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Fleeting images in sand

In the Buddhist realm of nonbeing, form and color have no names. But here on the earthly plane at 38th and Chestnut Streets, the particles flowing from Losang Samten's "pen" are forming luminous fields of cobalt, rose, celadon and more, where elephants, skeletons, demons and foolish humans play.

Losang Samten sits atop a platform in the Philadelphia Cathedral, where onlookers watch him begin work on the mandala. The Buddhist ritual portrays a message of life.
Losang Samten sits atop a platform in the Philadelphia Cathedral, where onlookers watch him begin work on the mandala. The Buddhist ritual portrays a message of life.Read moreCLEM MURRAY / Inquirer Staff Photographer

In the Buddhist realm of nonbeing, form and color have no names.

But here on the earthly plane at 38th and Chestnut Streets, the particles flowing from Losang Samten's "pen" are forming luminous fields of cobalt, rose, celadon and more, where elephants, skeletons, demons and foolish humans play.

It's all an illusion, of course.

It's the Wheel of Life.

And you are its subject.

Samten, a Tibetan-born monk, glanced up Thursday afternoon from the mandala of colored sand he is creating in the sanctuary of the Philadelphia Cathedral, seat of the Episcopal Diocese.

A candle flickered beside him.

"The blue represents the pureness - the compassion and kindness - within every living being," he explained to three visitors.

"But the message of the Wheel of Life" - one of the names for this four-foot circle of symbolic images and saturated hues - "is here," he said, pointing to its inmost circle.

"The pig symbolizes ignorance," he said. "The snake is anger. The pigeon is greed, or desire."

Considered one of the world's masters of Buddhist "particle art," or sand painting, Samten began his mandala - Sanskrit for

circle

or

completion

- last Sunday at the invitation of the cathedral's dean, the Rev. Richard Giles.

He expects to finish Friday or Saturday, in time for a 1 p.m. dedication next Sunday. In the meantime, visitors may watch - but not touch - weekdays between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. During the noonday Eucharist service (to which all are welcome), Samten takes a one-hour lunch break.

Tradition has it the Buddha designed the Wheel of Life, a kind of visual sermon also known as the Wheel of Deception.

"There are some varieties in shapes and color and size," Samten said, "but the message is always the same."

Its moral: Wise people seek enlightenment, which reveals the ultimate reality beyond the senses. Those who succumb to earthly appetites will be reborn to this life again and again.

And, like all Buddhist sand mandalas, this fragile, ephemeral image will suffer a purposeful extinction.

After the circle's week on display, another monk will step into the cathedral sanctuary Feb. 3. With a few quick strokes of a broom, he will sweep the image into an incoherent blur "as a reminder," Samten explained, "of our impermanence."

Samten, 54, knows something of the fleeting nature of human existence. In 1959, at age 5, he fled Tibet with his parents and sisters shortly after an uprising resulted in the Chinese Communists torching ancient monasteries and libraries.

Following in the footsteps of the Dalai Lama, who had fled just months before, they made their way across windswept glaciers "where I saw dead bodies" of other refugees, into the mountains of Nepal, Samten said.

In 1964, the family moved to northern India to be with the Dalai Lama and served for many years as his aides. There, the young Samten studied Buddhist philosophy, dance, chant and sand painting, memorizing hundreds of traditional mandalas, before the Dalai Lama encouraged him to introduce the art form to the United States in 1988.

Since 1989, he has lived in Philadelphia, where he heads the Tibetan Buddhist Center. It will move next month from Upper Darby to a room in the cathedral complex.

After the visiting women thanked him and departed, Samten picked up two narrow cones of serrated steel and bent again over his still-forming universe.

The cone, or

chakpo

, in his left hand contained a few teaspoons of yellow sand, which he released by rasping the other chakpo back and forth across its top. (Much of the sand is tinted with watercolors, although he collects naturally colored sand as well.)

Rasping steadily, he shook loose a narrow stream of yellow, then brick-colored, sand. In minutes there appeared a monastery roof.

It was just one detail in the wheel's third and largest circle, which will contain six large panels depicting a Tibetan village, a herd of deer, two realms of jealous demigods, a scene of human drunkenness and lust, and, at the bottom of it all, hell.

Around this will run a narrow band of 12 smaller, similarly themed images. And gripping it all in his gnarly claws and fierce teeth will be the image of Mara: the red Lord of Death, who serves to remind us that we all must die.

After the mandala is "disaggregated," the sand will be ceremoniously dumped into the Schuylkill "as a gift," he said, "to Mother Earth."

Does it upset him to see his labors destroyed?

"No, no, no," he said with a laugh. "It is meant to be, like cutting a birthday cake. Its energy will bless the whole universe."

More Information

To view an Inquirer video of Losang Samten making the Wheel of Life mandala, go to

http://go.philly.com/

mandala

For more information on the Tibetan Buddhist Center of Philadelphia, go to

www.tibetanbuddhist.org

.

For more information about the Philadelphia Cathedral or times for viewing the mandala, call 215-386-0234.

The cathedral is entered from its rear doors on 38th Street at Chestnut Street.