Reaction paper #3, Mandala: Tantric Visions

I have been attempting to cultivate an awareness of mandala into my daily experience. It is my way of informally participating in the mandala experience. There are two dimensions to cultivating such awareness: mental and physical. Both of these can be internally or externally manifested, and they are all closely linked to one another.

Internally, mental awareness of the mandala involves literally keeping the idea of mandala in mind. That could mean visualizing it to the best of one’s ability, or as I have been doing, visualizing the circumference of my mind as a mandala, locating the five Buddha families in the different directions, and attempting to assign dimensions of my psychological faculties in accordance with the characteristics of the five families. I oriented the mandala in such a way as to place Akshobya at the back of my mind, Ratnasambhava in the south, or above my left ear, Amitabha in the west, or at my third eye, and Amoghasiddhi at the north, or above my right ear, and of course, Vairocana in the center of my mind, radiating white light. It is a meditative exercise I engage in usually while unoccupied on the subway. Also there is a clearly physical dimension to this mental exercise, transposing the cosmic model of the mandala onto the microcosm of thought space. Another mental exercise I practice is visualizing mandala on surfaces around me. This likewise synthesizes the mental and the physical, and helps me in realizing the no-ground of emptiness, and the everywhereness of the cosmic architecture of mandala, in external phenomena and the internal fabric of thought.

The more explicitly physical or external ways of realizing mandala have been occurring as I explore possibilities for my creative project. I have been seeing mandalas everywhere in mundane physical objects, such as bowls, mirrors, plates, spiderwebs, fireworks, water ripples, and in more esoteric physical phenomena such as crop circles and megalithic structures such as Stonehenge. Some of these things are mysterious, their esoteric meaning having been closed by the doors of time, while others were never constructed with the intent to be read esoterically. Still, attempting to read these structures reveals the pervasiveness of circular imagery in the mundane as well as the exotic. It speaks to a collective experience of spatial harmony that not only supports the Vajrayana understanding of the essence of mind, tathagatagarba, but modern psychological understandings as well. I think that through these exercises in attempting to experience mandala in my everyday life, to perform mandala in an informally routine way, both internally and externally, has cultivated a new way of experiencing conventional reality that was not so readily accessible to me prior to this course. It has become so natural to me that I draw fundamental mandalas on my notes, create them out of clay, and even notice that my multi-colored pen is arranged almost perfectly according to the five family configuration, the one exception being that in place of yellow, there is black. And sometimes I even visualize myself as always standing at the summit of a mountain (Mt. Meru, perhaps?), regardless of my actual physical surroundings. I find externalizing the internal and internalizing the external is blurring the boundaries of both, creating a more fluid ground (or is it no-ground?) upon which I experience reality/emptiness/Dharma. And the vocabulary of mandala and Vajrayana lends me the language through which to express that experience, to the extent that it can be conveyed conceptually.