Tibetan monks visit SLO County to create a colorful sand mandala. See the process
Buddhist monks from Tibet visited San Luis Obispo County this week to create a colorful — and temporary — sand mandala.
The monks traveled all the way from Ladakh, India, to the Healing Tree wellness center in Atascadero to craft the delicate and ancient artwork while raising funds for the Ngari Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, which provides housing, education and cultural knowledge to disadvantaged children and orphans.
“Mandala is not just an art,” Lobsang Dhamchoe, a supervisor of the Ngari Institute, told The Tribune, while watching a monk use a delicate tool to guide grains of colored sand into an intricate design. “It’s a practice.”
Just like other practices, like love and compassion, making mandalas is a sacred practice of visualizing the Buddhist deities to reach enlightenment, Dhamchoe said.
There are thousands of mandala designs that represent different deities. The monks visiting Atascadero were creating the medicine mandala, which represents the palace of the medicine Buddha and is meant to bring healing, Dhamchoe said.
“It’s not like the medicine you eat,” he said. “It’s the medicine of teaching.”
The public was invited to watch the monks create the mandala all week at the Healing Tree, located at 5735 El Camino Real, Suite G. They were set to finish it up on Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Mandala takes a week to create, minutes to destroy
However beautiful the final result may be, it will not outlast the monks’ stay. As an ode to the impermanence of life, the monks will destroy their work of art during a dissolution ceremony on Saturday starting at 10 a.m.
“We take everything for granted,” Dhamchoe said. “It’s to remind people that everything, however perfect it looks like, the nature is impermanence.”
As an opposite action to how the mandala was created from the center outward, it will be destroyed through a ceremony in which the sand is pushed inward, dissolving the design in the process.
Small amounts of sand will be distributed to each participant, and then a procession will carry the remaining sand to Atascadero Lake to be “given to nature.”
“The water will carry all the healing, all the blessing to all the people,” Dhamchoe said.
Monks are regular visitors to SLO County
The Ngari Institute monks stop in SLO County on their nationwide fundraising tour almost every year.
Last year, they also visited San Luis Obispo and Avila Beach, but Atascadero was their only stop in the county this year.
Dhamchoe said it costs the Ngari Institute around $1,200 a year to send a child to school in India. All donations the Institute receives this week will go toward paying for children’s education, as well as environmental and cultural development in the Indian Himalayas.
Artisan items from India are also available for purchase at Healing Tree, all proceeds of which will go as donations to the institute.
Visitors can donate in person or online at www.ngari-institute.org.
This story was originally published October 24, 2025 at 9:00 AM.
