A group of monks from Gyuto Tantric University visit Grand Valley State University from April 16-19 to demonstrate a sacred form of Tibetan art.
The monks will make a sand mandala, which is a design created by painstakingly placing millions of individual grains of colored sand in a pattern representing a Buddhist principle.
The monks will work on the mandala daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Manistee River Room of the Kirkhof Center on GVSU's Allendale campus. The event culminates in a closing ceremony at 7 p.m. on April 19. During that ceremony, the mandala will be dismantled as an illustration of the Buddhist concept of impermanence.
The monks are making a Yamantaka mandala, which is done for peace and to bless the environment and to protect against the negative forces which bring hunger, suffering, ill health and calamities to the earth. It also is done to transform disturbing emotions into beneficial intuition and wisdom.
The visit is sponsored by the GVSU chapter of Students for a Free Tibet, an organiaztion whose aim is to raise awareness of the situation of Tibet, which was invaded by China in 1950. The Tibetan spiritual and political leader, the Dalai Lama, fled Tibet in 1959 and lives in exile in India.
