What’s It All About?
I was watching a documentary recently that showed Tibetan monks displaying their incredible talent in creating sand art. Their creations, called Mandalas, are made from white stones the monks crush and grind. They mix that with naturally colored sands to make desired colors.
The monks work in teams, meticulously arranging the sand in intricate designs that form geometrically perfect and breathtakingly beautiful art, much of it depicting Buddhist deities. It takes weeks to finish them, but once finished, the art is ritualistically destroyed.
“Huh? How can they work so hard to create such beauty then destroy it?”
Because the whole process is meant to be a ritual symbolizing the tentativeness of life, something that we in the western world desperately try to ignore.
An Illusion
Oh, we may attend a funeral now and then where we can’t ignore what awaits us all, but by and large, society does all it can to provide the illusion that the world, and all that is in it – including us – is permanent.
TV drug commercials show old people gingerly doing yoga in a park; other ads depict self-satisfied young people buying, not one but two, expensive SUVs, one for each partner. Articles in newspapers and magazines eagerly describe medical breakthroughs that promise to extend life indefinitely.
You would think that observing nature, where life and death are so obvious, would keep our vulnerability constantly before our eyes. But are we too busy to notice?
“Ok,” you may say, “what’s the point?”
The point is exactly what the Buddhist monks try to make with their art. Life is fleeting, and at some point all of us should take stock, asking the question 1960s British movie and song “Alfie” did: “What’s it all about?” The lyrics ask that question and provide an answer.
What’s it all about, Alfie
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give
Or are we meant to be kind?
And if only fools are kind, Alfie,
Then I guess it’s wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie
I know there’s something much more,
Something even non-believers can believe in.
I believe in love, Alfie.
Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
Until you find the love you’ve missed, you’re nothing, Alfie.
It may be a bit corny; after all, it’s from the 60s. And “love” in the lyrics may refer to romantic love. But that’s still love, and it’s close to what Jesus was talking about in the gospels when he quoted the Hebrew Bible, saying that the two greatest commandments are love of God and neighbor.
But what is love? People searching for God can do no better than refer to the Apostle Paul’s description in his First Letter to the Corinthians in the Christian Bible:
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Also in the Christian Bible, the writer of John’s first letter insists that “God is love.” This may be one of the differences between us, who search for God in the Christian tradition, and our Buddhist brothers and sisters. We believe – as Paul in his Corinthian letter proclaims – that love is incarnated in a person and that it never ends.
