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If it seems that Look/Listen just recently featured a local visit by Tibetan monks, you’d be kinda right. In August, an eight-member visit by the Monks of Drepung Gomang Monastery came through town, including well-attended appearances at the Festival of Nations. Last week, a second group came to St. Louis, featuring seven monks representing the Labrang Tashi Kyil Monastery.
In both cases, the monks were in the United States on lengthy, cultural missions. These are largely intended to serve two, interlocked purposes: to remind Americans of the cultural, linguistic and national suppression of Tibet by the Chinese government; and to raise funds for the individual monasteries, which run in exile in India. While Drepung Gomang is found in the south of India, Tashi Kyil is located geographically closer to Tibet, in India’s north. For all intents and purposes, though, both monasteries are worlds away from where they wish to be: their homeland of Tibet.
Like the monks of Drepung Gomang, the Tashi Kyil monks work in multiple, artistic disciplines. At the heart of the each visit was the building of a sand mandala; these are sand murals that are built for extreme impermanence, ritually disassembled and poured into moving water, for the purpose of letting the sand particles float away, expanding world peace as they go. But the Tashi Kyil monks added some twists to their visit, including a very direct lecture on Buddhist notions of compassion, held at U. City’s Shinzo Zen Center; a prayer-and-chant session at Downtown’s version of MacroSun; and a “Let’s Travel to Tibet,” variety show held at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in Kirkwood, where the monks performed dances, songs and debates that date back centuries (at which attendees were given a piece of Tibetan money, a study guide, and a Tibetan “passport” with their suggested donation, along with a unique bit of cultural entertainment).
Over the course of the week, this writer was able to attend five events put on by the monks of Tashi Kyil, including a session of sand mandala creation, as well as the mandala’s dissolution ceremony at the Glendale’s hosting Healing Arts Center. Having attended a mandala closing ceremony just a few months ago, the act of sweeping the beautiful mandala into a metal urn wasn’t quite as shocking or upsetting as the first time, though it was just as profound, with days’ worth of painstaking artistic labor coming apart in a few, swift brushstrokes.
Though the monks were treated to very small audiences throughout the week, their message of peace, compassion and common humanity were easily received. While these men spring from a very male-centric experience and tradition, their messages are cross many boundaries: those of sex, race, class, religion, politics and even language. Their ultimate goal of bringing freedom to Tibet was heard with intention and clarity.
For more information the monks’ remaining American tour dates, there’s a dedicated Facebook page, here. And for larger-scale images of the monks, see this Flickr page.
Photographs by Thomas Crone
