Speaking of religion, there's a subset of Buddhism which teaches that all material things pass. Your CD player, your car, your fancy house, and even your own body, will eventually be destroyed. The only things which are forever are your soul, karma, and that sort of stuff. So, they argue, it's silly to put so much concern over your CD player, and so little concern over your soul. It's not a belief I subscribe to (I'm devastated when I lose songs I've composed, pictures I've drawn, etc. due to a harddrive failure), but unlike some other religious beliefs (e.g. thou shall beat up homosexuals), it seems relatively harmless.

Partly as a result of this belief, Buddhist monks are sometimes required to put a lot of effort into making drawings using coloured sand, and then to destroy the sand. I don't know if it's training to desensitize against pain of loss, or if it's a test to see if you really have reached enlightenment, or something else. Either way, I think this exercise doesn't quite have the impact it seems to have been designed to have: it's easier to deal with the loss of a work of art you created, if you know ahead of time that it will be destroyed. It's like how it really kills me that those killer songs I've composed in Reason are gone forever, but it doesn't kill me so much that those improvisation sessions I've done jamming with musician friends are gone forever. Also, in this day and age, people will take photographs of the sand drawings before they get "destroyed", further weakening the sense that it really is "gone forever".

Which is why I found this news story amusing. Those Buddhist monks were doing one of their sand drawings, having scheduled 5 days to complete it (presumably planning on destroying it at the end of the 5th day). After the end of the 3rd day, when the monks went to sleep, a toddler saw the drawing, and decided to dance on it. This was caught on tape by a security camera. It also caught a woman, presumably the toddler's mother, grabbing the toddler by the arm, and dragging him off camera. The article doesn't say whether the mother appeared embarrassed, angry, or neutral, uncaring, or what.

Anyway, when the monks saw what had happened, they pretty much said "Oh well. We'll have to work extra hard to finish on schedule." Mei thought it would have been more amusing had they said something along the lines of "Argh! What the fuck? We spent 3 fucking days working on this shit? Where's that fucking kid? I'm gonna kick his ass!"

She's right, of course: it would have been funny, but in all seriousness, I think the monks should have been thankful. If the sand-drawing is a form of desensitization drawing, then here the monks have received a much more potent dose of training than usual, given that the destruction was unexpected. If instead, the sand-drawing was a test, here they had a truer-form of the test, with no opportunity to photograph the completed work before it got destroyed. This is one of those things that's hard to replicate. If the head monk told the novice monks "Okay, you guys are gonna draw a sand drawing, and I'm gonna destroy it at some random day, but I'm not gonna tell you when" in an attempt to simulate what the child did, again this isn't quite as potent, because you're expecting it. Even if the head monk didn't make that announcement, and went ahead and destroyed drawings randomly anyway, you'd learn the pattern after a while, and stop getting affected by it.

Truly, it is by virtue of being totally unexpected that this child did a big favour to the monks. That's my interpretation, anyway.