Yaks and Mandalas! What do they have in Common?

The Himalayan Art Resources website was certainly a participant in the successful Rubin Museum of Art exhibition Mandala, The Perfect Circle. HAR provided scholarship and essays both for the catalogue publication and wall text on the gallery floor. But what does this all have to do with yaks and mandalas, and what do they have in common? Well, familiar with both the art and the exhibition we have come up with five interesting facts that touch on both the lighter side and the more serious side of the exhibition and Buddhist Tantric art in general. To pursue the yak question see the Five Interesting Facts of the Rubin Museum exhibition. (Also see the Five Myths About Mandalas).

Mandala Resource Page

It has become obvious that the subject of mandalas is too large for the current navigation on the site. A new Mandala Resource Page has been created to help navigate and also to highlight examples of the different types of mandalas, their elements, iconography and meaning. More example pages will be added....

Reading & Interpreting the Symbols & Iconography of the Yama Dharmaraja Mandala

Representations of Deity Mandalas are created for many different reasons and probably least of all as 'an artistic aid for meditation' as is commonly believed by many Western scholars. The primary reason for the physical creation of a mandala is to have a visual presence when preparing and conducting a ritual initiation for Tantric Buddhist devotees into a deity yoga meditation practice. Initiations, sometimes called ceremonies or empowerments, require a physical depiction, as stipulated in the Tantric texts, either two dimensional or three dimensional in form, of the deity, the celestial palace and the surrounding lotus petals, vajras and five coloured flames. Sand mandalas and painted wooden mandala plates are good examples of objects used for this ritual function.

Yama Dharmaraja Mandala
Yama Dharmaraja Mandala Elements
Yama Dharmaraja Schematic - Quick Study
Yama Dharmaraja Outline Page
Yama Dharmaraja Main Page

(See an essay on Mandalas: An Introduction, Painting & Sculpture based on the Rubin Museum of Art exhibition Mandala, The Perfect Circle).