Mandalas

One of the best ways to get a sense for a “type” is through the mandala.

The word mandala (Sanskrit, “circle”) is derived from the root manda, which means essence, to which the suffix la, meaning container, has been added. Thus, one obvious connotation of mandala is that it is a container of essence.  The most common shape of a mandala is of a circle within a square, or of a square within a circle.

For Buddhists and Hindus, the mandala is a type of both the self and the universe—in fact it represents the union of the self with the universe. It can represent the self because it consists of a dot (the center) and an outer container (the circle or square).  In this way, the dot can stand for the self while the world is the enclosing boundary. 

In fact, Buddhist stupas are three-dimensional mandalas.  Borobudur temple on Java island, Indonesia, for example, is not simply the world’s largest Buddhist temple but it is at the same time the world’s largest manifested mandala.

This is how a mandala is a type for a structure—the squares and circles on plan can be shaped into three-dimensional form. 

In fact, attempts at “squaring the circle” are all about union: uniting heaven with earth, the spiritual space with the physical one, god and man, matter and spirit. This is why the saying has stuck with us for so long: it is an insoluble problem precisely because of the difficulty of uniting such disparate things.