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Buddha's Digital Dance, Page 11

In the Chakrasamvara mandala there are eight directional graveyards (actually, charnel grounds) located around the periphery of the circle, something that strikes many people as grotesque. Only human beings regard graveyards as symbols of fear, largely because we understand them as our final, fatal destination. But, it is also true that graveyards are special places, places where our basic animal instincts and our refined human intelligence merge. We think about death. We have insights about death.

The Kalachakra Tantra (around the eleventh century?), is known as the Wheel of Time. It is widely regarded as the mandala of mandalas. It also represents the completion of the, seemingly, limitless recursive development of mandala systems. There are 722 deities in it, according to a commentary, making it virtually impossible to depict all of them without omission. The Kalachakra mandala consists of four (body, speech, mind, and bliss) main mandalas arranged from the bottom to the top vertically. The three dimensional proportions correspond to both the proportions of the Universe, and to the proportion of the Buddha's body (implying that the macrocosm and microcosm are mathematically parallel). The bulk of the iconometric canon of proportions in Tibetan Buddhist art is mainly derived from the Kalachakra Tantra and the Samvarodaya Tantra (the Tantra of Cakrasamvara).

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