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By RICHARD C. DUJARDIN
Journal Staff Writer

 It was fairly easy to write this tale about two Tibetan Buddhist monks who spent a week at Providence College making an intricate mandala with brightly colored sand. As it happened, I had been at the Religion Newswriters Association annual meeting in San Francisco three weeks earlier where a whole afternoon was devoted to Buddhism. I also visited a Buddhist monastery so I come back with lots of lecture notes.

As a result, the visit to PC by these saffron-robed monks provided me with the chance to weave in some of what I had learned from that trip -- including one professor's theory why Americans care about that part of the world, much to the puzzlement of the Chinese leadership. University of California at Berkeley professor Orville Schell says its because we still associate Tibet with the mythical city of Shangri La in the book and movie "Lost Horizon." When the Chinese invaded Tibet, he says, it was as if China had "invaded our dreams."

Also making the assignment easier was the ability of both monks -- whose future had been determined by their parents when they were 13 and 14 -- to speak English. This allowed me to ask them lots of questions about how they felt about being chosen to become celibate monks, about their current lives, and how they felt about having to destroy the mandala, as is the customary practice, after it was completed.

I also learned much from a lecture by Professor Ann W. Norton, who'd invited the monks to the campus and who gave a slide lecture on sand mandalas and what these "cosmograms" represent. When she told me she planned to give a little "talk" to anyone interested in the subject before my meeting with the monks, I assumed her lecture would be an intimate gathering of maybe three or four people. To my surprise, the room in the lower level of Slavin Hall was packed with a standing-room-only crowd of maybe 60 to 70 students from the Rhode Island School of Design.

With all the material at hand -- interviews with the monks, Norton's lecture and my notes from the religion writers meeting in California -- I was able to come back to the newsroom and tie everything together for a Metro centerpiece. From all of this I learned that cosmograms are not just pretty pictures. Though they may be two-dimensional designs to us, the Tibetans eye them as three-dimensional palaces, inhabited by actual deities.

No doubt the monks, when they spoke to me, had a measure of confidence that one or two of the deities would be looking over my shoulder as I wrote the story.