The Sand Mandala of Existence

Sunway Square Mall has one of the most beautiful bookstores, a BookXcess outlet also called The Library. It overlooks a beautiful artificial lake. There is a section with some very scenic seats in the library, which are usually 'booked' early by students from the neighbouring Sunway and Monash universities. 

I've been here a couple of times and have bought several books from the store, but I've never had the opportunity to read or work from one of these highly sought-after seats. Today, I'm blogging from The Library but from the Coffee Bean outlet downstairs.  I want to spend time here, writing my article of the week before adjourning there later to browse some books. 

It has been another week of intense coding work. I started two new projects because I wanted to capture the ideas that have been brewing in my head. It will still take many more iterations before all the details are fully fleshed out. But there's no hurry. I'm just doing things for myself.

That's the joy of not being employed or running a business anymore. You are just pursuing ideas. Ideas for their own sake. I still treat them as commercial projects that will ultimately be released to users, but that is secondary. The primary objective is simply to work for work's sake, nothing else. The reward is knowledge and the satisfaction of proving an idea true and realisable.

I see my work now as similar to the Tibetan practice of building sand mandalas. I've always admired this laborious yet spiritual practice of the Tibetan monks, in which they slowly build an intricate 2D mandala using coloured sand grains. One would think that after spending days and weeks constructing this beautiful work of art, it would be preserved for posterity, but no. The ritual, upon its completion, is to systematically destroy it, returning that intricate form back into a random mix of coloured sand. And in that act of creation and destruction is encapsulated the entire teaching of the Buddhist philosophy. 

Every grain of sand is a symbol of the time and energy of our mortal existence as we go through our lives. The act of laying down sand, almost a grain at a time, is itself an act of meditation, focusing the mind on each moment, attuning it to the present. If we think of the complexity of the form that we are constructing, we would naturally feel daunted by the monumental labour ahead. 

But no, all we have to do is to lay down the correct grains of sand here, and then there, one at a time, never hurriedly, always present, content with the completion of each tiny placement. Each grain of pixel is itself a work of art, final and complete. This is present-moment living at its finest.

That attitude ensures that the source of pain itself--attachment--does not have a solid ground to take root. There is no intricate form or structure that we have to cling to and preserve at all costs. We are just beading each moment of sand together in a continuous thread of time, and form manifests, because that's what the external world of mind sees--patterns and structure. Its significance--its intricate beauty and majesty--is only a mirage that exists in the mind. It is intrinsically empty. We only feel pain because we cling to these illusions of form.

Emptiness is form; form is emptiness. That's the recurring chant from the famous Heart Sutra, beloved by Mahayana Buddhists. We appreciate form for its transient beauty, celebrating its culmination and at the same time, accepting its inevitable dissolution, because that is the rhythm of existence. Creation and destruction go on ceaselessly. It's the cosmic dance of Shiva, of which we all partake, as part of this divine universe.

I do not want to be hurried; I simply want to live, a moment at a time. A thought at a time. A word at a time, deposited here, to form a sand mandala of my existence. And when the time comes, it too shall dissolve.