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The Theory and Practice of the Mandala

With Special Reference to the Modern Psychology of the Unconscious

Dover Publications, Inc.

THE DOCTRINAL BASIS OF THE MANDALA

THE history of Indian religion may be defined as one of a toilsome attempt to attain autoconsciousness. Naturally, also, what can be said of religion applies to philosophy as might be expected in a country where religion and philosophy were blended together in the unity of a vision (darsana) that helps an experience (sadhana). In India the intellect has never prevailed to the extent of obtaining mastery over the faculties of the soul, of separating itself therefrom and thus of provoking that dangerous scission between the intellect and the psyche which is the cause of the distress from which the Western world suffers. The West, indeed, as though to designate its present inclinations, has coined a new word, unwonted in the history of human thought, the word 'intellectual'—as though it were possible to have a type of man reduced to pure intellect.

Pure intellect, indeed, detached from soul, is the death of Man. Intellect, self-confident and isolated in arrogant complacency, does not ennoble Man. It humiliates him, deprives him of his personality. It kills that loving participation in the life of things and creatures of which the soul, with its emotions and intuitions, is capable. Intellect, by itself alone, is dead and also deadly—a principle of disintegration. But in India intellect was never dissociated from soul. The world of the subconscious was never denied and rejected but, on the contrary, accepted and transfigured in a harmonious process intended to re-establish autoconsciousness, the consciousness of an Ego which is not, of course, the individual ego but the Ego, that cosmic Consciousness from which everything derives and to which everything returns. Pure consciousness, not darkened by a concrete thought, but, all the same, the premise of those concrete thoughts which make up the psychic reality of the living individual. Without that consciousness the individual psyche could not exist. But, on the other hand, the development of the psyche must be arrested if one wishes to reacquire, after the experience of life, the possession of that consciousness.

The Vedanta, the system of speculation which is derived from the Upanishads, calls this consciousness 'Brahman' and recognizes in us its Mysterious presence as the aatman, the 'secret self', pure intelligence, First Principle, Sole Reality in the midst of the ocean of that which is in process of becoming.

The Saiva Schools call it Siva or Para-samvit, 'Supreme Cognition' which is poured out and spread out in all that exists. Thus, in contradistinction to the monistic Vedanta, these Schools maintain that this world is not unreal but is the self-manifestation of God, that it is his garment. Error consists in attributing real, objective, autonomous existence to what appears as ego or a thing. Both ego and things are waves which, provoked by divine necessity and maintained by our error, arise and alternate on the originally motionless surface of that Consciousness.

Primitive Buddhism postulated the existence of two planes between which there is no communication, two worlds absolutely different the one from the other. On the one side, the world of samsara, our own, in which karma operates and which is forever dying and being born again, and, on the other side, the plane of nirvana reached by a qualitative 'leap' when karma and the force which causes it or derives from it are stopped or suppressed.

On this plane of samsara] the psycho-physical complex of Man is carried along in incessant movement. The conscious principle which is, then, the cause of moral responsibility (since by inspiring My actions it fashions My personality) projects itself, at the moment of death, into a new existence and predetermines it by virtue of the karmic experience which is accumulated in it and which is the cause both of the projective force and of My future character. But such predetermination is very comprehensive, inclusive of individual conditions in which is preserved completely the liberty of the individual; by being effected it exhausts itself.

It thus happens that although I suffer from My past, I remain always the free author of My future. Lives repeatedly develop, linked together like the rings of a chain, until cognition and experience (lived within us), that the universe is solely a becoming and a flux, arrest the course of samsara. At that moment there occurs, as I have said, the 'leap' into nirvana, which is beyond karma (asamskrta). More than this, it is probable that early Buddhism did not say. But this proposition, with its schematic concision, could not fit in with the ontology that has always prevailed in Indian inquiry. It is an ontology which, finally, came to dominate Buddhism also. The plane of nirvana, indeed, came, very early on, to be defined in ontological terms and was conceived as an Absolute, that is to say the premise of all phenomenal appearances which, while having in it their origin and their justification, suddenly flash on the surface of the sea of existence, to disappear rapidly, burned in the fire of gnosis. This was a conclusion arrived at in various stages. At one time it was affirmed that samsara] and nirvana, thus contrasted, were equivalent inasmuch as they partake of the same character, since both are equally devoid of essence; the sole reality remaining is indefinable being. At other times this being was defined in positive terms as pure consciousness without object or subject. The world of appearances, or, as the Buddhists say, of duality, finds there its justification. Although this duality is not real, it cannot be said that it does not have a relative existence.

Let us take the oft quoted example of a man who sees a coil of rope in the dark. At first he thinks that he sees a snake and is therefore very alarmed. His fear is real and of the same intensity as it would be were he confronted with a real snake. However, as he draws closer he becomes aware that there is no snake at all, only a rope—and his fear disappears. It is of no consequence that his first perception was not 'real' since it induced in him the same feelings as if it had been 'real'. But his fear disappeared entirely as soon as he noticed that what he saw was a rope and not a snake. Thus, the plane of relative existence, from the point of view of the Absolute, has no consistence but may determine action. It is like a mirage. Such is the doctrine of Vijñanavada. 'Relative consciousness', says Asanga, 'which creates unreal images, does exist, but duality, that is to say perception and the object perceived, does not exist in it in an absolute sense, that is, as really existing. In it is the Absolute as non-existence of duality, but this duality is in its turn an absolute.'

The Buddhists gave various names to this Cosmic Consciousness: Matrix of all the Buddhas (Tathagatagarbha), Absolute Identity (Tathata), Basis of All Things (Dharma-dhatu), Thing-ness (Dharmata). But some Schools, that of the Vijñanavadins, for instance, called it Alayavijñana or 'store-consciousness', that is to say they understood it as psychological reality, collective psyche in which individual experiences are deposited to reappear in a single flux. No act or thought is ever lost but is deposited in that universal psyche which, therefore, and implicitly, is not an immobile entity but an 'experience' continually being enriched. In it, past and present live together, form a fruitful and inexhaustible soil on which grows the plant of the individual, so that when it dies it lets fall into this soil the seeds which perpetuate the life-cycle. This was an intuition which Buddhism carried to the highest degree of formulation, but there are to be found analogous ideas in other systems. The Saiva School of Kashmir, to name only one, maintains also that karmic experience is never lost until all creatures have been carried back into the Absolute Consciouness indentified with Siva. Thus, even when the worlds at last are consumed in cosmic fire, the force of karma, the sum of individual experiences, acts as though thrust forward for the creation of a new universe. The latter, then, is not initiated ex novo but conforms itself according to the predispositions which survive destruction, so that it begins where the old world ends and inherits from it all its characters and possibilities.

Indian thought has, therefore, established two positions: a metaphysical conception which postulates an immutable and eternal reality to which is opposed the unreal flux of appearances which are always becoming; on the other hand, what we may call a psychological construction of the world which reduces everything to thoughts, their relations, but these, nevertheless, although ephemeral, are possible inasmuch as there exists a universal and collective force which provokes and preserves them. This Absolute Consciousness, matrix of all that becomes, this Conscious Being, the premise of all thought, was very often imagined as light. We experience it as an interior illumination that flashes before our eyes when concentration has removed us from the alluring appeal of external appearance—to which the senses yield—and has led us to look within ourselves. It is colourless, dazzling light. In the Upanishads it is the atman which consists of an interior light (antarjyotir-maya), it is that light with which the poet wished to merge himself. 'From the unreal, lead me to the real, from the darkness, lead me to the light.' (Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, I, iii, 28)

In Mahayana Buddhism it is defined as thought by nature luminous (cittam prakrtiprabhasvaram): in the state of bardo, that is in the period which accompanies and immediately follows on death, light flashes before the eyes of a dying man and in the consciousness of a dead man henceforth freed from the bonds of the body and hovering hesitant between liberation and rebirth. If the conscious principle of the person recognizes this light for what it is, that is Cosmic Consciousness, Absolute Being, the cycle of samsara] is then interrupted. But if the conscious principle of the deceased is troubled by the dazzling refulgence and withdraws, allowing itself to be seduced by more soft and coloured light, it will be reincarnated in the forms of existence which this latter light symbolizes, and thus will be precipitated anew into the cycle of births and rebirths.

'O son of noble family, thou, such a one, son of such ones, listen. Now to thee will appear the light of the Pure Absolute. Thou must recognize it, O son of noble family. At this moment thy intellect, by its immaculate essence, pure and without shadow of substance or quality, is the Absolute expressed in the symbol Kun tu bzang mo.

'As thy intellect is void, think that this void does not fade away, thy own intellect remaining clear without hindrance, pure and limpid; that intellect is the Buddha Kun tu bzang mo. The insubstantial void of thy intellect and thy clear and shining intellect are identical: this is the ideal body of the Buddha.

'This intellect of thine, which is identity between light and void, dwells in a great luminous mass. It is not born and it does not die. It is the Buddha Od mi agyur. It is enough that thou shouldest know this.

'When thou hast recognized thy intellect as being, by its pure essence, identical with the Buddha, this spontaneous vision of thy intelligence rests in the thought of the Buddha.

'This must be said three or seven times in a correct and clear voice. In this way, first of all (the dying man) remembers the instructions which serve to induce that recognition and which were, in his lifetime, imparted to him by the Master; secondly, he recognizes his own intelligence free (from all concrete thought) as identical with that light. Thirdly, in recognizing himself thus, he becomes conjoined with, and never to be separated from, the ideal body. Salvation is then certain.

'O son of noble family, in the moment when thy body and thy mind separate, thou wilt experience images of the ideal plane, pure, subtle, scintillating, luminous, through their own nature dazzling with a light which alarms like the mirage that appears shimmering on desert plains. Do not be frightened by these visions, have no fear for this is the constant play of the ideal plane's lightning which is within thee. Recognize it for such. By means of this light, the sound of the Absolute, with raging voice, will come like the roll of ten thousand thunder-claps which explode at the same moment. This is the sound of the ideal plane contained within thee. For that reason, be not afraid. Have no fear.

'Now that thou hast a mental body constituted by the propensities of thy karma and no longer a material body made up of blood and flesh, neither injury nor death can come to thee from that sound, from that light, from those flashes of lightning.

'Recognize these things only as thy own imaginings, recognize that all this is the intermediate state of existence.

'The world and its experiences are demolished. Then the images will appear like luminous bodies. The heaven will manifest itself as deep blue light. In that moment, from the depths of Paradise, T'ig le brdal, which is in the centre of the Universe, will appear the Blessed rNam par snang mdsad, white, seated upon the leonine throne, He holds in his upturned hands a wheel with eight spokes, and he clasps in his embrace Nammk'a dbyins "The Mother".

'A deep blue light, the manifestation of the gnosis of the sphere of ideas, the purification of the Conscious Principle, of deep blue light, transparent, emanating from the heart of rNam par snang mdsad and from the Mother in mutual embrace will appear to thee in such a way that thy eyes will not support it.

'Together with this (deep blue light) there will rise before thee the white light (emanating from) the world of the Gods and not dazzling, corresponding to the light of gnosis. In that moment, through the force of thy karma, thou wilt have fear, terror and dismay because of that deep blue light of gnosis of the sphere of ideas; it is as a splendour of dazzling lightning and thou wilt flee, and thou wilt feel born within thee a desire for that white light (emanating from the world of) the Gods, which is not dazzling.

'Therefore, have no fear, have no terror of that deep blue light of dazzling, terrible and awful splendour, since it is the light of the Supreme Way. This is the refulgence of the Tathagatas, the gnosis of the sphere of ideas; but thou must have faith in it and intense devotion and must pray with fervour thinking that it is the refulgence of the compassion of the Blessed One rNam par snang mdsad. In him must thou take refuge and the Blessed One rNam par snang mdsad will come toward thee in the distress of the intermediate existence. This white light that does not dazzle is the Path of Light accumulated by thy mental perturbation. Have no attachment for it, have no desire for it. If thou have for it attachment thou wilt wander in the world of the Gods and transmigrate in the six different spheres of the intermediate existence and there will arise hindrance to the Way of Salvation. Therefore, turn away thy eyes from it, and have trust in that deep blue light of dazzling splendour.'

The Indians have not thought of life as a struggle between good and evil, between virtue and sin, but as an opposition between that Luminous Consciousness and its opposite, the psyche and the subconscious which they call maya. All experience is a conflict between the intrusion of this maya (which begins to operate with life itself, which is, indeed, life itself) and that conscious Being. The vital process tends fatally to the victory of maya. Maya, objectively, is the magical liberty which creates its own net around that light, darkens it and hides it. But it is not a force that emerges miraculously from nothing. It is born of the Cosmic Consciousness, in unity of the Primordial Consciousness which contains it within itself.

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Excerpted from The Theory and Practice of the Mandala by Giuseppe Tucci, Alan Houghton Brodrick. Copyright © 2001 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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