Page 116 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE BODY AS PAN-CULTURAL UNB/ERSAL 109

the psyche.^ Circular forms made in the image of the eye circumscribe
a symbolic Ego in terms of inwardness. But they also circumscribe within
the whole of their compass a privileged place: a center, a unique point
from which light emanates. Of the fact that mystics place themselves at
the center of a mandala, a recognized authority on Indian mandalas
writes that "Man places in the centre of himself the recondite principle
of Ufe, the divine seed, the mysterious essence. He has the vague
intuition of a light that burns within him and which spreads out and is
diffused. In this light his whole personaUty is concentrated and it develops
around that light."^^ If man places the principle of life or mysterious
essence at the center of his being, however, the principle or essence
cannot have been found to be there, that is, it cannot have been actually
experienced. On the other hand, if man feels a Kght within himself, a
light that, while concentrated, diffuses itself throughout his being, animate
essence must be a corporeally experienced fact of life. On this account,
a centering of oneself inside the circle of a mandala is not the result of
a seemingly gratuitous act. It is a symboUc elaboration of a bona fide felt
experience, the experience of eyes as openings onto a world in which
light is felt rather than seen. This experience and the experience of eyes
as circles leading to inwardness together appear closely related to the
dual dimensions Husserl singles out as descriptive of spirit or animate
presence: "spirits are the subjects that accompUsh cogitationes''; spirit is

^ See Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, and Campbell, The
Power of Myth, for drawings and graphic incorporations of mandalas. In light of the
evidence—the drawings and the graphic incorporations—and of the extraordinary
cognate relationships outlined in the present paper, it is puzzling to find analyses
of the corporeal origin of the mandala lacking and indeed to find the question of
why the mandala is first and foremost a circle rather than a square or a cone, for
example, entirely omitted. A pervasive cultural inattention to the body and to bodily
experience would seem to explain the omissions. Tucci, for example, casts experience
in the role of follower rather than leader in the generation of the concept of a
mandala. He speaks of the mandala as a geometric projection of the world, and
though he explicitly states that he is not concerned with its origin, he nevertheless
emphasizes its '"worldly" genesis, i.e., the mandala is a pictorial representation of
cosmic processes. In fact, Tucci explicitly states that "experience . . . suggested
certain analogies" with the drawn figure after it was conceived and drawn. The
mandala thus appears to be tied to experience only after the fact and only in the
most general sense. (Tucci, Theory and Practice of the Mandala, 23-26; quote from
p. 25.)
'^ Ibid., 25-26.