Probably the most important subject of Tantric art is the system of esoteric energies in the body known as the subtle body in its various sheaths, which charts the inner human body of energies used in yogic sadhana. It is similar to the Cosmic Body. From the aspect of sadhana, it is the mechanism by which the practitioner can re integrate spirit and matter, or as is called by the Sankhya, “I” and “That.” The Tantra-Sankhya schema of the body closely resembles the “subtle body”, the body(ies) of energies associated with the physical body, systems illustrated in Tantric diagrams. While Tibetan Buddhists argue that the patterns of the subtle body differ distinctly from that of the Hindu, they share many fundamental ideas. Both require an intense preparation of the body and its faculties.
Like so much in Tantra, these notions are common throughout India, not belonging to any one religion. The basis of the system is as follows: The ultimate transcendent ground of reality and life, is separated from the everyday, mundane world by a kind of surface in the same way that the surface of the earth separates the air and the ground. The earth represents the ultimate ground of being and the air the mundane world of everyday existence.
The human being can be represented by a plant growing from that soil out into that air, but upside down. The crown of his head is thought of as where the root penetrates the surface between the mundane and the transcendent. The body, out in the air is fed with vital energy from the “ground” beyond through an invisible opening situated in the dome of the skull. From the crown of the head, a system of subtle channels, nadis, branch out from the principal nadi ,which runs down the spinal column, Susumna, and courses throughout the body, spreading vital energy throughout the body. Important channels terminate in special places such as sense organs, the hands, and genitals. The vital energy running through these nadis, are called the pranas. Different pranas course through different regions in the body, the most vital being the prana running through the chest. This can be compared with the focus of divine energies in the heart region observed by Hesychast adepts. In the ordinary person, absorbed in his life, these pranas distribute existential power to all the sense-faculties, to the mental activities, and to sexual-procreative activity.
The Tibetan mandala carries this Tantric understanding of human perception described briefly above and thus serves well to explain more deeply this approach. The mandala is one of the major connecting elements in this work since it is the bearer of not only a whole religious culture but requires a cultivated visionary consciousness capable to construct a symbolic housing for the divine dimension visualized by the yogi.1
As one high lama, a Geshe, told me, the first mandala is the universe, then the human body. Except where indicated, the data in the next three paragraphs is from Philip Rawson’s book, Art of Tantra.
The human body as the symbol of human personality in relationship with the body and personality of the universe is the micro- and macrocosmic interaction that gives rise to the mandala. This interaction is a catalytic process of empowerment exploring human identity within the confines of one’s cultural and religious bias. The mandala is as well a means of realizing absolute potentials believed to be inherent in such an interaction of microcosm and macrocosm.2 Thus, the mandala as an object represents a vast ritual that evokes and guides the forces and states characteristic to this interacting complex of individual and world to ultimate realization of the “real.” G. Tucci, in his book, The Theory a Practice of the Mandala, refers to this art form as a “psycho-cosmogrammata which may lead the neophyte, by revealing to him the secret play of the forces which operate in the universe and in us, on the way to the reintegration of consciousness.”3 The mandala like the stupa represents a scheme of the world in the liturgical drama. Indeed, it is the universe itself led back from its material multiplicity to its quintessential unity. While the stupa represents in an architectural manner this cosmos and the persons who perform the ritual circumambulation around it go back, from the expanded and displayed world, to the source of all things, thus becoming unified with the source. The mandala is the linear and pictorial scheme of this process. The mandala gives us, horizontally, the plan of the stupa; it is the stupa seen from above. The mandala too is entered into, in the ceremony of ritual initiation is a pravesa, an entry to this realm of other consciousness that provides the visionary experience of the divine. It is the human body, the microcosm, the most perfect mandala, in which the interplay of universal forces is reproduced. The symbols through which this language finds expression are images, nearly always the image of deities. The component parts of human personality, skandha, material elements, dhatu, and sensorial spheres, ayatana, are reflected into it as figures of gods and goddesses. The disciple, when he has been ‘baptized’ is introduced into the mandala, and becomes ideally identified with its center, which is not a spatial center, but the origin beyond time and space.
The mandala is drawn according to the same paradigms used to build a stupa: Both are Indian echoes of the Babylonian ziggurat, but inserted in a vital manner into the Indian tradition; hence the remote foreign inspiration is slowly transformed into a natural and more appropriate symbol of the liturgical, cosmological, and psychological equivalencies of Indian soteriology.
This correspondence between the mandala and the plan of the stupa extends to the scheme of the palace or city of the Cakravartin, the universal monarch, whose mythograpny took roots in India after her contacts with the Persian empire.4
There is a similarity here to Western religious traditions. Not only is there the god-as-universal-king motif, but there is an approach to worship that requires an earthly sanctuary sharing time and space with eternity around the altar of sacrifice and celebration. There are Brahmins and yogis ministering to the sacred in the architectural temple as well as the human body temple of the Prana energies. This can be compared with Christian priests, monks and lay people in architectural church and fleshly (soma) temple of the Holy Spirit, the human body/personality. Since this format is thought to derive from Mesopotamia, one cannot avoid the possibility that we are dealing with ideas from which originate not only Asian, but Middle Eastern and European, especially Christian, cosmologies. Original Buddhism disposes of the temple, priests, and rituals, depending wholly upon the Raj yogas of meditation. Panikkar’s sober advice calls for metanoia.
From this consideration of the art form of the mandala in its connection with the human body, the architecture of the temple, and the structures of the universe, let us return briefly to a discussion essential elements of the human body as vehicle and symbol of personality. From H. Guenther’s Matrix of Mystery:
How is it that man is both the encodement (as preserver) and the encoder (as transmitter) of essential insights into the structure of reality? Stating it another way, how are we to understand that fantastically improbable complexity termed “man” so that the equally complex notion of ‘tradition’–as that which preserves and transmits essential insights–is itself comprehensible?
Here, “essential” is to be understood as that which is relevant to the actuality of man’s existential predicament. As such, it has nothing to do with cultural artifacts, museum pieces, and other playthings of those in the humanities who have failed to distinguish between that which can still make a claim on contemporary man in all his situational complexities and those fossilized cultural patterns which survive merely by virtue of gathering dust. It is a failure that accounts for the growing suspicion and hence fear–completely justified–that the humanities are in fact no longer relevant.
Whether or not the so-called “insights” of any tradition are essential, will be determined by the extent to which they are, firstly, comprehensible to whomsoever chances to focus on them and, implementable, that is, experientially accessible, so that they may become relevant to one’s own life.5
The mandala must also be appreciated aesthetically within the process of its ritual usage because here the elements of art, culture, and religion join with a singular purpose of total realization; of clarity, perfect dynamic stability, formal composition, and content. The sentient experience of that interactive complex and how the art object functions within that complex is my interest. I have included a large amount of material about the mandala here and in the appendices of this dissertation because the Tibetan mandala in comparison with Western Art forms, such as, Icons and Abstract Expressionism, provides the opportunity for a liberating perspective that will lead eventually to my conclusions. For instance, Guenther, from a Tantric Buddhist perspective, makes “returning to ground-zero”6 statements very much like some Existentialists and therefore some Abstract Expressionists, such as Newman.
In this regard, speculation suggests another litany of suspicions: Does access to these realms of indescribable, radiant, beauty, bliss and wisdom really and always require a certain cosmology? If there is no Cosmology, then there is no consensus of understanding about who we are or what the universe is. In the last 500 years we have moved more and more to concentrate on the individual aspects of physical phenomena and less on the context of experience: the spiritual and the ontological. This relegates medieval cosmologies based on those of the ancient world, such as that which produced the Tibetan Mandala, to the parlors of the occult, however sophisticated psychologically and culturally, rejected by the hard sciences in search of verifiable information. The issue of overall relationships between various aspects of reality, the religious issue, are left to one’s personal bias.
No cosmology, no mandala! We lose any possibility for a shared identity and thus are tempted to self-destruction. For Example: Without a consensus cosmology, i.e., is the universe a sacred body or an object of commercial development and exploitation? We, as a body, and as individuals do not know how to behave appropriately. The result is, with the advent of great technological power, a world in danger of nuclear or environmental suicide since there are no absolute guides or restraints to control behavior.7
These of course are partisan suspicions, but they indicate something of the urgency associated with the topics of this dissertation that one finds in Panikkar’s work and are of great influence in the content of my catalog.
Von Balthasar presents one of the Church’s modern cosmologies and the problem mentioned above like this, as he relates the denigration of the theology of image, including masculine and feminine elements, in twentieth century thinking to the barbarization of culture. Von Balthasar sees the Church as not only being illuminated by the presence of God, but the Church actively radiates the divine energy into the world as a single community of real human beings that has believed uninterruptedly. The Church mediates between the believer and the Christ as an apostolic community into which “the archetypal experiences of the Prophets and the Apostles… have been incorporated as a ‘foundation’; a real and vital relationship connects the contemporary experience of faith with the archetypal experience existing in the space of history.”8
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- Again it is useful to remember that Christian sacrament is a symbol that contains what it signifies, in comparison with the symbolic visualization of the mandala. Christ is the sacrament of God, the gift. The world is also a sacrament of God. The Eucharist is God’s gift of forgiving, unifying Christ in the world for its salvation as well as the sacramental symbol of the altar and communion. The visualization above starts out as an imaginary exercise and takes on a reality of divine proportions for, according to Guenther, the rectification of the world. See quote footnoted #62 in this chapter for Von Balthasar’s commentary on sacramentals. [↩]
- Tucci, …Mandala, p.138. The understanding of this relationship is fundamental to understanding mystical thinking. It is the quality of our ‘presence’ not the quantity that is significant. My first Tibetan teacher, abbot of the Nyingmapa monastery in Derha Dun (U.P.) India, taught this through certain traditional visualizations meant to free one from the quantification of self. [↩]
- Tucci, p. vii. [↩]
- Philip Rawson, The Art of Tantra, p. 160. [↩]
- Herbert Guenther, Matrix of Mystery, p. vii. [↩]
- Ibid., p. 42. [↩]
- This would certainly be one of Panikkar’s positions, though he may express it differently. It is consistent with apocalyptic sensibility found in scripture and justifiably in contemporary sensibility as well. [↩]
- Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. I, p. 420-423. [↩]