By Alice Yoo on April 21, 2014

Imagine the amount of patience that’s required to create such highly detailed art such as this! To promote healing and world peace, a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks, from the Drepung Loseling Monastery in India, travel the world creating incredible mandalas using millions of grains of sand. For days or even weeks, the monks spend up to eight hours a day working on one mandala sand painting, pouring multicolored grains of sand onto a shared platform until it becomes a spectacular piece of art.

Each work begins as a drawing, the outline of the mandala. Then, colored sand is poured from traditional metal funnels called chak-purs. Each monk holds a chak-pur in one hand, while running a metal rod on its grated surface; the vibration causes the sands to flow like liquid. It is almost as if they are truly painting. […]

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