The World in a Grain of Sand By Nicholas Day Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, August 5, 1998

"What do you do when you're done?"

There. That's the question – the American question, the way it cuts to the chase, the way it values the product, not the process. Not the Tibetan question.

Wangchuk, born in India, pauses. He is not unaccustomed to Americans. He knows how bizarre the answer will seem. Anticipating the reaction, he laughs gently to himself. Rolls back his head. Laughs again.

"Uh," he says, at last. "We destroy it."

It is beautiful, this limited-time-only mandala, a traditional, highly elaborate, brilliantly colored devotional work that the monks are constructing at the Sackler. Millions of grains of crushed, vegetable-dyed marble – delicately funneled into shape from last Saturday until this Sunday – fill in a complex five-foot design, a representation, at its most simplistic, of the universe. The act of constructing it, a tradition as old as the Buddha himself, is a religious practice, a way to reach the enlightened state.

That enlightened state, you think, watching the monks precisely plop the sand down on fine lines, must mean not needing to breathe. A false breath, a sudden shift of the elbow or the wrist, and the mandala would scatter, kaleidoscopic dust in the wind. But that, the monks say, will never happen. Even though the mandala, like sugar spilled on a counter, lies there unattached to anything.

When the final grain is in place, the mandala will be a wild, swimming display of color and form, seemingly infinite in detail. Then – with chants and music, in what Wangchuk calls "the most beautiful part of the mandala" – the work will be destroyed, gathered into an urn and dumped in the Potomac, sending its "healing energies" out to the world.

It's the sort of thing that you can't put off seeing until Monday, in other words.

Last weekend, approximately 5,000 people streamed through the Sackler – more than double the usual attendance – and officials expect even more this weekend, especially for the closing ceremony. The demonstration accompanies the just-opened "Buddha's Art of Healing" exhibit – which features the only existing paintings from a Tibetan medical atlas, a wonder of that civilization – by creating the mandala of the Healing Buddha.

A mandala – which also can be painted, sculpted, embroidered, drawn or acted out through dance – contains three levels: The outer level represents the divine universe, the inner level depicts a map toward enlightenment, and the secret level represents the ideal balance between body and mind. The psychologist Carl Jung – to provide a Western perspective – called it a universal expression of the human subconscious.

Aside from the mandala, the monks themselves – almost prostrate on the table, their upper bodies wrapped in dark red cloth – convey a spiritual energy and a sense of peace, of unearthly patience. They work diligently and silently, although occasionally they stop briefly to debate their work in Tibetan. They work two-hour stretches, often in positions that look painful.

They rise above physical discomfort, says Wangchuk, their spokesman. "They do it with great happiness and enjoyment."

The mandala is created – in a breathtaking paint-by-number type of production – with 23 different colors of sand and a highly detailed outline that the monks drew last Saturday, after the opening ceremony. The sand is poured through metal funnels called chak-pur; rubbing a rod against the ridged surface of the chak-pur produces vibrations that cause the sand to run out smoothly. The vibrations also produce noises – hoarse and dissonant – that sound like a yard full of crickets, say, or an avant-garde string quartet recording. It sounds foreign. It transports you.

It takes you, to be specific, not to Tibet, but to southern India, where these monks, from the Drepung Loseling Monastery, originally in Lhasa, Tibet, are now in exile. In cooperation with the Loseling Institute of Emory University and the monastery, the monks, all specially chosen, are on what they call the 6th Mystical Arts of Tibet Tour, promoting their culture. Tibetan independence has become a celebrity cause in the United States and this show is presented by Richard Gere Productions, the agency of the actor and well-known Tibet activist.

The strict religious prohibitions imposed on Tibet by the Chinese government mean that mandalas are probably not currently constructed there, Wangchuk says. If they are, he added, it is most likely a token display of religious freedom.

Watching the mandala take shape in the Sackler, it is impossible not to think about how the work – unintentionally yet unavoidably – disrespects the traditions of the building in which it is being constructed: the worth that museums – by their very existence – attach to their collections is absent here. All the conventional institutional overtones – the sense of greatness, or consequence, or grandeur – have been culturally eclipsed.

The mandala is a self-negating work. It's created in order to be destroyed. It's going to be preserved in the Potomac.

This is art that will end up in someone's bathing suit.

Although, according to the monks, the mandala is not art.

"We never consider this an artistic work," Wangchuk says. "Other people can consider this an artistic work." Such interchange of perspective, of cultures, is essential. "It's like having a beautiful garden in which all different kinds of flowers grow. If there was just one flower, it wouldn't be very beautiful."

Wangchuk talks about the United States with great admiration, stressing, not surprisingly, the right to religious freedom. But he understands, he says, why so many young Americans seem magically drawn to Tibet.

"The culture we have is entirely based on not harming others," he says. "In the Western countries, most people do not have that [belief]. People are realizing that material development is not the final solution for mental as well as physical happiness. That's why people are drawing more toward the Tibetan culture.

"And Tibetan culture has the ability to provide that sort of peace."