Image source: http://people.hws.edu/yignyen/images/mandala.jpg
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Yesterday, in the student center at University of Maryland College Park, I was fortunate to see an extraordinary demonstration: Tibetan Buddhist monks creating a sand mandala. The red-robed monks worked with relaxed concentration, painstakingly pouring millions of grains of brightly colored sand to form intricate designs laden with religious meaning. The whole process is enthralling to watch, not least because it is so foreign to (my) Western sensibilities. |
Afterwards, I remembered that, when I gave a conference in PSYC 900 about publishing your research as an undergrad, one of the examples we looked at was a research study on mandalas!
Small, S. R. (2006). Anxiety reduction: Expanding previous research on mandala coloring. Undergraduate Journal of Psychology, 19, 15-21. Retrieved February 27, 2008, from http://www.psych.uncc.edu/UJv19.pdf
It never ceases to amaze me how broad psychological inquiry is: any topic is fair game!
A search on mandala* in PsycINFO retrieves over 100 articles.
Some of the articles have to do with a Jungian-based assessment instrument, the MARI (Mandala Assessment Research Instrument). The MARI Web site looks a little over-the-top to me, but I can't speak to the test's validity--that's up to psychologists and psychology students!
I'm guessing that mandalas entered the realm of Western psychology with Jung. Using catalogUSMAI, you can request his book
Jung, C. G. (1972). Mandala symbolism. (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
If you go into our database of full-text online books, NetLibrary, and enter the word mandala as a Full-Text search, you'll retrieve a lot of books--some art history, some psychology--that talk about mandalas at least briefly.
Wishing you a mystical research experience,