This vulnerable and volatile city, stuck on the downside of a boom-and-bust cycle for decades, could be one of the most peaceful places on earth for the next few days.
Beginning on Friday, a three-day meeting called the Newark Peace Education Summit convenes at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, near the city’s struggling commercial downtown. The convention’s theme is “The Power of Nonviolence.” Its roster is crowded with celebrity pacifists. Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, is the keynote speaker.
In the atrium of the nearby Newark Museum, monks from the Drepung Gomang monastery, once in Tibet, now in India, have created, literally grain by grain, entirely from colored sand, a large, intricate mandala. And the museum’s collection of Tibetan art, one of the oldest and finest anywhere, has been reinstalled in a suite of galleries surrounding a Buddhist altar that the Dalai Lama consecrated more than 20 years ago, and that he will revisit this week.
The reappearance of the Tibetan collection is by itself occasion for hoopla. From gilded sculptures of deities to silver filigree chopsticks, this is astonishing stuff. And almost as astonishing is how few New Yorkers are aware that these treasures exist just across the Hudson, or know the story of how they landed in Newark a hundred years ago.
Not long after the museum was formed in 1909, one of its founding trustees, Edward N. Crane, struck up a friendship with a fellow passenger on a steamship traveling to the United States from Japan. The passenger was Dr. Albert L. Shelton, a Christian medical missionary, originally from Indianapolis, who was returning home from six years of service in China and Tibet.
The missionary’s stay had coincided with a period of devastating border wars between the two countries, during which many Buddhist monasteries were destroyed and their contents scattered. Under these circumstances, objects previously all but unseen by outsiders — ritual instruments, religious paintings, sacred books — came into his hands.
Shelton’s plan was to sell them as one collection to an American museum and put the proceeds toward his mission. And in Crane he found, if not an institutional customer, an ardent and well-connected viewer. Once back home, Crane persuaded the museum — this was not an easy sell — to borrow the Tibetan material as a special exhibition.
The show, which opened in early 1911, was a hit.
When Crane suddenly died later that year, his family bought everything Shelton had on hand — about 150 items — and donated them to the museum, which in its turn commissioned Shelton to scout out more art when he was back in Tibet. He agreed, and between 1913 and his death in 1922 (he was murdered by bandits in the country’s interior), he shipped hundreds of additional items to Newark.
