Mandala Making

  Mandala 12 ft.X12 ft.( Made in Basantapur, Kathmandu in the occasion of Deepawali 2068)

  

Small Mandalas for "Mha Puja" 

Mha Puja (the worship of the self), is unique festival to the Newar people of Nepal. The newars believe that one needs to understand and respect oneself before he/she can understand others. Mha puja is purification, strengthening and understanding to oneself. Mha puja carries all the grandeur that a typical Newa festival or ritual possesses. It is also distinct from other Hindu or Buddhist worships in that it is the worship of oneself and not the usual worship of Gods and Goddesses or others. Mha puja exposes the relationship of a person with the surrounding nature and the cosmos.

Mandala

Maṇḍala (मण्डल) is a Sanskrit word meaning "circle." In the Buddhist and Hindu religious traditions sacred art often takes a mandala form. The basic form of most Hindu and Buddhist mandalas is a square with four gates containing a circle with a center point. Each gate is in the shape of a T. Mandalas often exhibit radial balance.

These mandalas, concentric diagrams, have spiritual and ritual significance in both Buddhism and Hinduism.The term is ofHindu origin and appears in the Rig Veda as the name of the sections of the work, but is also used in other Indian religions, particularly Buddhism. In the Tibetan branch of Vajrayana Buddhism, mandalas have been developed into sandpainting. They are also a key part of anuttarayoga tantra meditation practices.

In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts, as a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing a sacred space, and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. According to the psychologist David Fontana, its symbolic nature can help one "to access progressively deeper levels of the unconscious, ultimately assisting the meditator to experience a mystical sense of oneness with the ultimate unity from which the cosmos in all its manifold forms arises." The psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw the mandala as "a representation of the unconscious self," and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional disorders and work towards wholeness in personality.

In common use, mandala has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmosmetaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the universe from the human perspective.
Source of Description: wikipedia
Photography: Yadhu K Balami