It was a worlds-within-worlds, blow-your-commuting-brain kind of day.

On the bus to work I was jammed up against a man thumb-flicking through email and Facebook posts. Words and photos flew by on his phone, until he stopped short at an image: a man’s hand, thumb-flicking the screen on his phone.

At the JCCSF, I happened on a toddler in leotard and tights, her body a pink-encased cocktail frank, standing on a stepladder and peering into a bathroom sink full of soap bubbles, utterly mesmerized.

And that was all before the free lunch-hour art lecture on mandalas, which, I learned, are not just psychedelic exotica but kaleidoscopic maps to an unseen world.

Our guide to this world was the erudite and enthusiastic Jeff Durham, Curator of Himalayan Art at the Asian Art Museum. As I tried to chew my carrot sticks quietly, he told us about the museum’s current exhibit, “Enter the Mandala: Cosmic Centers and Mental Maps of Himalayan Buddhism.” Color-drenched slides illuminated the dim room, while Durham said things about art that seemed suited to a geometry classroom or an ashram. Long story short, he pretty much blew our workday minds. When the 25 or so of us left Gallanter Hall, blinking at the sunlight pouring through the atrium skylight, I for one had vowed to see the exhibit as soon as I could.

So what’s so great about mandalas, and the exhibit?

For one thing, both cry out for you to do more than look. Most art-viewing involves a uniformed guard, ready to step in if you get too close. You stand at the designated distance from an object someone has deemed valuable and you admire or zone out or wonder just what it is you’re supposed to be seeing.  This usually takes less than a minute – museums pay big bucks to study these things. Then you move on to the next object.

“Enter the Mandala” wants to turn that model inside out, arranging the many gorgeously intricate 14th-century mandalas on display into a single mandala configured in open space – a mandala that visitors can physically enter. 

But just what is it that you’re walking into?

Durham broke it down, explaining that mandalas are a kind of spiritual technology.  We’re so accustomed these days to our secular technologies that we no longer marvel at the nearly limitless virtual worlds we enter with the flick of a thumb or by punching Enter. With mandalas, a much older technology, the idea is to imaginatively enter the mandala, moving through its nested squares and circles and towards its center, in a journey that enacts the cosmic processes of disintegration and reintegration that for Buddhists are key to enlightenment. Mandalas, in their original purpose, demand not viewers but practitioners. In modern terms, mandalas are an interactive technology.

'a journey that enacts the cosmic processes of disintegration and reintegration that for Buddhists are key to enlightenment.'

“Enter the Mandala” builds on the idea of an immersive experience by arranging the exhibit’s individual mandalas into a single mandala, writ large. You could say that the room-sized mandala is three-dimensional, except that individual mandalas also contain within them the potential for multiple dimensions. Stand at a certain distance from some mandala paintings and a third dimension emerges. And in engaging with a purportedly two-dimension mandala, the viewer is supposed to recreate the image in their mind’s eye and then enter that virtual realm.

At this point I’d stopped eating. I have trouble contemplating infinity and chewing at the same time.

As if sensing that he’d led us too far down the rabbit hole, Durham threw us a bone, likening the mandala experience to a hall of fun-house mirrors. But the question he posed was better suited to a Himalayan monastery than to an amusement park.

“Are you in the mandala?” he asked, “Or is the mandala in you?”

Thankfully, he didn’t leave us hanging.

“The answer, of course, is yes.”

Enter the Mandala: Cosmic Centers and Mental Maps of Himalayan Buddhism is at the Asian Art Museum through October 26

For information go to: http://www.asianart.org/exhibitions_index/enter-the-mandala.

For more info on Free Daytime Lectures at the JCCSF, visit https://www.jccsf.org/all-ages/jccsf-fall-guide/fall-guide---adult

Banner Image  of a Taima mandala, from Japan, approximately 1300–1400 AD, from the The Avery Brundage Collection, courtesy of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.