Emory's Carlos Museum finds its center with 'Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism'

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Atlanta, GA (USA) -- Emory University's Michael C. Carlos Museum, an often-overlooked gem for local art and culture, is exhibiting Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism through April 15. Mandala brings to Atlanta many rare and beautiful Buddhist thangkas, or paintings, along with other objects intended for initiation and meditation.

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Four Mandalas of the Vajravali Series, c. 1429—56, Central Tibet, Tsang (Ngor Monastery), Sakya order, Thangka, gouache on cotton, KKimbell Art Museumimbell Art Museum

Mandalas are a kind of technology for meditation, meant to work with personal practice to achieve spiritual insight and liberation. The most common mandalas in Tibetan Buddhist art place a deity at the center of a palace filled with other deities and iconography. This palace is an individual and a cosmological map that lines up with a highly proscribed set of meditational practices so that an individual may see him or herself as the central deity. In fact, Buddhist philosophy describes individual and deity as one and the same.

Mandalas act as visual tools for meditators. The basics of mandala practice are fairly easy to imagine - think about a golfer on the green visualizing Arnold Palmer putting in order to perfect his own stroke.

Although intended for monks, religious art in Tibet touched nearly every aspect of society. For many centuries, Tibet was at the center of a vast Empire, trading with Nepal, India, Persia, China, and Central Asia. In addition to bringing technology and high-level artisans, this trade delivered to Tibet a fantastic range of artistic styles. The painted mandalas on display at the Carlos Museum are fantastically detailed, including myriad deities, monks, and symbols. Their arrangement in circular forms adheres to iconographic conventions, from the colors used to the placement of elements.

A mandala from Dallas' Kimbell Museum is so meticulously painted that even on closest inspection it’s difficult to discern irregularities; It looks as thought it was printed using modern technology, rather than being created by hand 600 years ago.

The exhibit features rare forms of the mandala: The 18th-century Mahakala (Tibet’s protector diety) is unusual for its large central triangle and absence of central deity. Instead, objects symbolic of deities and practice are present, placed with unusual, lotus-shaped palaces. The mandala’s minimalistic design includes some gruesome imagery: flayed human skin, skulls, and intestines, all designed to remind the viewer how transient and unsustainable human life is.

A mandala beautifully decorated with flowers also elides deities, showing instead empty thrones to connote the “thus gone” aspect of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni and his 16 Arhats (acolytes). Tucked away amid the blossoms are wish-fulfilling jewels and ducks in ponds, while deer, traditional symbols for Shakyamuni adorn the four gates.

In addition to painted mandalas, the exhibition includes cosmological paintings, sculptures, and a fantastic, one-of-a-kind three-dimensional wooden carved model of the Guhyasamaja Mandala.

In association with this exhibition, Oglethorpe's Museum of Art has another kind of mandala on display: images created by patients of the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung. Jung used art as therapy, instructing his patients to create images as a means of expressing the conscious and unconscious, and clarifying mental obstacles.

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Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism runs through April 15 at Emory's the Carlos Museum. The Sacred Round: Mandalas by the Patients of C.G. Jung runs through May 6 at Oglethorpe.

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Monks create mandala in Frist

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Princeton, New Jersey (USA) -- This week, men in red and orange robes, the Tibetan Monks of the 2011 Drepung Gomang Monastery Sacred Arts Tour, will construct an interfaith sacred sand mandala, a three-dimensional drawing made of sand - in Frist Campus Center from Sept. 19 through Sept. 22.

In addition to the mandala, the monks are hosting discussions, slide shows, pujas - chants and prayers - and lectures during their tour, which is sponsored by the Fields Center and Community House. The tour will also be selling merchandise such as scarves, beads and clothing, most of which were handmade by the monks.

According to a pamphlet produced by the Drepung Gomang Monastic University, the Sacred Arts tour aims to “make a contribution to world healing and peace” by sharing Tibetan Buddhist teachings, offering sympathy and prayers for the world’s tragedies and raising awareness of the “endangered Tibetan civilization and human rights abuses by the Communist Chinese.”

Members of the tour said they hope to raise financial support for the nearly 2,000 refugee monks “who call the South Indian monastery in exile their home,” according to its website.

The Drepung Gomang Monastic University is located in Karnataka, India, and was established after the monks were exiled from Tibet in the Chinese invasion of the 1950s.

Opening prayers and work on the Mandala began at 10 a.m. on Sept. 19.

The mandala, which represents peace and harmony between all religions, includes symbols familiar to religions such as Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, as well as depictions of the four seasons and the natural world. A flyer distributed at Frist explained that the art is called “dul-tson-kyil-khor,” or “mandala of colored powder.” Over several days, the monks will carefully place bits of colored sand into a design on a flat platform to create the mandala.

On Thursday, in keeping with the tradition of mandalas, the sand will be swept up and dumped into Lake Carnegie to symbolize the transience of all things. According to the flyer, this ritual is done so that the waters can “carry healing energies throughout the world,” and is typically performed in rivers or streams.

Students said they appreciated the symbolism of the mandala.

“I love how they’re combining all the different world religions into one piece of art using a technique that holds so much importance and tradition for them,” Alex Rodgers ’14 said. “The peace message is coming across beautifully.”

Meanwhile, others such as Jenny Zhang ’13 had mixed feelings. “I think it’s really cool what they are doing,” she said. “But I wonder how effective it is going to be, how many people are going to receive the message and if it is going to be gone on Thursday, regardless of the symbolic nature of sweeping it up.”

Many of the monks learn the art both at home and at a nearby monastery, monk Dawa Tashi said. When they have less time than usual to create a mandala, such as during their stay at the University, they work for longer periods of time and rotate positions among several artists.

The monks are currently staying in Toms River, N.J., located an hour away from the University.

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