Zen and the Art of Painting with Sand

This is an essay I wrote in the spring of ‘98 while in college. I was inspired to go dig it up after a Twitter conversation I had with Sam Han a while back about anxiety and permanence. Pause.

Saturn Never Sleeps also had a post on Mandala sand painting at the start of this month which reminded me to actually follow through on finding this thing.

The photo to the right of this post ran alongside the essay in our campus arts magazine. It shows the visiting Tibetan monks at work on their sand painting and was photographed in ‘98 by my future wife.

I thought you might enjoy a taste of 12 year old writing. If you see any errors or omissions, blame it on the OCR not the heart.

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Show Time
What is it about the performing arts that set them apart from other art forms? Performing artists know that it’s all about the moment. This is why we in the audience are so captivated. It is only in the performing arts that Creation itself is at center stage. The privilege of live art is its special relation to time. Artist and audience share in the very instance of Creation.

Non-live art has the opposite relation with time. The visual and literary arts produce products – things – that provlde for posterity. From the ancient Greeks through and beyond the Romantics, we have adopted the foolhardy notion that our art can and should last forever. Performers know better. When you’re out of the moment its over. Recordings, representations, people’s reactions… these may last but the actual product of their art was the moment it occurred.

This dichotomy is apparent in the way the art is received. Performances are passing events while “solid art” is fixed in a seeming vacuum. Accordingly academics study the art that will stay still long enough to be studied: the written play, the musical score, etc. The phrase “Fine Art” connotes paintings in the Louvre, not a show on Broadway. Thls would seem to indicate a cultural preference. But most people outside the art world will prefer performers. The snobbish explanation is that performances are easy on the attention span. This is a false assumption; we are talking about two unique experiences each with their share of cultural baggage.

Americans like to see stuff built to last. We are a nation of developers. It fits in with our mythos – God made things with eternity in mind. Judeo-Christianity and Socrates and his kin gave us our current picture of eternity. Our eternity is neat and our afterlife implies permanence. Other cultures put less importance on an end-goal to time.

Cultures with less Iinear notions of time put more importance on the moment than on an end result. The history of their art and culture has shown them go against the goals of permanence we see in western culture. The folk tales of the Japanese for instance center on doomed heroes. Genji, possibly the most famous of Japanese heroes, and his kin are always unfulfilled in their quests. The Tale of the Heike makes heroes out of the defeated side of a war. Sure, everyone loves an underdog but in Western stories there is always, ultimately, redemption. In the Japanese stories the only relief is to know that what is going on is not permanent. This is one of Buddha’s most crucial lessons – none of this is permanent. Not your defeat, nor your victory.

Interestingly our aesthetic sense, which supports the domination of images over time, propels our political being. We are a culture of domination: good over evil, man over nature, art over time. We have an inverse in those other cultures that show acceptance of the transient through their art and philosophy.

The Gnostics refused to proselytize, even as their numbers diminished into extinction, because it was not how they did things. There is a similar sad resignation associated with the art of cyclic cultures. Many native cultures used dances for art, communication and prayer. The Navajo, for example, drew intricate sand paintings as a sacred ritual not with the impossible goal of keeping them intact. There is a parallel between the transience of the act and of the transience of a doomed culture that is a little too neat to be ignored.

Sacred but fleeting art; the religious importance of dance and sand paintings links the Navajo and Tibetan Buddhists. Perhaps then this artistic preference arises from a more pantheistic worldview. After all, if the whole universe is sacred then the here and now should be the whole of divinity since it is our interface with the universe. The moment is sacred. This is how it is for those in theater, as it is for the Tibetan monks. Zen, like Stanislavsky, seeks only honest experience.

The Troupe
The monks who came to Purchase have scattered origins. Two had fled Tibet; two were from India; one was American. They traveled here by way of Atlanta’s Dretong Loseng Monastery (part of Emory University) one of the largest Tibetan institutions in the United States and the only school of its kind.

The sand painting is a ritual practice for the monks. They draw brightly colored sand from bowls with a long ladle. Then by scraping the ladle with another metal rod they are able to “paint” with the sand. The painting itself is a beautiful and extremely detailed mandala. The mandala is a sacred circle holding a circumscribed quadrilateral. It is a symbol of complexlty and wholeness. For Tibetan Buddhists creating the sand painting the mandala is a representation of the universe, lt is also a palace constructed for the Divine. Interesting to see these two roles overlap. This extravagant palace is an attempt to lure Divinity to help us with our problems. Through these means the sand painting acts as a healing ritual.

First the monks sketched out a plan in chalk on the table they were working with. Once the palace’s blueprint had been drawn out they set to the actual painting. A group of monks was required to fill the universe with enough color and shape. The general public was encouraged to come watch the monks work.

After all the man-hours that went into the mandala, the monks held a ceremony to disperse their work. They took the fine colored sand to a nearby creek and put it in the water so that the healing powers of the act could spread to parts beyond.

Ovation
Many a student took advantage of the opportunity to watch the sand painters at work. The Satori Club, which sponsored the event, also had the monks lead a few meditations while they were on campus.

The most profound impact that the sand painting had was that it showed both what a great thing beauty is and how temporary even the greatest things can be. The painting of the mandala shows us a profound cycle: the creation of the universe and then how it fades into a ripple.

It is an idea that goes against our cultural biases. But if there’s anything the modern age has shown us it’s that we can’t trust our cultural biases. We find ourselves these days less linear than ever before and even, dare I say it, leaning towards pantheism.

So this explains people taking Performance Art seriously the past few decades. But more importantly it explains how the dichotomy that our mentality has been built on may soon start to fade. And with a Jungian curioslty we now start to examine one another and find, to our surprise, more similarity than difference.

“Mandala means a circle, more especially a magic circle, and this form of symbol is not only to be found all through the East, but also among us; mandalas are amply represented in the Middle Ages. The specifically Christian ones come from the earlier Middle Ages. Most of them show Christ in the centre, with the four evangelists, or their symbols, at the cardinal points. This conception must be a very ancient one because Horus was represented with his four sons in the same way by the Egyptians… For the most part, the mandala form is that of a flower, cross, or wheel, with a distinct tendency toward four as the basis of the structure.”
- Carl Jung on the mandala as cross-cultural archetype
Commentary to the Secret of the Golden Flower