Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Monks draw interest
Sacred Art Tour opens.
Last January, Carrie Berman took her two daughters to watch Tibetan Buddhist monks carefully build a sand mandala on the floor of the Coral Springs Museum of Art. Fascinated with their precise work, she returned every day for a week to watch as the monks scraped colorful grains of sand out of metal funnels to create complicated designs.
It felt like an escape from her responsibilities.
“My life is very frantic, with children and work,” says Berman, 45. “I felt this incredible stillness.”
Nearly one year later, Berman volunteered to host in her home another eight monks from the same monastery as they bring their “Sacred Art Tour” back to the museum.
“I just thought it was fascinating culturally. I wanted to bring my children to see it, and I never dreamed that they would be staying in my house,” Berman says. “It’s an incredible cultural opportunity for my family, one that we feel very honored to have.”
Coral Springs is just one stop in the monks’ yearlong tour across the United States. They come from the Drepung Gomang Monastery in South India, where more than 2,000 Tibetan monk refugees live. The tour is also way of raising awareness for the Chinese occupation of Tibet and funds for the monastery, which provides food, housing, education and health care for all the monks.
They started the mandala on Tuesday and will finish it on Sunday, when they’ll scrape all the sand away during a 3 p.m. dissolution ceremony. They’ll be working on the mandala every day between 10 a.m. and around 5:30 p.m., starting and finishing the work with chanting ceremonies.
It takes the monks about three years to learn the ancient technique of the sand mandala. In Tibetan Buddhism, the mandalas often carry a message. At the museum, the monks are building a “Buddha of Compassion” mandala, representing love and compassion. Destroying the mandala after its completion symbolizes our ephemeral lives.
“I love the energy. I want to be one of them,” says Randi Ifcher, 55, of Coral Springs, a yoga and meditation instructor who went to the museum on Tuesday. “They’re very patient, and they’re in the moment. That’s what I tell my students all the time.”
Besides the mandala, the monks will also teach Tibetan butter sculpture workshops, cook traditional meals and offer a pet blessing ceremony at 11 a.m. on Saturday.
Every day at noon, the monk’s leader, Losang Yonten, 45, leads a meditation and Dharma hour, sharing meditation techniques. Yonten speaks in Tibetan, and another monk, Stanzin Dawa, translates parts of it to the crowd in broken English.
“Compassion and meditation is very important to our life,” Dawa translated for Yonten. “Meditation is to control your mind.”
Yonten also spoke about the history of Tibet and shared some of his personal story. He left Tibet in 1985 for India when he was a teenager. It took nearly a month of walking through the mountains to make it to his new country.
On Tuesday, the language barrier didn’t seem to inhibit communication between the monks and the American crowd. Several people asked questions, and Yonten and Dawa laughed out loud when a man asked if they would visit other monasteries to try the food.
“If the food is better in one monastery, you go there,” Dawa translated with a laugh. “Our monastery has good education.”
For Berman, having the eight monks and their driver in her home in Parkland has been a learning journey of her own.
She bought new mattresses to accommodate all of them, spreading them across the floor in two rooms. She hung Tibetan flags across her courtyard, where her family and the monks share tea every night.
“One of my goals was to make this their favorite stop,” she says. “I wanted to make it very peaceful. They are exhausted when they get home because they’re working all day.”
They also share breakfast, usually oatmeal and fruit.
Berman was particularly fascinated by how little garbage they have produced. When she has guests, she’s used to see the garbage bin fill up fast. But the only waste the monks have produced was hair that they shaved off their heads.