Writer in Residence: Monks Help to Build Peace in Baltimore
May 2, 2016
Contact: University Relations
Phone: 410.837.5739
Arthur J. Magida, writer in residence in the University of Baltimore's Klein Family School of Communications Design, writes in The Baltimore Sun about a group of Tibetan monks and their message of peace to the city. The monks created an elaborate sand mandala and then erased it, prompting Magida to explore their motives.
"The 10-day visit to Baltimore last May of Tibetan monks from the Drepung Gomang Monastery in southern India came at a fortuitous time. The week before they arrived, a sliver of the city had erupted hours after the funeral of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old African American who suffered a fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody," Magida writes.
"As it turned out, the monks were here to construct peace as much as to construct a mandala. Their mandala was a tribute to Green Tara, the goddess of compassion, a quality rare in this city of woe, and their refrain wherever they went — a yoga center, a university, a private school, a public school, a radio interview — was loving-kindness and non-attachment, bedrock Buddhist virtues whose benign emanations might erode some of the rage that had turned Baltimore into the nation's latest symbol of racism that won't die.
"The monks' lessons could have been reduced to 13 words from The Dhammapada: 'Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded.' Baltimore's money lenders, zoning wizards, political bosses and failed urban planners had turned the city into its own worst enemy. To redeem themselves, they could begin reversing their own unhealthy thoughts that had laid waste to parts of the city and to realize the monks' visit was a blessing, a salve for the riots or the uprising or the disturbance or whatever we call it."
Read the op-ed.
Learn more about Magida and the Klein Family School of Communications Design in the University of Baltimore's Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences.