Monks draw campus and community

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The creation of a sand mandala by Tibetan monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery drew crowds of onlookers into the Pavilion for nearly a week in late September, in what USU Director Joel Zarr termed "the most valuable program we (USU Productions) have presented in the last five years."

Colorful opening and closing ceremonies acquainted campus audiences with the Buddhist monks' saffron attire, their temple instruments, and their unique multiphonic vocal techniques. An evening program of "Sacred Music, Sacred Dance" on Saturday, Sept. 25, brought a sell-out crowd to the Satellite Student Union, where the monks performed such masked dances as the Dance of the Sacred Snow Lion, the Skeleton Dance and the Dance of the Celestial Travelers.

Zarr said, "The program provided an interactive, educational, entertaining event that brought a diversity of our campus together .... It brought people into the USU who had never been there before."

With their painstaking work on the brilliantly colored sand painting completed by midday on Friday, Sept. 24, three of the monks (top) relaxed and celebrated as they looked down on the mandala through the Pavilion's clerestory windows. By day's end they had swept up the millions of grains of sand - symbolizing the impermanence of all that exists - and poured them ceremoniously into the waters of Woodward Park.

USU program adviser Kelly Stevens said that one member of the campus community described the monks' appearance as "the best event he's seen in 31 years on campus."

"Of all the cultural events we bring, this is the one the campus connected on," Stevens said. "We were really a community of people."

The Tibetans enjoyed residence hall life on campus during their stay. "The monks said they were at home here," Stevens said. "The campus did a really good job of hosting them."