Kalachakra means “wheel of time.” These hand-painted Kalachakra mandalas are by Tashi Gurung, a thangka painter and mural restorer from Lo Manthang, Nepal. Each original is painted on cotton with mineral pigments, framed and ready to hang, and ships from our San Francisco gallery. Prints are listed after the originals.
12 artworks
12 artworks
What is a Kalachakra mandala?
Kala means “time” and chakra means “cycle” or “wheel.” A Kalachakra mandala is the residence of the Kalachakra deity, a five-story palace painted from a bird’s-eye view, like a floor plan. What looks like a flat pattern is a building seen from above.
Practitioners use the mandala to establish a sacred space and as an aid to meditation, training their concentration until they can visualize every detail of it and the deities within it.
Who is Kalachakra?
Kalachakra, the “Wheel of Time,” is a meditational deity (yidam) of Tibetan Buddhism who represents time itself. He belongs to the Highest Yoga Tantra, one of its most complex and symbolic systems.
His form. He has a blue-black body, 24 arms and four three-eyed faces. The central face is black, the right red, the left white and the rear yellow, the same colors that mark the four directions of the palace. His hands hold weapons and ritual implements, including a vajra, sword and trident.
Beneath his feet. He presses down on two gods: red Kamadeva, the god of love, and white Rudra-Shiva.
His consort. Vishvamata, the “All-pervading Mother,” is golden-yellow, with four faces and eight arms. The two are shown in union, as is common for deities of this class.
His teaching. The Kalachakra Tantra extends to the laws of time and space, including astronomy, astrology and mathematics.
In most mandalas, the two deities appear as small symbols at the center of the palace rather than as figures.
How to read the painting, from the outside in
- Protective circle. The outermost ring, also called the Mountain of Flames or Circle of Wisdom, encloses and shields the mandala.
- Space (vajra ring). The green ring is the element of space in Kalachakra texts. Its gold links resemble the vajra ring that protects many Tibetan mandalas.
- Wind (air). The dark band, here carrying mantra script, represents the subtle winds and life-force energy that flow through the body’s channels.
- Fire. The red ring symbolizes the burning away of ignorance, delusion and attachment.
- Water. The blue waves stand for cohesion and the purity and clarity of an enlightened mind.
- Earth. The golden ring around the palace corresponds to the solid structures of the body.
- The palace. The square at the center has gates at the four directions and five levels. The tradition counts 722 deities in the mandala, often shown as small symbols.
The five levels of the palace
The palace rises in five levels, each representing an enlightened quality. Tashi Gurung’s 3D thangkas paint it as a building rather than a floor plan.
The levels describe a path. In Kalachakra practice, a person’s ordinary body, speech and mind are gradually transformed through meditation, until they are inseparable from wisdom and unchanging bliss. Climbing the palace is a picture of that journey, from the ground floor to Kalachakra at the summit.
- Great bliss. The top level, where Kalachakra stands on a lotus.
- Wisdom. A platform inside the mind level.
- Mind. With the two levels above it, home to 70 deities.
- Speech. Home to 116 deities.
- Body. The ground floor, with gates at the four directions and 536 deities.
How to hang a Kalachakra mandala
A Kalachakra mandala has a correct way up. Hang it with the black gate at the bottom.
Why black goes at the bottom. East is treated as the mandala’s front, so it sits at the bottom of the painting, nearest the viewer. In the Kalachakra, east is black, matching the main face of the deity.
The other three gates.
- Red (south) is on the left.
- Yellow or orange (west) is at the top.
- White (north) is on the right.
Telling black from blue. Black is often painted as a very dark blue, so the two can look alike.
Sand mandalas and painted mandalas
The Kalachakra is also made in colored sand for the initiation ritual. Monks lay it grain by grain, and when the ceremony ends, they sweep it away to show that nothing material lasts.
This time-lapse by Steve Osborn, made from still photos taken every three minutes, follows Venerable Losang Samten as he builds a sand mandala at the University of Texas at El Paso, from October 21 to November 18, 2012.
A painted thangka holds the same design in a form that lasts, so the palace stays on your wall long after a sand mandala is gone.
The painter: Tashi Gurung
Tashi lives in Lo Manthang, the walled capital of Upper Mustang, close to Nepal’s border with Tibet. In 1999 he joined the restoration of 500-year-old Buddhist murals in the region’s monasteries, training in restoration under the conservator Luigi Fieni. The work was documented by NOVA. He then spent five years in Kathmandu studying thangka painting and iconography with the master painter Mukti Singh Thapa.
His pigments come from minerals and semiprecious stones, ground to powder over three months and bound with yak-skin glue. Some works also use 24-carat gold.
I met Tashi in Lo Manthang in October 2018, after four days on horseback from Jomsom. Read more about Tashi and that journey.
