| Creating your own mandala
About mandalas The Mandala is a very powerful concept that originally came from the religious teachings of Hinduism, and Indian, Chinese and Japanese but especially Tibetan Buddhism. The word comes from Sanskrit (an ancient language) and manda means "essence," and the ending la means "container" or "possessor." Therefore, mandala means "A Container of Essence" or "Sphere of the Essence." Another Sanskrit meaning for the word is "circle." It has a centre or axis around which important and meaningful symbols are placed. For Buddhists in particular a mandala depicts the perfect environment of the Buddha so a mandala must reflect order and harmony and perfect wisdom, because this is what the word Buddha implies. Perhaps the closest idea for us is to imagine how the Garden of Eden may have looked. Another idea for us to imagine involves us thinking about how the earth may have looked before we began polluting it and destroying so many of our natural environments. For those of us who live in Australia, imagine the environment before white settlement, when Aboriginal people were the caretakers of our land. Activity We can imagine what our world may have been like before and put these images onto our own mandalas we create. Use bright colours and detailed drawings or designs to show the ideas in your imagination. One idea could be that you divide your mandala up into four regions that represent earth, fire, water and air and create your pictures around these themes. By creating mandalas and displaying them we can all see the images we all together hold in our imaginations of the way we would like the world to be. Once we know this then perhaps we can then find ways of making it happen. For more information check out these websites: http://www.jyh.dk/indengl.htm#Mandala http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~wbt/mandala/
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