The Kalachakra Sand Mandala as Cultural Object in Performance

Abstract

This essay traces the modern life of the Kalachakra Sand Mandala as exhibited in cultural institutions. It locates the sand mandala within the discursive continuum of an Asian modernity, as well as attending to its more complex ideological framings within the disciplines of anthropology and art history.

Employing visual and discursive analysis as well as artist biography, the essay provides a multi-faceted reflection on the innovation of a performative modality that was introduced by the Tibetan exile community as a spatiotemporal currency, creating a theatrical bridge between the dream of the exilic and its geo-political negotiation in a time of cultural and national dispossession. Introduction

In spite of its doctrinal complexity and controversial eschatology,1 the Kalachakra (dus-kyi ‘khor-lo) Tantra is the most prominent Tantric practice of Vajrayana Buddhism today. Promoted by the fourteenth Dalai Lama since the 1980s as ‘a vehicle for world peace’, it is at the same time recognised as a

specific body of cultural and artistic heritage that the 100,000 strong exile Tibetans claim community with. Kalachakra, meaning wheel of time, is a spiritual and philosophical system that expounds a concept of time as cyclic - from the movement of the planets to the cycles of our internal bodily rhythm

to the very means of enlightenment. This concept of temporality is personified in the figure of the Kalachakra deity and his consort Vishvamata. Its tenets encompass cosmology and include an astrological system that is foundational to the Tibetan calendar. As a tantric practice, it provides the practitioner an

opportunity to bypass the tedium of multiple rebirths, to achieve enlightenment possibly within this lifetime through an active identification with the deity of the practice, in order to cultivate compassionate devotion towards altruistic goals. 2

Since 1988, not only has the Kalachakra Tantra been imparted via initiation, elements of the corpus have become public knowledge through cultural

institutions, such as natural history museums from the late 1980s and art museums from the early 1990s onwards. In these instances, the staging and display of the Kalachakra powder mandala, more commonly known as the sand mandala, became its most significant and visual register. Other forms of visual support

for the Kalachakra Tantra that were also at times included in the exhibition repertoire were cloth paintings or thang-ka (depicting deity portraits, mandala diagrams, or mantra designs, as well as narrative paintings related to the mythical kingdom of Shambala); votive statues of the Kalachakra deity

and consort; and miniature three-dimensional architectural models. However, the presentation of the Kalachakra sand mandala often took centre stage as a form of ‘cultural offering’, to use the term derived from the exiled Tibetan spiritual community who were situated as central actors in these displays.3 Here the sand mandala stood as cultural capital for the purpose of demonstrating good will and initiating inter-cultural dialogue.

Studies on the Kalachakra Tantra have largely focused on its philosophical, textual, mythological, historical and soteriological features.4 Likewise, research on the mandala has concentrated on its more permanent material manifestations in the forms of painted scrolls;5 stupas, moundlike reliquaries;6 as

well as what Heather Stoddard has alluded to as the ‘mandalisation’ geographic space.7 An exception to this is Martin Brauen’s The Mandala, which explored in great detail the Kalachakra sand mandala’s place within the ritual practice of the Tantra. However, Brauen’s departure is to appraise the mandala as a

broad platonic concept and then explore its visuality as an orthopraxic support for ritual, rather than attend to the specificity of its material signification as well as its contemporary shift in meaning and context as central questions of aesthetics.8 Because of the sand mandala’s ephemerality, its

hybrid quality neither as performing art nor permanent object, the contextual and discursive history of sand mandala is an area of Tibetan art that remains to be fully accounted for,9 let alone in relation to Tibetan modernity, even as modern and contemporary Tibetan art is increasingly written about.10

While the sand mandala’s historical expression had existed within a sacred and esoteric context, its extraction from this exclusively recondite setting enabled the staging and display of it in cultural institutions to take on an additional set of meanings and motivations. One may locate it within

the discursive continuum of an Asian modernity even as it attends to more complex ideological framings that underpin the disciplines of anthropology and art history. For we now not only consider sand mandalas as visual aid to ritual practice, but also as cultural material (through historicism) and work of art (through aestheticisation). The framing thus re-objectified the sand mandala along different discursive trajectories. The role that the Kalachakra sand mandala played since the late 1980s intersected with ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ at the Centre de Pompidou in 1989, an exhibition that subverted the rigid distinction between modern art as an exclusively Euro-American phenomenon and art that existed in other cultural contexts, so that indigenous sculptures

were paired with works by modern painters, underpinned by a universalist discourse of the role of artist as magician.11 Its desire to impose an overarching singular narrative of the mythic was, however, a problematic reaffirmation of the sacral and ahistorical function of artistic expression, and ultimately

differed from what I hope to demonstrate, which is that the underlying discourse of what constitutes tradition is a parallel development The Kalachakra Sand Mandala for World Peace Through Inner Peace. An Offering to the City of Philadelphia from Oct. 26-Nov. 22., 2009 by the Chenrezig Tibetan Buddhist Center of Philadelphia, the University of the Arts and The Gershman Y. Photo: Chenrezig Tibetan Buddhist Center of Philadelphia

in Asian modernity, related to notions of exilie and perceived cultural and national territorial loss.

A number of anthropological and art historical critiques emerging in the late 1980s and early 1990s initiated the argument that the investment of non-Euro-American objects and materials with analytical categories such as ‘cultural’ or ‘artistic’ constituted forms of ideological colonisation.12 While these

critiques led to alternative propositions to solely regard ‘non-Western’ material culture as objects,13 they failed to acknowledge the historical turn since the 1970s in museum practice towards an inclusionary approach, allowing non-Euro-American communities to adopt its epistemology and participate more

effectively in shaping their representation.14 Keen to discard the penchant for pedantic and authoritative narratives in which non-Western cultures were shaped through Euro-American scholasticism, museum exhibition practices turned towards collaborative efforts, in the hope that indigenous views were able to contribute effectively to shaping new directions in its curatorial discourse.

Moreover, on the introduction of aesthetic paradigms to non-EuroAmerican cultural objects, Evelyn Hatcher moves beyond the ‘ethnocentric’ charges against the use of the term ‘art’ to describe material cultures that might not have a vocabulary or a discursive tradition associated with art and tradition. Her

analogy points out that while many societies do not have words for ‘economics’ or ‘chromosomes’ or ‘religion’, it does not invalidate these concepts as an irrelevant comparative measure. In this, she describes the three elements of aesthetic, craftsmanship and meaning as components in which we could use art as a meaningful and valid concept for comparative understanding of culture.15

With the above caveat, this essay advances the idea that the performative code engendered in the aestheticisation of the Kalachakra sand mandala is an articulation of a neo-traditional vernacular. The reading is informed by a disciplinary framing of modern Asian art in order to problematise the binary

between the modern and the traditional, often characterised by the linearity of teleological succession and opposition. The dominant cultural practice of post-1959 Tibetan government in exile was directed towards conserving what was categorically defined as ‘Tibetan cultural tradition’ and within this mandate it sought to stake out ownership of and solidarity with the objects, rituals and values of this past.

Yet as described by John Clark, the invariance of the ‘traditional’ as a category was never historically true where “customs themselves changed and custom itself could also serve as a precedent for change.”16 This posits the constructed nature of the ‘traditional’ as a body of knowledge, values and objects

shaped through an encounter with its categorical other, the modern. The term ‘neo-traditional’ is then used by Clark to frame the reinvention of the context and the continuation of this past’s forms and techniques.17 While Clark has proposed that the neo-traditional often involves a “reinterpretation of

formal value systems that govern art”,18 I suggest that this process could also be evinced on a structural and institutional level, as I will demonstrate in the case of the Kalachakra sand mandala presentations.

On one level, this transformation was facilitated by the shift in institutional language and framing, from a recondite context to one that was aestheticised and historicised through cultural institutions. What made the Kalachakra sand mandala an interesting case in point is that while its

construction and formal schema remained anchored and unchanged within the customary, the iconicity of the mandala was now overlaid and superscribed by

prioritising the performative vector that produced an aesthetic mode qualitatively different to the earlier use and reception of the sand mandala within Kalachakra initiatory rites. While attenuating the focus solely to the iconic, it nonetheless colluded with the visual register of the sand mandala to

produce a contestation that was not exclusively limited to a “representational field”,19 as suggested by Clare Harris, but was also a theatrical enactment of its political mythos, encoded in the complex spiritual system underpinning both Kalachakra as a philosophical, religious, magical system and its

aesthetic, material and cultural overlay. This was important to the ‘chrono-politics’ of the Kalachakra Tantra, augmented as it was transposed and given a new lease of significance in cultural institutions.

The Modern Mass Initation

The conferral of mass initiation is often said to be the earliest purpose for which the Kalachakra Tantra was historically imparted, thereby justifying the scale of its propagation today.20 This is traced back in popular accounts to the origin of the Tantra, where the Buddha is said to have bestowed the

Kalachakra teaching to the legendary king of Shambala, Suchandra, thus allowing him to unite his subjects under one ‘vajra caste’ against the enemies of the faith, at the same time as enabling him to undertake a high level of practice without the need to renounce his worldly enjoyments and responsibilities.

Yet the concept of mass initiation on the scale we understand today is more likely to be a modern one. For the Kalachakra Tantra to be classed as an Anuttarayoga Tantra (bla-na med-pa’i rgyud), which is categorically the highest and most profound of the four classes of Tantric instructions, meant that

access to its doctrines would be restricted to a small number of practitioners, even from within the monastic order in the case of the Gelug school, prior to its modern propagation. Often as was the case with Tantric initiations of this class, it was not normally given to groups of more than twenty-five.

Citing its mythological origin, the fourteenth Dalai Lama however justified the modern mass initiation by appealing to a tradition of delivering it at large public gatherings.21

Though considered as a reincarnation of one of the Shambala kings, not all of the Dalai Lama incarnations held the Tantra to be of significance. It was not included in the curriculum of the Gelug school’s Upper and Lower Tantric Colleges. Significant political figures such as the Great Fifth and Thirteenth did not promote the teachings extensively. Nevertheless, depending on the circumstances of patronage and interest in different periods, it did play a prominent

role within the Gelug school, where the founder Tsongkapa and his immediate disciples practised and taught it. Moreover, it was practised in the Tashilunpo monastery since the fifteenth century and the Namgyal Monastery since the eighteenth century. This would spread outwards to Amdo, Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Outer Mongolia and later amongst the Mongols and Turks in Siberia.22

The two initiations conferred by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama in central Tibet in the 1950s prior to his escape to India recorded attendance of up to 100,000

individuals at each event.23 In spite of Tibet’s mass monastic system,24 the huge estimate suggests that lay practitioners were most probably allowed to attend, either as observers or postulants, as the total population of Lhasa during the period was estimated to be between 25,000-30,000 with an additional 15,000 from the monasteries in the greater outskirt region.25

However, one of the earliest visual documentations of the Kalachakra sand mandala in the modern era survived in a photograph taken by Basil Crump at the Hall of Supreme Harmony (Taihe Dian) in Beijing’s Forbidden City. The sand mandala was constructed on the occasion of an initiation

conferred by the Panchen Lama from the 21st to the 24th of October 1932.26 While Crump referred to the Kalachakra as the ‘Great Peace Mandala’, this was in part titled to reference the site on which it is constructed: a hall used for coronations, investitures and imperial weddings. However, other sources have

demonstrated that the conferral conducted in then Beiping (now Beijing) was requested by a Buddhist association as an intercession for peace in the wake of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931, following a tumultuous period of political unrest since the founding of the Republic of China.27 The chosen site would thus have amplified significance.

The Beiping initiation was a remarkable precedent and was fortuitously prescient of how the Kalachakra Tantra would serve as a ‘vehicle for world peace’ in the late twentieth century, providing us with a hint at the importance of site and location as a geomantic activator for the Kalachakra Tantra. Moreover, the conferral of the Kalachakra initiation in Beijing, Hangzhou and across Inner Mongolia by a pro-Chinese Panchen Lama, who had fled his monastic seat in Shigatsein 1924 over an altercation with the

The Beiping Kalachakra sand mandala in the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Photography by Basil Crump.

central Lhasa government, indicated that the Kalachakra sand mandala had already been fashioned into a discourse of Tibetan identity for the purpose of ‘cultural offering’.28

From the period of 1926-1934, the Panchen Lama had given up to nine Kalachakra initiations with a recorded attendance averaging up to eighty thousand people at each of these events.29 Having accepted a role in the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission of the Republic of China, and, to some extent,

embraced Sun Yat-Sen’s Three Principles of the People (Sanmin Zhuyi),30 the Panchen Lama’s conferral of the Kalachakra teachings within the palatial grounds of China’s imperial dynasty could be seen as a significant attempt at renewing the old patron-priest relationship (mchod-yon) between China and Tibet, even as he was committed to the Republican government’s ‘union of the five nationalities’, most directly expressed through his 1931 speech at the Third Congress of the New Asia Association (XinYaxiyaxuehui) entitled ‘Tibet is Part of China’s National Territory’.31

This a crucial discourse that will reverberate down to a late twentiethcentury presentation of the Kalachakra sand mandala in Western museum spaces. It is therefore important to qualify what Urban Hammer suggested in his study of contemporary Kalachakra initation: As a consequence, these initiations are having a significant function of uniting the Tibetan people, even in a spiritual way. There is an eschatological perspective in the Kalachakra Tantra,

saying that all who have received the initiation will assemble with the king of Shambhala and fight against evil in the future. This might inspire the activities for more freedom in Tibet.32

Kalachakra was not entirely an assertion of Tibetan independence, even if it continues to fashion itself as a culturally unique and distinctive Tibetan Buddhist offering to the world. After all, the thirteenth Dalai Lama, who fought for Tibetan independence and arguably achieved de facto selfrule from 1913

– 1951,33 was recognizably not a proponent of the Kalachakra Tantra. In its modern form as a mass initiatory practice promoted by the Panchen Lama, it took on a number of characteristics. First of all, it was utilised for the purpose of promoting peace. The second purpose was to raise sufficient funds for the

Panchen Lama’s estate to cover the taxes and fines that were imposed on the Tashilunpo monastery by the central government of Tibet in 1917 and again in 1923 during the latter’s attempt to finance a modern military.34 In this instance, it sought to define its role within the dynamics of a patron-priest relationship. Lastly, it was defined as a ‘cultural offering’, to assert Tibet’s unique identity in relation to the broader Chinese state.

The Kalachakra initiation would be significantly promoted during the fourteenth Dalai Lama’s reign after the People’s Liberation Army of the People’s Republic of China entered Lhasa in 1950 and the signing of the 17 Point Agreement in the following year. Two mass initiations were recorded before his flight to India in 1954 and 1956, both held in the Norbulingka complex, which served as the Dalai Lama’s summer residence. It was again introduced to the

exile community and the world from 1970 onwards, after the 1960s where the exile government fought for independence, during a time when the Dalai Lama shifted its political goalpost and would work towards what he would come to call the ‘middle way approach’. In a sense, this approach could be seen as a

renewal of the position taken by the ninth Panchen Lama who advocated the ‘union of five nationalities’ while pressing for equal footing and greater autonomy for other nationalities within the Chinese state. Compositional Structure And Medium Of The Sand Mandala

Though having arrived in Tibet during the new transmission (gsar-ma) of Buddhist teachings from the eleventh century onwards, the Kalachakra Tantra is today practiced in all Tibetan Buddhist schools deriving from two

main lineages - Dro and Rwa.35 Initiation into the Kalachakra Tantra can be conferred from both cloth and sand mandala. Conferral with the former support are used in ‘side collection of empowerments’ (zur-ka) in the Gelug school and more commonly used to confer initiation in the other schools. In the case of

the sand mandala, which was transmitted in the Gelug school through the Namgyal monastery for the purpose of general main empowerment (spyi-ka), the tradition is traced to Sakya Master Bu-ston Rin-chen grub in its use of crushed coloured stones. The scriptural source for its iconometry and use of sand

painting is said to be located in Naropa’s Commentary to “The Abbreviated Point Concerning the Empowerment” dbang-mdor bstan-pa’i ‘grel, (Skt. Sekoddeshatika) elaborating on the note found in The Abbreviated Point, a textual fragment from the Kalachakra Root Tantra, ‘Having laid out the mandala, give it”.36

Not unlike other mandala designs, the Kalachakra sand mandala is a blue print of a sacred palatial habitat. This is represented by a diagram of a square with four prominent gateways, surrounded by rings of concentric circles. It maps a particular Buddha world from an aerial perspective. The Tibetan term for

mandala, dkyil-‘khor, is a compound of the words ‘centre’ and ‘surrounding’. Fabio Rambelli notes that this definition differs somewhat from its transliteration into Chinese and Japanese with meanings ranging from ‘perfect circle’, to ‘gathering’, to ‘ritual platform’.37 In the Tibetan term,

relationality is central to the mandala as a diagram that is both centrifugal as well as centripetal. In the former, the dispersal of the one pointed awareness of the Kalachakra deity into numerous forms reflects specific qualities of an enlightenment disposed mind, and each of these qualities

personified as deities owe their interconnected and expanded field of association to the central figure of awareness. As a centripetal point, one traces the inward journey through the labyrinth of gates and stages into the inner chambers of the palatial core.38 This Buddha world is neither thought out in

terms of seclusion nor the spiritual fulfilment an individual seeker; rather it extends the concept of the liberated mind beyond a hermitage into a relational field whereby enlightenment is collective and mass, in which “the perfected self [is] in ecstatic interconnection with perfected others.”39

Unlike cloth mandala, the sand mandala’s representational schema is distinct. While the former contains both figurative and symbolic representations of deities, the representational schema of the latter is, for the most part, symbolic. The deities of the sand mandala, of which there are issue twelve, november 2012

seven hundred and twenty two, are mostly represented by dots and seed syllables, with the exception of the main tutelary Kalachakra deity, indicated in the centre by the presence of the rDo-rje sceptre.40 In the past, the sand mandala was ‘painted’ using different crushed materials including soapstone, rice,

flower petals and minerals. More recently however, at least since the 1959, it became common to use ground white pebbles dyed with the desired colour.41 The sand is sprinkled over the surface of a sketched out diagram by lightly rasping a metallic bar against a funnel, which contains the powdered sand.

The sand mandala by design is therefore two-dimensional and lacks Kalachakra sand mandala diagram.

the illusion of depth. Its presentation on a raised platform (stegs-pu) creates a separate space around which the postulant in an initiation ceremony would circumambulate. The place of the sand mandala in a ritual ceremony is not for the purpose of inducing an altered state of consciousness by sight or

encounter and does not serve as an object of contemplation.42 Its horizontal placement around which the postulant would move around would not provide him/her any suitable vantage point to trigger such optical response. Rather, the sand mandala’s complex design serves as a narrative preface for the

viewer, a visual demonstration of the model of enlightenment, which should be activated in the viewer’s own mental continuum through Tantric meditational exercises.43 Moreover, in the pre-modern exhibition modality of the sand mandala within a ritual context, it was presented as a finished form to postulants and did not incorporate the process of staging as a vital component to its display.

The aesthetic transformation and contextual shift of the Kalachakra sand mandala in the late 1980s, pitched along both performative and visual nodes, was entwined with the identity politics of the exile community. Certain features of the Kalachakra sand mandala lent itself to this strategic deployment that

allegorised a deeper undercurrent, which was the promise of the Tibetan cultural survival and identity as the destiny of the exilic. This was accompanied by a sense of cultural loss and erosion especially after the Cultural Revolution that destroyed and upended local cultural and religious institutions on a massive scale.

One interpretative model of art history that is able to provide an explication of how this was achieved is to consider Kalachakra’s medium. Here I take the expanded concept of the medium defined by Rosalind Krauss as “the technical support for the work.”44 The medium acts as the customary norm that is contingent with the material condition of an artwork. It is however not similar to it, for it is a conceptual determinant that serves “a source of rules that prompts production but also limits it, and returns the work to a consideration of the rules themselves.”45

This expanded notion of the medium allows us to consider the underlying predicate that governs the Kalachakra sand mandala and how this has been more effectively enhanced and played out through the new emphasis of the performative register. Drawing from the very name of the mandala, I would suggest the medium to be time and place. The medium as

time and place allows us to reflect on the formation and dissolution of the sand mandala in relation to its philosophical and mythological foundation as central to our understanding of the artwork, as opposed to privileging the iconicity of the finished and completed sand mandala as a point of departure for

our analysis. As an ephemeral object, its dissolution and destruction was integral to the logic of the sand mandala’s presentation and display. At the conclusion of the initiation ceremonies as well as museum exhibitions, the mandala was ceremoniously dismantled with one swift stroke by the use of the rDo-rje sceptre that cut across its sandy array.

The Kalachakra sand mandala operated and was situated in specificities of time and place. In spite of its unchanging formal and stylistic repertoire, its medium within both time and place here suggested the different terms in which the sand mandala operates in its enactment. Its set of rules relied on the complicated time structure propounded by the Kalachakra Tantra system itself; one that is based on the three wheels of time. The first of these relates to

the planetary cycles and the calendric concept of time that enables us to measure the external world. This is followed by an inner wheel, which is connected to the circularity of our breathing, bodily, and emotional responses. At its core is the transcendentally named ‘alternative’ wheel, which seeks

to purify the Outer and Inner Kalachakras. This is represented by the Kalachakra cosmology proper, corresponding to the attainment of complete enlightenment in the Tantric stages of generation and completion.46 The wheel as a metaphor for time existing in all these three different levels points to

a shaping of temporality as cyclical, a movement that folds from the outer to the inner before being supplanted by an alternative temporal order. In this progression, its material anchor as belonging to the physical world would necessarily index its location in place as the site of transformation that enables the activation of these three wheels.

In the performance of the mandala, a much more complex articulation of time and place as medium can be appreciated beyond its mere visual representation. The enactment as a durational event demonstrates the system as inhabiting the logic of time. As the mandala is made, so it is destroyed. This brackets the

passage of time as the host and container, and in turn also secures, by its location, its historical and ontological position, in order to comment on the passage, and thus influence its course.47

This intervention was demonstrated in the ‘rituals of the site’ where a chosen site was prepared for the construction of the sand mandala.48 By means of divination, the suitability of a site for the purpose of constructing the sand painting was thus ascertained. When determined, prayers were directed to

certain celestial as well as earthly deities for the permission to proceed with the intended aim. The monks then proceeded to ‘invoke a circle of protection’, using the three sided peg/dagger (phur-ba) to mark out a sacred territory. The ritual included a set of prayers and offerings, including a litany that called upon the seven hundred and twenty two deities of the mandala to take residence within its physical representation. It was after the ceremonies were performed that the monks could begin applying the sand through a metal funnel known as lcags-pu.49

Due to the fragility of the sand mandala, visitors were not allowed in close proximity. This problem was addressed very early on in the 1988 exhibition of the Kalachakra sand mandala in the American Museum of Natural History. Video cameras were fixed to the platform (stegs-pu). Four large television monitors

located in the exhibition space provided enlarged screenings of the work in progress. The mandala was seen from above magnified up to six hundred per cent, thus allowing visitors to examine the finer details, an experience a visitor would later relate as “being in the monks’ shoes”.50

The huddled bodies of four monks bent over as they assiduously apply colour sand to a sketched out diagram on a raised platform is perhaps an image most representative of the sand mandala in the making. Here the gradual and painstaking process spotlighted the labouring body as a focused vehicle in the

performance of a collective authorship, shorn of individuality by the non-descript maroon of their religious habit. The silent theatre functioned as a bridge connecting the far shores of the promise of a mass enlightened society, exemplified in the kingdom of Shambala, with the audience in situ. In turn, they too collapsed the contemporary into the mythic, linear history into the cyclic.

This geographically centred practice and performance was deeply linked to a persuasive enactment of its spiritual, political and cosmological goal. The ritual for the dissolution of the sand mandala was particularly metaphorical of this endeavour. The event began with the head monk standing on the outer edge of the eastern quadrant. He cut through the mandala along what is known as the Brahman lines with a rDo-rje, signifying

the dispersion of the energy stored within it. This would be repeated in the southern, western and northern quadrants, followed by the diagonal lines. The monks then surrounded the four quarters and swept up the sand before placing them into an urn.

The urn would be carried in a procession to a body of water, whether a lake, river or sea, where it was then offered to the water spirits klu (Skt. Naga). This process required the monks to imagine the blessing of the aquatic life by the holy sand and as the body of water vapourised into clouds, they would also carry the blessings above our heads and rained down on all beneath. Having thus concluded this visualisation exercise, the monks proceeded to pour the

sand into the water, saving some for the rest of the participants to bring home. The assembled audience thus participated in a shared vision for humanity, one which could be summed up in Robert Thurman’s analogy of the tantra as a time machine, “in the sense of a vision of reality wherein time Close circuit video feed from the ceiling of the thegs-pu or mandala platform, magnifying the detail of the sand mandala to six hundred percent. Photograph by Barry Bryant.

itself is the machine, a dimension in which beings live and evolve toward their perfect fulfilment in the supreme bliss of enlightenment.”51

The above conceptual and structural frameworks of the Kalachakra sand mandala can be identified on a number of levels with contemporary exile Tibetan politics. For the Kalachakra sand mandala above other mandalas, by way of its cosmology, enacted with time and place as a medium, held out the potential

and promise of an enlightened state, a collective spiritual force forged into a single ‘vajra caste’. In its relation to the legendary Shambala kingdom, this imagined community did not only serve as an historical or mythological backdrop; it was also premised on the promise of a prophesied future. The enabling of new grounds for political contestations also meant that the exile community, specifically under the leadership of the fourteenth Dalai Lama,

had to resolve and even mask the endemic problem of religious sectarianism, rife amongst Tibetan Buddhist schools, and political differences that have continued to fragment the exile community by figuring a ‘nonsectarian’ representation of the exile ethno-nationalistic political aspiration.52 This would be known as the middle way approach and it would also be premised not on a desire for independence, but for political and cultural autonomy within the Chinese state, under terms acceptable to the Tibetan government in exile.

Mandala As Exhibition Design

However, the late 1980s saw a breakdown in a period of cautious dialogue between the Tibetan government in exile and the Chinese government, culminating in the 1987-1989 crackdown on Tibetan unrest, followed by the abortion of any immediate hope for democratic process resulting from military action against the

Tiananmen Square Protest of 1989. This signals a flashpoint where the Kalachakra sand mandala becomes part of the exhibition repertoire, one that begins to reassess the changing nature of Tibetan culture and identity, as rooted in fluidity, migration and engagement with the world as much as it retains elements

of specific political struggle. By the early 1990s, the sand mandala was being exhibited in a different kind of cultural space. As it began a new lease of life in art museums, the Kalachakra sand mandala was now not only subjected to the discursive framework of ethnology and natural history; it was also read

as an artwork,- formulated under conditions that would allow for the communication of its aesthetic paradigm and artistic sensibility. The Asia Society’s 1996 exhibition ‘Mandala:

The Architecture of Enlightenment’, co-curated by Robert Thurman and Denise Patry Leidy, is an example. Conceived as a survey of mandalas throughout Asia, it traced the mandala’s inception in India to its diasporic proliferation in Tibet, China, Japan and South East Asia. While the exhibition laid great

emphasis on the sacral utility of the mandalas on display, the enveloping reach of its regional focus directed a layer of conversation that allowed for the bracketing of the mandalas outside their specific cultural/ regional contexts in a broad survey that can be studied and compared on a thematic and formal level.53

Within this formulation, the mandala as art was often compared to ‘Western art’ as part of discussions aimed at shaping and defining its ontology. The distinction frequently highlighted was that Tibetan art tradition represented an ideal of art making that de-emphasised the authorial figure and embodies

timelessness, in contrast to the prominence placed on authorial attribution, said to be central to ‘Western art’ tradition since at least the Renaissance. This sweeping binary painted a partial picture;54 however, it did serve the purpose of retooling the sand mandala and its underlying Tantric system towards an exercise in mytho-historiography.

Offering to the water spirits or klu, following the dismantling of the sand mandala presented at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in 1989. Photography by Barry Bryant.

This exercise was furthermore extensively encoded into the curatorial design of ‘Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet’ organised by Tibet House, New York with Robert Thurman and Marylin Rhie as co-curators. The exhibition began at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in 1991, and subsequently went on a remarkably successful tour across major cities worldwide. The relevance of this exhibition to our subject lies in its curatorial design, which was

based on the Kalachakra mandala, considered in exhibition literature as ‘the mystic site, which embodies the perfect history and cosmos of the Buddha.’55 Moreover, the exhibition space was meant to suggest the architectural environment of a Tibetan temple.56 With walls painted yellow, visitors were invited to shed their passivity as neutral observers, and embarked through the hallowed halls as pilgrims on a spiritual excursion.

The journey began with the Kalachakra sand mandala, encountered at the entrance. Walking through the exhibition, one was feted with the story of Buddhism explained through art, starting with the life and legends of the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, and the subsequent development of the three major vehicles.

Figures of the historical Buddha and the Arhats represented the early developments of Buddhism, followed by the Boddhisattvas of the Mahayana and then the Mahasiddhas of the Vajrayana. The second part of the exhibition shifted its focus specifically onto the development of the four main Tibetan Buddhist schools. This culminated in the founding of the Gelug school, which the Dalai Lama belongs to, presented as the final development of Tibetan Buddhism,

before the exhibition moved into the third section, which opened up its timeline into a trans-historical space to introduce the vast pantheon of Buddhist deities.57 At the end of the exhibition, one entered the final room which contained works related to the Kalachakra Tantra before returning to the starting point, which was the Kalachakra sand mandala. The Kalachakra sand mandala, positioned as beginning and end, entrance and exit, path and attainment,

structured the history of Buddhism as essentially cyclical. By moving through the exhibition, visitors were guided by a mythohistoriographical compass, in which the Kalachakra served as model and measure. Here the three wheel of time was further articulated by the neat historicism of the Buddha’s past, the reflection of this journey as an inner development by casting the audience in the role of a viewer/pilgrim and finally transcending these two wheels by arriving in a trans-temporal universe of Tantric Buddhism.

The ideological canvas of ‘Wisdom and Compassion’ drew on the two eponymous qualities as central to the narrative of Buddhist Tantra. Here they contested the prevalence of an older generation of Western imagination and scholarship that cast the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as an exotic, albeit degenerate, form of Buddhism, often playing up the mystical and supernatural aspects of the practice, which has been described in some cases as ‘Lamaism’.58 The extensive

effort to purge the misconception of previous discourses required a counter articulation in the public arena that extended beyond the confines of academia.59 Within academia, efforts to redress many of its own misconception of Tibetan Buddhism escalated significantly, especially from the 1960s onwards, partly due to increasing number of exile Tibetans migrating to the West, setting in motion a process of demystification.60 However, the need to

project a positive and affirming image of Tibetan Buddhist cultural identity as relevant to the modern world and as one that was currently under the threat of extinction and not a remote, degenerate or mystical practice, in some sense found a more immediate and effective platform in the exhibition hall, where an early figure showed up to 50,000 visitors attended the 1988 exhibition in the American Museum of Natural History.61

The Kalachakra sand mandala as a cultural offering, in this sense, was a visual essay. Not only did it provide a tangible narrative that located the apotheosis of Buddhist teaching in the Kalachakra Tantra, but this temporal unfolding of events was also illustrated to be already contained in the

Kalachakra conception of history. This argument then strategically upstaged the spectres of ‘Lamaism’ by exercising and rehearsing a mythohistoriography by the immediacy of its theatre and spectacle. The mixture of the quiet intensity of the labouring monks, the educational displays/ installations on Buddhism

and pendant tantric practices, as well as deference towards its religious solemnity (prayers were performed every day during the sand mandala construction) lent an atmospheric gravitas.

The presence of the monks furthermore testified that this complex knowledge was not entirely an intellectual discourse, but also one with a human face. Shorn of this, what was presented as a contrasting picture was exemplified in the case of the travelling exhibition ‘Tibet: Treasures from the Roof of the

World’, organised by the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, Santa Ana in collaboration with the Bureau of Cultural Relics, Tibet Autonomous Region, the Potala Palace and the Tibet Museum, which brought Tibetan artworks and material culture from within the Tibetan autonomous region to four museums in the United States from October 2003 to September 2005.62

The issue that is of specific interest to this essay concerns the request by the director of the Bowers Museum, Anne Shih, to the Tibetan monks from South India for the construction of a sand mandala painting in conjunction with the exhibition. However, the imposition of last minute conditions by the director on the monks led to their withdrawal from the program. Among the conditions included the proscription against displaying portraits of His Holiness the

fourteenth Dalai Lama, and against revealing that the sand painting monks were refugees from India (instead they were asked to say they were from the United States), as well as disallowing the monks from distributing literature about their organisation, Tibetan Living Communities, which fundraises for Tibetan refugee settlements in India.63

While the Dalai Lama gave his consent on the condition that the art and its historical contexts were described fairly, many protestors felt that the default position of the museum was inevitably compromised by Chinese government pressure to prevent the American public from understanding the true

implications behind the exhibition. The contestation of history was only gradually, perhaps also only partially, resolved in the last leg of the exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco where extensive community consultation resulted in a collaborative public program (which incidentally included the

construction of the sand mandala) that was able to contextualise the exhibition collection in relation to contemporary debates on Tibetan identity and culture. Amidst the maelstrom of controversy, the successful staging of the sand mandala interestingly became, in the final part of the tour, an indicator and an activator of community participation, an eventual bridge that could not be found in the mere display of historical objects.

In doing so, the shaping of a Tibetan culture was acknowledged as an open-ended project. An example that brings this point back to our discussion is the subsequent establishment of a branch of the Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, New York in 1992. Translator Palden Oshoe spoke of this diasporic movement and

expansion from Tibet to India to the United States as one that was based on encounter and the acceptance of change, ‘Tibetan culture is one thing in Tibet; another thing in India. It will be another thing in America as well. So as it goes from one place to another, it will be reshaped in different forms whatever is most suitable and congruent with the particular culture that you are exposed to.’64

Losang Samten: The Emergence Of A Sand Mandala Artist

It is from the figure of Losang Samten (bLo-bzang bSam-gtan) that we can sketch out the human story analogous to the story of Tibetan culture as it shape-shifted across continents. Born in 1953 in Chung Ribuce, near Lhasa, Losang’s family left for Nepal and eventually settled in Dharamsala following the

flight of the fourteenth Dalai Lama to India in 1959. There, he joined the Namgyal monastery and was given full ordination in 1967. It was in Namgyal that he learned sand mandala painting in 1975. Losang admitted that the most difficult challenge for a sand mandala painter was to memorise all the designs and colours on top on knowing the different levels of meaning and symbolism behind each design and colour.65 In 1988, when the Samaya Foundation invited the

Namgyal Monastery to present the Kalachakra sand mandala in the American Museum of Natural History, Losang Samten was sent to the Samaya Foundation in June as an artist-in-residence, where he first trialled the presentation of sand mandala outside of the Tantric initiation with the construction of the

Guhyasamaja sand mandala. This would also be the first time that a custom-made transportable thegs-pu or mandala platform was built with Western engineering input by an American architect. The thegs-pu was fitted with video cameras that captured the process of the sand mandala painting, to be documented and later turned into time-lapse videos and photographs that have become a staple form of sand mandala construction documentation today.

At the conclusion of the event at the American Museum of Natural History, Losang maintained his connection with the United States and was subsequently sponsored by the Tibetan Buddhist Center of Philadelphia to migrate over. He continued presenting sand mandalas in cultural institutions while also

establishing himself as a Buddhist teacher across a number of spiritual centres.66 In 1995, he returned his monastic robes and has since lived as a lay practitioner and teacher. In 1997, he served as technical advisor, sand mandala supervisor and even took on a small cameo appearance in Martin Scorcese’s biopic of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Kundun. More recently in 2002, he was awarded the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts of the United States.

In the personage and artistic practice of Losang Samten, we can see how the Tibetan Buddhist sand mandala was shaped by new cultural and social conditions. These were framings that were engendered by much more complex interactions and flows of ideas, atomised and exemplified in the creation of an artist-guru

figure, than that of the shift in discourse on an institutional/curatorial level. Here the transformation of the customary into the neo-traditional underlined a number of significant facets. In Losang we are able to identify the actor of Tibetan Buddhist sand paintings with the personage of a single artist, instead of attributing it to the anonymity of author. While this does not suggest that Losang represented an entirely new approach to sand mandala

painting, in which innovation and originality is prized over tradition, he nonetheless assumed an unprecedented role/ position. Here he was able to conscientiously leave the confines of a life destined for monkhood and established a career as a professional artist and lay spiritual teacher in the Gelug school, who remained connected to a cultural system though no longer strictly within its customary bounds.

One could argue that although Losang’s life story and practice was perhaps less novel compared to a Tibetan artist who expresses himself in the modern or contemporary art idioms that are more familiar to us today, it epitomises an equally interesting facet of the global condition of Tibetan modernities. The

focus placed on a more universal stylistic coding of the contemporary in the work of artist Gongkar Gyatso by Clare Harris presents an interesting comparison.67 Gongkar’s practice stood for a much more apparent and recognisable deployment of a global contemporary art language to mount an aesthetic

critique simultaneously against the prevailing cultural norms and ethos of the Tibetan Autonomous Region under China, and the ‘preservation in practice ethos’ of the Tibetan government in exile.68

While Losang Samten continued to work within what Harris calls a ‘religio-cultural definition of Tibetan-ness’, the reinvention of the Kalachakra sand mandala occurred in a period that was contemporaneous with Gongkar Gyatso’s universal, contemporary practice. This example provided a contrasting yet

compelling counterpoint to the framing of Asian modern and contemporary art as a belated uni-directional reception and replication of Euro-American modernity. Losang Samten exemplified the refashioning of the language of the customary into a vernacular of the neo-traditional, presenting an equally

complex response that exemplified the conditions and possibilities of ‘the Buddha going global’, coming into contact with different aesthetic, cultural, economic forces that continue to redefine Tibetan Buddhist culture. This was situated at an interstice not necessarily yoked to a fixed geographic constant, yet it did not entirely dispense with the politics of cultural particularity and its artistic agency.

Losang Samten constructing the Kalachakra Sand Mandala for the Tucson Festival of Books at the University of Arizona. Photograph by Losang Samten personal homepage www. losangsamten.com Harris’s insightful study ends with an anthropological caveat on the discipline of art history, relating the need to unfix

the concretisation of the field, specifically pertaining to the temporal distance that is placed on the study of Buddhist art as remote from the contemporary.69 This essay has hopefully expanded on such arguments by demonstrating that the binary between the new and the old was not always clearly demarcated, suggesting the need to attend to the inconclusive spaces of ‘in-between-ness’, that is in-between performance and the visual; in-between the

spiritual and the political; as well as the ‘neither-nor’, neither religious object nor contemporary art; neither original nor repetitive.

Studies in world art have recognised the reconceptualisation of time, no longer conceived as linear and atomistic. This allowed for sensitivity to various structures of time and their relationship to localities. Kerry Freedman notes that “time is represented as a multidimensional space where various

cultural and socioeconomic groups exist who influence artistic production, and knowledge about art, as well as values concerning art are shaped by crises that ensue when classes and cultures clash.”70 This notion of a clash, I would suggest, is possibly conflictual or anxious on only one level. It could also suggest an instance of collusion where situational encounters provided novel epistemological grounds to make new sense, such as in the case of the Kalachakra sand mandala.

The presence of monks labouring in situ further testified that this complex cultural edifice was not only sustained by the remoteness of text and teaching; they lent credence to its broader humanitarian appeal. As inheritors of the Kalachakra Tantra, the Tibetan spiritual exile community not only viewed

themselves as possessing rightful lineage, but also tpreservers of the system.71 Alongside its increasing popularity as once or twice yearly mass initiation gatherings for world peace, the most public form in which this was affirmed can be seen in the presentations of the Kalachakra sand mandala from 1988 onwards as ‘cultural offering’.

I have suggested that the Kalachakra sand mandala as a cultural object in performance was an enriched articulation of its conceptual medium as time and space, thus citing the formation and dissolution of the sand mandala as central to the enactment and actualisation of the concept of collective Enlightenment, which was encoded in the sand mandala’s symbolic registry of the mythical Shambala geo-body. This was, at the same time, resonant with the

constitution of an evolving notion of Tibetan culture as the destiny of the exilic and its fluid reconfigurations of what it means to be Tibetan today. Situated at this intersection, the Kalachakra sand mandala was an aesthetic confluence that came to perform Tibet’s place in the world, employing the currency of tradition, in a time of national and cultural dispossession, that was strongly rooted in its attempt at forging a new interpretation,

performance and representation of the customary, that aspired to achieve a concept of peace through assertion of cultural identity, at the same time as it attempted to balance the exiled government’s political appeal for some form of political and cultural autonomy within the modern Chinese state. A middle way.

Simon Soon is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney where he researches left wing art communities in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore during the 1950s - 1970s. He has worked as an independent

curator in contemporary Southeast Asian art, as well as contributing essays for exhibitions such as ‘Realism in Asia’ (The National Gallery, Singapore), ‘Sulaiman Esa: Ra’ajah’ (The National Visual Art Gallery, Malaysia), and ‘Tanah Ayer: Malaysian Stories for the Land (Galeri Sunaryo, Bandung)’. Soon maintains an interest in modern and contemporary Tibetan art.

Notes

1 Alexander Berzin, The Kalachakra Does Not Advocate Or Predict An Actual World Armageddon, 2008, http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/advanced/ kalachakra/kalachakra_world_peace/kc_not_advocate_predict_armageddon.html (Accessed December 2011) 2 Tenzin Gyatso and Jeffrey Hopkins, The Kalachakra Tantra: Rite of Initiation for the Stage of Generation, London, 1985, p27. 3 Barry Bryant, The Wheel of Time, Ithaca, 1992, p28. 4 Examples include Edward

A. Arnold, ed., As Long As Space Endures: Essays on the Kalacakra Tantra in Honor of the Dalai Lama, Ithaca, 2009 and Vesna A. Wallace, The Inner Kalacakratantra: A Buddhist Tantric View of the Individual, Oxford, 2001. An extensive bibliographical list can be found online at http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/ e-books/published_books/kalachakra_initiation/kalachakra_initiation_bibliography.html; An exception to this is Urban Hammar, ‘The Kalacakra Initiation by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama in Amaravati January 2006’, Orientalia Suecana LVIII, 2009, 40-59. 5 Robert Thurman

and Denise Patry Leidy, eds, Mandala: The Architecture of Enlightenment, New York: Asia Society Galleries and Tibet House, 1997. 6 Lama Anagarika Govinda, Psycho-cosmic Symbolism of the Buddhist Stupa, California, 1976. 7 Examples include Diana Eck, Banaras: City of Light, Princeton, 1982, 41, on the mandala of Siva that is India and its condensed form, which is the Holy city of Benares; and O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, Ithaca and Singapore, 1999, pp27-40. See also, Heather Stoddard, ‘Dynamic Structures in Buddhist Mandalas: Apradaksina and Mystic Heat in the

Mother Tantra Section of the Annutarayoga Tantras’, Artibus Asiae, 58: 3/4, 1999, p169. 8 Martin Brauen, The Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism, Boston, 1997,pp 61-119. See also, Giuseppe Tucci, Theory and Practice of the Mandala, London, 1961. 9 A critical discussion of the commercialisation of the system can be found in Jeanine Andresen, Kalacakra: Textual and Ritual Perspectives, unpublished PhD dissertation Harvard University, 1997, pp237-68. 10 Tsewang Tashi, ‘Twentieth Century Tibetan Painting’, Tibetan Modernities: Notes from the Field on Cultural and Social Change, Robert Barnett and Ronald

Schwartz, eds, Leiden and Boston, 2008, pp251-66; Clare Harris, In the Image of Tibet: Tibetan Painting after 1959, London, 1999; Per Kvaerne, ‘The Ideological Impact on Tibetan Art’, Resistance and Reform in Tibet, Robert Barnett and Shirin Akiner, eds., London, 1996, 166-185; Heather Karmay, ‘‘Dge-‘dun Chos-‘phel, The Artist’, Tibetan Studies in Honour of Hugh Richardson, Michael Aris and Aung San Suu Kyi, eds., New Delhi, 1979, pp145-9. 11 See Rasheed Araeen, ed., Third Text, 6, Spring 1989. 12 Anna Laura Jones, ‘Exploding Canons: The Anthropology of Museums’, Annual Review of Anthropology,

13 Coote and Shelton, eds, Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, Oxford, 1992. 14 Jonathan Haas, ‘Power, Objects and a Voice for Anthropology’, Current Anthropology, p37, February 1996, S2-3. Although Haas’s address is primarily concerned with the anthropological museum, I think this extends also to art

museum, which are keen to show traditional non-Western art, even when the latter focuses its discussion and interest on aesthetic qualities. 15 Evelyn Payne Hatcher, Art as Culture: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Art, London & Connecticut, 1999, pp8-10. 16 John Clark, Modern Asian Art, Honolulu, 1998, pp. 71-4. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 See Clare Harris, In the Image of Tibet: Tibetan Paintings after 1959, London, 1999. Harris’s general thesis is however applicable primarily to Tibetan paintings, which she understood as grounds for representing conflicting and evolving notions of Tibetan-ness from

different communities. 20 Alexander Berzin, Introduction to the Kalachakra Initiation, Ithaca, 2010, p33. 21 Glenn H Mullin, The Practice of Kalachakra, Ithaca, 1991, pp9-12 22 Berzin, Introduction to the Kalachakra Initiation, pp31-2. 23 Source: http://www.dalailama.com/teachings/kalachakra-initiations 24 Melvyn Goldstein, ‘Tibetan Buddhism and Mass Monasticism’, Des Moines et des moniales dans le monde. La vie monastique dans le miroir de la parenté (Monks and Nuns in the World. The Monastic Life in the Mirror of Relationship) Toulouse, 2010, English translation available on http://www.case.edu/affil/tibet/tibetanMonks/monks.htm ; Other traditions that have survived might not have conducted the initiation in such scale, such as the Jonang school which was persecuted since the seventeenth century and survived in remote locations out of the reach of the Lhasa government. 25 Hugh E.

Richardson, Tibet and its History, Boston, 1984, p7. 26 Basil Crump, ‘The Meaning of the Great Peace Mandala’, Peking Chronicle, October 30th, 1932. 27 Fabienne Jagou, The 9th Panchen Lama (1883-1937): A Life At the Crossroads of Sino-Tibetan Relations, Rebecca Bissett Buechel, trans., Paris & Chiangmai: Ecole Fracnaise d’Etreme-Orient and Silkworm Books, 2011, pp66-7; Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China, New York, 2007, 169-172

(Kalacakra in Beiping) and pp185-6 (Hangzhou Kalachakra) 28 The China Weekly Review, 54, Millard Publishing House. 1930, p406. 29 Fabienne Jagou, ‘A Pilgrim’s Progress, The Peregrinations of the 6th Panchen Lama’, The History of Tibet: The Modern Period 1895 – 1959, Alex McKay, ed., London, 2003, 423-7. 30 Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China, 142-153; and Gray Tuttle, ‘Review of Le 9e Panchen Lama (1883-1937): Enjeu des Relations

Sino-Tibetaines, by Fabienne Jagou’, Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, 2, August 2006, http://www.thlib.org?tid=T2726 (Accessed 3 December 2011) 31 See Liu Jiaju, Banchan dashi quanji [Complete works of the Great Master Panchen], Chongqing, 1943, pp123-4. 32 Urban Hammer, ‘Kalachakra Initiation Ritual and Its Importance for the Tibetans Today’, a paper presented at the Ritual Practices in Indian Religions and Contexts,

conference in Lund Sweden, December 9th to 11th 2004. See also, ‘Dalai Lama and the Modern Kalachakra Initiations’, published at http://www.scribd.com/doc/27307231/Dalai-Lama-and-theModern-Kalacakra-Initiations (Accessed December 2011) 33 See Melvyn Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, 1913 – 1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State, University of California Press, 1991.

34 Jagou, The 9th Panchen Lama, pp35-8. 35 Mullin, The Practice of Kalachakra, pp128-45. 36 Alexander Berzin, ed, “Chapter 3: Tibetan Traditions of the Kalachakra, Questions Sessions with H. H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama Concerning the Kalachakra Initiation”, http:// www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/advanced/kalachakra/attending_kalachakra_ initiation/question_sessions_hh/question_hh_initiation_03.html (Accessed December 2011). 37 Fabio Rambelli, ‘Re-incribing Mandala’, Studies in East and Central Asian Religions, 4, Autumn, 1991, pp9-13. 38 Gyatso and Hopkins, The Kalachakra Tantra, pp74-5. 39 Robert Thurman, ‘Mandala: The Architecture of Enlightenment’, Mandala: The Architecture of Enlightenment, Thurman and Leidy,

eds, New York, 1997, p127. 40 Thurman, Mandala, 132; Bryant, The Wheel of Time, p178. 41 Bryant, Wheel of Life, pp177-8. 42 Donald S. Lopez, Prisoners of Shangrila, Chicago, 1998, p146. 43 Thurman, Mandala, p127. 44 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Reinventing the Medium’, Critical Inquiry, 25/2, Winter 1999, p296. 45 Ibid. 46 Geshe Lhundub Sopa, Roger Jackson and John Newman, The Wheel of Time: The Kalachakra in Context, Ithaca, 1991, p31. 47 For related ethnological

research, see Mary Van Dyke, ‘Grids and Serpents: A Tibetan Foundation Ritual in Switzerland’, Constructing Tibetan Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, Frank J Korom, ed., Quebec, 1997, pp178-227; Mona Schrempf, ‘Taming the Earth, Controlling the Cosmos: Transformation of Space in Tibetan Buddhist and Bon-po Ritual Dance’, Sacred Spaces and Powerful Places in Tibetan Culture, Toni Huber, ed., Dharamsala, 1999. 48 Bryant, The Wheel of Time, p137. 49 Ibid,

p195. 50 Ibid, p33. 51 Thurman, ‘Introductory Remarks’, Kalachakratantra: The Chapter on the Individual together with the Vimalaprabha, translated by Vesna A. Wallace, New York, 2004. 52 Elena Young, The Boundaries of Identity: The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Nationalism, and Ris med (non-sectarian) Identity in Tibetan Diaspora, unpublished masters dissertation, McGill University, 2010; See also, Jeanine M. Chandler, Hunting the Guru: Lineage, Culture and Conflict

in the Development of Tibetan Buddhism in America, unpublished PhD dissertation, University at Albany, State University of New York, 2009, pp30-70. 53 See Thurman and Leidy, Mandala: The Architecture of Enlightenment. 54 See David P. Jackson, A History of Tibetan Painting: The Great Tibetan Painters and their

Traditions, Vienna, 1996; Jackson, Patron and Painter: Situ Panchen and the Revival of the Encampment Style, New York, 2009; David Weldon, On Recent Attributions to Aniko, 2010, http://asianart.com/articles/aniko/index.html (Accessed October 2011) 55 Thurman and Marilyn Rhie, Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet, New York, 1996, p13. 56 Ibid, p4. 57 A.C. McKay, Wisdom and Compassion, 1999. http://www.iias.nl/iiasn/iiasn8/ascul/ tibet.html

(Accessed October 2011). 58 Donald S. Lopez Jr., ‘Foreigner At the Lama’s Feet’, Curators of the Buddha, Donald S. Lopez, Jr., ed., Chicago, 1995, pp251-95. 59 Examples include Tenzin Gyatso and Jeffrey Hopkins, The Kālachakra tantra: rite of initiation for the stage of generation: a commentary on the text of Kay-drup-ge-lek-bēl

sang-bō, London, 1985; The Berzin Archive has a section on Vajrayana practices http://www. berzinarchives.com/tantra/index.html (Accessed on 23 August 2010) 60 See William S. Weedon, ‘Tibetan Buddhism: A Perspective’, Philosophy East and West, 1967, pp167-172. 61 Bryant, The Wheel of Time, p33. 62 These

are the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, the Houston Museum of Natural History, the Rubin Museum of Art, New York and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. 63 A compilation of the media coverage surrounding the controversy can be found at http://tibetanmaterialhistory.wikischolars.columbia.edu/Tibet-

Treasures+from+the+Roof+o f+the+World (Accessed December 2011). 64 Into the Kalachakra Project Page, http://media.gfem.org/node/10866 (Accessed December 2011). 65 Mary K. Lee, Interview with Losang Samten 2002 NEA National Heritage Fellow, 2002, http://www.nea.gov/honors/heritage/fellows/interview.php?

id=2002_12 (Accessed October 2011). 66 See http://www.losangsamten.com/ (Accessed December 2011). 67 ADD NOTE 68 Harris, ‘The Buddha Goes Global: Some Thoughts Towards a Transnational Art History’, Art History, 29:4, September 2006, p703. 69 Ibid, pp718-9. 70 Kerry Freedman, ‘Recent Theoretical Shifts in the Field of Art History and Some Classroom Applications’, Art Education, 44:6, 1991, p43. 71 Donald S. Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La, p179.