The sand mandala is a Tibetan tradition of painstakingly arranging grains of sand into beautiful works of art and then sweeping it all away.
The Buddhist canon teaches that all things are transitory. The art of making sand mandalas follows this tradition in that these exquisite creations are painstakingly built, and then after dedication and ritual, systematically desroyed.
For the monks from the Drepung Loseling monastery, the practice of creating these Mandalas is a healing ritual as well. Formed of a traditional prescribed iconography that includes geometric shapes and a multitude of ancient spiritual symbols, the sand-painted mandala is used as a tool for re-consecrating the earth and its inhabitants.
After an opening ceremony, the monks being painting in the lines for the mandala. The construction of the mandala then can take many weeks to complete, filling in the lines with various colors of grains of sands using tweezers to inch in every individual grain. The end result is a work of amazing achievement, worthy of a place in any museum. However, after the closing blessing and ceremony, the sand is swept away with half of it being distributed to those present and the remaining sand is carried in a procession by the monks to a flowing body of water, where it is ceremonially poured to disperse the healing energies of the mandala throughout the world.
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