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The Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part I – 9. The ADI Buddha: The mandala principle and the world ruler
© Victor & Victoria Trimondi
9. THE ADI BUDDHA: THE MANDALA
PRINCIPLE AND THE WORLD RULER
We have described how the “starry body” of the tantra master (ADI BUDDHA) indexes the time, but
his mystic body likewise embraces all of space and everything we have said about the heavenly
bodies is basically also true for the spatial arrangement of the universe. The ADI BUDDHA
incorporates the entire Buddhist cosmos. This is to be understood most concretely in a tantric point of
view, and means that the structural elements of the “great world” must be able to be found again as
structural elements in the body (the “small world”) of the yogi (ADI BUDDHA). We thus begin with
a look at the construction of the Buddhist cosmos.
The Buddhist mandala cosmos
As soon as we have gained some insight into the cosmography of Buddhism it becomes apparent how
fundamentally different it is from our modern scientific world view. It is primarily based upon the
descriptions of the Abhidharmakosa, a written record from the Mahayana scholar Vasubhandu (fifth
century C.E.). The Kalachakra Tantra has largely adopted Vasubhandu’s design and only deviates
from it at particular points.
At the midpoint of the Buddhist universe rises Meru, the world mountain, which towers above
everything else and on which heaven and earth meet. It is round like the “axle of a wheel”. In a
passage in the Kalachakra Tantra it is compared to the vajra and described as a gigantic
“thunderbolt” (Newman, 1987, p. 503). The Swiss mandala expert, Martin Brauen, sees in it a
“dagger-like shape” and therefore calls it the “earth dagger” (Brauen, 1992, p. 127). According to
Winfried Petri the world mountain has the form of the “inverted base of a cone”. All of these are
phallic metaphors.
Five circles of different sizes surround the gigantic “phallus” like wheels; they are each assigned to an
element. Starting from the outermost they are the circle of space, the circle of air, the circle of fire, the
circle of water, the circle of earth. Air and fire, however, permeate the entire cosmic architecture. “In
all directions are wind [air] and fire”, the Kalachakra Tantra says (Newman, 1987, p. 506). These two
elements are the spirit, so to speak, which blows through the entire construction, but they also form
the two forces of destruction which shall obliterate the world structure at the end of time, exactly as
the breath (air, wind) and the flames (fire, candali) together burn down the old bodily aggregates in
the yogi’s mystic body. The circle of the earth consists of a total of twelve individual continents
which swim on the circle of water like lotus blossoms. It thus forms a discontinuous, nonhomogenous
circular segment. One of these continents is our world, the “earth”. It bears the name
Jambudvipa, which means “rose apple tree continent”.
In Vasubandhu’s original account, Meru is not surrounded by the five elements, but rather by seven