Peace rites
A Buddhist ceremony provides a focus for peace-making on historic Pukenamu
By David Young, The NZ Listener
Dec 14, 1996
For two weeks in November Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery flew Tibetan flags and rang to the sound of monks chanting beneath the gallery’s distinctive central dome. With its resonant curves and four entrances, the dome area had caught the eye of sculptor-photographer Hamish Horsley as the perfect place to conduct a sand mandala.
Such a unique event – thought to be the first in the southern hemisphere – involves the creation of a spiritually inspired design made painstakingly, grain by grain, from coloured sand. The three young Tibetan Buddhist monks who built it, Gendu Kelsang, Lobsang Gendu and Lobsang Khedup, still had raw memories of their escape from the oppression of their Chinese-ruled homeland. They related how they had left to learn their culture from the monasteries in exile, in their case in southern India.
The mandala - intricate, exquisite and in eye-catching colour, has a ritual form that takes months to understand and commit to memory. The work was a gift of peace and compassion to the gallery and the town. But it was also there to support an exhibition of photographs, Near to Heaven: a Sculptor’s Journey Through Tibet, by Hamish Horsley, a son of the city and a sculptor. A resident of London for 20 years, he has close links with the London based Tibet Foundation.
Over 10 days, a record number of people attended the gallery. They saw the red-and-saffron-robed, shaven-headed monks offer up their puja (devotional ritual) with symbols, drum, long horn and resonant chart at the beginning and end of each day. They watched the mandala - dedicated to the Buddha of Compassion in the interests of world peace – slowly unfold before their eyes. Working from memory of ancient tantric texts, the monks tapped each grain of sand from long metal tubes onto the emerging form.
Their hands never touch the mandala, which, despite its increasingly deceptive appearance of an enchanted cake icing, was as fragile as a sand castle.
Paradoxes swam out of the creation; culture as art, the exotic as workaday and, miraculously, exiles creating connections with and between tangata whenua and tangata tiriti.
According to the animistic Buddhists, the mandala generates its own vibration of compassion. We are all blessed by it. So it became a unique and poignant point of triangulation between Tibetan, Maori and European culture on a historic site.
The gallery sites on Pukenamu, the same hill where once stood the stockade, erected from late 1846 for the garrison. Shortly after the stockade was built, three young Maori were summarily hanged for an act of utu that had left six of the Gilfillan family dead. With a taua (war party) bristling on the edge of town, it was a moment of bloody racial tension that spilled briefly into war.
Nga Rauru, with manawhenua from the northern side of the lower river, have never been back on the hill. But, on the morning of the November 9th, one year shy of 150 years later, they returned to powhiri (welcome) the peaceable monks. Chenrezig was abroad.
The monks responded, doing a traditional ritual from the flat roof of the gallery – their slow, pulsing music as rhythmic as the tread of a quietly advancing army, the longhorn braying across the city, the chants a deep, throat-controlled rumble from the pit of the solar plexus
Inside, mingling easily with the tangata whenua, they traded long white ceremonial silk scarves for hongi, chants for waiata. Then they went back to their demanding work. After 10 days, at noon on the Thursday, the mandala was complete. In bright pastels, it even contained an upright border of lotus flowers. The monks returned in the afternoon to complete four flags: the Tibetan and New Zealand national flags, as well as one for the Tibet Foundation and the Sarjeant Gallery.
On the Friday, the final day of the mandala’s life, tangata whenua and Tibetans again blended in ceremony. At 6.00 am after a karanga, Noko Tangaroa (from the southern-most Ringatu marae, Otoko, on the nearby Manawhero River) swept in with tangata whenua. Tangaroa and some of those behind him, such as Ken Mair, had been prominent in last year’s 100 day occupation of nearby Pakaitore (Moutoa Gardens). Ceremonially, they placed on the mandala a pebble from the river and a sprig from the kauri stands in Moutoa Gardens.
Tashi Thondup, the monks interpreter, explaining the mandala’s symoblism to Niko Tangaroa.
Through their interpreter, the monks explained the patterns of the mandala. One of the kuia observed that one section had the precise colour and form of taniko weaving.
By noon more than 300 people filled the gallery. Most had watched the mandala’s growth and had returned expectantly to attend its dismantling. After a final rooftop ritual dominated by the horn, everyone trooped inside where the monks were engaged in their most sacred act of the entire fortnight: the summoning of Chenrezig to enter the mandala.
A Tibetan bell was rung. A monk with a ‘pizza cutter’ stepped up silently to make two deliberate, diametrical slices into the mandala. The shock rippled through the audience more used to the permanency of art than a form that marks the impermanence of things. It was a wrenching lesson in the Buddhist tenet of non-attachment.
But, more significant was what followed. Quickly, but systematically, the sands were swept up like ashes into a heap with the Moutoa offerings and the mysterious additions of a rose and pohutukawa flower. All were consigned ceremonially to a gathered bag. With a taiaha bearer out in front, a procession under the flags of the nation of Tibet and Maori sovereignty made its way to the banks of the Whanganui River.
Here within cooee of Moutoa Gardens, the sweepings from the mandala table were consigned to the river of Te Atihaunui a Paparangi, browned by a moderate flood. The intention is that, disbursed, the compassion and peace from Chenrizig will flow out to all people.
Near to Heaven: a Sculptor’s Journey Through Tibet.
An exhibition of photographs by Hamish Horsley
Although primarily a sculptor, Horsley has for the past 10 years regularly roamed the Himalayas with a camera, drawing on that vast and elemental landscape for artistic inspiration.
In the course of his travels, he has come to a close understanding of Tibetan Buddhism and culture – both inside Tibet, which culturally is a shadow of its former self, and outside. “Where in 1960 there were 6000 Tibetan monasteries, today only 10 exist,” he says. The rest have been systematically destroyed by the Chinese invaders.
Horsley’s 59 photographs [on show at Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery] depict the grandeur of the Tibetan land and the Tibetans relationship to it. Virtually the only intact parts of Tibet are in the communities and monasteries set up in exile, many in northern and southern India, so his work also reflects these. Images of Tibetan Buddhism found in Mongolia provide another intriguing focus for the exhibition.
The photographs clearly exist as art in their own right. But also shown are selected miniature bronzes [sculptures] of fire, air, earth and water that will form a part of one of his great works, a garden of peace beside the Imperial War Museum, for the Tibet Foundation.