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And by Friday evening, it would be gone, poured into Lake Andrews in a ritual enacting the final words of the Buddha: \u201cImpermanence is inescapable. Everything vanishes.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
All week long the nuns, who are on a tour of the United States \u2014 they\u2019ve already visited Minnesota, Kentucky, and Ohio \u2014 had been working on the mandala. On Monday they\u2019d chalked out a design of a Medicine Buddha, specifically chosen for this stop on their tour. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The nuns worked from memory, without diagrams, imagining where every grain of sand would go in the mandala, choosing from small dishes nearby holding more than a dozen colors including hues of blues, greens, pinks, yellow, and orange. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
They filled their tools, conical metal implements that allow them to tap out grains of sand one at a time, and began growing the intricate design from the middle out, their rhythmic tapping and scraping filling the quiet of Gomes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Other than their trips to Commons for meals and pauses for two sacred dances, three nuns worked tirelessly to fill in a vision they held only in their minds, rather than on paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMemorization is a beautiful meditation,\u201d Dasel said. \u201cThe nuns have trained in this for the last year intensively.\u201d They studied five mandalas specifically, training with monks, and had to pass exams before the trip. \u201cIt\u2019s mind training. And very rigorous. It\u2019s much more rigorous than the training I did every day to play basketball at Bates\u201d \u2014 when she was known as Lisa Blake \u2014 \u201cor even writing a thesis.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n By Thursday afternoon the mandala was all done but for the outer circle, and a steady stream of visitors to Gomes \u2014 which was open to the public during the day \u2014 had continued to grow, thanks to coverage of the event in the Lewiston Sun Journal<\/em> <\/a>and on the local CBS affiliate, WGME<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some visitors sat quietly in the pews, watching from afar, while others edged up to the gold ribbon the nuns had put down to keep a little distance between their meticulous work and onlookers. Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline stopped by to check on the progress and greeted Dasel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Guatham Vijayan, a doctoral student who is on campus attending a Gordon Research Conference, said he\u2019d seen the nuns in Commons and been curious. Growing up in India, it had been rare for him to have a chance to interact with Buddhists so he\u2019d welcomed the chance to meet them and learn about their project. \u201cHere I felt really comfortable talking to them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Jangchub Choeling Nunnery group would finish constructing the Medicine Buddha on Friday, Dasel said, bringing the blessings of clarity of the mind, the heart, and beauty into a physical manifestation intended for the communities of Bates and greater Lewiston. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When Dasel, who serves as a spiritual advisor in Buddhism to the Multifaith Chaplaincy at Bates, learned that her grant application to the Frederick P. Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism to fund the nuns\u2019 trip had been successful, she specifically asked the nuns to create a sand mandala to help the region with its ongoing recovery from the mass shootings of Oct. 25. Hence the very specific choice of the Medicine Buddha, known as the embodiment of healing energy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the observers in Gomes, there was a palpable sense of gratitude for this gift, and also an engagement, a sort of silent cheering section. Associate Multifaith Chaplain Raymond Clothier has visited during the week, mostly supporting the nuns by delivering water, opening doors, and refilling paper towel dispensers. And observing the beauty being created not just in colorful sand, but in those interactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMy experience has been a gradual awakening to the realization that what is happening here is truly astounding,\u201d Clothier said. \u201cThe art is stunning, but the process draws people into the moment: the clinking of the metal funnels as they are filled, the rhythm as they are finessed like a guiro to dispense sand, and the clanking as they are emptied back into the bowl.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s sacred movement as much as it is art,\u201d he said. \u201cThe people who come to watch feel themselves becoming a part of something that is unfolding moment by moment, grain by grain. When they leave, they may not be able to articulate what they have just participated in, but they are grateful to have been a part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think it shows people where healing and beauty begin: by stitching life together from the inauspicious bits and pieces at hand.”<\/p>\nAssociate Multifaith Chaplain Raymond Clothier<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n They become vested in what they\u2019re witnessing. After the nuns huddled to discuss some element of the design, Linda Johnson, who had come from South Portland to observe, approached Dasel to ask about the nuns\u2019 visibly apparent expressions of concern. Had something gone wrong? Maybe, Dasel said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes, as the nuns created from memory, they weren\u2019t satisfied with the outcome, and when that happened, the group would confer and perhaps even decide to erase and start a section over. If they had to do that, Dasel told Johnson, the age-old process was to invert their metal funnels, and carefully suck the element that wasn\u2019t quite working away from the mandala. \u201cThe first vacuum cleaner maybe,\u201d Dasel joked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mandala is \u201can expression of perfection and beauty,\u201d Dasel said. Before the nuns dissolve it into the waters of the Puddle at the end of the week, they\u2019ll offer grains of sand to those in the community who want to hold onto a small embodiment of the nuns\u2019 visit. \u201cIt\u2019s very blessed with this intention of creating healing.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n For Clothier, witnessing the process was a vivid illustration of how healing energy is generated. \u201cI think it shows people where healing and beauty begin: by stitching life together from the inauspicious bits and pieces at hand,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dasel said it can be hard for Westerners to experience the part of the process where a sand mandala is swept up and dissolved into water. \u201cPeople are absolutely shocked when they see the dissolution ceremony entails collecting all those colors and wiping it all into a sacred box and then bringing it to a body of water and just letting it all go again.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n But despite the physical embodiment of the mandala being gone, the blessing remains \u2014 if you allow it to, she said. \u201cThings in the material world are impermanent. So create and offer always your best, your perfection. But don\u2019t cling to that, because it\u2019s going to change.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Created in Gomes Chapel this week by Tibetan nuns, the colorful, exquisite sand mandala will be dissolved into Lake Andrews, but its healing energy will remain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1283,"featured_media":164238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[7,11010,133,224],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-arts","category-creativity","category-society-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1283"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164198"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":164265,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164198\/revisions\/164265"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2024\/06\/0H9A6487-copy.webp\")
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