In the winter of 2001, the Academy was host for five days to monks from the Drepung Gomang Monastery in Tibet, who created a sand mandala in Rockefeller Hall on the main floor of the Library. Students, staff and area residents stopped by to watch the monks at work and at their daily public prayers for peace.

A mandala is a Buddhist sacred symbol of the ideal world. Following an opening ceremony to bless the space, the outline for the pattern of the mandala was laid on a wooden board. Over the next few days, the monks filled in the pattern with sand, colored with vegetable dyes or opaque tempera. The sand was shaken, a few grains at a time, through narrow metal funnels.

At the end of the week, when the mandala was complete, the monks led the community in a closing ceremony in which the mandala was ceremonially destroyed, the sands mixed together and poured into the Exeter River.