Diversity!

Last Wednesday night I attended "The Mystical Arts of Tibet" lecture at the Memorial Union. Most of the speech was about the Buddhist practice of constructing a sand mandala and what this practice meant to the religion. I knew that mandalas were very intricate works, but I never knew that there was so much symbolism and religious meaning behind them.

I actually enjoyed the speech a lot more than I thought I would. Honestly, I thought that I would sit there bored the whole time, but the monks were pretty interesting. They described their practices and the reasons these practices are significant. Every action holds a lot of meaning for Buddhist monks. One negative about the lecture was that the monks were pretty difficult to understand because of the language barrier. However, after a few minutes I was used to the accent and I could understand the monks better. I thought that the chant/prayer the monks did before the speech itself was the most interesting part of the whole experience. I have never seen anything like that before!