Yet Another Unitarian Universalist
A postmodern heretic's spiritual journey.
Another picture of the monks working; the monk closest to the camera is incising a design into a background using a stylus (the point of a compass, actually); the monk at rear is adding a line of sand to the incised design:
At the end of the day today, the mandala was nearly complete:
It is hard to see in this photo, but the mandala is not a two-dimensional work; the sand is built up in low relief that is difficult to capture in a photograph.
Another photo of the Tibetan Buddhist monks working on the sand mandala. This was taken a quarter of an hour before they stopped working for the day.
We have five Tibetan Buddhist monks visiting the Unitarian Universalist Church in Palo Alto, from the Drepung Loseling Phukhang Monastery. They’re working on creating a sand mandala, which will be completed by Sunday:
Here’s a close-up:
Last night, they had an opening ceremony, which involved about ten minutes of chanting. They wore elaborate yellow headdresses, and accompanied their chanting with a bell and a pair of cymbals. Part of their chanting involves overtone singing, which produced exceptionally low notes. (I happened to be sitting next to Marsha, a professional singer who knows a great deal about chanting, and asked her about the technique, but she said she couldn’t speak with any certainty about their specific technique.) All of the chanting tended to stay in the lower ranges of their voices, and was quite powerful and loud. You can find recordings of this type of chanting on the Web, but they simply don’t capture what it’s like to be sitting a couple of yards away when the monks are chanting.
Now they’re working on creating the sand mandala. As their work on the mandala progresses over the next few days, I’ll post more photos. (Link to a photo on the church Web site.) I’m also including a press release below, which gives more details. Continue reading “Tibetan monks in Palo Alto”
This is the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Version translation of the Bible (KJV). As one way of honoring this monument of English prose literature, I’ve been composing some a capella four-part musical settings for short excerpts of the KJV. These settings are in the idiom of American singing-school music, an unbroken tradition of composition and performance going back to about 1720, and carried on today by Sacred Harp singers.
So here’s a song for Advent. The text is Mark 1.2-3; although Isaiah 40 might seem to make more sense as a text for Advent, the prose in the KJV translation of Mark 1.2-3 was just too perfect to pass up, and preachers are wont to use bits of Mark 1 as texts during Advent (for churches that use the lectionary, Mark 1.1-8 is the gospel reading for the second Sunday in advent in lectionary year B). As is traditional in this musical idiom, the song is named after a geographical place.
If you know anything about composition, this breaks many standard rules, but it is consistent with the Sacred Harp idiom.
This is going to be a prime year, and by that I don’t mean it’s going to be first-rate (though I don’t rule that out) — rather, 2011 is a prime number.
Since 2011 is a prime number, that means we can look forward to having several dates that consist solely of prime numbers. The first one will be 2/2/2011, and the last 11/29/2011. I leave it as an exercise to the student to determine how many of these dates will occur all year (translation: I’m too lazy to figure it out myself, and I hope someone will post a comment with the answer). *
The last prime number year was 2003, and the next one will be 2017. While searching for lists of primes on the Web, I discovered that 2011 and 2017 are so-called “sexy primes”; that is, they differ by six (“sexy” from the Latin “sex” for six); if they differed by four, they would be cousin primes, and if by two, twin primes. Thus 2011 is a sexy prime number year.
I suspect I am fascinated by prime number years because I was born in the middle of the largest gap in prime number years in the twentieth century (1951 to 1973). I had to wait more than a decade to live in a prime number year; I had a deprived childhood.
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* Here’s the list of primes 31 and under: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31. Don’t say I didn’t help you out. Oh, all right, the answer is 52.
