According to Buddhist teaching, giving is an act that can transform and purify the mind.

On Tuesday at the ALANA Cultural Center, approximately 30 members of the Colgate community took part in a 2,500-year-old Sri Lankan Buddhist ceremony of alms giving called a Dana.

A week of observation and interaction marked the weeklong visit of two Tibetan monks to the Colgate campus last month.

Tenzin Thutop and Tenzin Wangchuk, from the Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, N.Y., spent hours painstakingly placing millions of grains of colored sand to create a sand mandala in Case Library and Geyer Center for Information Technology.

Students used study breaks to watch the monks in action, occasionally asking questions and writing comments in a guest book.

Students and faculty will not be the only ones working in the Case Library and Geyer Center for Information Technology next week.  

Two Tibetan monks from Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, N.Y., will be creating a sand mandala in the reading room on the library's third floor. (See this webcam to watch them work).