Enter the Mandala: Cosmic Mind Maps

Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Assistant Curator Dr. Jeff Durham (SFAAM)

Buddha icon in Tawang district, Arunachal Pradesh, India (Appaji/flickr.com)

A mandala in Tibetan Vajrayana meditation serves as a kasina (indiebookevent.com)

Buddhist and Hindu hallway, Norton Simon, Pasadena (Christian DeLao/judasmaiden15/flickr)

Enter the Mandala: Mental Maps and Cosmic Centers in Himalayan Buddhism

Jaws of Samsara, Bhavacakra (thangka-mandala)

Dr. Jeff Durham, Assistant Curator of Himalayan Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, will explore the possibility of re-creating a Buddhist experience without years of meditative discipline:

Mandalas are geometric maps of Vajrayana Buddhist visionary worlds [planes of existence in Buddhist cosmology]. Appearing in both painting and sculpture, mandalas typically consist of nested squares and circles.

These geometric forms define the center of the cosmos and the four cardinal directions in the sky/space (akasha). Minutely detailed and saturated with philosophical meaning, mandalas are a feast for the eyes and mind.

For Buddhist meditators, however, they are not just images to view, but also worlds to enter. To work with a mandala, practitioners first re-create it in their mind’s eye then imaginatively enter its world.

• Lecture: Norton Simon Museum
• Date: Saturday, April 19, 2014
• Time: 4:00 pm-5:00 pm

Free with admission (limited seating). Member seating 3:30 pm; general seating at 3:45 pm.
  
Rise of Shramanic tradition
Wisdom Quarterly edit of Dharmic Religions (7th to 5th centuries BCE)

The Buddha taught mostly in Magadha

Buddhism and Jainism belong to the "wandering ascetic" (sramana) tradition as distinct from the Brahminical (temple priest) tradition.

They rose to prominence in 700-500 BCE (Svarghese 2008, pp. 259-60; Jain 2008, p. 210; Mallinson 2007, pp. 17-8, 32-33) in Magadha (Magadha Kingdom), reflecting "the cosmology and anthropology of a much older, pre-Aryan upper class of northeastern India" (Heinrich Zimmer, 1989, p. 217) and were responsible for the related concepts of the cycle of birth and death (saṃsāra) and liberation from that cycle (moksha) (Flood, 2003, pp. 273-4, n. 9].

 

The wandering ascetic movements challenged the orthodoxy of Brahminical rituals (Gavin D. Flood, 1996, An Introduction to Hinduism, Cambridge Univ. Press, p. 82) inherited by Hinduism. The shamans (shramanas) were wanderers as distinct from orthodox Vedic Brahmin priests. Mahavira, founder of Jainism, and the Buddha, founder of Buddhism, were the most prominent and long lived icons of this ancient Indian movement. More