LET IT GO
A visit with the monks in … Lone Pine?
It felt like chaos was close at hand.
Powerful windstorms had knocked over semis and trailers on US 395, closing the highway south of Lone Pine to the big rigs. The ferocious gusts had restarted a wildfire on the edges of Cottonwood Creek in the Sierra and it ran uphill and downhill, sending plumes of grey smoke into the sky, which mixed with the overcast clouds to dampen the weak sunshine to a dull glow. Little spits of rain on Saturday (Nov. 23) were more of an annoyance than welcome water. The wind blew leaves and stray bits of paper across Main Street and made American flags and business banners flap and snap in a jerky rhythm.
Going past a subdued Jake’s Saloon and ducking into the Metabolic Studio storefront and winding into the backroom Maker Space was to be greeted by bright light, brilliant colors and the silent concentration of two Buddhist monks in maroon red moving intentionally and deliberately around a blue tabletop.
The walls of the small room were lined with 10 long banners, precisely placed, each featuring intricately detailed depictions of fantastic Buddhist deities. The exception to the ancient art was a banner with a photo of the Dalai Lama.
A small table served as an altar, holding vases of flowers, single flower blooms in bowls, incense standing in a small bowl of rice, a small gold Buddha statue and two plates of oranges. Another table held about two dozen plastic bowls filled with colored sand.
The two monks bent to their work, creating a colorful, sacred sand mandala of delicate intricacy. Each held a metal cone filled with green sand. A second cone was moved rhythmically over the top of the cone with sand. That created a gentle metallic hum as it rattled the sand out, one grain at a time. The green sand was being applied around the already completed center of the mandala.
The art work was started Thursday by a group of six Buddhist monks from the Gaden Shartse Monastery in southern India whose US tour had brought them to Lone Pine to hold a “Bless the Water Mandala Event.” In addition to inviting the public to watch creation of the sand art mandala, the monks presented talks/teachings on three nights. The Lone Pine Friends of Tibet, the Metabolic Studio and the Gaden Shartse Cultural Foundation of Long Beach sponsored the visit.
The focus of their trip was spending days creating the stunning sand mandala and then destroying it as a visible lesson in impermanence, a foundational tenant of Buddhism. A basic explanation: “Impermanence is one of the most fundamental teachings of Buddhism and the starting place of the path to enlightenment. It means there is nothing in reality, including us, that has a permanent, solid core. The Buddha taught that the source of human suffering and discontent is that we crave and cling to the things of this world under the mistaken view that they will last forever. But nothing does.”
Sunday the wind had died down, but the Cottonwood wildfire had consumed more than 3,000 acres.
Inside the Metabolic Maker Space, the completed sand mandala waited. The monks invited the attendees to take a blessed, local crystal from the table, and gave each a white string, tied around the neck as a blessing. Then the monks lined up behind the table, dressed in their distinctive red maroon and gold robes with brilliant yellow cockscomb caps. The chanting in unison by the six monks was deep, strong and hypnotic, despite being interrupted several times by the clanging of bells, cymbals, rattles, drums and the bugling from a conch shell.
The scene and sounds were ancient and mesmerizing.
Then, silence.
Circling the square table the Rinpoche drew lines with his fingers through the sand painting, followed by monks with brushes quickly swirling the sand into a pile and then scooping it up and sponging the table clean.
In minutes, the painstaking and beautiful work of days was gone without a trace.
Sunday morning dawned to snow to the Sierra above Lone Pine, which helped stifle the Cottonwood fire, but only cold, overcast skies on the valley floor.
The final water blessing, a symbolic effort to bless and help heal the area’s much abused rivers, streams and lakes, took place on the banks of the Lower Owens River north of Lone Pine. The six monks, bare-armed in their maroon red robes and chanting and ringing bells and cymbals and drums walked out on the silver metal platform above the recently restored river and poured the sand from the mandala into the water.
Soon after, a gentle rain started to fall.
Jon Klusmire of Bishop is awed in the presence of the ancient
