When Tibetan Buddhist monks from Drepung Loseling Monastery arrive in Kingston this October, they won’t come armed with paintbrushes or chisels, no marble blocks or bronze casting tools in tow. Their medium is more fragile than all of that: colored sand, millions of grains of it, sifted into geometric patterns so intricate you’d think they were laid out by CAD software, not by hand. Over five days, from October 27 to October 31, the Ulster Performing Arts Center will host the construction—and dissolution—of a sand mandala, an ancient art form whose central theme is as radical as it is simple: Everything passes.
The mandala is a diagram of the cosmos, a kind of spiritual architecture built grain by grain. Each gesture is prayer. Each pattern is meaning. The monks work in near silence, their breath and the rasp of the chakpur—the funnel-like tool used to coax sand into place—the soundtrack of creation. And then, on October 31 at noon, it all goes away. The finished mandala is swept into a heap, the brilliant symmetry undone in a matter of minutes, a reminder that beauty is not diminished by its impermanence but defined by it.
This choreography of making and unmaking is at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist practice. Where Western art often seeks permanence—paintings preserved in climate-controlled museums, sculptures mounted on pedestals—the sand mandala insists on the opposite: That nothing lasts, and that this is not a tragedy but the nature of reality. To witness the process is to be initiated into a philosophy of release, a crash course in the Buddhist teaching of impermanence. In a culture wired to archive, digitize, and cling to every scrap of data and memory, there’s something liberating, even subversive, about art designed to vanish.
The monks themselves come from Drepung Loseling Monastery, once the largest monastic institution in the world. Founded in 1416 near Lhasa, Tibet, Drepung at its height housed more than 10,000 monks—scholars, philosophers, and practitioners dedicated to the preservation of Buddhist teachings. After the Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1950s, many monks fled into exile, and Drepung Loseling reestablished itself in India. Today, its diaspora extends to the United States, where the monastery is affiliated with Emory University’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics in Atlanta. The monks’ tours, like this one, are not only fundraisers for their community but also cultural diplomacy, offering a glimpse into a tradition that has survived upheaval and displacement.
To step into UPAC during the week of October 27 is to enter a contemplative space disguised as a performance venue. You’ll see an image emerge from nothing, watch it fill with color and pattern, and then see it vanish. It’s not a trick. It’s a lesson.
The construction begins with an opening ceremony on Monday, October 27 at noon, and concludes with a closing ceremony on Friday, October 31 at noon. All events are free and open to the public.
