13 October 2007

ne of the unusual aspects of Ithaca is that we are home to a Buddhist monastery. As a result, it is entirely normal to see Buddhist monks walking around Ithaca. For the past month, these monks have been building a sand mandala at the Johnson Museum of Art as part of the festivities surrounding the Dalai Lama's visit to Ithaca. This photo is a detail of part of the edge of the mandala; I'll post more photos of the entire mandala later. The precision and detail in the shapes and shading of the mandala are absolutely exquisite. The mandala itself represents a palace in which a deity is housed. After the mandala was completed, the monks held a dissolution ceremony, in which they swept all of the painstakingly-placed sand together, processed with it to Beebe Lake, and poured it into the water to release the deity and allow it to disseminate its blessings upon the world. #

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