Lama Tenzin Yignyen returned to Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School (MVPCS), through a donation from the Sound Foundation, to create a sand mandala and teach the students about compassion. Students stopped by Yignyen’s station between classes to talk and make sand designs of their own on a separate table using funnels, like animals and greetings written in colored sand.
MVPCS isn’t the only school Yignyen goes to to teach through the mandala. He taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., for 25 years before retiring this year, and he continues to visit “many, many schools all across the U.S.”
“The reason I do this is because I want our future generation Americans to be more kind, more compassionate, more caring,” Yignyen said, adding that while schools do well in teaching students “how to be smart,” they can be lacking in teaching how to be “good people.”
Sand mandala is “art created to encourage healing, peace, and purification generally, as well as spiritual or psychological focus specifically for those creating and viewing it,” according to World History Encyclopedia. Yignyen spent a week making a “mandala of compassion,” starting on Monday, Oct. 10, to teach the trait and advocated for people to take care of their mental health. The sand mandala is a Tibetan Buddhist tradition, but Yignyen avoids using religion to teach students at schools he visits “good things of compassion, loving, kindness, caring, and the bad things about anger, jealousy, grief,” although he does approach the spiritual nature of the art.
“Don’t say it’s bad because I’m Buddhist, I’m Christian. Don’t rely on religion. Common sense, reality. If you become angry, at that moment are you happy or not? If you have a lot of kindness, compassion, are you happy or not? You just judge using common sense,” Yignyen said. “I want to go to schools to remind, you know, education is not completed until and unless you educate your heart. Educated brain, educated heart.”
Particularly for young students, he thinks teaching them that people, no matter what their beliefs, can be good people is more important than teaching religious doctrines. “Religion should not come from fright, ‘Oh, if you don’t follow this religion, you go to hell.’ Don’t say that. Religion should come from joy, and there’s beauty,” Yignyen said, continuing by saying learning religious beliefs as a child is “too early,” and children should instead be taught to be kind and to use that common sense.
Yignyen told The Times that the sand mandala’s different sections represent components of compassion, which was represented by a lotus flower at the center of the circle. Encircling the flower is the wheel above it that represents wisdom, a blue object below represents patience, an orange object to the left represents generosity and humility, and a green object to the right represents appreciation and rejoicing.
“Everybody has compassion, but our compassion is very biased, very selfish. If you are my friend, my family, then I love you. If you are not mine, we ignore it,” Yignyen said. “If [compassion] is supported by these other qualities, then it will become like a seed of an apple tree. It will become a big tree.”
The sand mandala was dismantled on Friday by Yignyen and the students, demonstrating life’s impermanence.
“We never, ever keep the sand mandala, because nothing lasts forever,” Yignyen said. “That will not frighten you, that will give you the value of today.”
MVPCS director Peter Steedman said Yignyen’s accessibility for “kindergarteners all the way to 12th graders” has made his activities “an organic process throughout the day.” Yignyen got to know the students and became “a part of our community,” according to Steedman.
“It’s wonderful,” Steedman said. “His presence just changes the atmosphere in the school in a really positive way, and we pride ourselves on having this wonderful, positive, community feel, and what he does, he elevates it to a whole different level.”
Yignyen was popular with both students and staff. “We look forward to having him for many, many years,” Steedman said.
Yignyen’s encouragement to find happiness was a part of why he was invited to MVPCS. Steedman said the school is mindful about the fact “we are coming out of two and a half years of a pandemic where we have not been able to build [connections].”
“We’re really trying to make this the focus of the year moving forward: How can we connect our kids,” Steedman said, listing examples of local activities, like working with Island Grown Initiative, and inviting traditional Senegalese musical performers to hold dance workshops with students, as efforts “trying to engage kids … cultivate these personal connections, because of the isolation that had been a part of the kids’ lives for many years.”
Additionally, promoting internationalism is another factor of inviting Yignyen, particularly with the International Baccalaureate program being used to educate the students.
“[We’re] intentional about spreading joy, no doubt about it, but also in an international mindset,” Steedman said. “So bringing a Buddhist monk, having Senegalese dancers, we’re sending kids to Scotland this summer, we’re sending our high school students to London and Paris for an art trip, we’re going back to Italy again. So internationalism is another real focus of the year, really trying to broaden our kids’ perspectives of the world, and their place in it as well. That feeling of isolation, we need to be purposeful and intentional about it, have them understand they are connected to a much larger world.”
Yignyen’s expectation is that America “should be the happiest country in the world” in the future, considering the amount of resources it has at its disposal.
“This country is very great. When it comes to happiness, Finland gets ‘happiest country in the world’ one year, and then Bhutan,” he said. “Why are we behind on them? We should be good role models of the world, you know? It’s not because we are a world power, because we have a lot of weapons. That’s weakness of America. Power should be from compassion, democracy, justice, law, education. That’s why I’m visiting, not to turn them into Buddhists. I don’t care if they are a religious person, even if they don’t go to temple or church. That’s fine.”
Yignyen pointed toward his heart and said, “Build a temple here, build a church here. First step and most important step to become a religious person is to be a good human being.”