Imagine yourself standing in front of an exemplary Tibetan Thangka or masterful Newari painting. From a distance, you see the figure of the central deity or realized master. She or he is surrounded by retinues of other figures: humans, animals, demons, and gods. Perhaps hundreds of arms swirl around the figures, each hand curved into a different graceful mudra or brandishing a uniquely fearsome weapon for demolishing the ego. Detailed foliage grows along the borders. The painting is an orchestrated riot of rich mineral colors and subtley luminous gold.

Narrow your focus to any small area of the painting. Move closer. Now, another layer of world unfolds: smaller figures within the landscape of color, tiny Sanskrit mantras weaving here and there, a fire, a moon, a pool, a river, a yogi, a mountain abode all rendered in meticulous detail. Move even closer. Experience the bursting forth of yet another layer of life, another precise world realized in subminiature scale. Discover an entire planet of beings within the shaft of the Devi’s hair or the play of crystalline light on the surface of a tear drop of lake water. Move closer yet again, and the consistent patterns that make up the complex whole come into view: the crosshatches, shadings, whispers of line and swirl, the infinite fields of grass-like brushstrokes that hold multiple layers of creation bound tightly together on one piece of cloth.

Why all of these minute permutations? Why so many worlds within one world? It is said that the mandalas of life expressed in paintings such as the one described above are direct revelations of the true nature of our world. They are born whole out of the vision of yogis and adepts. They are simply, or spectacularly, one among many modes of appearing of the world essence.

When we look out across a landscape in nature, it is not too much of a stretch to experience what we see as a mandala with the same qualities as a Thangka. Whether we take in the scene as one whole, or continually adjust our focus until we are “seeing” down into the intricate worlds that populate our one world, the mandala of the natural world and the mandala of the Thangka are the same. We admire the infinite and infinestimal expressions of creation in both without reserve. Every new modulation, every subtle new distinction, such as those between two blades of grass, becomes evidence of abundant fecundity.

However, when it comes to people, or the circumstances of our own lives, we are not so admiring. We divide the infinite permutations of human beings into “good” and “bad,” or “pleasurable” and “unpleasurable.” We find some human permutations “acceptable,” and others “unacceptable.” (Can you imagine telling a tree it is “unacceptable?”) We treat the permeable, ever-modulating situations in our own lives the same way. Rather than seeing the play of phenomena in our lives as an expression of the abundant creativity or experimentivity of the world, we complain when things don’t go a certain way and feel victimized. We design our lives to feel as static and “safe” as possible and get upset when there is too much movement. We want to forget that we are all mandalas and that our entire life situation is also a mandala within a mandala: worlds upon worlds of variation.

Tantra is Reality. All of it. All at once. Just like a Thangka.What if, even for only a moment, we were to look at our lives and other people in the same way we look at the Thangkas of Tibet or their modern-day heirs? Could we, even while not denying the reality of pain and suffering, even in the midst of pain, open ourselves to appreciate the variety, the infinite variety of our world?

In Tantra, this is freedom.

OM Shanti, Shambhavi

Posted by Shambhavi on May 15th, 2005 | Explore More! Tags: freedom