Tafties - The Taft School

m A visiting Tibetan monk empties the
sand from the peace mandala into flowing
water to carry the blessing throughout the
world. ye e-fu n yin
6 Taft Bulletin Spring 2009
b An inFuSion oF
TibeTAn SpiRiT
During the last week of February, Taft
hosted a group of six Tibetan monks
who showered the community with
their art, music, political awareness and
spiritual good vibes.
The visit was an offshoot of the one
from a year ago, during which two monks
presented us with a traditional Buddhist
Thangka to add to our collection of sacred
art and religious texts. This group of
monks spent the week in Potter Gallery
creating a “peace mandala,” an art form
based in colored sand that is meant to be
admired first for its aesthetics and then
spread throughout an area as a blessing
of peace. Students and faculty visited the
gallery to watch their progress and to admire
the dedication of the monks.
They began their visit with an opening
ceremony in the gallery on Monday,
followed by a presentation in Morning
Meeting on Tuesday that addressed their
life in exile at the monastery in southern
India and how their own religious lives
figure into that struggle for freedom. They
visited most of Chaplain Bob Ganung’s
classes, in which they discussed Tibetan
Buddhism, history, culture, art, music,
and politics. More specifically, they discussed
the meaning of mandalas, which
further substantiated the work they were
doing in the Potter Gallery.
The week wrapped up with the dispersion
of the peace mandala into the
brook behind the baseball field. “The
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Around the pond
by Sam Routhier
closing ceremony was moving, colorful,
and rich with ritual, chants, and the
traditional cacophony of Tibetan horns,
drums and symbols,” says Ganung.
“The monks said that the brook would
carry the sand to the whole world, blessing
all the fish, animals, plant life, and
living organisms that share this earth
with us. We were so lucky to have the
monks here, as I sensed that their very
presence generated an evolving feeling
of serenity, gentleness and peacefulness
that permeated the whole school.”
c ouR nATion’S
GReATeST SociAl
injuSTice
When she was a senior at Princeton
University in the late 1980s, Wendy
Kopp had the idea for Teach for America
and presented it as the research thesis for
her public policy major. She saw all of
her friends looking for jobs that required
leadership and ambition, and it seemed
that the only jobs that were recruiting
those skills were on Wall Street. She
thought to herself, “Why aren’t we being
recruited as aggressively to teach?”
Nearly 20 years later, Kopp—who
is both the group’s founder and now
CEO—reported at a Morning Meeting
in March on the history, mission and
relevance of Teach for America.
“It was an idea whose time had come,”
she said. “It must exist; it’s so obvious. If
I hadn’t started it, someone else would
have, so right off the bat, it magnetized