Kalachakra, the Wheel of Time Sand Mandala
This most astounding beautiful and complex sand mandala traces its history back 2,600 years to India and a secret doctrine taught by the Buddha. Kalachakra is the name of a deity and everything in this mandala is the symbolic representation of some aspect of the deity’s universe. The word “kalachakra” can be translated literally “wheel of time.” Kala or “time,” is not linear time but the flow of all events, past, present and future. Chakra means “wheel” and is related to a once secret tantric doctrine. Tantra is a Sanskrit word meaning “rule or ritual.” The Buddha originally transmitted these teachings to individual disciples.
In The Wheel of Time Sand Mandala by Gary Bryant (1995), the XIV Dalai Lama of Tibet explains in the foreword that:The Kalachakra system was one of the last and most complex tantric systems to be brought to Tibet from India. In recent years many Westerners have become acquainted with this tradition as various lamas have given the Kalachakra Initiation to large groups of people. I myself have given it several times in Western countries, as well as in India and Tibet. Such initiations are given on the basis of a mandala, the sacred residence with its resident deities, usually depicted in graphic form. The tradition I follow employs a mandala constructed of colored sand, which is carefully assembled prior to each initiation and dismantled once more at the end.
The kalachakra teachings include three unique and simultaneous cycles of instruction: external instruction on cosmology; internal teachings on the nature and functioning of the human body; and the alternate Kalachakra, the meditative path toward enlightenment. In the construction of the mandala, ritualistic blessed colored sand is used. The Kalachakra mandala is also a two-dimensional interpretation of the five-story palace of the deity Kalachakra residing in the center with his consort Vishvamata and a total of 722 deities, represented by either Sanskrit “seed” syllables or by dots.
Gary Bryant, the author of the book, recanted his first introduction and initiation into the Kalachakra as follows:I was invited by one of the Dalai Lama’s secretaries to film the Kalachakra (wheel of time), which he was to confer on 50,000 Tibetans in Bodhgaya, India, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. When I saw the mandala for the first time, “I felt my insides lightning up like a sunburst…as if firecrackers were exploding. When they settled, I saw the mandala before me in a large gallery in a North American museum, with thousands of Westerners experiencing the peace and light I felt at that moment.”
The Dalai Lama has since sanctioned and promoted the construction and mass initiations in the Kalachakra for world peace and healing throughout the western hemisphere. The mandala has been displayed in many Museums across the USA. In 2002, the Kalachakra mandala was constructed and displayed at the Washington, DC Mall by the Tibetan Lamas of the Drepung Loseling Monastery. Most sand mandalas are being dismantled once the exhibit has fulfilled its purpose and function of healing, world peace, initiations and re-consecration of the earth and its inhabitants, as a metaphor of the impermanence of life. The sand is ritualistically swept up and placed into an urn. At the closing ceremony half of the sand is dispersed to the attending peoples, the rest is taken to a nearby body of water and deposited. The intent of distributing the sand in a body of water is to carry the healing blessing to the ocean, and from the ocean to reach throughout the world for planetary healing.
