Page 113 - Contribution To Phenomenology

106 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

the mandala, and that briefly. I leave the evil eye for a future time."

V

Jung tells us that the Sanskrit word "mandala" means circle and that
where used in rituals, it is "an instrument of contemplation," an
instrument that "is meant to aid concentration by narrowing down the
psychic field of vision and restricting it to the centre." He goes on to say
that the circles which describe the mandala "are meant to shut out the
outside and hold the inside together."^ The initial question is, how did
mandalas originate? Where did the concept of a mandala come ft'om? If
we look to the body as a semantic template, then a spatio-teleological
similarity is immediately apparent. The mystic circle that is the mandala
is spatially patterned on that original mystic circle that is the eye. The
teleological correspondence is borne out in the fact that the eye is both
the original "instrument of contemplation" and the instrument par
excellence that aids our concentration by focusing our attention. In
contemplation, the eye shuts out the outside and holds the inside
together—by literally closing itself, for example, by intentionally avoiding
other eyes or other objects, or by glazing itself, thus keeping the world
of things at bay. Mandalas are circular forms morphologically and
teleologically modeled on the image of eyes.
The similarity is thus not a mere surface similarity. Moreover the
mandala is generally interpreted as a symbol of the self and of the
cosmos. It is in fact an aesthetic instantiation of the correspondence
between self and world, microcosm and macrocosm. It is, in effect, a
"psychocosmogram.*^ To understand how the circular form that is the

Jung—have related the Mandala to other cultures and traditions, no one has
developed a concept of its universality to any extent." As the present paper will
show, what is needed is a phenomenological analysis that recognizes and elucidates
the psychophysical unity of the mandala.
^^ An initial analysis of the evil eye was given as part of a paper presented at
a panel session titled "The Corporeal Turn," Society for Phenomenology and
Existential Philosophy, Boston, October 1992.
^ Carl G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd ed.,
translated by R. F. C. Hull, BoUingen Series XX (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1968), 356.
^^ Giuseppe Tucci, The Theory and Practice of the Mandala, translated by Alan
H. Brodrick (London: Rider & Company, 1961), 25.