Tibetan monks share their culture at Musikfest with song, dance, art, meditation
Tibetan monks will share their culture with song, dance, art and meditation
The Tibetan Monks of Drepung Loseling will perform 'The Mystical… (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO )
Beneath Musikfest's normally boisterous and frantic face lies an inner eye of tranquility. As a unique tonic to the festival's restless hustle and bustle of pop, rock and polka, a troupe of Tibetan monks from the centuries-old Drepung Loseling Monastery will soothe the eyes and calm the soul in a series of programs featuring sacred music, dance, meditation and mandala sand painting.
Yeshe Phelgey, a Tibetan who spent 20 years in southern India and is one of the monks in the group, sees nothing incongruous with the Musikfest performance. For example, consider the sand painting, one of Tantric Buddhism's most unique arts. In the Tibetan language, this art is called "dul-tson-kyil-khor," which means "mandala of colored powders." Millions of grains of multicolored sand are being painstakingly laid into place on a table in geometric shapes and in a multitude of ancient spiritual symbols by the monks. The mandala will be finished by Saturday, and ceremoniously destroyed on Monday.
"The sand painting is exactly like the music festival itself — all different colors and designs exist in a place for a few days, and after it's finished nothing remains," Phelgey says with haiku-like simplicity.
Phelgey speaks with more than just spiritual knowledge. The monks of the Drepung Loseling Monastery, based in Mundgod, South India, with a North American seat in Atlanta, Ga., have seen their share of performance venues. Endorsed by the Dalai Lama as a means of promoting world peace and healing through the sacred performing arts, they've performed to an audience of more than 50,000 at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and shared stages with the likes of Philip Glass, Paul Simon, Sheryl Crow, Patti Smith, the Beastie Boys and many others. They've appeared in such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall and the Ravinia Festival, as well as in hundreds of university auditoriums, civic halls, festivals and churches across the country.
The sand painting began Thursday at Handwerkplatz in the Colonial Industrial Quarter of downtown Bethlehem. The monks first draw an outline of the mandala (a Sanskrit word meaning "circle") on a wooden platform. Then they lay the colored sand, which is placed by pouring from traditional brass funnels called chak-pur. Each monk holds a chak-pur in one hand while running a metal rod on its grated surface; the vibration causes the sand to flow like liquid.
Tonight, the monks will take part in the festival's opening ceremonies at AmericaPlatz at Levitt Pavilion SeelStacks by invoking a blessing of the site with multiphonic chanting and a variety of musical instruments. These might include trumpets, gongs, cymbals and singing bowls. The biggest crowd-pleasers by far are the long trumpets called "dungchen," which can be up to 16 feet long with a sound compared to the singing of elephants.
The opening program also includes Tibetan polychanting, a commonly used spiritual practice involving throat singing, a technique where multiple pitches are produced by each performer by controlling muscles in the vocal cavity, intensifying the natural overtones of the voice. In fact, the Drepung Loseling monks have even taken polychanting to the big screen, having performed on the Golden Globe-nominated soundtrack of the motion picture "Seven Years in Tibet," starring Brad Pitt.
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