What does the Hindu mandala represent?

Answer 1

The Mandala in Buddhism represents impermenance.

Buddhist monks may spend days and days creating an extremely elaborate and painstaking Mandala. It is viewed and admired for its beauty, but then swept away in a a series of swift movements. the sands used to make it are then gathered and poured into a body of water - i dont know if it matters which one - and watched as it floats away.

The entire experience is supposed to show that nothing lasts for ever and not to get attatched to material things for exactly this reason.

(Think about it... usually when someone -or maybe you yourself have experienced this- has created something soooo beautiful and you are extremely proud of it that you want to keep it and not give it away. This is what the Buddhist monks discourage. It lessens the suffering that will be had when that thing finally does disappear.)

~Hope this Helped.

Answer 2

Mandala

is a Sanskrit word that means "circle". In the Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions, their sacred art often takes a mandala form. The basic form of most Hindu andBuddhist mandalas

is a square with four gates containing a circle with a center point. Each gate is in the shape of a T.

These mandalas, concentric diagrams, have spiritual and ritual significance in both Buddhism and Hinduism.[3][4] The term is of Hindu origin and appears in the Rig Veda as the name of the sections of the work, but is also used in other Indian religions, particularly Buddhism. In the Tibetan branch ofVajrayana Buddhism

, mandalas have been developed into sandpainting. They are also a key part of anuttarayoga tantra meditation practices.
In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts, as a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing a sacred space, and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. According to David Fontana, its symbolic nature can help one "to access progressively deeper levels of the unconscious, ultimately assisting the meditator to experience a mystical sense of oneness with the ultimate unity from which the cosmos in all its manifold forms arises." [5] The psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw the mandala as "a representation of the unconscious self,"[citation needed] and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional disorders and work towards wholeness in personality.[6]
In common use, mandala has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective.

Source(s):http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala

Answer 3

A Mandala is a symbolic picture of the universe created in coloured sand and is considered to be one of the richest visual objects in Tibetan Buddism. It's significance is to help transform ordinary minds into enlightened ones and to assist in healing.