AllatRa by Anastasia Novykh 2 www.allatra.org

AllatRa by Anastasia Novykh
divine Spirit within man. The “Ishvara” title is assigned to various gods in India and also
to the definition of the cause of the world, a form of a divine incarnation, an attribute of
omnipotence and omniscience.
Anastasia: Yes, representatives of various religious and philosophic schools of India are
still arguing about this concept, and everyone tries to interpret it from their own mind.
Rigden: But he who has reached spiritual heights does not need words, because the
person acquires an inner spiritual understanding of the very essence of this
phenomenon… In Buddhism, for example, the spiritual “centre” means Nirvana and
Enlightenment. By the way, as I once told you, in this religion during certain visual
meditative practices they use a mandala (translated from Sanskrit, it means a “circle,
sphere”) – a geometric composition or a structure drawn diagrammatically that
symbolises the spiritual and the cosmic order of the Universe, as an aspiration for the
spiritual centre which gives the clarity of Enlightenment. But what particular form does
it have? Usually, it is a circle within a square or triangles, which most often point
downwards, with the central symbol (a circle) in the middle. As a rule, a mandala is
divided into four parts or into the number of parts divisible by four. Or let’s take yantra
(“an amulet”, “a magic drawing” when translated from Sanskrit), which is the simplest
form of mandala. This is a diagrammatic drawing of a composition of geometric figures,
which is used in meditation practices of Hinduism and Buddhism to strengthen the
processes of inner concentration during meditation. As a rule, it represents circles,
triangles, a symbolic drawing of the lotus, a point (the centre, zero point) inscribed in a
square. Again, if we talk about the symbolism of monumental structures, the
architectural planning of most Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain temples represents yantras.
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Figure 71. Mandala and yantra.
3
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