SpiritMatters Monthly February 2010

Dust thou art,

And unto dust shalt thou return.

A couple weeks ago I was walking through Union Square when I happened upon a young man putting the final touches upon a huge sand mandala that he had made on the sidewalk. Sand mandalas are a Tibetan Buddhist tradition whereby colored sand is used to create a large circle or wheel with extremely intricate designs within it. I have seen sand mandalas made several times. The first time was by a team of Buddhist monks that spent an entire week painstakingly placing sand grain by grain into the pattern. It is amazing to see just how careful the monks are with their work and sand mandalas are usually amazing works of art, but they are not merely art. This is a beautiful creation with an important lesson to teach. As soon as the sand mandala is finished it may be ritually blessed and then, much to the horror of many onlookers, it is swept away. Sand mandalas are meant to be an object of great beauty for only a moment and their destruction emphasizes the Buddhist belief in the transitory nature of the material world. The used sand is scooped up and poured into a nearby river never to be used again. Regardless of how beautiful or complicated this piece of art appears, its creator always reminds us that it is made from the same stuff we sweep off our floors everyday: sand. After looking at the young man’s mandala for a few moments, I went on about my business. By the time I had returned from getting a cup of coffee at a nearby café, the mandala was gone, with scarcely a trace that it had ever been there at all.
Of course, you don’t have to be a Buddhist to recognize that the material world is fleeting. Every year millions of Christians mark their foreheads with ashes as both a sign of penitence and as solemn reminder of their mortality. The ashes are all that remain of the palm branches from Palm Sunday the previous year. The palm branches, which to Christians are a reminder of Jesus of Nazareth’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, are completely burned until there is nothing left but carbon. This carbon is then pressed upon a person’s head with the memorable words: “remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.” It is a stark reminder that human life, no matter how complex or intricate it may be, can like that sand mandala be swept away in a moment.
The sand and the ashes are not just meant to remind us that life is short though: for the Tibetan Buddhist the sand designs are meant to portray eternal spiritual realities and the pouring of the sand into the water is meant to bring healing and blessing into this world, for the Christian the ashes are a sign of belief in an eternal world beyond this physical one and they are a reminder that what we do in this temporary world matters in that eternal one. Both the sand and the ashes are physical symbols of an important spiritual truth: life is about more than the stuff it is made out of. Beautiful things may fade away, or be swept away, but beauty never can. May we be able to appreciate the beautiful things in our life, but never lose sight of the true eternal beauty which lies behind them.