Four-circle Hevajra Mandala - Reflections of the Buddha

Four-circle Hevajra Mandala 2
“Highest Yoga Tantras,” of the Sakya school. The Highest Yoga Tantras are one of the four types of
tantras in Vajrayāna Buddhism, 5 the tantras being systems of practice, usually based on specific texts,
that are meant to enable the practitioner to attain Buddhahood through meditative engagement with a
particular tutelary deity. The Highest Yoga Tantras are believed to allow attainment of Buddhahood in a
single lifetime. They demand that the practitioner follow a teacher’s instructions in performing radical
inner transformations—for example, visualizing his body as a particular arrangement of deities both
male and female, and further visualizing himself as neither different from nor the same as those deities.
These tantras particularly emphasize the simultaneous unity of and difference between wisdom and
compassion. Because wisdom is considered a female attribute in Buddhist thought and compassion a
male attribute, sexual metaphors and imagery are used extensively. In contemplating such metaphors
and imagery, “desire is converted to bliss, hatred to radiance, and delusion to awareness, and the union
of male and female is transformed into the nondual state of compassion and wisdom of a Buddha.” 6
Importantly, as can be seen in this thankga, the deities depicted in ecstatic, sexual embrace are
profoundly wrathful ones. They all bear various weapons, some trample upon corpses, and others wear
garlands of skulls. Vajrayāna practitioners understand the fearsome appearance of these deities to be,
in fact, an outward manifestation of their compassion. By directing their wrath against the obstacles
that hinder worshippers’ progress along the path to awakening, these deities display their compassion
for their followers. They manifest, in essence, “benevolent wrath.” 7
These four manifestations of Hevajra are depicted at the center of a mandala—an array of deities
positioned within a palace-like architectural setting, meant to be envisioned as a fully three-dimensional
space. Mandalas are usually created in accompaniment to meditative practices in which the practitioner
visualizes himself in union with—or as—those deities. 8 While the deities depicted within a mandala may
vary, and while stylistic differences may always be identified, the basic structure of mandalic
compositions remains generally constant across all periods and places of Vajrayāna Buddhism. The
structure of each of the four mandalas depicted on this thangka might be best understood by taking a
5 The four types are Kriyā-tantra (Action Tantra), Caryā-tantra (Performance Tantra), Yoga-tantra (Yoga Tantra),
and Anuttarayoga-tantra (Highest Yoga Tantra). A brief introduction to the different types of tantras may be
found in Dina Bangdel and Aviana P. Maki, “Related Esoteric Tantras,” in Huntington and Bangdel, pp. 422-423.
6 Ibid., p. 423.
7 For more on the notion of “benevolently wrathful” deities, see Rob Linrothe, “Protection, Benefaction, and
Transformation: Wrathful Deities in Himalayan Art,” in Rob Linrothe and Jeff Watt, Demonic Divine: Himalayan Art
and Beyond (New York: Rubin Museum of Art, 2004), pp. 3-43.
8 Mandalas are often described as “visualization (or meditation) aids.” The texts that prescribe the creation of
mandalas, however, never explicitly describe how the worshipper is to interact with mandala, even though such
texts often tell the worshipper to create a physical mandala according to precise instructions and then to construct
an identical mandala in his mind. Thus, while the creation of the physical mandala may help practitioners to
familiarize themselves with the deities that they envision during meditative practice and to focus their mind on
those deities, it cannot be asserted with absolute certainty that a mandala is explicitly used during actual
meditative practice. This is not to say that physical mandalas do not serve any precise ritual faction. Indeed,
during some consecration rites (Sanskrit: abhiseka), a mandala may be laid out on a raised altar, onto whose
deities each new initiate into the practices associated with the mandala tosses a flower petal, taking as his tutelary
deity the figure onto which the flower petal falls. The Kamakura-period (1185-1333) Womb World Mandala also
on display in “Reflections of the Buddha” could have been used in such a way, though as David Snellgrove points
out, given that mandalas like this Four-Circle Hevajra Mandala focus on only a single presiding deity, it is unlikely
that they would have been used in a similar consecration ritual. See David Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism:
Indian Buddhists and Their Tibetan Successors (Boston: Shambhala, 2002), p. 180.
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Reflections of the Buddha