“Mandala” is an ancient Sanskrit phrase meaning “sacred group that protects the spirit.” In addition, it refers to the sacred cosmograms that serve as primary symbols of most ethnicities. Westerners have been fascinated for centuries about the mandalas from the Hindu-Buddhist ethnicities of Asia, most often coated geometric diagrams of great beauty and class, that pull the viewer into a realm of balance, tranquility, and calm. But such diagrams are actually architectural blueprints from the purified world of about World of Mandala bliss that people can only recognize through enlightenment. They represent three-dimensional spaces of personal and communal exaltation, palaces for the regal confidence of love, compassion, and general satisfaction of self and other. Understanding their role in anchoring the world-picture of the culture or a person offers a new insight in to the “mandalas” of our very own lifestyle – the national space anchored by the Washington monument and its environs, or the personal cosmological space anchored with the models of the solar program, the DNA double-helix molecule, as well as the atom.

Robert A.F. Thurman may be the Jey Tsong Khapa Teacher of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Division of Religious beliefs at Columbia School, President from the Tibet House U.S., a nonprofit organization focused on the preservation and advertising of Tibetan civilization, and Chief executive from the American Institute of Buddhist Studies. Thurman is actually a talented popularizer of the Buddha’s teachings. He is a riveting speaker and an author of many books on Tibet, Buddhism, art, politics and culture