DANIEL WONG/Daily Bruin Senior Staff The Gyuto monks,
performing at Royce Hall tonight, create a mandala.
By Mary Williams
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Tibetan monks in a museum on busy Wilshire Boulevard might seem
out of place, but somehow it was the native Angelenos who looked
like they didn’t fit.
Dressed in red robes, heads shaved, members of the Gyuto
monastery worked on a mandala, or sand painting, in a room at the
UCLA Hammer Museum. The space was decorated with colorful cloths,
and a picture of the Dalai Lama sat on a table to one side.
Outside the velvet ropes that surrounded the monks were watchers
““ people in jeans who came to see the mandala as it was being
constructed. Thupten Donyo, an English-speaking monk and the
group’s translator, stood near the handful of spectators and
answered questions.
Behind him a group of three monks scooped colored sand into
long, narrow funnel-shaped tubes and scraped the ridged sides to
distribute the grains. Not one appeared to miss the line he was
filling in.
At a demonstration table, Donyo showed the technique used to
suck the sand back into the tube.
After the mandala is finished, it will be swept up and the
grains will be thrown into the Pacific Ocean.
“Once we finish all the consecrations, when we’re
through with all the rituals, we make a gift to the
non-humans,” Donyo said.
Fourteen Gyuto monks are on this West Coast tour, including the
three-day stop at the Hammer and a performance in Royce Hall
tonight, to raise money for their monastery in India. The monastery
was forced to move from Tibet in 1959 when the Chinese army
invaded, with only 90 of the 900 members able to follow the Dalai
Lama into exile.
Now the monastery has grown to 370 members, and is in dire need
of funds. The monks made an album of prayer chants in 1989,
“Freedom Chants From the Roofs of the World,” recorded
with the help of Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.
The chants are prayers recited in a guttural voice, where each
monk sings up to three notes at a time, creating a chord. Donyo
said that members of each monastery have a distinct sound.
“We need to hide the words through this technique.
You’re not supposed to hear the text unless you have
practice,” Donyo said.
He was modest, although his voice appears on the “Freedom
Chants” album and he will be performing tonight.
“Sometimes it is easy, but in my case it is
hopeless,” he said, laughing, about the difficulty of
learning multi-tonal singing.
In addition to chants, the live performances will feature bells,
horns and drums. The series of prayers is somewhat different when
performed in front of an audience.
“We are not doing everything like we do in the
monastery,” Donyo said. “We do not do the whole ritual;
we just take the most important parts, and the most enjoyable to
see. If we do the whole text, people may get bored and not
understand.”