Since 9 AM last Friday four Tibetan Buddhist monks from the Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, India–home of Tibet’s exiled Dalai Lama–have been working undeneath a canopy on a wooden platform on the second floor of the Field Museum of Natural History. They are slowly drawing a six-and-a-half-foot-wide, exquisitely detailed circular picture–not with paint, but with 18 different colors of fine-grain sand that they carefully tap onto a horizontal board, directing the stream through long, thin metal funnels. The work requires concentration and extremely steady hands, and were any of the monks to sneeze, he could destroy days or weeks of painstaking craftsmanship.
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The Kalachakra mandala is the stylized representation of a roughly pyramidal building in Shambhala, the ideal world; every day Kalachakra, one of Tibetan Buddhism’s 722 enlightened beings, is invited to take up residence there by the monks, who address him in the half hour of chanting with which they begin each workday. In a painting the monks have hung on the wall at the museum near their work platform, Kalachakra, the personification of compassion, is seen passionately embracing his consort, Wisdom. This act symbolizes the interdependence of wisdom and compassion, which a Buddhist proverb compares to the two wings of a bird, each useless without the other in the effort to fly high over the ocean of cyclic birth and death.
In pictures of this mandala, you can clearly see Kalachakra’s building standing within concentric circles representing the spheres of Tibetan cosmology: earth, water, fire, wind, space, and wisdom. The Sanskrit initials of another 88 enlightened beings appear within the circles, along with various tiny symbols representing the rest of the 722. It takes four monks almost a month to construct this sand painting. Given a little more time, any one of them could build the mandala by himself; as part of standard monastery training all the monks have committed to memory its smallest detail, along with 17 other large and small mandalas associated with specific enlightened beings and times of the year. These mandalas and the accompanying prayers and chants have been transmitted by generations of monks over the centuries–beginning with, the monks say, the Buddha himself, who attained perfect enlightenment under a tree in Bodh Gaya, India, in the sixth century BC.
“We are saying that the Chinese killed more than one million Tibetan people, and they destroyed more than 6,000 monasteries,” says Chogyal. “But most people don’t know about this. A number of leaders say it is not true, and also some senator says, ‘I went to Tibet and I can’t see any torture, any killing.’”
