
Chinese authorities in Tibet have systemically stolen land, arrested activists without cause, intimidated and assaulted the populace, spied on phone and online communications, and have denied Tibetans their rights to free speech and religion, according to a Human Rights Watch report.
“That’s why there’s a lot of problems in our country,” Geshe Wangchuk said through a translator.
While the Chinese government refuses to give Tibetans the same rights as Chinese citizens, it also refuses to acknowledge them as separate and autonomous people, attempting to tell them that they are neither Chinese nor Tibetan.
“The main thing to do is to be aware that the Tibetans exist […] In the erasure of Tibetan culture, and of the Tibetan people, and of the Tibetan language, simply being aware that they exist is a good first step for advocating for people,” Thurman said.
Thubten Dhargye Ling Monastery will livestream the dissolution ceremony of the Heruka Chakrasamvara sand mandala on Facebook from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 30.
To make a donation, visit Thubten Dhargye Ling Monastery’s website.
