Magic Circle

Every great image of the world must start with the cosmic egg.

bachelard

The sand slips out from the mouth of a brass funnel, like ink from the tip of a fountain pen. The funnel is a sleeve rippled with extruded ridges; brushing a metal stick against them loosens the grains inside. Rubbing hard or soft releases the sand in large or small amounts—control is achieved by the delicate application of pressure. This is how you build a palace: grain by precious grain. And that is what we are constructing here—the dream of an ordered and kaleidoscopic universe. We are in the rear portion of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in a chapel shaped like the cupped palm of your hand placed on its side. Our companions are four monks who have come to New York City to make this mandala of sand. The Gyuto monks have traveled from their Himalayan refuge in Dharamsala, India, where they live in exile. Building the mandala is one of their ancient practices, born beneath the clouds and cerulean skies that cover the earthen canopy of this planet, the Tibetan plateau—a place where they are forbidden to return.

These monks have never been outside of India or Tibet. They were originally invited here to perform a harmonic chant that has puzzled and fascinated musicians and ethnomusicologists since its discovery in the 1960s. The term harmonic, in their case, does not refer to the sound the monks make while chanting together but rather to the resonance of three distinct octaves that usher from a single voice. The bass tone is feral, like the sound tectonic plates must make when they rub together; another tone sounds like the sustained grunt of a water buffalo; and above them both floats a falsetto—the whisper a ballerina makes in that moment of airborne suspension before she lands in the arms of her hero. The monks say the chant unites their masculine and feminine energies: the earthquake, the water buffalo, and the dancer, all living together in one person. Chanting and sand mandalas are both integral to their practice and can’t really be separated from one another. The path to heaven, for them, runs right through their bodies. Creating their dreamland requires the work of their throats and their lips and their hands and the hips upon which they sit to build this castle of sand.

We start with a white, two-by-two-meter raised platform—tabula rasa. Building cannot commence until this blank space becomes a real place. To realize this transformation, the monks chant and—dressed as the deities who will populate this palace—perform a ceremonial dance around the site of the incubating mandala. Next, they lay out the map of the palace according to the four directions. This intricate floor plan is drawn from memory. Each one of its rooms houses a deity, and every detail is etched into the mind of the monk. Creating this mandala unfolds a place that exists in their imagination; through this practice they reenact a cosmic order, a pattern mentally inscribed into their body and mind.

Making this mandala is a practice that belongs to the ancient art of memory—ars memoriae, as it is called in Latin. The great Roman orator Cicero adopted this method from the Greeks, but its original source remains unknown. In a time before books, Cicero built a mental scaffolding to help him remember his speeches. He converted each line of his speech into a memory image and then situated each image in a specific location in the theater in which he was to speak. He performed his speech by traveling through the room in his mind’s eye and recollecting his lines in the proper order. Charged with his mental powers—the theater became a vessel for memories and images that mingled together among the rapt audience.

Fluid and seemingly intangible, memories need a shelter to hold them. Using the classic technique of ars memoriae, Dante also built a ballast to contain memory in his Divine Comedy. In his journey through heaven and hell, the hero encounters the...