When you enter the mandala, you are entering a kind of twilight zone. Certainly this is literally true of the lighting in the gallery. Beyond this, though, the system of Buddhist practice that informs so many objects in the exhibition is based on a kind of language called “twilight” speech. This is symbolic language, twilight in the sense that it is halfway between the metaphorical and the literal, just as the gallery itself is halfway between light and darkness. For example, in the “twilight language” of esoteric Buddhist practice, a ritual bell (ghanta) stands simultaneously for the female reproductive apparatus and mystic insight into the truth of emptiness (shunyata). Similarly, the stylized lightning bolt called a vajra stands both for the male reproductive organ, and for the strategies (upaya) used to realize that emptiness. Under these conditions, art, philosophy and physiology mutually inform and illumine each other. In this sense, then, you might say that twilight language stands at the threshold between concrete image and abstract insight.
In an analogous way, the Enter the Mandala gallery lies at the threshold between the geographic space of ordinary experience, and the visionary space of meditative experience. Consider the mandala shape, which consists of a central axis surrounded by the four cardinal directions. Now an architectural mandala structure in physical space would typically be oriented towards magnetic north, but Enter the Mandala is not so configured. Why? The answer is simple: in the visionary space of the mind’s eye, there is no magnetic north that might correspond to conventional geography. Instead, the directionality of the visualized mandala is predicated solely on the mandala form itself, with no external referent. In such a space, the four directions are relative to one another and to the mind of the meditator, rather than to any objective touchstone. Enter the Mandala is thus both architectural and visionary, again lying in the twilight zone between apparent opposites.
In our ordinary daily experience, twilight is halfway between day and night; it is neither just light nor just darkness. Instead, it concentrates both of these apparent opposites within itself. In a similar way, the goal of esoteric Buddhist mandala practice is to consciously experience a vision that is devoid of any actual physical substance (it is “empty,” shunya in Sanskrit) and yet still appears to the perceiver. In esoteric Buddhism, a vision of this type is a hieroglyph of the ultimate reality of the cosmos, which consists in the following insight: there is no physical substance in existence, but still appears to the mind. Precisely this insight is deemed to produce full awakening (bodhi) in meditators, dissolving the illusion of objectivity and catalyzing the insight that mind (not matter, which does not exist in visionary space) is the central formative reality in the cosmos. And with “enter the mandala,” we hope to give our visitors a taste of what it might be like to find oneself halfway between opposites, at that magical point where we wake up to our actual situation as consciously creative beings.