Mandalas: Sacred Circles as Maps of the Universe and the Self
Draw a circle. Any circle. In that simple act, something shifts — a boundary is created between inside and outside, center and periphery. Something is enclosed, protected, held. This is the primordial gesture underlying one of humanity's most universal spiritual art forms: the mandala . The word comes from Sanskrit: mandala (मण्डल) means "circle," "disk," or "center-periphery." But the mandala is more than a circle. It is a cosmological diagram, a meditation support, a map of the psyche, a sacred architecture — a circle containing a world, a world contained in a circle. Found in Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, Celtic Christianity, Indigenous traditions of the Americas, Islamic geometric art, and the spontaneous drawings of patients in Jungian psychotherapy, the mandala appears wherever human beings attempt to represent wholeness, order, and the relationship between the individual and the cosmos. Origins and Universal Presence Hindu and Buddhist Origin...