Like the setting of the sun, autumn leaves tumbling from a tree or the fading of a flower, everything ends.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
That's why after days of painstaking and meticulous work sandpainting a vibrant mandala, Buddhist monks will sweep it away on Sunday as if there was never anything there.
The monks are part of a group bringing the Buddha's teachings of compassion and kindness to the centre of world friendship during a state-wide tour.
Buddhist nun Pema Thubten said the ceremony is a metaphor for the impermanence of life.
"[Everyone who watches] finds it hard to think we're going to sweep it up at the end of a few days hard work," she said.
"It was hard for me to watch the first time but now it seems part of it. It's beautiful while it's there and then it's gone.
"Everything comes and goes, it lives, it dies, a bit like a flower. You can't hang onto things forever."
The monks have performed this peaceful ceremony in art galleries and crowded shopping centres across the country.
Step-by-step they are piecing together a depiction of Chenrezig, the Buddha of compassion, using crushed marble flowing like liquid through vibrating funnels during their five-day-long residency.
The purpose of their tour is promote the Nying Jey Project, an organisation that sponsors Tibetan children to go to school.
"We've got 102 in university at the moment and we've got 360 being sponsored and we've got quite a few nuns and monks being sponsored too," Ani Pema said.
"The children in Tibet, if they haven't got enough money to go to school they have to work in the fields."
Through their tour, they're also hoping to leave imprints of kindness in their wake which will carry into the next life, according to their Buddhist beliefs.
"What the Dalai Lama says is be kind wherever possible. It is always possible," Ani Pema said.
A framed picture of the Dalai Lama smiles down upon the monks as they go about their work, sowing these seeds of kindness to bud in this life or the next.
The monks will continue their work on the mandala today, tomorrow and Sunday from 10am at Cowra Regional Art Gallery.
The dissolution ceremony will take place at 2.30pm on Sunday.
