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I knew exactly what was going to happen–I had even seen it happen once before–so I shouldn’t have been so surprised. But I was. And shocked, and saddened, and embarrassed about feeling shocked and saddened. And then revelation happened.

This week, my university has been hosting seven Buddhist monks from the Tashi Kyil Monastery in Uttarakhan, India. As these particular monks are wont to do, they spent all week painstakingly creating a beautiful mandala out of colored sand. They finished it at about 12:00 this afternoon. And at 12:15, they destroyed it, swept it into an urn, and took the now-brown sand and dumped it in the Ohio River.

I’ve read books and stuff, and I know why Buddhist Monks do this. It is a way to teach the core Buddhist principle of the transitory–and ultimately illusory–nature of everything. Desire produces attachment, and attachment causes suffering. It’s Buddhism 101. I’ve given the lecture in dozens of World Civ. courses. Don’t get attached to stuff, because it will just go away and make you miserable.

But the mandala was beautiful. And it was meaningful. It depicted the world’s eight great religions in a circle of harmony and vibrant color. Each grain of sand was meticulously placed in harmony with others. Seven monks, in seven days, shook their fists at entropy and wrenched both truth and beauty from common sand. They cooperated. They completed a project. And then they destroyed it. What a waste!

This, of course, is the point. The construction of the mandala was half of a sermon. Its destruction was the other half. The first half of the sermon tells us that, with cooperation, skill, and intense effort, we can make nice things. We can have of meaning and purpose and great beauty all at the same time. We can do hard things and do them well. And we can matter. But we can only do it for fifteen minutes and then everything gets swept away and dumped into the river. Or something like that.

Western writers have taken these facts and drawn exactly the wrong conclusions from them: Shelly’s “Ozymandias,” Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes,” Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and even the Book of Ecclesiastes. All of these works (and oh so many more) point to the transitory nature of human striving and say, in effect, “what’s the point–it’s all going to end up as dust.” Even the 70s rock group Kansas said so in their most famous song.

This cluster of Western classics about the transitory nature of everything generally end up coming to one of three conclusions: 1) everything is transitory, so be really depressed and wear black all the time and die tragically; 2) everything is transitory, so eat, drink, and be merry because, hey, why not?; and 3) everything is transitory, so focus on really meaningful things like the making sure you get into heaven by being really, really good.

All three of these conclusions are wrong. Or, at least, that is the lesson of the mandala.

What I learned from watching the monks create and destroy is that the transitory nature of a thing does not make it any less valuable or the effort in its creation any less worthwhile. It’s OK to be temporary. Everything else is too. The beauty is still beautiful and the truth is still true–even if it all crumbles to dust fifteen minutes later. It is not the impermanence of things that makes us miserable; it is the unreasonable desire for things to last forever–which, in fact, nothing does.

This, I think, is what Buddhists mean when they say that attachment makes us unhappy. The point is not that we should avoid loving people or things because they will go away someday. It is that we should love them and cherish them while they are part of our lives and not let the fact that they will go away interfere with our ability to love them now. “Attachment” is not love; it is the expectation that what we love will last forever. It is the unfair and unrealistic condition that we create when we say, “I will only love you as long as I can be sure that you will never go away and make me sad.”

Human beings have a strong tendency to equate value with longevity–whether it is relationships, lifetimes, truth, spiritual choices, used cars, or works of sand art. Such a view cannot make us anything other than unhappy, since nothing will ever meet the requirements that such a view imposes. Happy people have figured out, I think, that things like beauty and meaning and truth don’t have to last forever to be beautiful, meaningful, and true. Things change.

Impermanence is not a flaw in anything. It is an unavoidable fact of everything. This, to me, is the great lesson of the mandala ceremony. I know that there are theological matters that I am ignoring. But my objective is not to convert you to Buddhism. It is to convince you that all of the things that give beauty and meaning to your life are temporary. They will stop being, or they will stop being beautiful and true. And that is OK, because the boat is not the shore.

All photos by Tamara Geiselman, University of Evansville Campus Minister