Literally, "disk"

Usage examples of mandala.

In this sense, the Mandala is an archetypal form generated by unconscious nature well prior to the evolution of human consciousness.

This has led Joseph Campbell to suggest that one archetype of the Mandala is the archetype of differentiated, urban civilization itself.

His ignorance they set about to rectify, teaching him as they would a child about samsara and its cycles of birth, death, and rebirth, and about the Great Mandala, the Wheel of Time.

The chamber was furnished with ascetic simplicity: a mat over a bare stone floor, a washstand, and a terminal with holo vitrine displaying a changing mandala.

No panthers or skulls, no dragons or nudes, these tattoos offered an unexpected jungle of pure design, spirals and knots, mazes and mandalas, interwoven and overlapped in a deliberate thwarting of the desire for representation, this prime example of tribal Hackwork spoke to an inner, more private eye.

And indeed in the Heian period the exceptional visual attraction of the mandalas and other Shingon icons greatly helped to endear esotericism to the Kyoto courtiers, who were finely sensitive to beauty in all its forms.

From the concept of a central Tathagata in the mandalas as well as the notion of a Supreme Buddha principle beyond the five manifestations, an Adi Buddha or Primordial Buddha was evolved, usually called Vajradhara or Vajrasattva but Samantabhadra among the rNying-ma-pa.

Most of a three-dimensional mandala in stucco existed until recently in a western Tibetan temple and elsewhere in western Tibet, including Ladakh, stucco modelling in the round or in high relief has been recorded.

Such groups - for this was no mass movement - practised consecrations, using mandalas for initiations and ritualised sex to express or attain the union or elimination of opposites.

Lamaism into the structure of the doctrine of emanations, the Tantric systems with their organisation by mandalas and the functional distribution into tutelaries and protectors.

Inside the walls were painted with mandalas, figures of gods, saints and demons.

The bar-do mandala or sets of mandalas illustrated peaceful and wrathful deities, all of them emanations of Samantabhadra as the Supreme Buddha, which appeared to the dead person in a given sequence within a period of forty-nine days between his death and rebirth or liberation.

Tantric texts multiplied so did the prescribed combinations for a mandala, differing in respect of ritual intention, sectarian affiliation and the visionary experience of the practitioner.

But Laidlaw also presents a kind of flesh-hating antimaterialism more typical of contemporary horror stories: the punky ex-addict Lenore, possessed by the mandalas, is "sickened to think of her own bones trapped and smothered in flesh, except for teeth standing like outcrops of rock, small peaks protruding from a thick red sea.

Winnie looked exhausted already, and two were still missing: Ansel Tarr and Asham Mandala.