Word: mandala
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SOLID MANDALA by Patrick White. 309 pages. Viking...
Only someone confident of his ability to demonstrate both a right-hand and left-hand spiral at the same time would have written The Solid Mandala...
Bowl & Blood. In many religions, man uses icons to guide his meditations. Nepalese cloth paintings often contain mandalas, magic diagrams of the cosmos without and the self within. One such (see opposite page) focuses on the mighty mediating god, Mahakala, whose blue bulk is crowned and garlanded with severed heads. The worshiper is expected to make a visual pilgrim's progress from the edges of the mandala, where he buries his worldliness in stylized cemeteries showing scenes of torture and immolation. Four godlings representing the cardinal compass points help him purge external reality. At the center Mahakala waits, clutching...
Thus it is that the "man" is eventually drawn. But children know that arms and legs do not extend from the head, Mrs. Kellogg notes, and, if they tried to draw a body, would not picture it that way. The figure is not a "man" at all, but a mandala (Sanskrit for magic circle), the circle-in-four that anthropologists have found central in design throughout history and a source of proof in much of C. G. Jung's "racial psychology...
...Adults. Mrs. Kellogg is wary of crystallizing her notions about child art into the language of cultural psychology -for example, the cultural-memory explanation that Jungians would give to the circle and mandala. But she is firm in be lieving that when adults invade the child's art world, a pernicious pattern results: the adult demands conformity to his rigid standards, grows impatient with the child's reluctance to depart his fine mandala world, shows anger. "Such human hos tility makes children into bad adults," Mrs. Kellogg says. "If we had more art and better art, there wouldn...