Circles of Healing, Circles of Peace
Visit by Tibetan Nuns of Keydong Nunnery

From the Wellesley News

College prepares for creation of Tibetan mandala
9 February 2005
By Christina Satkowski ‘07

By mid February, Wellesley will be back to its normal hectic routine. Amidst the stress of classes and papers, eight Tibetan women will arrive to campus to painstakingly construct a tiny world of peace.

The eight women are nuns at the Keydong Buddhist nunnery in Kathmandu, Nepal. During their two week stay at Wellesley, they will spend hours building a mandala, a two-dimensional painting of vibrantly colored sands. The creation of the sacred mandala will be the centerpiece of an exhibition at the Davis Museum called “Circles of healing, Circles of Hope.”

"The process of making the mandala is a meditation,” said Ji Hyang Sunim ’91, Buddhist spiritual advisor and director of the project. Carefully tapping tiny funnels called chapkus the nuns will arrange countless grains of sand to form a large, intricate design. The varying colors and the symmetry of the design will represent different emotions and the wholeness of life, respectively. The Wellesley mandala will include sands from Kathmandu and Cape Cod. Its overall message will be Avalokiteshvara, or compassion.

“The world could always use more compassion,” said Ji Hyang. While the mandala comes from a religious tradition, Sunim said that people of all faiths can benefit from the peace and wholeness that the mandala represents.“Spiritually, it speaks to everybody,” she said. “You’ll walk out of the museum, the grass will seem greener and the air will seem fresher.” Project organizers hope that people will learn not only from the nun’s mandala, but from their lives too.

“For these nuns, to ordain is in itself a political act,” said Ji Hyang. “They’re really brave.” They are the first women to be trained in the art of the mandala. They have also studied language, debate, and medicine, training that is rarely available to Tibetan women.“ Their work ties in nicely with the theme of ‘women who will’ and should provide an inspiration to us all,” said Katie Ellis ‘07, president of Students for a Free Tibet, one of more than more than twenty student groups, academic departments and funds that is sponsoring the project.

The Keydong nuns have been to the United States once before in 1998, when they built a mandala for the Dalai Lama during his visit to Brandeis University. During that same trip, they created a similar mandala at Trinity University in Connecticut. It was the success of the Trinity project that inspired Ji Hyang’s efforts to bring the nuns to Wellesley.

The Mandala project at Wellesley will run from February 16 – March 1 and will include a panel discussion about the mandala, a traditional Buddhist blessing called a puja, and a viewing of "Windhorse,” a film about the perilous environment in which the Tibetan nuns work. The public will be able to observe the nuns as they create the mandala. The exhibition will also include Tibetan artwork from the collection of Mok Mokotoff, the father of a Wellesley student.

At the end of their visit, the nuns will dissolve the mandala into water in a ceremony at Lake Waban. This customary ritual represents the transitory nature of life, said Ji Hyang. “What will last is the impression that it makes in the heart.”