{"id":1161,"date":"2009-03-01T19:01:05","date_gmt":"2009-03-02T00:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/?p=1161"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:37:23","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:37:23","slug":"heartland-mandala","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2009\/03\/heartland-mandala\/","title":{"rendered":"Heartland Mandala"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was surprised to learn, about ten days ago, that PSU was going to be hosting a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks creating a sand mandala. This is a touring company<\/a>, but somehow they ended up in Pittsburg, Kansas in the run-up to the fiftieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s uprising<\/a>. There was no political commentary around it, as near as I can tell. The school newspaper<\/a> and city paper<\/a> reported on it, but didn’t make a big deal about the anniversary. It wasn’t entirely apolitical: The Pittsburg Morning Sun<\/i> did quote the monks on the subject of the Chinese takeover and subsequent Tibetan cultural endangerment. But the opening invocation, which I attended, included no mention of that; there was a prominent altar with a picture of the Dalai Lama, though.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I fell ill a few hours after the opening ceremony on Monday1<\/a><\/sup> so I only got pictures of the very first moments of creation — I love the traditional-style plumb-line — and of the nearly-completed mandala on Thursday. I haven’t seen these up close before, and if I’d been healthier I would have gotten more pictures, but I was struck by the texture<\/i> of the mandala. I’m used to seeing these as two-dimensional images, but the sand is actually laid out in little piles and walls (see here<\/a> for a detail shot), in a very intricate fashion.<\/p>\n

It was, apparently, a variation on the Amitayus Mandala<\/a> (see also<\/a>), centered on Amitabha (aka Amida), and emphasizing healing and wisdom. Here are some of the better pictures I did manage under the fold:
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  1. I hope my students don’t make the connection between the “driving out of evil forces” and my absence!  ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I was surprised to learn, about ten days ago, that PSU was going to be hosting a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks creating a sand mandala. This is a touring company, but somehow they ended up in Pittsburg, Kansas in the run-up to the fiftieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s uprising. There was no political…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,112,119,121,154,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-current-events","category-english","category-ethnic-minorities","category-religion","category-tibet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-iJ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4711,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1161\/revisions\/4711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}