Mandala and yantra

The teaching

As each tantric tradition that draws them teaches it.

The palace and its rings

A mandala of the Tibetan tradition is the palace of a deity seen from above, and it is read from the outside in. The outermost ring is a ring of flames, the wisdom that burns away ignorance. Within it is a ring of vajras, the diamond thunderbolt, for what cannot be broken; in many mandalas comes a ring of the eight charnel grounds, for death and the passing of all things; and then a ring of lotus petals, for purity and rebirth.

Inside the rings stands the square palace, its walls in coloured bands and a gate in the middle of each side, facing the four directions. At its heart sits the chief deity of the mandala, with the deities of its retinue set in the courts around. To enter the mandala in meditation is to pass through the rings and the gate and come to the centre.

The five families

Many mandalas are ordered by the five Buddha families, each with a colour, a direction and a wisdom that transforms one poison of the mind. Vairocana, white, is at the centre: ignorance becomes the wisdom of the whole field of reality. Akshobhya, blue, is in the east: anger becomes mirror-like wisdom. Ratnasambhava, yellow, is in the south: pride becomes the wisdom of sameness. Amitabha, red, is in the west: desire becomes discerning wisdom. Amoghasiddhi, green, is in the north: envy becomes the wisdom that accomplishes all. In some systems Vairocana and Akshobhya change places.

Making and sweeping a sand mandala

Tibetan monks make the mandala of coloured sand over many days. The ground is blessed with chant, and the lines are laid out with chalked string snapped against the board. The sand is poured from narrow metal funnels, rasped with a rod so that the grains run in a thin stream, working from the centre outward. When the rites are done the sand is swept together, part of it given to those present and the rest poured into running water to carry the blessing on. The sweeping is itself the teaching: nothing made lasts.

The two mandalas of Shingon

In Japan the Shingon school keeps a pair of great painted mandalas, hung facing each other in the temple hall: the Womb Realm, of compassion and the principle in all things, and the Diamond Realm, of the wisdom that cannot be broken. The great sun Buddha, Dainichi, sits at the centre of both. In initiation the newcomer, blindfolded, throws a flower onto the mandala, and the deity on whom it falls becomes the one to whom that person is bound.

The yantra

A yantra is a plainer diagram used in Hindu worship as the seat of a deity. At its centre is the bindu, the point, the deity in unmanifest form and the source from which all comes. Around it stand triangles, the downward for Shakti and the yoni, the upward for Shiva and fire; then circles, then rings of lotus petals, eight or sixteen; and outside all the bhupura, a square with four gates, the earth and the bounds of the world.

A yantra is brought to life by rite, with mantra and offerings, and is then worshipped as the deity's own body. The worshipper meditates on it from the outside in, passing the gates, the petals and the triangles to rest at last on the point.

The Sri Yantra

The Sri Yantra, sacred to the goddess Tripura Sundari in the Shri Vidya tradition, has nine interlocking triangles, four pointing up and five pointing down, which cross to make forty-three small triangles round the central point. Its nine enclosures, read from the outside in, are the gated square, the ring of sixteen petals, the ring of eight petals, the fourteen triangles, the outer ten, the inner ten, the eight, the single central triangle, and the point, where the goddess herself sits. Each enclosure is peopled by her powers, and worship moves inward through all nine.

Jung's circles

In the West the word came by way of Carl Jung. From 1916 he drew circular pictures, and for a time he sketched a small one each morning in a notebook, finding that it matched his inner state that day. He came to read the mandala as an image of the self, the wholeness of the psyche with its centre, and found that such circles, often divided in four, arise of themselves in his patients' drawings at times of inner disorder, as the mind's own attempt to set itself in order.