CAI JING’s gallery

Le beau lever de soleil

Devant une peinture moderne:
— Magnifique, ce tableau. Quelles couleurs! Ce peintre, quel talent! Vraiment, c’est un très beau lever de soleil.
— Je ne pense pas, Monsieur, je connais le peintre. Elle ne sort jamais du lit avant midi. A mon avis, c’est plutôt un coucher de soleil!

In front of a modern painting:
— Magnificent, the picture. What colors! The painter, so talented! Really, it’s a very beautiful picture of sunrise.
— I don’t think so, sir, I know the painter. She never gets up before noon. In my opinion, it’s rather a painting of sunset.

Compare with the Medicine Buddha sand mandala, here’s another form of sand art:
click here to download…

1,2,3 - Construction of the Medicine Buddha sand mandala.
4,5,6 - The dismantling process symbolizes the Buddhist belief in the transience of life and the ideal of nonattachment to the material world.

Mandala, a Sanskrit word that means “circle,” is a sacred diagram created in sand or paint. It symbolizes the pure, perfected universe, and provides a visual framework for establishing feelings of peace, well-being and wholeness. Composed of millions of grains of dyed sand, the mandala is believed to have a positive effect on all who see it as each particle personifies goodness. Created by Buddhist monks and nuns, the mandala is part of initiation ceremonies — accompanied by other ritual art objects, costumed dancers, music and chanting — that grant the initiate the privilege to study and practice the teachings of a sutra or tantra, sacred texts that are guides to visualizing a particular deity.

click here to view my gallery