Reaching Nirvana

PAUL SOLMAN: Tibetan Buddhist monks making a sand Mandala at New York's Asia Society. Mandalas--art with a mission. In essence, they are visual aids to enlightenment. Professor Robert Thurman helped assemble a host of Mandalas for this exhibit.

ROBERT THURMAN, Buddhist Scholar: A Mandala is a--it means a sacred circle that holds a spiritual essence. And basically the two-dimensional diagrams that you see, although they are called Mandalas, they really are blueprints of a three-dimensional building and a space.

PAUL SOLMAN: A video makes the point graphically. Read the blueprint right and you begin to see a 3-D castle--heaven in the mind.

ROBERT THURMAN: It is believed that the sand mandala particularly contains a kind of gene or seed of division of the three-dimensional mandala space.

PAUL SOLMAN: So it's a trigger?

ROBERT THURMAN: It's a trigger of your imagination. So when you see that, it imprints itself on your unconscious, the idea that there could be the most magnificent palace, universe, that I could create when I become perfectly enlightened in the future.

PAUL SOLMAN: After some 20 years of sporadic stabs at enlightenment myself, yet still pretty much in the dark, I asked Professor Thurman for meditation pointers. A former Buddhist monk, he tried to lead me down the palace path.

ROBERT THURMAN: All right. So you want to go in meditative mode, then which means that we don't converse in an argumentative or in a reasoning matter. We just think--visualize something.

PAUL SOLMAN: Don't converse? For a guy whose job is gabbing on TV, you can see how this might pose a problem.

ROBERT THURMAN: So, you let your eyes close, preferably only halfway, not completely.

PAUL SOLMAN: Professor Thurman isn't cheating, by the way. That's a glass eye--the result of an old injury.

ROBERT THURMAN: And then imagine that you and your whole environment dissolves into voidness, and then imagine that you are in a jewel pavilion, a magnificent mansion made of solid jewel substance, like softy rubies, soft diamonds, glowing emeralds, glowing sapphire.

PAUL SOLMAN: This is the vision that all Mandalas are trying to evoke, often with bright colors, sometimes ground from real jewels. Begun as a purist reaction to Hinduism and its gaggle of gods, Buddhism eventually developed its own drove of deities to help access the divine. And they reside at the core of the Mandala. The Asia Society's Vishakha Desai.

VISHAKHA DESAI, Asia Society: Look at these like conceptual road maps, there by looking at certain kinds of images you are visualizing within yourself, some kind of ordering of your understanding of the cosmos. You see the gate--small shapes which you also will see in the sand Mandala, or the three-dimensional models. And then what happens is that you really can begin to create other kinds of Mandalas, such as the small image here you see of different manifestations of the same divinity.

PAUL SOLMAN: The key deity here is Manjushri, Lord of the Word, which made us think of that secret word you learn to trigger meditation--a mantra.

VISHAKHA DESAI: The magic word "om" or any sound that emerges from your naval and out, that it's like part of the breathing.

PAUL SOLMAN: Chants, mantras, Mandalas, all devices for developing one's attentiveness, one's awareness, technologies in a sense for opening up the inner eye each of us supposedly has.

ROBERT THURMAN: A show like this enlightens us about the culture of another people that put in the center of their culture this cultivation of wisdom.

PAUL SOLMAN: It was Buddhism's emphasis on the intellect that drew Thurman to it in college, lured him to Tibet in 1961.

ROBERT THURMAN: They used to call me a fakir, you know, like an Indian fakir. I wore like Afghani clothes and a turban. And I had this scraggly beard and I was very thin and gaunt and sun-browned, and, you know, I looked like somebody's notion of like a youthful Moses on a bender, or something, you know, with one eye.

PAUL SOLMAN: And with one eye.

ROBERT THURMAN: Yes. And then later I became a monk and my daughter says I looked like Henry Miller in drag when I became a monk.

PAUL SOLMAN: Thurman returned to the U.S. to teach Americans about Buddhism.

ROBERT THURMAN: In the Buddhist view the highest evolutionary merit is teaching another being something that helps their life, you know that opens their mind.

PAUL SOLMAN: Tibet's spiritual leader, the exiled Dalai Lama, has established a monastery in Ithaca, New York, where Buddhists practice what they teach. These two monks are from the monastery, and this is how they meditate, while they make the sand Mandala.

TENZIN YIGNYEN, Buddhist Monk : We are in pure land, and we are making and we are entering the Mandala as well.

PAUL SOLMAN: So you're entering this pure land--

TENZIN YIGNYEN: Yes.

PAUL SOLMAN: --that you are representing.

TENZIN YIGNYEN: Yes.

PAUL SOLMAN: I see. What's it feel like?

TENZIN YIGNYEN: I feel joy. It's good, you know, good feeling, peaceful, calm.

ROBERT THURMAN: And then imagine that everything around you that breathes the sound, everything is modulated to make you feel good. And drop out of your thinking, worrying about what am I doing here, why am I meditating, who am I, what it is, what is he talking about. Just feel restful.

VISHAKHA DESAI: This is called--and I love this word--it's called "womb Mandala," so literally imagine that lotus as kind of a womb from which the Buddha of the center and infinite light is emerging in the center.

PAUL SOLMAN: This Japanese Mandala is from the 15th century. Buddhism was already 2,000 years old, having spread through Tibet, China, across Asia, around the world. But its origins are Indian, including good luck symbols like the "swastika."

VISHAKHA DESAI: The word "swastika" is a Sanskrit word, and it literally means "for one's own good" in a literal translation.

PAUL SOLMAN: You mean the word.

VISHAKHA DESAI: The word itself. But it also has to do with essentially the movement of the solar movement on the earth, so that if you start any ritual, Buddhists or Hindus, or a wedding, or an important function, you actually would first draw a swastika.

PAUL SOLMAN: It was Adolf Hitler, of course, who turned the swastika into a symbol of hatred against the Jews, whose Star of David was also born in India as the joining of male and female principles, which supports the claim of some scholars you can find everything in India, including to Buddhists, the most important thing of all, how to meditate your way to Nirvana, what Thurman calls the Buddha verse.

ROBERT THURMAN: Once you attain Nirvana you will be happy forever, and you will be infinitely effective in helping others become happy because you become like Starship Enterprise as an individual being going around the galaxy and cheering people up. That's what Buddha's do, in the Tibetan view and the Indian view of ancient times.

PAUL SOLMAN: The monks were plugging away at their sand painting, at their efforts toward enlightenment. To western eyes, though, the whole enterprise seemed awfully fragile.

PAUL SOLMAN: Is there like glue here? I mean, is it glued down?

TENZIN YIGNYEN: No, not at all. And if you blow, it will go away.

PAUL SOLMAN: You're not worried, I mean, about sneezing, for example?

TENZIN YIGNYEN: No, we don't worry, but it's possible.

PAUL SOLMAN: You don't worry about sneezing either?

BUDDHIST MONK: No.

PAUL SOLMAN: Never have?

BUDDHIST MONK: Never have.

PAUL SOLMAN: But you would think it was funny if I did it?

TENZIN YIGNYEN: It's funny. It's good sometimes, so people understand it's impermanent. (laughing)

PAUL SOLMAN: It took the monks two weeks to complete their sand Mandala on display until the show closes in January, at which point the monks will come back down from Ithaca to sweep up the sand, and scatter it all into Manhattan's East River.