Built on Sand

It was a weekend of rituals. Guy Fawkes’ Night as ever combined the ancient practice of bonfires with the recollection of seventeenth-century “terrorism”, and the modern delight in smartphone photography. On Sunday morning the commemoration of Armistice Day led into a Buddhist ceremony focused on compassion. For me the most striking juxtaposition of those two days was the yellow-robed figures of Buddhist monks against an ice-blue sky while glittering sand scattered on the surface of the river.

The Buddhist ritual (like the letting off of fireworks) began the preceding week, when a group of monks “in residence” at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford began to make a sand mandala. This intricate depiction of a divine palace into which the Bodhisattva of Compassion would be invited was made entirely of coloured grains of marble, laid out as precisely as paint on a table top, initially over an underdrawing. The sand was poured from the narrow funnels the monks held, with the consistency of a liquid and colours as intense as jewellery. When the underdrawing was covered, the monks made the rest of the pattern from memory.

I can’t go into details about the symbolism or purpose of the mandala – I’m not a Buddhist – but it was very beautiful, all the more so for the foreknowledge that the day after it was completed it would be destroyed.

At 10.45 on the Sunday the Pitt Rivers was packed with – this being Oxford – Buddhists, families, students and bemused tourists. My family and I were on the mezzanine floor above the mandala, peering round and under display cases full of weapons – of all things – while the museum’s expert in Tibetan artefacts explained what was about to happen.

Then a gong sounded to mark the beginning of the two minutes’ silence for Remembrance Sunday – one sort of meditation preceding another. When the gong sounded again the monks started their music.

The Pitt Rivers is mostly a huge high-roofed hall packed with cabinets, each of which is packed with objects on a particular theme – for example, human or animal figures, devices for beautifying the body, votary offerings – from all periods and from all parts of the world (with a bias towards the old British Empire and the nineteenth century). Many of the dark-varnished cabinets are supported on sets of drawers, some of which can be opened to reveal even more things inside, each with its own tiny handwritten label. There’s little light – visitors are equipped with wind-up torches – and little free space. It has been preserved as a place of curios and curiosity, outwardly Victorian, delighting in knowledge but also imperialist, and aiming to draw the visitor, adult or child, into a kind of trance of exploration, never quite able to decide “I’ve seen it all”.

I’d find it hard to say what facts, if any, I’ve learned in the Pitt Rivers, but I have come to know particular objects, and an overall feel for humanity’s endless capacity for living in the world. It can invite meditation by itself.

So the monks’ chants were both incongruous in this place of preserved things, and entirely in keeping with the setting. Their music was their seventh offering to the Bodhisattva, along with six bowls of water. To a mind looking for space in which to rest, as mine was, the chants were an open door. The accompanying trumpets made from dead monks’ leg bones were something entirely different, although oddly hypnotic. I don’t know how long the music lasted.

In the quiet that followed one of the monks picked up a heavy metal scraper and dragged it several times across the mandala. Then he swept the sand into a pile in the centre of the table. He and his companions filled some small flasks with the grains. Then they were up and off from the museum, taking their motley audience and their sand. They carried a canopy and sounded their trumpets.

Outside it was the clean cold of November. The turn in the leaves brought colour overhead and underfoot, and breeze cooled faces damped by the crowded heat of the museum. The monks and their cavalcade turned right out of the museum and right again into the University Parks.

At once my mind, which felt as though it had been drifting among the loose leaves, returned to itself, though having shed the entanglements it had brought with it into the museum. My daughter and I scurried along hand in hand, keeping an eye on the monks’ canopy ahead. My wife moved between us and the head of the column. Either side, the grass shone with its own liquid green, and overhead a crow was a pattern of darkness.

Between these absolute colours was the equivocal brown of a robin in the lichenous branches of a tree, the palette of a leaf just coming free of a twig and spinning down in the sunshine. Meanwhile the monks kept up their pace and their attendants talked about upcoming appointments.

When we reached Rainbow Bridge across the Cherwell my wife stayed close to the monks near the centre of the span. Our daughter and I went to the bank at the foot of the bridge, and I lifted her onto my long-suffering shoulders. The trumpets sounded. The monks’ shapes were stark against the sky’s uniform blue. The river’s murky back was studded with reflections of the sun. The far bank, fields scattered with willows both living and fallen, receded as if pinned to Uccello’s notion of perspective. A fisherman directly opposite tried to pretend nothing was happening at all – or maybe he too was in a meditative space.

Then they scattered the sand. As it fell from the flasks the monks had brought the wind caught it. The saffron robes on the bridge were sheer against the sky – colour clear against colour, as in the mandala. But the falling sand was shapeless, massless, an approximation of ripples shaped on the gestures of the breeze.

On the water surface, not quite lost, it glittered as the water glittered in the sun, but in its own pattern quite different from the water’s shifts. After the sand had fallen, a female mallard made her way past us, oblivious to the invocations and the audience. In contrast, the fisherman, as if suddenly aware, started to look around dramatically.

What do you do in the wake of such events? We went back to the museum to collect a little bag of sand left over from the mandala – so we cling to objects in memory of things that no longer exist. Memory began the day’s ceremonies; a shadow of memory remained in the small plastic bag. I was most transfixed by the time between, when the colours of the park spilled into the space created by the rituals.