On Friday, a few minutes before 2 p.m., and some 40 hours, give or take, after a pair of moldering properties on Derry St. became the latest in the city’s run of high-profile collapses, there commenced in a back room in the heart of Midtown another kind of ritual destruction. To demonstrate the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence, six Tibetan monks from the Drepung Gomang monastery, in India, sat beside a temporary shrine to the Dalai Lama and prepared to obliterate a work of art.
The work in question was a sand mandala, which the monks had constructed, over the course of four days, in Historic Harrisburg’s office building at Verbeke and 3rd Street. Perched on a three-foot-square wooden table, and composed entirely of colored sand, in brilliant white, yellow, red, blue and green, the mandala contained images of conch shells, mongooses and Himalayan dragons in an intricate geometric array. There was also at least one pair of what looked like clouds trailing wisps of vapor, identified by one of the monks as “precious umbrellas,” and symbolizing, according to a printed cheat-sheet, “the wholesome activity of preserving beings from illness, harmful forces, obstacles and so forth in this life and all kinds of temporary and enduring sufferings of the three lower realms, and the realms of men and gods in future lives.”
The monks had come to town Monday afternoon and were to leave the following Sunday. They spent the week in and around the city, giving talks and workshops, chanting in the Capitol rotunda, and, on Thursday, coloring with children at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore. On the night of their arrival, they attended a welcome dinner at the Mohler Senior Center in Hershey, where one of them explained their training at the monastery while their handler, Tenzin, translated.
“They study Buddhist philosophy. They debate,” Tenzin said. The monk clapped. “They must spend day in debate.” The monk clapped again. (Later, addressing the room, Tenzin apologized for his translations: “I am monk’s van driver. We had translator, he went back to India.”)
Drepung Gomang sends a group of monks to the United States each year, to spread awareness of their plight—their literature explains that, like the Dalai Lama, they have been exiled from Tibet by the Chinese government—and to raise funds by selling their merchandise and soliciting donations. Sue Simone, who has been the national coordinator of their trips for the past seven years, noted that they’d traveled from coast to coast, to California and to New York City’s Carnegie Hall. Their host in Harrisburg was Simone’s cousin, Joan McCabe, who put them up on borrowed folding beds and air mattresses at her home in Hershey.
“They get up each morning and cook breakfast, and you wake up to the smell of cilantro,” McCabe said. “You think they’re all holy, but they like to laugh, too.” She pointed out her husband next to one of the monks. They were both soccer fans, she explained, and after the monk’s favored team beat her husband’s, the monk kept teasing him about it into the next day. “I’ll be devastated when their van pulls away Sunday,” she said.
After Monday’s dinner, the monks offered a long chanted prayer, which included passages of “throat singing,” a deep-register, droning form of vocalization which is to a bass singer what a subwoofer is to an iHome. For most, it was a brow-furrowed, eyes-closed, gently-rocking-to-and-fro kind of singing. The prayer leader, Lobsang Chosphel, cleared his throat now and again throughout, at one point wiping beads of sweat from his forehead with his saffron robe.
On Friday, when it came time to destroy the mandala, the monks began with more chanting. One rang a bell, and another clashed cymbals. Then they donned tall yellow hats, reminiscent of Trojan helmets, with fuzzy cloth ridges running from their foreheads to the back of their necks. One of the monks circled the mandala several times, ringing the bell, while the cymbals continued clanging. Then he picked up flower petals from a bowl and tossed them onto the table.
You wouldn’t think impermanence was something you could hear, but to a pair of ears at a certain distance, the thud of the flowers landing said it all: the invisible bubble around the mandala, a near-perfect work of art, with its crisp lines and blazing hues, had been pierced irrevocably. The rest was just follow-through. The monk made a few more passes, cutting lines through the sand with his thumb, until the mandala was split up into eight equal wedges, like a pizza. Then more monks came forward with brushes and swept over it, turning it first into a smear of bright colors and then into a pile of brown sand.
Tenzin, at the ready with a paper box from Giant, approached and began scooping the former mandala into sandwich bags, forming free souvenirs. Then, the monks marched down Verbeke Street to the riverfront, where, below a set of concrete stairs whose impermanence needs no ritual reminders, they dumped what was left of the mandala out of an urn and into the Susquehanna.
