PRAYING GRAIN BY GRAIN

The University was much enlivened recently when a gaggle of Tibetan monks visited for two days, offering prayers, meeting with students and faculty, playing music, performing a "yak dance," visiting classes, and raising awareness and money for exiled Tibet; that ancient nation, larger than Western Europe, has been occupied since 1949 by China, which has killed more than a million Tibetans and destroyed some 6,000 places of worship. The monks, of the Gaden Shartse monastery, also spent two days painstakingly crafting a sand mandala, as the deft photographer Steve Hambuchen notes here. The stunning painting, made of millions of grains of sand, is many things at once: meditation, prayer, map of the cosmos, and artistic expression (in this case, of Avalokiteshvara, bodhisattva of compassion). As is traditional, the painting was destroyed as soon as it was finished; half of the sand was distributed to students and friends, and the other half was scattered in the Willamette River, so that the sand would spread around a world much in need of healing.