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Buddhism Weekend
The annual Buddhism Weekend at the National Museum of Ethnology (Leiden, The Netherlands) offers a varied program that includes lectures, performances, meditations, workshops and guided tours, all in the field of Buddhism.
Carmen Mensink regularly offers lectures, guided tours, workshops and thangka painting demonstrations at this wonderful museum.
For the Buddhism Festival she developed a large painting project, to be realized with the visitors of the museum:
The Buddha Flag Project
This project covers a series of 5 colored flags (each flag being 4.30 meter/ 14 feet long) with the Five Buddha-Families as a theme.
In 2015, the first flag was painted with many visitors (some joined for 5 minutes, other stayed an hour). It was the red flag of red Buddha Amitabha– and in the next couple of years we will paint the rest of the flags of the 5 Buddha Families together.
The 5 Buddha Families:
- Amitahba – red
- Ratnasambhava – yellow
- Vairochana – white (in some traditions blue)
- Amogasiddhi – green
- Akshobhya – blue (in some traditions white)
When the entire project is finished, the series of flags will be hung in front of the entrance of the museum, and used for special events:
Painting for the Dalai Lama
During the Buddhism Weekend in 2015, Carmen’s Painting for the Dalai Lama was exhibited in front of the entrance of Museum Volkenkunde:
