In Tibetan Buddhism, and in other practices, it’s said that contemplating a mandala can lead you toward enlightenment and integration.
Mandalas have become very popular. People use the word to mean different things, including “a pretty image with, like, some things resembling petals, and maybe a circle.” But the mandala that leads to enlightenment is of a specific sort. It’s extremely elaborate in the images, shapes, and colors it contains. It includes both a circle and a square inside it. And the square has four gates or portals, in the middle of each side of the square. The symbology is rich and meaningful.
The mandala is considered a representation of the Universe. Contemplating it becomes analogous to entering the Universe, passing through the four gates in the square that surrounds the circle, and becoming one with its center.
I’ve been developing an ambitious project titled “Power of Four.” It’s structured around the number 4 and its uses in creativity, problem-solving, intellectual and spiritual work, and so on. Researching my project, I pondered the mandala and its four-gated design, and I pondered the notion that you could become enlightened simply by contemplating an image.
This seemed far-fetched at first. An image? You stare at an image, and now you’re the Buddha?
But then I got thinking.
Imagine a photo of your mother as a child. The photo is framed, and it has sat on your bookshelf for twenty years. You might be very upset to come home one day and discover that the photo is missing. That’s because the photo encapsulates a wealth of thoughts, emotions, sensations, memories, yearnings, and stories. The photo “is” your mother, the photo “is” all mothers and motherhood, the photo “is” the passing of time, the generations, the eons. We might say that, like a mandala, this photo is a representation of the Universe. “It contains everything,” and if the photo goes missing, everything you cherish disappears.
Your mother as a child is only an illustration. Your brother as a child; you, as a child; a child. In principle, every image has the potential to become the informal mandala, to coin an expression: थे इन्फ़ोर्मल् मण्डल, as we say in the old country.
Feliz aniversário, Luis Eduardo!
A devout person keeps a painting with a religious theme on her wall. It could be the Madonna and child, for instance; or a man, crucified and bleeding; or the smiling Dalai Lama. The image tells a story, and both the image and story rearrange the mind, heart, and soul of the devout. Sin, punishment, and redemption; sacrifice and unconditional love; goodness, evil, and many other ideas “reside in the image,” although in truth these ideas “reside in the viewer’s heart” and the image triggers the thoughts, sensations, and emotions inside the viewer.
If you’re not devout, you might find it strange that someone venerates an icon such as a painting of the Virgin Mary—a painting that you consider gaudy and maybe even ridiculous. But suppose a drunk guest at one of your dinner parties goes up to that photo of your mother and spits on it. How would you feel? Deeply upset, incensed, enraged. Or paralyzed, in shock. It means that you have the same relationship with the photo that a devout person has with a traditional religious icon. The photo of your mother is, in fact, a religious icon. The phenomenon is non-denominational, so to speak.
Now imagine a photo of an ancestor, a political figure, or a spiritual leader whom you greatly respect. The photo “is” the leader, who “is” the set of principles he or she espouses. You’d be afraid to misbehave in front of the photo, which would possibly come to life and admonish, mock, or punish you. You turn the photo around so that it faces the wall. Then the spiritual leader won’t see you, and you can do your thing in private.
A photograph can be so disturbing that a single short glance at it can traumatize you for a long time. Something unfathomable being done to a human being, a nine-year-old girl running naked and desperate from a napalm attack, from incomprehensible hellish fires. It’s so horrible that I won’t reproduce the image here.
Conversely, the contemplation of a photo of your own self as a child can help you on the way to forgiveness, acceptation, and love. It’s a big deal.
The power of images to affect us deeply is undeniable. It’s perfectly plausible that the sustained contemplation of an image of a certain type would lead you to enlightenment and integration.
Contemplating means really, really looking at it for a long time, with a certain frame of mind, absorbing every detail and receiving every message implied in every part of the image. It takes tremendous dedication to look at any one thing this way. As the song goes, “look with your heart.”
I’m not saying that you should become a Tibetan Buddhist. I’m only saying that images are powerful and very affecting. You might want to consider the images you look at and how you look at them. You might want not to look at certain images, and also not to share them with others. You might want to appreciate that different people find different images powerful and affecting. You might want to go out look at the world—look and really see, look and take it in, look and become the world.
There’s a tradition in which monks build a mandala with colored sand. It takes days to design and craft it, and the final result is remarkably beautiful. It’s the product of knowledge and wisdom, of team work, of skill and dedication, of devotion and discipline. Once the mandala is finished, the monks ritualistically destroy it, acknowledging that everything is impermanent in this life.
I found a short documentary about it, produced by the London-based Wellcome Collection. I downloaded it, muted the narration, edited the documentary into a shorter version with a new rhythm, and added one of my compositions as a soundtrack.
Turn the sound up. Impermanence is marvelous and terrifying.
©2020, Pedro de Alcantara