Last Friday at Primitive Art Works, a gallery in River North, well-dressed people chatted and nursed their drinks in the outdoor sculpture garden, standing among stone animals and totems, statues of Buddha and Ganesa, and reflecting pools stocked with lazy koi. Despite the price tags dangling from the artifacts, the people weren’t there to buy Eastern art; they’d come to be blessed by nine Tibetan monks with shaved heads and red-and-gold robes, who sat at a small round table under an oriental gazebo.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“At some point it becomes just another CD to buy,” said one man at Primitive Art Works shortly before the chanting began. Having attended several such events over the past couple years, he felt the monks were being overexposed and “taken out of context.” But most people at the event seemed to enjoy receiving the monks’ “blessing of compassion.”
“I think every year it’s just been building exponentially,” says Jennifer Harris, an energetic 33-year-old with a quick laugh who’s been the monks’ local cruise director since their initial visit in October 1999. “The overall interest in Buddhism just keeps growing.” Recently named director of special events for the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Harris first brought the monks here as part of the Dalai Lama’s World Festival of Sacred Music at Loyola University and Old Saint Patrick’s Church. “I was sending E-mails all around to Tibetan organizations, because we needed some monks for this thing,” she says. “Someone wrote to me about these monks, who were in the U.S. for the first time. I got ahold of them and they agreed to come.”
“I wanted to learn more about Tibetan culture and religion,” he says. “In my town there was nowhere to study–there was no proper school. Kids worked all the time in the field. There was no kind of future. People who live in my town cannot see the world. They don’t know about the Free Tibet movement. I thought, ‘If I stay there I will always be working in the field, just for the stomach.’” He’s written his family but never heard back. Though he sometimes spends as many as 13 hours a day driving the monks from city to city in their van, he says he enjoys staying with the same people every time. “I think many people here have never seen monks. They are very friendly. Wherever we go here, we make a new friend.”
