So from Monday, February 9, 2009, until Friday, February 13, 2009, my school is having five or six Buddhist monks staying at our school while they are creating a sand mandala. For those of you who don't know what a mandala is, it is like an intricate drawing made out of sand that is destroyed not long after it's made. It is meant to represent the circle of life.

Many of these monks come from Tibet, refugee camps, Nepal, and other countries surrounding Tibet and China. Most of them speak through a translator, but a few of the monks can speak basic English. Besides making a mandala, they sell jewelry, scarves, Tibetan flags (which are outlawed in China), and silk hangings, and all the money made from the sales goes towards feeding, clothing, and sheltering over 2,000 who live in the Dreprung Gomang Monestery near Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Some of their goals during this tour are to promote world peace and awareness on the conflicts between Tibet and China.

The are many different kinds of mandalas, and all of them are so finely detailed, it's amazing. I'm going to post a couple pictures I took of their work-in-progress, so you can take a look, too. I also encourage you to go to the website created by the people who organized the monks' tour of the US at [link] .


P.S.
I'm Nara Shikamaru in the deviantART Naruto Crew!
I'm "The Glutton" Jewelry Bonney in dA's Eleven Supernova's Crew!
I'm Sengoku in the deviantART One Piece Crew!