Sand From a Tibetan Mandala

San Francisco, 1991

In 1991, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco opened a large exhibition called Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet. As part of the show, a group of six monks from the Dalai Lama’s monastery in India created a magnificent sand mandala.

Like a painted mandala, a sand mandala is a visual representation of a divine space, used for meditation. It is created from millions of grains of colored sand, painstakingly tapped from small funnels onto a horizontal surface. The process takes weeks of work, and intense concentration.

Though the final result is beautiful, it’s also impermanent. After completion the entire mandala is swept up, collected, and poured as a sacred offering into a lake, river, or ocean. A small amount of the sand is retained.

As the Tibetan monks were completing their 6-foot-square sand mandala at the Asian Art Museum, a “deranged” woman in sneakers leaped suddenly into its center. Dancing maniacally, she obliterated the artwork. Onlookers screamed in anger and dismay; some even wept.

“I was smiling and laughing” commented Lobsang Samten, leader of the delegation of artist/monks.

I don’t know exactly why Samten laughed. My guess is that he understood that he couldn’t always dictate the terms of a sand mandala’s impermanence. But aside from that, I’m not so sure the woman was deranged. I have my own theory.

Among the 159 artworks on display at the museum that spring were a number of ancient, secret thangkas: paintings of such overwhelming spiritual power that they are traditionally covered with silk brocade, to be viewed only by adept practitioners of Buddhist mysticism. Viewing them without the proper training, some lamas believe, can cause madness.

I’ve long wondered if the woman’s only “crime” was being too deeply receptive to the artistic works on display. Was she guilty of vandalism, or a full participant in the process of creation/destruction? We will never know; the monks did not press charges.