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gaian carols
October 2009 
The Mandala
Posted on May 16th, 2009
by 
Gien
Gien
From Wikipaedia:
Mandalas are commonly used by tantric Buddhists as an aid to meditation. More specifically, a Buddhist mandala is envisaged as a "sacred space," a Pure Buddha Realm and also as an abode of fully realised beings or deities.
While on the one hand, it is regarded as a place separated and protected from the ever-changing and impure outer world of and is thus seen as a Buddhafield or a place of Nirvana and peace, the view of Vajrayana Buddhism sees the greatest protection from samsara being the power to see samsaric confusion as the "shadow" of purity (which then points towards it).
By visualizing purelands, one learns to understand experience itself as pure, and the abode of enlightenment. The protection we need, in this view, is from our own minds, as much as from external sources of confusion.
In Practice,
at first, as one meditates and performs the Mandala offering, offering the entire universe to the Buddhas, it is symbolic. However, with practice the symbolism begins to diffuse through a process of osmosis into one's mundane life.
One begins to shift into the "frameless" paradigm, in which there is no conceptual framework at all. One begins to experience one's reality as the LITERAL mandala. Both inner and outer appearances are merely aspects of the mandala.
While to the new student, the mandala makes its first appearance as symbolic and an artificial tool for mediation, it begins to transform and in time, it is seen that the mundane life was full of artifice and the mandala view pure. In retrospect, we will see that the mandala helps us to remove the obscurations of the mundane life that we never even suspected.
Indeed, when the mandala principle spreads out from our meditation cushion into our nonmeditative experience of reality and appearances are felt and experienced as miraculous and all living beings as deities, only then can we practice genuine compassion.
Mandalas are commonly used by tantric Buddhists as an aid to meditation. More specifically, a Buddhist mandala is envisaged as a "sacred space," a Pure Buddha Realm and also as an abode of fully realised beings or deities.
While on the one hand, it is regarded as a place separated and protected from the ever-changing and impure outer world of and is thus seen as a Buddhafield or a place of Nirvana and peace, the view of Vajrayana Buddhism sees the greatest protection from samsara being the power to see samsaric confusion as the "shadow" of purity (which then points towards it).
By visualizing purelands, one learns to understand experience itself as pure, and the abode of enlightenment. The protection we need, in this view, is from our own minds, as much as from external sources of confusion.
In Practice,
at first, as one meditates and performs the Mandala offering, offering the entire universe to the Buddhas, it is symbolic. However, with practice the symbolism begins to diffuse through a process of osmosis into one's mundane life.
One begins to shift into the "frameless" paradigm, in which there is no conceptual framework at all. One begins to experience one's reality as the LITERAL mandala. Both inner and outer appearances are merely aspects of the mandala.
While to the new student, the mandala makes its first appearance as symbolic and an artificial tool for mediation, it begins to transform and in time, it is seen that the mundane life was full of artifice and the mandala view pure. In retrospect, we will see that the mandala helps us to remove the obscurations of the mundane life that we never even suspected.
Indeed, when the mandala principle spreads out from our meditation cushion into our nonmeditative experience of reality and appearances are felt and experienced as miraculous and all living beings as deities, only then can we practice genuine compassion.
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