As you can see in the pictures posted in the gallery below, the monks study and work very hard despite the challenging conditions. Without complaint, and usually cheerfully, they sit on cushions in bare classrooms that are often over 90 degrees and still manage to excel in their studies.

The main project we are proposing is the construction of a shade roof on top of the school. This roof would significantly reduce the temperature in the classrooms. It would also provide a sheltered space during the rainy season for the monks to do their calligraphy class. The picture on the left is an example of a building with the type of shade roof we want to build (just click on it to make it bigger).

The second project is a power storage system for their computer lab. The monks have received donated computers to create this wonderful computer room. Unfortunately they cannot use them much of the time because of the random electrical supply here. The electricity here is only on during half the day and alternates between mornings and afternoons with constant, random outages. Our goal is to purchase a backup power system like this one pictured on the right. This type of system would allow the computers to operate even when the electricity is off and then regular classes could be scheduled.

The third project is to purchase new books. Every school needs books and our school is in desperate need for new ones. Not only are there not enough, many of the ones we do have are very worn and difficult to read.

The combined total of these 3 projects is about $10,000. If just 500 people were able to contribute $20 we could meet this goal. If you cannot afford $20, please consider a $10 donation – every little bit helps! If you able to contribute significantly more, all the better. It is a great cause!

Update – We have met our goal as of June 24th, 2009. Thank you all so much for your kindness.

On behalf of the Principal, Venerable Geshe Sangye , and all the monks at the school, I thank you for your kindness and consideration. May you have much peace, happiness, and many blessings.

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Keep in mind we are only halfway to our goal. We still need almost $5000 so please help get the word out. For more info see the “Gaden Shartse School Needs Your Help Post.”  Thank you to all that helped to make this possible.

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Six Gaden Shartse monks will spend the next three days creating sand artwork and spreading the message of tolerance and compassion at Washington & Jefferson College.

The Buddhist monks are traveling across the world to share their message and raise money for monasteries in India.

The Gaden Shartse monastery was located in Tibet until the Chinese crackdown in 1959, monk and tour director Jangchub Chophel said Tuesday. The Chinese destroyed 5,000 monasteries and India was kind enough to give the monks refugee status, he said. Gaden Shartse monastery has 3,000 monks, and there are 100,000 living in exile, he said.

Nineteen years ago, the tours began, combining education with fundraising. The monks sell Indian and Tibetan goods.

During the last tour, the monks raised enough money to build a small hospital in southern India that serves the entire population in the area, including the monks. This tour will raise money to help operate the hospital, including buying items like X-ray machines and medicine, he said.

However, the tour is about more than raising money. The monks have a mission of spreading tolerance and unity. That has happened in some places they have visited, where labels such as Democrat and Republican have fallen away as people talked to one another, he said.

“Everywhere we go, we talk about unity,” he said, including the unity of religion since so many are similar at their core. “All give practitioners a chance to grow and develop a spiritual path.”

On the tours, they teach about Tibetan culture and demonstrate their arts. The monks will be working on the sand artwork from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at Olin Fine Arts Center gallery until Thursday night. The public is welcome.

The monks create the artwork by scooping sand into two cones and rubbing one on top of the other, guiding the amount of sand released.

“The creation of it is a spiritual practice,” Chophel said as music softly played in the background. “It takes a lot of concentration and meditation to do it.”

This particular artwork is a symbolic representation of the celestial home of the Buddha of Compassion, he said. It has a center and four entrances, each of which symbolizes a different path to enlightenment.

On Friday, they will have a dissolution ceremony to bring the Buddhas present and purify the negativity, he said. Anyone who attends will get a bag of sand from the artwork and the remaining will be put to rest in a body of water to allow the purifying to continue, Chophel said.

The Mandala artwork is a lesson in impermanence, just as life is temporary, he said.

“Every day we live is special and sacred because it’s never going to come again,” he said. “Sweeping it up is reminding us not to waste each precious day we have.”

Schedule of events:

Wednesday

9 a.m. to 9 p.m. – Mandala construction at the Olin Fine Arts Center

1 p.m. – Buddhist-style debate at Yost Lecture Hall

6 p.m. – Lecture on World Peace and Unity of All Religions at Ski Lodge

8 p.m. – Healing ritual at Ski Lodge

Thursday

9 a.m. to 9 p.m. – Mandala construction at the Olin Fine Arts Center

6 p.m. – Small Group: Eastern Views on the Environment in Yost Lecture Hall

7 p.m. – Butter sculpture in Ski Lodge

Friday

1 p.m. – Dissolution ceremony at Olin Fine Arts Center

For more information about the monks, visit their tour Web site at www.gadenshartsetour.org.

The Observer Reporter ]]> http://www.gadenshartsecf.org/impermanence/feed/ 0 http://www.gadenshartsecf.org/art-temporary-variety/ http://www.gadenshartsecf.org/art-temporary-variety/#comments Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:33:45 +0000 ri http://gadenshartsetour.info/?p=415 By Harry Funk, Online editor

Everyone knows what art is.

It hangs in galleries, behind velvet ropes and in ornate frames, for aficionados to enjoy for generations to come.

Sure, that’s the way you learned it in school: da Vinci and Rembrandt, Manet and Monet, van Gogh and van Dyck. Art for the ages.

But what about that dragon you drew in fourth grade? That was art, at least until your mother took it off the refrigerator and tossed it into the trash.

More specifically, that was disposable art, even though you didn’t intend it to be temporary.

Some artists do. To them, art is for the moment, not for posterity.

You see and hear temporary art in a variety of places, be it a spray-painted graffito that will be glossed over by the public works department, or a couple of guys playing guitar without a tape recorder running.

You even smell and taste it: Master chefs create culinary masterpieces, knowing full well that they’ll end up in a series of stomachs.

Sometimes art reaches none of the senses. The late composer John Cage wrote a piece called “4’33,” which is literally four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

In the opinion of many a layman, that’s the definition of disposable.

Temporary art can touch a spiritual side. Washington & Jefferson College recently hosted a group of Buddhist monks from the Gaden Shartse Monastery in India, men who spent four days working on a mandala, an intricately detailed sculpture of sand.

Then they swept it all away.

One of the monks, Jangchub Chopel, explained the ancient practice as a lesson in the temporary nature of life.

“We’re going to dissolve the mandala,” Chopel said in mid-project. “This means we’ll have a very large ceremony. We’ll bring the blessings of the Buddha of Compassion present, and at the end we’ll symbolically take parts of the sand and put it in a special container, to make sure it lives on.”

The closing ceremony drew a healthy crowd to W&J’s Olin Fine Arts Center, to at least take photos and videos of the sand mandala before it was relegated to oblivion. Then came the brushes: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Or more accurately in this case, ground quartz to ground quartz.

Speaking of pulverized minerals, chalk serves as a fairly popular instrument for temporary art. Give a youngster a box of multicolored Crayolas, send him out to the sidewalk and watch him go.

But sidewalk chalk is not necessarily kids’ stuff. Pittsburgh artist Conrad Quesen is among those who will take to the streets, painstakingly sketching creations that soon will disappear.

He also works in more traditional media, but he views that as somewhat disposable, too: “Once you sell a painting, it’s gone anyway,” he said after finishing a chalk mural in the middle of Shadyside’s Ellsworth Avenue.

Perhaps Vincent van Gogh entertained similar thoughts as he took a blade to his ear.

His paintings might be here to stay in galleries around the world, but permanence is by no means a prerequisite for creating art.

The Observer-Reporter

Monks make for low-maintenance houseguests.

Grand Junction’s Ray and Peggy Pilcher invited six monks with the Gaden Shartse Monastery to stay in their home during the monks’ stay in Mesa County.

The monks are on a U.S. tour, raising awareness about Buddhism and donations for construction of a hospital to serve their monastery and other villages in southern India.

The monastery originally was built in Tibet, but Chinese occupation decades ago forced the Tibetan monks to flee to India.

The Pilchers, both Buddhists, have opened their home to the Gaden Shartse monks for the past 10 years, showing the monks the compassion synonymous with Buddhism.

Ray Pilcher said he has been interested in Buddhist culture since he was young, and his nearly four dozen trips to China and Tibet through the years only furthered that interest.

On Sunday, during a free presentation at Western Colorado Center for the Arts, the Tibetan monks demonstrated the precision and time that goes into making a mandala, which is believed to help cleanse negativity for those who view it, said monk Jangchub Chophel.

The monks used brightly colored sand made from crushed and dyed Indian quartz to create a symbolic representation of Green Tara’s universe. Green Tara is honored in Buddhist culture for being a female Buddha, showing that women can achieve equality in a male-dominated society.

The mandala construction began Saturday and will finish at 6:30 p.m. today during a Green Tara puja and sweeping up ceremony, in which the monks will distribute some of the blessed sand to those in attendance at the Art Center ceremony at 1803 N. Seventh St.

The remaining sand will be thrown in the Colorado River to float downstream. The cleaning of the mandala signifies nothing in the world is permanent, and understanding change is part of balancing life.

The Buddhist monks will be in Grand Junction until Wednesday. From Grand Junction, they head to Hotchkiss and Moab, Utah, before continuing east across the country, Chophel said.

To learn more about Buddhist culture, to bid on silent auction items Ray Pilcher brought back from Tibet or to see the mandala, visit the Art Center from 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. today.

Money donated will be used to build a hospital in southern India.

By MELINDA MAWDSLEY
The Daily Sentinel

After Yachats, we headed off to Aspen, Colorado. There was a buzz in town because His Holiness the Dalai Lama was coming to give some talks at the Aspen Institute. The energy was electric and we had a great time. The tour has been visiting Aspen since the early days and our long-time friend and organizer Dennis had a busy, thoughtful schedule ready the moment we touched down. Since His Holiness was coming we created a Chenrezig sand mandala. This was hosted by the kind people at the Elliot Yeary Gallery where we were surrounded by some amazing art. Dennis put together a schedule of teachings and empowerments to fill the week for so many that were unable to attend His Holiness teachings. This worked out wonderfully as we were there to help fill the void and people were still able to receive teachings and many blessings. Our kind friend Adam put us up in his wonderful home. Both Dennis and Adam have been helping us for almost 20 years and we cannot thank them enough for their generosity.

Our amazing friends Ri and Renee from Oregon traveled with us from Yachats and, like brave troopers,  helped us throughout our stay in Aspen. They are also shooting film of our tour/adventures with the thought of putting together a film one day. Also joining us in Aspen were long-time friends and organizers Peggy from Grand Junction, Bob and Candi, from Crawford, and new organizers Hannah from Gunnison, and Louise from Durango, as well as our old friend Charlie. So our time was filled with blessings, teachings, friends, and lots of fun.  We even had the blessing of attending the public talk given by His Holiness on Saturday.

In addition to the sand mandala, Venerable Geshe Norbu gave a teaching on the Four Seals of Buddhism, conducted a Vajravidaran Healing, and a Dukar Empowerment.  As always there were many business and house blessings along with personal healings to fill out the day.  One great event was blessing the County Fair. So many people came after that to thank the monks saying that the energy totally changed and from that point everything was wonderful. As usual we met so many wonderful people it is impossible to fit them in. Please feel free to add any comments you might have.

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This was our second visit to Yachats on this tour and we were thrilled to be back again so soon. Our precious organizers Ri and Renee put together a great schedule of events starting with a screening of the film Dalai Lama Renaissance. They received permission for us to show it from the producer/director Khashyar Darvich in order to help our monastery. Khashyar has been kind enough to let us continue to show it as we travel throughout the tour. Our main event was creating a sand mandala of the Buddha of Compassion at the Green Salmon. By the way, some of the best coffee in the world! He roasts it himself and people were driving from 40 miles away to get some. We also did a Medicine Buddha empowerment, Vajravidaran healing, a Chay Drol ritual, and a question and answer night. So we were kept pretty busy. In addition to all the kindness of Ri and Renee (by the way, they are also hosting this blog for us), Precious Claire came down to help us out and we meet a new organizer, Colette, who was brave enough to take up the task of bringing us to Moab. More on that in the Moab post later.

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