If you have watched the progress of the laborious construction of an intricate Tibetan sand mandala, seeing it be swept away can be a little traumatic. “No! Wait! Oh well–so it goes.”
I. The Mandala
Grain by grain the monks sift down a dwelling place
for Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion.
Its walls, pierced by four doorways, are made of
faith, effort, memory, meditation and wisdom.
Its doors are comprised of four precious jewels:
of love, of compassion, of joy, and of equanimity.
To the east of the Enlightened One rages hatred.
To the south moans misery. In the west, ignorance.
To the north, a green distillation of jealousy seethes.
But the vajra fence of the Dharma hems them in.
After weeks of painstaking labor, the monks
chant prayers, burn incense, and clang bells.
They break out cheap foam rubber paintbrushes
and sweep all the colored sands together in a jug.
Leading scores of us across town, they offer the sand up
to the river, send up prayers among the honking geese.
The undoing done, the long snake of the procession
dismantles itself into ones and twos to wander home.
II. Ephemera
Ironically, I was given a glassine bag of mandala sand
so I might forever recall my lesson in impermanence.
I placed it on my home altar, under the benevolent gaze
of my white porcelain Guanyin, next to my sutra book.
A poet friend of mine had given me another tiny glassine bag.
In it was a bit of soil filched from Allen Ginsberg’s garden.
But the best thing was, Ginsberg’s ashes had been spaded
into the plot. So, the dirt held a little soupçon of poet.
I mix them together, the Buddha in the sand, the beatnik
in the dirt. A little bit of them will go a long way, I pray.
Now the ash of my white pine incense falls into it, too.
How it all mingles together, an olio of awakening mind.
