The painting
A mandala (Sanskrit maṇḍala, “circle”; Tibetan dkyil 'khor, “centre and surround”) is the residence of a deity and its retinue, set out around a centre. In the tantric practice of Tibet it is painted on cloth, laid out in coloured sand, built in three dimensions, or imagined in meditation. In every form it is a palace with the deities in their places, and the painted version is its ground plan.
This painting shows the mandala of Sarvavid Vairocana, the principal mandala of the Tantra Purifying Bad Rebirths (Sarvadurgatipariśodhana). The tantra belongs to the Yoga class, the third of the four classes into which Tibetan tradition sorts the tantras. It was composed in India in the early eighth century and translated into Tibetan soon afterwards. It teaches twelve mandalas whose rites purify the causes of rebirth in the three lower destinies, as a being in hell, a hungry ghost or an animal, and in Tibet it became the tantra of funerals.
The painting was made in Tibet in the seventeenth century, in ground mineral pigment on cotton. Around the mandala sit the teachers through whom the practice was handed down: above, on clouds, the Buddha, Vajrapāṇi and the early Indian and Tibetan masters; below, twelve Tibetan lamas and four protectors. Their inscriptions run from Rinchen Zangpo through the founders of the Sakya school to Ngorchen Kunga Zangpo and two figures of the late sixteenth century: a lineage that runs through the Ngor branch of the Sakya school.
The mandala itself is a set of nested enclosures. From the outside in: a ring of gold, a ring of vajras, a ring of 128 worldly deities, a green courtyard, the outer palace with sixty figures, the inner palace, a lotus of sixteen petals, and a circle holding the five buddhas and four goddesses. The thirty-seven deities of the inner palace are the mandala proper; everything outside them surrounds and protects them.
The model at the top of the page is built from the photograph of the painting. Press Raise the palace and the painting stands up into the building it records; press Walk in to go through it from the rim to the centre with a note on each element.
Reading a plan
A mandala painting is a plan: the palace seen from directly above. A plan shows the ground and nothing that rises from it, so the painter adds the elevations by laying them down flat. A wall is drawn as a strip lying outward from the line it stands on, with its foot along that line and its top along the outer edge. A figure is drawn lying on its back, its seat toward the centre and its head toward the rim. A portico over a door is drawn as coloured tiers stacked outward from the door, and the ornaments on a roof are drawn beyond the wall that carries them.
The orientation follows the entrance. The main gate faces east and lies at the bottom of the painting, so that the viewer stands where the disciple stands on entering; west is at the top, south on the left, north on the right. Each quarter takes the colour of its direction.
The model applies the rule in reverse. Each wall rises from the inner edge of its painted bands; its faces show the bands in order from foot to top, and its top shows the plan. Each figure is cut out along its painted outline, halo and flames included, and stands up on the line of its seat. Each ornament painted beyond a wall moves onto that wall. Seen straight down, the tops of the walls are exactly the painted bands; the Plan view lays the whole model flat again, and then it is the painting.
- Heights. The painting gives a plan and no elevations. The heights of walls, gatehouses and pedestals are the model's; the courses of each wall keep the proportions of the painted bands, stretched upward.
- Roofs. The texts describe a roofed palace. The model leaves it open, as the painting does, so that the inside can be seen.
- Figures. The deities are imagined in the round, seated on lotus and moon seats. The model stands the painted images up as flat panels. Each panel carries the painting on both faces, so from behind a figure is seen in reverse, as through glass. Vairocana has four faces; the painter shows the three that can be seen from the front, and the model keeps that view.
- The ground. Once the palace is raised, every zone of the floor takes one flat colour, the commonest colour of its painted ground: the four quarters of each palace floor, the nine compartments of the central circle, the lotus, the courtyard, the sky above the mandala and the earth below it. The small ornaments, clouds and scrolls painted on the ground are left out. The brocade border stays as painted.
- The centre. The painter seats Vairocana in the middle of the central square. A figure standing up on the line of its seat would stand at the square's eastern edge, so the model moves him to the centre.
- The gateways. The wheel, deer and parasol over each outer gate are raised together, cut along their painted outlines; the arch around them keeps its measured shape.
- The surroundings. The lineage above and the protectors below are outside the palace; the model stands them up where they are painted, facing the viewer.
From the rim to the centre
The enclosures in the order in which the disciple crosses them. Each name moves the model to that place.
- The ring of goldthe outer boundaryone ring
- The vajra ringa fence of vajras, the boundary of the protectionone ring
- The worldly deitiesgods, spirits, planets and stars, facing the centre128 figures
- The courtyardeight adepts, eight vases, eight victory banners, four gateway arches8 figures
- The outer palacefour gates, sixteen wrathful guardians, twenty-eight hearers and solitary buddhas, sixteen bodhisattvas60 figures
- The inner palacefour door goddesses, eight offering goddesses12 deities
- The lotusthe sixteen vajra beings on its petals16 deities
- The circlefour buddhas on the arms of the cross, four goddesses between them8 deities
- The centreSarvavid Vairocana1 deity
The inner palace holds 37 deities, the outer palace 60 figures, the ring 128: 225 figures inside the gold, and the painter's eight adepts besides. Outside the gold the painting has seventeen teachers above and sixteen figures below.
The thirty-seven
The Tibetan name of the mandala gives its number: kun rig rnam par snang mdzad lha so bdun gyi dkyil 'khor, the thirty-seven-deity mandala of All-Knowing Vairocana. The same count, and most of the same figures, make up the Vajradhātu mandala, the central mandala of the Yoga tantras. The Tantra Purifying Bad Rebirths gives the four buddhas names of its own and puts the goddesses Locanā, Māmakī, Pāṇḍaravāsinī and Tārā in the corners of the circle.
The painting labels none of the thirty-seven. The tantra places the groups; where it does not place the members of a group, the order below is the usual one.
| Place | Deity | What it stands for |
|---|
The five families
The five buddhas of the circle are the heads of five families (kula) into which the Yoga tantras sort everything in the mandala. Each family has a direction, a colour, an emblem, a wisdom, and an affliction of which that wisdom is the purified form. The tantra alludes to the emblems when it asks for the mandala to be marked with “vajras, jewels, lotuses, and crossed vajras”.
In this painting the ground of each quarter takes the family colour, while the four buddhas have colours of their own set by the tantra: the buddha of the east is pale pink on a blue ground, the buddha of the south dark blue on a yellow ground.
| Quarter | Here | Elsewhere | Family · emblem | Wisdom | Affliction |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Centre · white | Sarvavid Vairocana | Vairocana | buddha · wheel | the sphere of reality | ignorance |
| East · blue | King Who Purifies All Bad Rebirths | Akṣobhya | vajra · vajra | mirror-like | anger |
| South · yellow | Ratnaketu | Ratnasambhava | jewel · jewel | sameness | pride |
| West · red | Lord of the Śākya Clan | Amitābha | lotus · lotus | discernment | desire |
| North · green | Vikasitakusuma | Amoghasiddhi | action · crossed vajra | accomplishment | envy |
Tibetan exposition extends the scheme to the five aggregates that make up a person and to the elements, and here the systems part company: the aggregate and the element given to each family differ from one tantra to another. The first three columns come from the painting and the tantra; the last three follow the common Tibetan presentation of the five wisdoms.
The palace as the path
The tantra prescribes the palace: square, four gates with porticos, a staircase of four steps, lions and elephants, garlands, bells and yak-tail whisks. The meaning of these things is left to the commentators. Tibetan commentary reads the architecture as an inventory of the qualities of awakening, so that entering the palace is a picture of travelling the path.
One reading, from the fourteenth-century Nyingma master Longchenpa in The Great Chariot, is given below. Other commentators, and the commentaries on other tantras, give other lists; they agree in treating every part of the building as a part of the path.
| Part of the palace | Quality of the path |
|---|---|
| The four gates | the four immeasurables: love, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity |
| The four porticos | the four foundations of mindfulness: body, feeling, mind, phenomena |
| The wall of five layers | the five wisdoms |
| The eight pillars | the eightfold noble path |
| Bells, garlands of suns and moons, yak tails, jewels | the five faculties and the five powers |
| Garlands and pendants | the seven factors of awakening |
| The eaves | great compassion |
| The cornices | the unchanging nature of mind |
| The parasols | the sphere of reality |
| The wheels | the four noble truths |
Longchenpa writes about the palaces of other tantras, and this mandala has no painted pillars or cornices. The list shows the kind of reading the tradition gives to a mandala palace in general; the Tantra Purifying Bad Rebirths offers no gloss of its own.
What the mandala is for
The story
The tantra opens in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three. A god named Vimalamaṇiprabha has died, and Śakra, king of the gods, asks the Buddha where he has been reborn. In the great Avīci hell, the Buddha answers, where he will suffer for twelve thousand years before passing through lesser hells, the births of an animal and a hungry ghost, and a long human life of misery. Śakra begs for a way to free him, and the Buddha teaches the mantras and the mandala of Sarvavid. The rites are performed on the god's behalf and he is restored to heaven.
The Buddha then gives the cause. In an earlier life the god had been a prince who killed his father and caused his mother's death, and who later repented before a sage and died of grief. The repentance won him birth as a god; the earlier deeds were delayed, not removed. The prince was Vimalamaṇiprabha, the father was Śakra, and the sage was Śākyamuni himself. The story establishes that the rites may be performed by others, on behalf of someone already dead.
Entering the mandala
At initiation the disciple is led into the mandala blindfolded with silk, holding a vajra and a lotus, and throws a flower onto it. The family of the deity on which the flower falls is the disciple's own, and the tantra promises accomplishment through that deity. The disciple then takes the vows, with an oath sealed by water:
“This is the water of hell for you. If you transgress your vow, it will scorch you.”The Tantra Purifying Bad Rebirths 1.79, tr. Kris L. Anderson
The disciple enters from the east. In the model, the east gate is at the front, where the viewer stands.
For the dead
The tantra says that the bodies of the dead, placed in the mandala and consecrated, are freed even from hell and reborn among the gods. The rites of Sarvavid, called Kunrig in Tibetan, became a regular part of Tibetan funerals, and Himalayan Art Resources notes their use in the consecration of new temples as well. Newar Buddhists in the Kathmandu Valley use the Sanskrit version of the tantra in their funerary rites to the present day.
In Tibetan history
The tantra was one of the few that the Tibetan empire approved for translation and circulation in the ninth century. The Chronicle of Ba records Sarvavid Vairocana among the central deities of the main temple at Samyé, Tibet's first monastery, founded in 779. The same chronicle tells of a debate at the funeral of King Tri Songdetsen (d. c. 800) over whether his funeral should follow Buddhist rites or the older ones, won by the Buddhists, who declared that royal funerals would follow this tantra from then on; that account may be considerably later than the rest of the chronicle. Rinchen Zangpo performed the funeral of King Lha Lama Yeshé Ö by its methods in the eleventh century.
Around the mandala
Thirty-nine figures carry inscriptions, numbered here as in Laura A. Weinstein's key for Himalayan Art Resources. Many are worn away; where the key identifies a figure from a fragment or from its place, the identification is given as the key gives it. Two figures have no number: Śākyamuni at the top centre and Śrī Devī among the protectors, named on the front of the painting as lha mo.
| No. | Inscription | Identification | Place |
|---|