| Must I be a recluse to understand Impermanence? | | | | Tibetan Monks and a Mandela |
| No, you do not. Though not everybody wants to live | | | | A Mandela is made from coloured sand. Tibetan |
| as a recluse, I found you can learn many lessons from | | | | Buddhists create intricate and lovely ceremonial |
| them. Some will be of help in our lives. We can apply | | | | mandela designs out of millions of grains of sand. |
| the lessons we learn from them to be better citizens. | | | | Mandalas symbolize a pure and perfect universe, |
| You do not need to be a religious fanatic to see why | | | | establishing feelings of peace, well-being and |
| you can benefit from their beliefs. | | | | wholeness. The monks work as a group on a |
| Three sets of clothing | | | | Mandela. Mostly two or three at a time. When I stayed |
| A monk may only have three sets of clothing I was | | | | in a place called Sacred Eagle Mountain, a monastery |
| told, but I think it is very close to the truth. He is not | | | | on the eastern side of the island of Taiwan I saw this |
| allowed to get attached to it and thus his room is | | | | in practice. Two weeks before the Chinese New Year |
| simple without too many possessions. Earthly good | | | | they created the Mandela. This took them around two |
| can hold us prisoners without us knowing it. The more | | | | weeks. |
| we seem to have, the more we need to protect. | | | | During the celebrations it was there for followers to |
| The Haiku in the bottle | | | | appreciate. The Mandela was an example of |
| Zen poets in Japan write a finely crafted haiku and put | | | | perfection and the making of it was an example of |
| it in a bottle. The bottle is seen floating away and the | | | | total concentration. They left no room for errors. From |
| poet knows he will never see the poem again. | | | | eye level the Mandela had a three dimensional |
| Recalling the words would also soon fade. The | | | | appearance. For days monks would sit chanting not |
| satisfaction that comes from this act is enormous. I | | | | far from the Mandela, enhancing the very reason they |
| once made a piece one could call digital art. After a | | | | made the mandela. Then around two weeks later, the |
| few days work I was satisfied. Then I deleted the file. | | | | monks unceremoniously scraped the sand together |
| The feeling was overwhelming, but the best of all is | | | | and threw it into the wind. As the wind blew it away, |
| that I was amazingly calm in doing it. I then proposed to | | | | the principle of impermanence was underlined. From |
| others to follow my example on an artist website. | | | | here it could float to all corners of the Earth. Who |
| Needless to say the reaction was that it was not | | | | knows where particles of the Mandela ended up, |
| necessary. They were right, but they missed the point. | | | | thousand of miles away? |
| Not long ago I visited the site and could not find many | | | | A last Thought |
| people I knew back then. The truth is they had moved | | | | When we set free our attachment of material |
| on and what they believed to be so valuable was now | | | | possessions, we gain in our spiritual understand . There |
| lying in a file on the internet. If they had set it free the | | | | is no comparison in what we give and what we get. It |
| emotional symbolic act could have meant so much | | | | is something we need to educate ourselves into doing. |
| more to them. | | | | |