On beautiful creations that never last too long and meditation.
According to the Buddhist beliefs, when in theVI century B.C. Buddha Shakyamuni reached the final liberation, he passed his teaching in two ways. Sutras that are declared publicly were for big crowds. Tantras were passed only to the most skilled followers.
In the Tantric Buddhism a special attention has always been paid to the visualization of some images, e.g. recreation of the deity's face in the one's mind. Meditation has also much to do with the creation of worldwide-known Tibet's sand mandalas.
Mandala (in Sanskrit मण्डल — circle, disk) is a schematic representation of the Universe. Different sections of a mandala are connected to different parts of a Cosmos (Buddha's reality etc.) There are 3D wooden mandalas – the images of a deity's residence. These creations remain in the Tantric monastery and are esteemed as relics.
We will talk about sheet images. The name "sandy" is not entirely correct: earlier these creations were made of semiprecious stones, corals. Currently because of many Tibetians leaving their places and the general situation in the region these images are created mainly from powdered and colored marble.
The process of making a mandala is really laborious, it demands a lot of perseverance and long practice to master it. The grains are applied on the surface with the help of a special tube – chaku. Rubbing the tube with a certain intensity, the monks achieve the needed speed of grains' falling. There are also monasteries where the technique of creating the sandy mandala by hand exists. The creation of these beautiful images is followed by rituals, motets and has religious meditative aims.
Apart from the unbelievable beauty of the images, the end of a procedure is also exciting and kind of weird to the European witness: created with such effort, unbelievable levels of preparations and patience, the image is destroyed. This action at its best reflects Buddhist ideas about temporariness of everything that exists, making you think about world's caducity, about our world where everything is changeable and destroyable. Such beautiful creations are not an exception.
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