Every Mandala Tells a Secret
If the Buddhist art is meant to guide us to enlightenment, it just as often reveals the blood, beauty, and mystery of earthly life.
By Jackson Arn January 2, 2025
“Mandala of Jnanadakini,” a distemper-on-cloth painting from the late fourteenth century.Art work courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art
There was more flaying than I expected, though not necessarily more than I wanted, at “Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet.” Any visitors going to the Met’s exhibition in search of tranquillity will find a fifteenth-century flaying knife, a pair of flayed cadavers embroidered onto a rug, and another flayed cadaver, with colorful guts stretched like caution tape around a palace. They may find tranquillity, too—just not the cuddly sort that American pop-Buddhism advertises. For the Himalayan monks of the early teen centuries, the ideal setting for initiation was a charnel ground, where people left their dead to be eaten by wild animals. If religion can’t help us amid the stink of rotting flesh, what good is it?
A millennium ago, India was still a Buddhist headwater. Various schools flowed north and east, to China and Japan, but one, Vajrayana Buddhism, left its richest deposits on the Tibetan Plateau. It’s a nice irony of this show that remoteness can speed up transmission: the Himalayas were uncrossable for a quarter of the year, but travellers needed to get through all the same, and many of them spent months near the southern side of the mountains, waiting out the snow and soaking up Buddhist culture. By the thirteenth century, Vajrayana was close to extinct in its own birthplace, and Tibet, the ex-satellite, had become the new center. Ideologically, too, remoteness worked to the school’s advantage. Its leaders stressed Tantric chanting, ritualized sex, and other secretive practices, but, as Christian Luczanits suggests in an eloquent catalogue essay, they could be flashy about those secrets. Some of the most ravishing works here were painted in distemper on cloth, so that they could be rolled up, transported anywhere, unfurled, and re-hidden the second they started to dazzle.
Sound complex? It is, but one thing this mandala definitively isn’t is bulky. The shapes seem to slide soundlessly against one another; the in-between spaces are loosened up with gorgeous floral squirms of green thread. Even when I squint at the little reproduction in the catalogue, I get a sense of a complexity that has been captured without being tamed—too big to belong to any single person, least of all the one who paid for it.
If I were smarter, or stupider, I would try to use the rest of this review to settle the question of what Tibetan mandalas (not the only art works here, but the most striking) were used for. I can take some comfort in the fact that not even the Met’s experts agree on an exact answer. At a recent conference hosted by the museum, an eminent professor claimed that they could be understood primarily as meditation aids; in the catalogue, another insists that “there is no basis for this interpretation.” There is plenty of basis for the interpretation that mandalas are symbols of the divine cosmos, designed to teach initiates about the real thing, unless mandalas are vessels in which the divine resides, nothing symbolic about them. They are teachers and icons, maps and billboards, propaganda for the Buddhists who create them and also for the kings who fund them. The most famous ones don’t even exist, since they are studiously destroyed as soon as the monks finish making them from sand.
“Portrait of a Kadam Master with Buddhas and His Lineage” (c. 1180-1220). Art work courtesy Michael J. and Beata McCormick Collection.
Mandala-gazing calls for a buffet of prepositions, an “at” that is also an “in” that is also a “down upon.” You’re meant to start along the edges and proceed clockwise, passing the pictures of monks, deities, or patrons in their neat squares. From there, go inward, to a circular plate on which a four-gated palace rests. Generally, each gate is guarded with a pair of prongs that suggest a vajra, a Buddhist scepter; make it past these and you’ve broken into the home of the main deity, who sits at the center, circled by lesser deities while waving a weapon or, depending on the version, embracing a consort. You can imagine each layer stacked on top of the previous one (three-dimensional mandala models are arranged this way), so that the farther in you move the higher the image pokes out of the picture plane. Inward becomes upward.
Either way, you are doing with your eyes what Buddhism says you can do with your life: proceeding from outer to inner, base to noble, ignorant to enlightened. The crawl from one to the other matters as much as the enlightenment itself—skipping the charnel grounds isn’t an option. Observe no fewer than eight of them at the outskirts of a single eleventh-century Nepalese mandala. Greenish jackals feast while birds nibble on skulls, and why shouldn’t they? They’re part of the cosmos, too. The red surrounding this mandala’s central deity is a Buddhist symbol of purity, but also a reminder that purity starts with the flesh and blood that everybody gets for free.
Even if you know nothing about Buddhism, even if you’re in no mood to learn, this show would be worth visiting for the eerie loveliness of the color. One mandala, depicting the goddess Jnanadakini, has barely a crack to show for almost seven hundred years of existing. The colors are all pomp and hot splendor: red grabs hold of softer pinks and jades and apricots and makes them burn. Slower to strike, but no less sensational, are the abstract patterns of frantic, curling lines you find throughout, as though Himalayan artists of the late fourteenth century had somehow visualized brain coral. When line and color work together at full tilt, as they do behind the walls of Jnanadakini’s palace, the patterns get so dense that they could almost be solid fills. Peace is made to feel like a state of faint, cheerful vibration. “Biography of a Thought,” a huge mandala painting that the contemporary Nepalese artist Tenzing Rigdol contributed to the show’s atrium, is pat by comparison—blue is just blue, solid is just solid, and taking this all in after marvelling at the real thing is like washing fine wine down with syrup.
Distemper doesn’t survive seven centuries unless someone is guarding it from breath and sunlight. One point on which all the Met’s experts agree is that mandalas weren’t made for mass gawking: most Vajrayana initiates journeyed through them with an experienced master as a guide. That was probably a shrewd move on the master’s part. Images—the good ones, at least—are always richer than their official meanings, which is why so many religions police or ban them. In a distemper-on-cotton mandala from 1800 or so, the deity Ekajata resides in a palace guarded by corpses and surrounded by smoky darkness. There’s an obvious progression here, from smoke to body and body to divinity, but maybe it leads from divinity all the way back to smoke, which gets brighter and livelier the longer we stare. Thick clouds seem to push out beyond the rectangle they’re in, and beyond any bounds anyone might try to place around them. Religious art could have been doing so much more with smoke this whole time, I thought as I looked. Fire and water have hogged the spotlight for too long; smoke has its own glamour, its own deathless wriggle. In this mandala, whether the monks approved or not, it gets the starring role it was born to play. ♦
Published in the print edition of the January 13, 2025, issue, with the headline “Enlighten Me.”
