Mandala - Sacred Circle, Sacred Self

The Mandala is a circle, a universally recognized symbol for life. Throughout history, sacred traditions around the world have used the circle to represent both life itself, and the Life-Force behind the life we experience with the five senses.

The Tibetan Buddhist mandalas, for example, are an intricate floor-plan of the temple of their deities. They recognize that the temple is within, and the floorplan is a pathway into the sacred space within. There are hundreds of Tibetan Buddhist mandalas, each constructed exactly the same, over and over, often with sand. The reason they are the same each time is that each one is used to illustrate a particular set of teachings about one or more particular deities. The essential teachings do not change, so the visual mandalas do not change. In the Buddhist tradition, deities (or "gods") are recognized as manifestations of Mind, or aspects of the divine nature within all of us. Rather than worshipping Buddha, they honor the Buddha's teaching by respecting their own divinity.

In constructing such a Buddhist mandala, the monk will enter a form of meditation, "seeing" in his mind the three-dimensional temple he is constructing for his deity, simultaneously with constructing the physical mandala. Thus, what we see as the physical mandala is merely a map or symbol of the temple and spiritual reality he has constructed within himself. In the teachings of the Christians, their master Jesus taught "do not pray in public, but enter your closet and pray to the Father in secret". It is the same principle -- going within and meeting one's deity on a spiritual plane. I have found in painting mandalas that I enter a sort of "time warp" -- my sense of material-world time is altered as I enter within and "see" the thing I am constructing or painting.

Other teachings of Mandala incorporate the sense of Self-in-the-World/Self-As-the-World. That is, they rephrase the metaphysical concept of "As Above, So Below". We are, individually as parts, reflections of the Universe as the whole.