Theorizing Non-Western Invention
Somewhere along the line, Emory struck up a partnership with the Dalai Lama's exiled Tibetan Buddhist community in Dharamsala. We now have monks-in-residence in an Atlanta monastery, and because the Dalai Lama thinks that Buddhist monks should be educated in the natural sciences, they take science courses on campus. Seeing and speaking to the red-robed monks was a part of our daily life on campus. We were also lucky enough to benefit from the cultural exchange.
One of the things that the monks brought to our campus was the practice of making sand mandalas. According to the Buffalo Museum of Science, “a ‘mandala’ is an artistic representation of the sacred mansion of a Tibetan Buddhist deity.” These mandalas are formed from colored sand, with delicate designs that make them look more like intricate paintings. They can be large, made of millions of grains of colored sand.
Linked in this post is an article about one of the monks’ mandalas on Emory’s campus in 2010. My senior year (2012), I remember buzz on campus in the spring because you could go to the Carlos Art Museum on the quad and watch the monks work on a mandala in real time: http://news.emory.edu/stories/2012/02/er_take_note_buddhist_monks_mandala/campus.html\
Making mandalas is not a task that just anyone can engage in; after its purported origins with the Buddha in the 6th century BCE, “the ritual creation of sand mandalas is an art still handed down from master to disciple in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries” (“Tibetan Sand Mandalas”). “Learning how to create the mandala teaches patience and meditation, while learning to understand the meaning of the mandala helps to initiate the monk into the spiritual complexities of Buddhist religion” (“Tibetan Sand Mandalas”).
Creating sand mandalas is invention within an Eastern religious context. And here’s where this artistic form deviates from invention as we frequently conceive of it in Western contexts: many mandalas, like the one in the 2010 piece that took six days to create, are destroyed upon completion. “This is normal practice,” the assistant program director at the Atlanta monastery, and a language instructor at Emory, asserted in the CNN article above. “It is done to symbolize the impermanence of life.”
So much of the invention scholarship that we have encountered this semester has been talking about invention as related to writing--invention from the topos (Leff, Miller, McKeon, Wallace); tagmemics and other heuristics; the Progymnasmata. Writing, in turn, is conceived of as permanent. Wallace does allow for the “overlap” of “creative activity” and “inventive activity,” in writing contexts (391, 393)... but I think that the idea of the sand mandala goes far beyond even meshing creativity, broadly defined, and invention. What happens when you invent in a mindset geared towards impermanence? When, in a Western frame of mind, would we dedicate such time and care, such purposeful action, toward something just for the sake of breaking it down again?
“Tibetan Sand Mandala.” Buffalo Museum of Science. http://www.sciencebuff.org/exhibits/tibetan-sand-mandala/
