Study III - Reach

Reach -- Mandala in Larung Gar Buddhist Academy, Yafei Li, ca.2017

"Converted to Buddha, law, masters and monks

The eighth day of April, is the birthday of Shakyamuni

Kittens, puppies, piglets, lambs, calves, same as me

There is joy, sadness, fear of death"

In the afternoon, at Larung Gar Buddhist Academy, I mistakenly hit into the church. A master sat in the upper, and thousands of Lama students sat on the ground. A very young Lama boy sat besides me. He showed me his homework on his Chinese class. He wrote this poem with childish strokes, full of correction and endorsement from his teacher. He might be younger than ten. I wondered how he could write such a beautiful poem. Perhaps only this age can do it.

On the hill besides the Buddhist Academy, they built a Mandala, like a temple. Mandala is a symbol of order, contrasted with chaos. In the west, it is commensurate with heaven. A symbol of everything -- a human body, a temple, a palace, a city, a continent, an idea, a fantasy, also nothing. Fly to the heaven, from top to bottom, staring at the Mandala. Larung Gar had been cloudy for couple days. Finally it gave us ten minutes of sunshine when we reached the top of the hill.

Before painting this, I told my friends that I was going to ruin it when it was finished, like Lamas building and destroying a sand Mandala. Destroying a Mandala shows the illusory of the earth. Only the outer Mandala is destroyed. In their mind, they have learned more energy through the building practice. The power of the inner Mandala becomes more and more solid. It is also said that the works of Mandala show the life of the short-term perishable. It seems to warn us that life is long pay, short harvest, and lost pain.

However, in the moment I finished it, I did not have the courage to destroy it. I do not want to accept the short harvest, especially the pain of loss. After all, I am too helpless to destroy it, perhaps because I do not have such strong faith.