Mandala

What does a mandala represent?

In Tibetan Buddhism it is a map of the universe and the palace of a deity. The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Nepalese mandala of Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi, of the late 1400s, is a typical plan: the two deities embrace in the central circle, “equivalent to the penthouse of their palace”; the palace has a gate in each side; and the outermost ring shows cremation grounds, which the museum reads as the fear of death that must be overcome before enlightenment. In its corners are four of the auspicious symbols, the umbrella, the pot, the pair of fish and the conch. In meditation, the museum explains, practitioners visualise entering through each of the four gates.

The plan maps a person as well as a world. In the Kalachakra sand mandala, the Pluralism Project explains, the circles are the body, speech and mind with pure bliss and pure wisdom at the centre, and the elements are laid out in order: earth, water, fire, wind, space and consciousness. The practitioner, Henss writes, circles and visualises the palace in stages of initiation, on the way to the deity at its centre, with whom the adept finally becomes identical. Even the count of its deities varies with the source and lineage: Henss gives 722 for the Potala’s Kalachakra palace, the Pluralism Project 822 “aspects of Kalachakra” in the sand mandala, and the Jonang teacher Khentrul Rinpoche’s model houses 636.

Painted, built and imagined

The flat mandala is a plan of a building in three dimensions. Khentrul Rinpoche found, Tricycle reported in 2019, that many students who knew the Kalachakra mandala from sand mandalas or paintings did not know it was meant as a three-dimensional image; his student Tenpa’i Gyaltsen compared the flat version to “looking at the blueprints of a house, instead of the house”. They had a model of it 3D-printed in more than 700 pieces. Henss lists eight kinds of mandala in Tibetan Buddhism, from sand mandalas and painted scrolls to small Mount Meru mandalas in gilt metal and full palace mandalas. Old ones are mostly gilt; contemporary ones are often painted in the traditional colours of the four directions, blue in the east, yellow in the south, red in the west and green in the north.

Why are sand mandalas destroyed?

They are swept away to enact the impermanence of all created things. Kalachakra sand mandalas have been built over several weeks at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and other American museums, the Pluralism Project records, with the coloured sand laid from the centre outwards through metal funnels, grain by grain; for the Namgyal monks of the Dalai Lama’s lineage, making it is itself a meditation. For the Dalai Lama’s Kalachakra initiation at Madison Square Garden in 1992, monks completed one in three days. In a ritual, the deities are invited to dwell in the mandala and afterwards asked to return to their celestial abode. Then the sand is swept up and poured into water, San Francisco Bay or the East River in the American examples. At the University of Arizona in October 2025, Lama Losang Samten made a Kalachakra mandala over several days and then destroyed it in a dissolution ritual, “as a meditation upon impermanence”. Khentrul Rinpoche’s students dismantle their printed mandala in reverse order and add water and sand to the ceremony to keep the same teaching.

Jung’s mandalas

The psychologist Carl Jung was fascinated by the mandala and used its structure in his own pictures, the Rubin Museum notes. In his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower (in English in 1931) he wrote that “Mandala means a circle, more especially a magic circle”, found the form in medieval Christian art and in Jacob Boehme’s book on the soul, and judged that “the most beautiful mandalas are, of course, those of the East, especially those belonging to Tibetan Buddhism”. His patients drew them, he said, long before he knew of Eastern practice, and he traced the pictures to the unconscious and to “an intuition of the self”. His own first known mandala-like work, Systema mundi totius (1916), was shown with his Red Book at the Rubin Museum.

The word in English

Merriam-Webster dates the word in English to 1859, in the sense of “a Hindu or Buddhist graphic symbol of the universe”, specifically “a circle enclosing a square with a deity on each side”. Its second sense is the modern one: any “graphic and often symbolic pattern usually in the form of a circle divided into four separate sections”.