EXHIBITION:
Tibetan Buddhist Chenrezig Sand Mandala
Healing and Compassion in Challenging Times
October 21 – November 16, 2024
Monday, October 21, at 10 am in the Gallery
Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address with Akwesasne artist Katsitsionni Fox followed by Tibetan Buddhist ritual opening ceremony with monks from Namgyal Monastery
Chenrezig (in Sanskrit, Avalokiteśvara) personifies compassion, the most important ethical value in Buddhism. Many Buddhists, especially Tibetan Buddhists, perform a contemplative practice in which they visualize themselves as Chenrezig and imagine that in his form they are able to relieve the suffering of living beings throughout the cosmos.
The Chenrezig mandala (“circle”) is an architectural ground plan of Chenrezig’s palace, its gardens and its decorations, at the center of the cosmos. Practitioners of Chenrezig meditation imagine that it is the abode from which they spread their compassion.
Because a sand mandala is usually made for the purpose of initiating meditators into a specific practice, it is a temporary construction. At the initiation’s conclusion, the sand is dispersed in a body of water. In recent years, however, mandalas have been constructed in public places such as art galleries and museums for educational purposes.
Made of millions of grains of sand and thought to be charged with powerful blessings, a sand mandala is painstakingly constructed over a period of days or weeks. Every aspect of it has symbolic significance. For instance, Chenrezig himself appears in the center of a lotus flower on a moon disc. The outer walls of the mansion, in layers of white, yellow, red, green, and blue, represent faith, effort, memory, meditation, and wisdom. The four doorways represent the four “immeasurable thoughts” of love, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
Tibetan Buddhists believe that simply viewing a mandala can put the observer in touch with the profound potential for perfect enlightenment that exists within every mind. During a post-Covid era of heightened psychological and emotional duress, here and around the world, the Chenrezig sand mandala offers wholeness, balance, unity, connection, and harmony.
– Daniel Cozort, Religious Studies professor emeritus, Dickinson College
– Catherine Tedford and Catherine Shrady, organizers
Video by Chris Lenney, November 4, 2024.
The Gallery will be open Monday through Thursday 9:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.; Friday 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
The monks begin working on the mandala at 9:00 a.m., offering morning prayers and silent meditation from 10:00 to 10:15 a.m. They take a lunch break from 12:00 to 1:00 and work from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.
The sand mandala is anticipated to be completed by the end of Wednesday, November 13. The monks will continue their morning prayers and silent meditation from 10:00 to 10:15 a.m., on Thursday and Friday, November 14 and 15. All are welcome.
Please join us for the ritual dismantling ceremony on Saturday, November 16, at 12:00 p.m. , in the Gallery. The ceremony will be followed by a walk to Willow Island to disperse the sand into the Grasse River.
St. Lawrence University’s Arts Collaborative provided major funding for the exhibition and related programs.
Several traditional Tibetan Buddhist thangka paintings from the Gallery’s permanent collection and regional lenders will also be on display. Typically used for devotional purposes, thangka paintings depict Buddhist deities, teachings, or mandalas, such as the Wheel of Life, which illustrates the cyclic existence of life, death, and rebirth.
As cultural ambassadors from the exiled personal monastery of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, the monks of Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies, Ithaca, New York, have become especially well known for the creation of sand mandala exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the world. Two monks from Namgyal will be in residence for the duration of the project. Chenrezig was chosen by the monks as a form of healing and compassion in response to current events around the world.
