Mandala Architecture, the Top of the Wall

 

Diagram of the mandala portal and wall, with labels
courtesy of Yael Bentor

I suppose I ought to go into a long-winded preamble before getting to the point. But first of all let me state the point, or the first point, I want to make. Nearly all of the Tibetan terms for the parts of the mandala have proven difficult for translators. After all, so many of them are technical terms of architecture. We as translators may not be architectural historians, but we could do better.

Architects, the people ancient Greeks called Mechanikos (Μεκανίκος) and Bharata’s Sūtradhāra (Tibetan translation: Mdo-’dzin-pa, ‘Thread Holders’), were a very select group, an exclusive guild that largely kept their secrets to themselves. Traditional architecture, all architecture in fact, has as its prime goal protecting its inhabitants from uncomfortable and potentially harmful environmental elements, but also, as part of that aim, protecting itself from the same. Defense against potential damage by fire, earth, wind and moisture as well as by external attacks of other kinds needs to be built into the design. Although we shouldn’t ever do it, let’s forget decoration and beauty for now.

Architecture? The mandala is, after all, in its overall structure, a building or rather a fortified domicile for divine forms of Buddha (lha-yi pho-brang). Seeing this may prove shocking to the systems of the Jungian and transpersonal psychologists who see in it archetypal imagery or human transformational potential. Others see it as representing order in the universe, as a cosmogram, or just a scientific diagram. Some would regard it as a memory palace, an object to gaze at in meditation practice, a kind of centering device, wholistic mind-body medicine, and so on. I personally hold that each view is correct in its own way to some degree. I could even, at times, consider going for a sociopolitical reading of mandalas as long as it doesn’t end up being too reductive. The mandala is capable of sustaining an array of ideas about it, and so should we.

Whatever our views may be, we ought to consider what it is and how it proves itself of use in Tibetan (and Japanese Shingon) Buddhist cultures where it has an overwhelming presence in ritual, as a liturgical object deployed in esoteric rituals of initiation. We should stop speaking about it with imperial confidence and instead make a bold and well informed attempt to hear what those cultures are saying for a change. That said, I will go against my own good advice, neglect all these large issues in order to narrow in on a few rather small philological points imbricated with art and architecture. We’ll leave wholism far behind and zero in on a few specifics.

Philologists are notoriously picky, slow and laborious. Some place a pleasant spin on this with catchy phrases like “the art of slow reading.” Philology’s bookish narrowness and insignificant aims are obvious to everyone except the philologist. I won’t harp on this today, just send you to the library for a fresh new essay by Peter Machinist that shows very nicely that philology’s aims haven’t always been so ascetically or narrowly defined, and can indeed be made to bring into its circle of evidence works of art and architecture (and of course natural sciences) when it makes sense.

For a few weeks now I have been slowly savoring a book by Fabio Barry. I had been looking forward to reading it for a very long time. Entitled Painting in Stone, it is a remarkably learned and informative history of the architectural use of colored stones, marble in particular, in the classical world as well as medieval and, to a lesser degree, modern Europe. It has beautiful photos — this alone is enough to recommend it to anyone — but the text isn’t always the easiest to read. Take the following example. At page 73 he discusses an architectural detail called guttae with illustration on page 75:

Guttae are normally interpreted as skeuomorphs of the hardwood trunnels that were driven through the mutules (triglyph soffits) to clamp the rafters onto the beams of the putative timber prototypes of the Greek temple... the conical shape of the gutta served as a water-repellant, a ‘drip detail’ that stopped the capillary infiltration of rainwater. In Latin “gutta” does, in fact, mean “droplet” ...

Their Greek name isn’t known with certainty, but they make their material appearance on Greek temples that are described in Latin by using this name guttae that means something like ‘drippers’. Viliouras does give a Greek word ςταλαγμoí, that looks like nothing so much as our English stalagmites / stalactites, with an etymology that also indicates dripping. I’d love to hear more expert ideas about this than I can offer, but this does lead me to look back at Barry’s discussion in his Chapter Three of caves and nymphaei, and classical beliefs about the ways water and stone interact and even trade places with each other. The water feeds the stone, and thanks to this nourishment, the stones grow. Minerals can liquefy and liquids can calcify, this is true.

The evident task of the drippers is to micromanage the moisture that falls from above, help wick it away from the walls, and make it drip down where it can be easily drained away. I see an analogue in the human eyebrows and eyelashes that perform the useful task of keeping the sweat of our brows from flowing over our eyes. Without the help of the guttae the building could, over time, suffer structural damage due to seeping. I see practical purposes defining the drippers’ shapes and placement.

Why did the passage in Barry’s book impress me so much? It’s because there is indeed an element of Tibetan mandalas described as a “dripper” named shar-bu. The word looks like a diminutive of shar meaning east, and shar-ba meaning dawning, appearing, arising. Shar-bu could easily appear pronounced and/or spelled as shar-ru, but none of this takes us anywhere near any convincingly meaningful etymology.*

(*Such changes as this happen with diminutives in general, for instance thor-bu can appear as tho[r]-ru, chol-bu as cho[l]-lu and we do find an instance of shar-ru in a ca. 1300 CE inscription in the essay of Tropper listed below. Sha-ru can mean ‘stag antler’, but no, that really goes too far toward the end of the limb, so let’s not go there. Although I haven’t found any source to collaborate it apart from my own guesswork, shar might conceivably be a form of gsher-ba, with the meaning ‘to moisten, make damp.’)

There •is• a Sanskrit word of corresponding meaning used in the Sanskrit works that were translated: sūcikā. Most usually that Sanskrit means ‘needle’, although it can be applied to other things with sharp points, elephant tusks and the like. As the Tibetan doesn’t yield the same literal meaning as the Sanskrit, it cannot be explained away as a calque, leaving us free to account for the Tibetan word in other ways.

The two-dimensional Tibetan mandalas often show it as three or more horizontal lines that get shorter as you go down, so that it looks kind of like an inverted pyramid or ziggurat, in 3-dimensional mandalas they may look similarly like inverted stepped pyramids. Then again, in some painted mandalas they could be said to look like inverted milk bottles. In the following not all that typical example, they have long skinny necks.

Sample showing the three ranks of the upper wall

Here the shar-bu are sandwiched in between the level of the “full and half festoons” (drwa-ba drwa-phyed) below and the “arrow covers” (mda’-yab) above.* I am now convinced the correct architectural term for these last mentioned is merlon. A merlon is what distinguishes a battlement from a mere parapet.** Surely what we are seeing in this particular mandala (sampled from Leidy’s book, p. 94) visually mimics a battlement of a medieval Indian fort, as you can see in the next illustration.

(*The syllable yab that forms part of the word should probably be taken as short for yab-sa, a general word for any covered or sheltered area. It occurs also in the term bsil-yab (or bsil-g.yab), for a shelter from cold wind, although confusingly it may also mean a fan. **In my present understanding a parapet is the railing around an open-air walkway meant to indicate a danger of falling. If this railing includes merlons, it is no longer a parapet, but a battlement. To be clear, as this is very often misunderstood, crenellation more correctly refers to the gaps between the merlons, the gaps being the crenels. Merlons are the standing structures meant to shield the defenders from arrows flying up at them from below. Merlons may take quite a range of shapes, see below in the reading list under Bounni, Deloche, Khan and Micale. They very often include, at their centers, a slot for firing arrows back at the enemy.)

Agra Fort merlons, from a photo by Umesh Baghel

Another nondescript example from a recent painting, notice the lotus-petal-like shape of the merlons, although we ought to emphasize that they are absolutely not the lotus petals you are thinking they are:

Does Tibet actually have on its fortified buildings crenellated battlements of any kind? No. Not really, not as far as I can see.*

(*The stepped tops of walls such as those that ascend the hill of the Potala, walls that continue up steep inclines, often have what we would most correctly call the crowstep, or corbiestep. But as these do not actually function as battlements and look differently, they aren’t very relevant to our discussion. If I remember right, the Feiglstorfer book has some discussion about this issue.)

But the items in the 2nd rank do not always, or even all that often, look like inverted bottles. As said above, very often they are made up of three simple horizontal lines, each one shorter than the one above it, lending the impression of an inverted pyramidal structure, kind of like this:

———

——

—

There is yet another visually related (possibly in some sense identical) type with a pattern exactly like the stepped crenellations we are likely to see only in Mesopotamia (with a few neighboring instances). Here are our three wall elements from a random ceiling mandala in Bhutan. A lot more examples could be supplied:

Following is a photo of the famous Ishtar Gate from Babylon. Its rubble was salvaged, shipped off, reconstructed, and put on display at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. It is truly a wonder to see, as I can say with the relatively secure certainty of direct perception.

Even if the pattern and the colors are strikingly similar, we have to say that where Babylon has blue merlons rising skyward, Tibetan mandala makers are seeing white drippers pointed earthward. It is a foreground-background switching illusion in more than one way.

While I do not feel confident enough to press down on the point very hard at this time, a Mesopotamian connection is plausible. In Mesopotamia, with only one serious downpour a year to deal with, they do not often feel the need to protect their buildings from rain damage (okay, floods, but that’s an entirely different story). That would explain why the use of those architectural drippers doesn’t seem to be known there. So it is at least worthy of noting another possible connection. I have to thank Mesopotamianist Uri Gabbay for correspondence on this issue. For today it will have to suffice to say that there is a Sumerian verb sur meaning ‘to press, drip.’ And there is an Akkadian verb ṣarāru meaning ‘to flow, drip.’ A derived adjective ṣarru means, ‘flowing, leaking.’ I do think the possible word-connection bears enough promise to merit further consideration. These words do resemble Tibetan shar-bu, a word that (as already mentioned) is sometimes spelled shar-ru, including the earliest epigraphical instance I know of. Put together with that undeniable visual correspondence with the dark blue and white crenellation pattern in the Tibetan mandala walls does raise the possibility of one day giving substance to a historical connection that may grow out of this seed.

The merlon protects from opponents, while the stalactite-like dripper protects the wall from damage by the element of water, so it might be that there is some deeper significance or symbolism to be seen in what would, in ordinary architecture, serve a practical function. As part of the mandala palace’s wall, there can be no doubt that it communicates the inviolability of the sacred space with all the beauty, compassion and peace it embraces. Because in the end it isn’t so much about the protection that the wall provides as it is about what we think requires its protection.

Do with it as you will. And if you can find it in your heart to be so kind, help us out with the puzzles. There could be conclusions for these more-and-less insignificant questions in our future so long as there will be a future. I see grounds for ominous optimism.

§   §   §

Written Matter and Illustrative Art

Note: I have been extremely selective in my listing of mandala publications, ignoring the earliest and perhaps best known ones as well as the coloring books while emphasizing those that have something to say about the architecture. With thanks to the several persons in both Tibetan and Mesopotamian Studies, who conversed or corresponded with me on this subject during recent times (they won’t be named unless they want me to). 

Anastasia Amrheim, Clare Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Knott, eds., A Wonder to Behold: Craftsmanship and the Creation of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University (New York 2019).

Fabio Barry, Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, Yale University Press (New Haven 2020).

Blo-bzang-klu-sgrub, Librarian of the Upper Tantra College, et al., Gsang-chen Rgyud-sde Rgya-mtsho'i Dkyil-'khor 'Bri Bzhengs-la Nye-bar Mkho-ba'i Dkyil-'khor-gyi Mtshan-ma'i Bris-dpe Dr-med Chu-shel Me-long, Rgyud-stod Dpe-mdzod-khang (Dharamsala 2016). This book is mainly a pattern book for drawing different parts of the mandala. At p. 16, we see as part of a quote from a work of Tsongkhapa the following: 

ཤར་བུ་དང་མདའ་ཡབ་ཀྱི་གཞི་ནག་པོ་ལ་ཤར་བུ་དཀར་པོ་མདའ་ཡབ་པདྨ་འདབ་མ་ཕྱེད་པའི་དབྱིབས་ཅན་དཀར་པོ། རྟ་བབས་ཀྱི་ཀ་བ་དང་གླང་རྒྱབ་ཀྱི་ནང་རྣམས་ཕྱོགས་མདོག ...

The drippers and merlons are against a black ground, the drippers being white. The merlons, with the shapes of half lotus petals, are white as well. The gateway pillars and the insides of the ‘bull back’* are the colors of the directions [in which the gateway is located].

(*The ‘bull back’ is the name of one of the levels in the dome area of the gateway.)

Adnan Bounni, “Couronnement des sanctuaires du Proche-Orient hellénistique et romain : origine et développement du merlon,” Topoi, vol. 9, no. 2 (1999), pp. 507-525. Available at the Persée website. This discusses quite a large number of examples of types of merlons, with useful visual material.

Martin Brauen, The Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism, translated from the original German edition of 1992 by Martin Willson, Serindia Publications (London 1997). The particular details that most interest us at the moment are both covered by the label “end of the roof” in the chart on p. 72.

Barry Bryant, in cooperation with Namgyal Monastery, The Wheel of Time Sand Mandala: Visual Scripture of Tibetan Buddhism, Harper San Francisco (New York 1992).

Here there are labeled diagrams (on pp. 203, 207 & 212) marking the wall elements of “parapet of half-lotus petals,” and “downspouts.” There is also a brief interpretation of their purpose and meaning on p. 205. Here it is very clear, as we see in other mandala systems as well, that the white side of the stepped merlon design is taken to be the shar-bu or the ‘drippers.’ This is still more obvious in the three-dimensional mandalas illustrated in Bentor.

Christoph Cüppers, Leonard van der Kuijp, Ulrich Pagel, eds., with introduction by Dobis Tsering Gyal, Handbook of Tibetan Iconometry: A Guide to the Arts of the 17th Century, Brill (Leiden 2012), p. 345. Here shar-bu appears as part of a letter-mandala description. There is no discussion of its meaning.

Jean Deloche, “Études sur les fortifications de l'Inde I. Les fortifications de l'Inde ancienne,” Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, vol. 79, no. 1 (1992), pp. 89-131. I find particularly remarkable the Sanskrit literary sources tell us of merlons shaped like “tambours et de têtes de singe” — drums and monkey heads.

Hubert Feiglstorfer, Material Aspects of Building and Craft Traditions: A Himalayan Case Study, Austrian Academy of Sciences Press (Vienna 2022). The book is much recommended even if not so much is relevant to our particular subject. The chart on p. 62, showing how rooves in Ladakh are protected from leakage and wall seepage, is particularly germane and fascinating.

Anja Fügert & Helen Gries, “The Men Who Wrought the Baked Brick, Those Were Babylonians: A Brief History of Molded and Glazed Bricks,” contained in: Amrheim, A Wonder to Behold, pp. 40-53.  According to this, the Babylonians favored a deep blue color for their glazed bricks made with cobalt oxide. However, inscriptional evidence from the time of Nebuchadnezzar II (reigned 604-562 BCE) tells us that the crenations on walls of the adjacent Northern Palace (as well as the nearby temple on top of the ziggurat) were colored with the darker blue of lapis-lazuli. Here on p. 49 is a reconstruction of the entrance to the Sin Temple in the palace-temple complex of Sargon II at Dur-Sharrukin, showing walls with stepped merlons decorated with lapis-lazuli-glazed brickwork. On the same page we read:

“From Nebuchadnezzar II’s inscriptions, we know that the crenellations of the Northern Palace (Hauptburg) as well as the temple on top of the ziggurat, were also clad in lapis lazuli-blue glazed bricks.”

Giovanni Garbini, “The Stepped Pinnacle in Ancient Near East,” East and West, vol. 9, nos. 1-2 (March 1958), pp. 85-91.

Cyril M. Harris, Illustrated Dictionary of Historic Architecture, Dover (New York 1977). 

The entry for gutta is on p. 270: “One of a series of pendant ornaments, generally in the form of the frustum of a cone, but sometimes cylindrical, usually found on the underside of the mutules and regulae of Doric entablatures.” There are relevant illustrations on the same page as well as on pp. 172-173.

Edward Henning, “Maṇḍala Literalism.” Leaving Tibetan-language literature aside for the moment, this is surely the most advanced discussion on the mandala and its architectural details to be found on the internet or anywhere else for that matter. It has many illustrations. I quote the most relevant section:

“From the underside of the flat roofing hangs a fascia (shar bu, bakuli) which can take several forms. The most common (but not the only form, as is sometimes suggested) is of white water pipes. These are in the shape of upturned little bottles which would channel water from the flat roof that would collect when rain falls. Finally, on top of the flat roof is the parapet (mda' yab, kramaśīrṣa), which can also take more than one form. The most traditional is of battlement-style merlons (btag so/stag so ?), either flush with the edge of the flat roof or set back a little. In the Gelug tradition, the merlons are commonly in the form of half-lotus petals, flush with the edge of the roof.”

M. Ashraf Khan and Qurat-ul-Ain, “Art and Architecture of Pharwala Fort, Islamabad,” FWU Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 11, no. 1 (Summer 2017), pp. 1-17. 

This is my main reference on the common shapes of the merlons in Mughal India: 1. bud-like, 2. lobe-shape, 3. upside down tear drop shape, and 4. flame like shape. But he adds that the typical form of merlons during India’s medieval period was “semicircular in shape, pointed at the top.” For earlier artistic representations of battlements with merlons, see Deloche.

Khedrup Jé (མཁས་གྲུབ་རྗེ་), Ocean of Attainments: The Creation Stage of the Guhyasamāja Tantra (རྒྱུད་ཐམས་ཅད་ཀྱི་རྒྱལ་པོ་དཔལ་གསང་བ་འདུས་པའི་བསྐྱེད་་རིམ་དངོས་གྲུབ་རྒྱ་མཚོ་), translated by Yael Bentor and Penpa Dorjee, Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, Wisdom (New York 2024). Definitely have a look at the three-dimensional mandalas illustrated in color, plates 5-6, and the labelled chart on p. 105 (our frontispiece is a somewhat different, pre-published version).

R[ichard J.] Kohn, “The Ritual Preparation of a Tibetan Sand Maṇḍala,” contained in: A.W. Macdonald, ed., Maṇḍala and Landscape, D.K Printworld (New Delhi 1997), pp. 364-405. Notice the labelled diagrams on p. 390. Quotes from p. 389:

“The pha gu ‘diamond band’, dra phyed ‘garlands’, and shar bu ‘water pots’ are details of the wall treatment... The term ‘garlands’, which is sometimes etymologically translated as ’half-nets’, refers to necklaces of jewels hung about the upper part of the wall and the dark band against which they are set off. Many of these features are common in Tibetan religious architecture. The diamond band and garland, for example, can be seen on monastery walls throughout Tibet and Nepal.

“The shar bu is a series of pots that hang below the eaves of the maṇḍala. Although easily identified as pots in many three-dimensional maṇḍala, they appear as an inverted pyramid of horizontal lines in painted examples. The pots are used for air-conditioning and the lines presumably represent dripping water.”

Denise Patry Leidy and Robert A.F. Thurman, Mandala: The Architecture of Enlightenment, Asia Society Galleries (New York 1997). There are a number of good examples here, including the one on pp. 94-95, dated late 14th to early 15th centuries and kept in the MET. Page 126 has a clear representation of the guttae in the shape of inverted white stepped merlons against a dark blue background.

Oded Lipschits, Yuval Gadot, Benjamin Arubas & Manfred Oeming, “Palace and Village, Paradise and Oblivion: Unraveling the Riddles of Ramat Rahel,” Near Eastern Archaeology, vol. 74, no. 1 (March 2011), pp. 1-49. 

Turn to page 19 for the photo of a stepped stone pyramid crenellation (described on p. 21). Located close to Jerusalem, this would date to the 2nd building phase sometime between late-7th to end of 4th centuries BCE, when the region was occupied first by the Babylonians and then the Persians.

Christian Luczanits, “On the Earliest Mandalas in a Buddhist Context,” contained in: Darrol Bryant and Susan Bryant, eds., Mahayana Buddhism: History and Culture, Tibet House (New Delhi 2008), pp. 111-138. We need better early examples to work with if we hope to write a history of the mandala’s architectural elements. This essay helps. For another early example, painted on wood, see under Samosyuk, below.

Peter Machinist, “Philology: Past, Present, and Prospects (Presidential Address),” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 144, no. 4 (October 2024), pp. 711-739.

My notes: Delivering a jocular take on commonly held views — we could say that philology means first and above all grammar and secondly lexicography. Third and lastly? Even more grammar. During the Mediterranean classical era, in its original meaning, philology was broadly understood to mean the pursuit of knowledge, period. It has often gone through contractions and expansions in its meanings over the centuries. The idea of slow and/or close reading of texts is often regarded as the defining essence of the scholarly discipline, the critical text edition being its ultimate realization. This essayist argues for the inclusion of oral literature as well as “nonwritten material objects like works of art and architecture, particularly as these interweave with and illuminate written texts.”

Dan Martin, “Earth and Wind, Water and Fire: Book Binding and Preservation in Pre-Mongol Bon Ritual Manuals for Consecrations,” contained in: Agnieszka Helman-Ważny and Charles Ramble, Bon and Naxi Manuscripts, Studies in Manuscript Culture series no. 28, De Gruyter (Berlin 2023), pp. 87-106. An “open access” publication.

The traditional Tibetan book binding methods are also ‘housings’ for books with a kind of architecture that evolved in order to better protect the inscribed content from loss due to environmental elements.

Maria Gabriella Micale, “Framing the Space: On the Use of Crenellation from Architecture to the Definition of Pictorial Spaces,” contained in: Marta D'Andrea et al., Pearls of the Past: Studies on Near Eastern Art and Archaeology in Honour of Frances Pinnock, Marru series no. 8, Zaphon (Münster 2019), pp. 601-631.

Michael Pfrommer, Metalwork from the Hellenized East: Catalogue of the Collections, J.Paul Getty Museum (Malibu 1993). 

Several silver pieces from the Hellenistic Period Middle East have continuous bands of stepped merlons as part of their decoration (they can be difficult to see unless you look closely). In general the specifically Mesopotamian stepped merlon is not at all common in the rest of Eurasia, even if examples may be found, if rarely, for example on the battlements of a few Irish towers dating from post 1400 CE (these merlons, although similar, have a sloping feature that distinguishes them from the Babylonian).

David Reigle, “The Kālacakra Tantra on the Sādhana and Maṇḍala: A Review Article,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 22, no. 2 (April 2012), pp. 439-463. On pp. 443-445 are some pertinent discussions on architectural elements of the mandala.

Rong-tha Blo-bzang-dam-chos-rgya-mtsho, The Creation of Mandalas: Tibetan Texts Detailing the Techniques for Laying Out and Executing Tantric Buddhist Psychocosmograms, illustrations by Don-'grub-rdo-rje, Dondrub Dorjee (Delhi 1999). The title Dkyil-’khor Tshig-rtsa appears on the outer cover as well as on an inside title page.

K.F. Samosyuk, Buddhist Painting from Khara-Khoto XII-XIVth Centuries: Between China and Tibet [in Russian], State Hermitage Publishers (St. Petersburg 2006). On pp. 290-291 find illustrated two remarkably well preserved early (12th-13th century) mandalas painted on wooden boards. The 2nd rank drippers are not visible in either one, although the festoons and merlons are quite clear.

Tanaka Kimiaki, An Illustrated History of the Mandala, from Its Genesis to the Kālacakratantra, Wisdom (Somerville 2018). 

My notes: The Sanskrit for the mandala’s arrow covers is kramaśīrṣa, ‘head of the steps’ (?). The Sanskrit corresponding to shar-bu is vakulī (or bakulī), ‘she who has fragrant flowers of the bakula tree (?).’ The bakula, identified with Mimusops elengi, blooms only when wine or nectar is sprinkled from the mouths of maidens, or so it is said. I suppose there is some sense to be made in this, I’m just not sure how. Perhaps it has to do with the shapes of its flowers?

Mimusops elengi

——, “The Measurement of the Maṇḍala According to Nāgabodhi’s Guhyasamāja-maṇḍalopāyikā-viṃśati-vidhi [in Japanese],” Mikkyo Zuzo, vol. 23 (2004), pp. 26-39. Even if you don’t read Japanese, this is worth searching out because of the labeled charts and Sanskrit equivalents according to one very influential source.

Tathāgatavajra (De-bzhin-gshegs-pa'i-rdo-rje - དེ་བཞིན་གཤེགས་པའི་རྡོ་རྗེ་),་Sambaram Maṇḍala Vidhi (Dpal Bde-mchog-gi Dkyil-’khor-gyi Cho-ga - དཔལ་བདེ་མཆོག་གི་དཀྱིལ་འཁོར་གྱི་ཆོ་ག). Tôhoku no. 1511. Dergé Tanjur, vol. ZHA, folios 308v.3-334r.3. Translated by Vibhūticandra. 

There are two informative passages here. The first tells us what the order of the wall elements in the powder mandala needs to be, starting at the lower ranks and moving upward: 1. Jewels. 2. Festoons. 3. Half festoons. 4. Jewel-like drippers (rin-chen shar-bu). 5. Merlons (mda'-yab). The other passage tells us the background colors: The dance frieze (snam-bu, literally 'blanket') is red. The jewel frieze has various jewels with red background (literally, 'basis'). The festoons and half festoons are on a black background. The jewel-like drippers and white merlons are against blue background. The hooves and ba-ran can be any color that is pretty. The passages  may be compared with what a modern author, Blo-bzang-klu-sgrub (q.v.), says.

Location: fol. 319a5 —

ལོགས་ཀྱི་ཀ་བ་ནི་རྟ་བབས་རྣམས་ཁོ་ནའིའོ། །རྡུལ་ཚོན་གྱི་རྩིག་པ་ལ་ནི་རིན་པོ་ཆེ་དང་། དྲ་བ་དང་། དྲ་བ་ཕྱེད་པ་དང་། རིན་ཆེན་ཤར་བུ་དང་། མདའ་ཡབ་རྣམས་རིམ་གྱིས་སྟེང་ནས་སྟེང་དུ་གནས་པའོ། །

logs kyi ka ba ni rta babs rnams kho na'i'o/ /rdul tshon gyi rtsig pa la ni rin po che dang / dra ba dang / dra ba phyed pa dang / rin chen shar bu dang / mda' yab rnams rim gyis steng nas steng du gnas pa'o/ /

This following indicates that the two elements that most concern us are both white against a blue background.

Location: fol. 322a4 —

གར་གྱི་སྣམ་བུ་ནི་དམར་པོའོ། །རིན་ཆེན་སྣམ་བུ་ནི་ས་གཞི་དམར་པོ་ལ་རིན་པོ་ཆེ་སྣ་ཚོགས་པའོ། །ས་གཞི་ནག་པོ་ལ་དྲ་བ་དང་དྲ་བ་ཕྱེད་པའོ། །ས་གཞི་སྔོན་པོ་ལ་རིན་ཆེན་ཤར་བུ་དང་མདའ་ཡབ་དཀར་པོའོ། །རྨིག་པ་དང་བ་རན་ནི་ཇི་ལྟར་མཛེས་པའོ། །

gar gyi snam bu ni dmar po'o/ /rin chen snam bu ni sa gzhi dmar po la rin po che sna tshogs pa'o/ /sa gzhi nag po la dra ba dang dra ba phyed pa'o/ /sa gzhi sngon po la rin chen shar bu dang mda' yab dkar po'o/ /rmig pa dang ba ran ni ji ltar mdzes pa'o/ /

Kurt Tropper, “The Historical Inscription in the Gsum brtsegs Temple at Wanla, Ladakh,” contained in: Deborah Klimburg-Salter, Kurt Tropper & Christian Jahoda, eds., Text, Image and Song in Transdisciplinary Dialogue, Brill (Leiden 2007), pp. 105-150, at p. 137 is quite a long discussion of the word. This Wanla inscription, using the spelling shar-ru, dates from the vicinity of 1300 CE.

Dimitris Viliouras, Architecture & God: Typological Overview of the Ancient Greek Architecture and Its Sources [extract from an as yet unpublished book], posted at academia.edu.

My notes: According to this fantastically detailed and technical source on the Parthenon of Athens, the Greek equivalent for guttae is given as ςταλαγμoí, or stalagmites (we might argue they have to be stalactites, but both terms have the notion of ‘dripping’ behind them). The projecting horizontal slabs they are suspended from are called the mutule in Latin. The Parthenon is basically built according to the Doric order, although it does include some Ionic elements, and as this source says, the Doric represents the masculine and the sky, while the Ionic represents the feminine and the earth. Although this author shows no awareness that mandalas exist, he includes architectural diagrams of the proportional relations underlying its floor plan that do indeed look quite mandala-like.

Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books on Architecture, ed. by Morris Hicky Morgan. Website version here. Scroll down a bit to the lower search box on your right and insert the word “guttae.” I have a handy Dover Publications paperback version (New York 1960) of the same, and prefer it over the website even if it is not so easily searchable.

•

More resources

For more on Mesopotamian connections, see this blog of fifteen years ago.

We’ve brought up the subject of the mandala before, particularly in two blogs about how it (both the word and the ritual object), starting about a millennium ago, made its appearance in Islamic and Jewish magical texts and practices, and from there entered Europe and much more recently the Americas where, whether for good or ill, occultists continued to experience its powerful effects.

For words in the languages of Mesopotamia, most available and easy to use is the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary.

On Ishtar Gate, watch the Khan Academy’s brief “Smart History” presentation on YouTube.

For a Latin dictionary definition of gutta, look here.

For a useful listing of entries on shar-bu, look here. Of the twelve definitions given, a few are correct, some simply repetitive, others misleading, even confusing the shar-bu with the “full and half festoons” (drwa-ba drwa-phyed).

ཤར་བུ་ ——— I searched TLB with every which spelling and found nothing, even though it ought to be in some of the texts included there.  RKTS has quite a few examples, just that it doesn’t make it easy to determine the Sanskrit. I recommend looking in Negi and searching THL and of course BUDA.

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Although I suppose it isn’t particularly relevant, we might go ahead and say that at Nabataean Petra (now in Jordan) and sites of equivalent age in northern parts of the Arabian Peninsula, especially in Hegra, we can see something resembling the stepped merlon, yet not only is it inverted, it is hollowed into the rock rather than rising out in relief, and it has many more steps — one single “merlon,” if we may call it that, covers the entire width of the entranceway. 

Still, crenellation patterns of the true Mesopotamian type may also be found at Petra (and Hegra, too), as you see here below. These clones of merlons obviously cannot serve their original function, but then how could battlements be of use on a tomb?

So, in short, the only true stepped merlon crenellations we are able to find in Tibet are to be seen in second-rank position near the top of the wall in some mandalas, where they are bound to be identified as drippers, not merlons. I think their absence in Tibet otherwise, and their apparent rareness (?) or absence in India, may help argue for a Mesopotamian cultural transfer.

Maṇḍalas of Medieval Jewish Magic

 

Book of Secrets manuscript, New York
Public Library no. 190, page 167

This blog ought to add some persuasive force to the preceding one on Maṇḍalas of Medieval Arabic (and Latin) Magic. After posting it, I wrote to a professor at Tel Aviv University, Gideon Bohak, author of an impressive book with the title Ancient Jewish Magic. His quick answer took my breath away. He not only knew of a Jewish example of a maṇḍala in a magic book, he sent the manuscript page with a sketch for one, labelled with the word mandal in larger Hebrew letters in the upper right corner. I feel humbled but then again slightly intelligent just because I knew enough to write the right person with my question. He not only knew of this manuscript — as he informed me it is available online — he studied it and published an edition of it.

The manuscript you see here is not in Hebrew, no matter how much it may appear to be. It’s in what is sometimes known as Judaeo-Arabic. That means it was written by an Arabic speaker more comfortable writing their Arabic in Hebrew letters. It has the title Book of Secrets. The language is Arabic, although Hebrew terms might appear here and there, and even, as we see here, at least one Sanskrit word. Oh, and some Greek terms, too. It appears it is little more than a lengthy book of magical prescriptions.

The title makes us think of a different magic book: Noah received the transmission of a Book of Secrets from an angel prior to the Great Flood and inscribed it on a sapphire slate. This he placed in a gold box he took aboard the ark, and after the flood was over passed it on to his descendants until it finally reached the hands of King Solomon, who evidently was the most remarkable in ability to make use of its magic. It dates from the Second Temple, at least in its essentials, preserving elements from that period, but possibly dating as late as the 7th century, according to G.B. 

But no, that older Book of Secrets is a different one from this one with the mandal. I say that because it is likely to confuse other people as it also confused me until G.B. set me straight. The two books of secrets share the same title. They have nothing especially in common besides the title and of course the general subject matter.

Title page of the Book of Secrets in
the New York Public Library

The New York Public Library’s Book of Secrets is a collection of recipes put together by the 15th-century scribe. Its significance right now is this: It supplies us with yet another example of the medieval Indian Buddhist maṇḍala moving far to the west, not just as a word, but as a corresponding object, a device used in ritual contexts. That is enough of a point to make for now.

§  §  §

On the frontispiece: The Digital Collection of the New York Public Library is the source of the page from the manuscript that you see at the top of this blog. You should go have a look at the link to find out more, but just let me say that the scribing was done in the year 1468 CE by one Mosheh ben Yaʻaḳov ben Mordekhai or משה בן יעקב בן מרדכי בן יעקב בן משה.  I assume this scribe must have been equally responsible for the sketch illustrated above, even if he likely copied from an earlier book.

A side note:  The title Sefer ha-Razim (ספר הרזים), or Book of Secrets, makes use of a Hebrew word borrowed from Persian raz, ‘secret.’ It occurs to me that one of many words in Sanskrit that mean ‘secret’ is rahasya, although I don’t propose to prove any linguistic connection, just to suggest the possibility. And now that I check into it, I’m hardly the first, since a lexicon by Georg Rosen entitled Elementa Persica beat me to it by one hundred and eighty years.

More to read

Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge 2008). The brief part about the earlier Book of Secrets on pp. 170-177 is most recommended, and is the main source of my knowledge about it.

Gideon Bohak, A Fifteenth-Century Manuscript of Jewish Magic: MS New York Public Library, Heb. 190 (Formerly Sassoon 56) - Introduction, Annotated Edition and Facsimile [in Hebrew], Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism no. 44], Cherub Press (Los Angeles 2014), in 2 volumes.

Michael A. Morgan, Sepher Ha-Razim: The Book of the Mysteries, Society of Biblical Literature, Scholars Press (Chico CA 1983). An inexpensive English translation of the more ancient and well known Book of Secrets.

• Prof. Bohak told me about some more relevant publications I had neglected to mention, with yet another article suggested by Gal Sofer, a doctoral candidate at Ben Gurion University. There are still more to be found, I know there are, but here are the ones I think to be most relevant in case you want to look into the matter of westward moving magical maṇḍalas some more:

Vajra Regan, “The De  consecratione lapidum: A Previously Unknown Thirteenth-Century Version of the Liber Almandal Salomonis, Newly Introduced with a Critical Edition and Translation,” The Journal of Medieval Latin, vol. 28 (2018), pp. 277-333. I haven’t yet seen this apart from an abstract on the internet. Notice the author’s first name Vajra, of Sanskrit origins. I must highly recommend an interview with the author on the subject of his published article at spreaker.com: https://www.spreaker.com/user/glitchbottle/035-the-unknown-liber-almandal-salomonis. Eleven minutes into it you can hear a description of the “portable altar.” And you might prefer the YouTube version of the same, https://youtu.be/fWAO-H5IKqg, since it has a diagram of the “Almadel.”

Anne Regourd, “Al-Mandal as-Sulaymānī appliqué: Une section interpolée dans le Ms. Sanna 2774?”  The Arabist: Budapest Studies in Arabic, vol. 37 [Studies in Memory of Alexander Fodor] (2016), pp. 135-152.

Anne Regourd, “Images de djinns et exorcisme dans le Mandal al-Sulaymānī” [with text edition, and translation], contained in: Jean-Patrice Boudet, Anna Caiozzo and Nicolas Weill-Parot, eds., Images et magie: Picatrix entre Orient et Occident, Honoré Champion (Paris 2011), pp. 253-294.

Julien Véronèse, L’Almandal et l’Almandel latins au Moyen Âge: Introduction et éditions critiques, Micrologus’ Library no. 46, Salomon Latinus no. 2, SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo (Florence 2012).

Note: On May 8, 2022, I received some corrections from Gideon Bohak that lead me to remove and rewrite this blog before reposting it.

Maṇḍalas of Medieval Arabic (and Latin) Magic

Tibetan studies hardly ever get old or boring. They can lead in unexpected directions, at times drawing you far outside the boundaries defined by and for that semi-(?)academic discipline(/s?). And I have to say, sometimes magic happens. 

I was flipping through some of the impressive and often, for myself, impenetrable products of David Pingree’s sheer genius the other night. I’ve been familiar with his work for decades, even once had the chance to meet and chat awhile with him while he was still living. I remember he was very courteous without being formal. And when I told him some crazy ideas I had about what the various colors of eclipses might have to do with the black magic of Milarepa’s youth, he at least avoided dismissing those ideas out of hand.(1) 

Never one to get overly excited about crossing borders the way most people do, Pingree had an admirable knowledge of early languages ranging from Europe and the Middle East through to India. A historian of science, he didn’t care much for the divide between sciences and the so-called ‘pseudosciences’ as they are bound to be called by the modernist supremacists of our day. Hardly anyone can hope to be his match, not me, and, I’m guessing here, probably not you either.

So just imagine my unjustifiable surprise to find a bit in one of his writings yesterday about the Arabic borrowing al-mandal — used in a context that, leaving Jungianism to one side, does some justice to the original Indian Buddhist referents of maṇḍala — in an 11th-century Arabic text from Sana’a, the ancient city in Yemen.* Not content to stay there, it was known to a very few savants like Albertus Magnus in 13th-century Europe but then went on to become a best seller among European conjurers of the 15th, when it transformed into Almadel and such & sundry spellings as it entered the vernaculars. I dare say (because I’m feeling daring) that the Solomonic magic it forms a part of is still today one of the main inspirations for occultists in Europe and the Americas.

*Sana’a appears to be in a contest with Jericho that will decide which of them is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. I cast my vote for Jericho if only for that 7,000-year-old tower.

I won’t belabor the point, but will supply the quote from David Pingree down below, and send you on a quest for the words “al-mandal” and “Almadel” on the internet. What you are likely to notice is a remarkable confusion. In some European minds Almadel was the name of an Arab magician, and/or author of a text known as the Six Firm Sciences on six types of divination. And those sciences might be anything from scrying (gazing into crystal balls and the like), to angelic or jinn invocation, to geomantic practices (randomly pick a square from a grid-work and get your answer). I won’t even try to sort all this out right now. In any case it is al-mandal as an object that interests us here, and it is this that is featured in that quite distinct Arabic text from 11th-century Yemen.

If you were to make me confess, my real motive for going into it is this: I have been drafting an upcoming blog on what I believe is a loanword — most likely from Arabic directly or indirectly via Persian, although with very deep roots in the ancient Middle East — found in the 1245 manuscript of the works of Padampa and his followers. My reasoning is, If I can persuade you that a Buddhist Sanskrit term was being adopted in an 11th-century Arabic manuscript with longterm effects in Europe, you might find it easier to see another word borrowing going in the opposite direction. And when and if we do go a little further into it, that instance of a word borrowed from east to west does have some strong and meaningful connections to the word borrowed from west to east. All in good time, all in good time.

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A note:

(1) I just checked, and found that the source of my chromatic speculations was an article by another historian of science, Winfried Petri (his article listed below). But anyway, a world-class expert on celestial lore, Pingree was the perfect person to ask a question like this. And he did in fact write something on that subject of eclipse colors in India, in his article “The Indian and Pseudo-Indian Passages in Greek and Latin Astronomical and Astrological Texts,” Viator, vol. 7 (1976), pp. 141-95, at p. 166, even if I didn’t know this at the time. I might add that al-mandal, or “the mandal” in the Arabic texts should not be connected with the offering maṇḍal (མཎྜལ་) of Tibetan Buddhist preliminary practices, but rather with the maṇḍala (དཀྱིལ་འཁོར་) of divine invocation and initiation. The distinction between these two different objects has eluded or confounded many great minds. And it is true that even with several clear points of similarity, the usage of al-mandal in its magical context is different from the maṇḍala (དཀྱིལ་འཁོར་) used in Tibetan empowerment rituals. The motives and rationales are different, even if both might entail evocations of lofty transcendent entities. If you look into some of the readings that follow this should become clear enough. Some may want to object that the use of al-mandal is magical, while the maṇḍala is religious. I shouldn’t have to say that the placement of a dividing line between religion and magic has often caused troubled thinking, but that’s understandable if you see how that boundary has often shifted back and forth as part of historical efforts at self-definition. Examples: exorcism is magic, but when recognized religious authorities within your own religion do it, it isn’t. Impressive prodigies are magic, but if done by saints they’re miracles (and yes, if scientists do them it’s science). Prayers for success and wealth are magic, but when done as a part of religious practice (as in ‘petitionary prayers’), they aren’t. Hell, even casting curse spells, the one thing we most often associate with magic, can be religious when taking the form of anathemas or condemnations. Nobody condemns more people to hell than the holy. If hearing me say these things upsets you, at least ask yourself why before you snap back at me for saying them. But wait, how did I get off on this train of thinking anyway, here in what was meant to be an innocent bibliographical footnote?

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Reading suggestions

I leave it up to you, depending on how comfortable you may or may not be, if you want to delve into such matters as divination and occultism. But if you do count yourself among the brave or foolhardy ones, I recommend above all else a look at this particular webpage. It appears to be an authorized digital version of a book by Joseph H. Peterson on the very texts of interest here, and the illustrations are particularly necessary to see.

Mark R. Cohen, “Goitein, Magic, and the Geniza,” Jewish Studies Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 4 (2006), pp. 294-304. Goitein's works are significant here for showing the general context of the word borrowing. That means the extensive sea trade between India and Egypt during the 10th to 13th centuries. And this article has good references in case you would like to explore this further.

A.W. Greenup, “The Almadel of Solomon, according to the Text of the Sloan MS. 2731,” The Occult Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (August 1915), pp. 96-102. I despaired of ever seeing this until I discovered there is a complete archive of the contents of this periodical online. 

Genese Grill, “Almandal Grimoire: The Book as Magical Object,” The Georgia Review, vol. 69, no. 4 (Winter 2015), pp. 514-541. Despite the title, this is more about what happens when, with no more spines or bindings to hold onto, and no more paper pages to flip over, books are dematerialized into digital streams on a screen. Very worth reading and reflecting about even, if you really must, on a screen. I went ahead and read it on screen myself, something I find I do more and more, even feel myself coerced into it against my will by the rocketing prices of postage and print cartridges.

Csaba Kiss, “On Yantras in Early Śaiva Tantras,” Cracow Indological Studies, vol. 16 (2014), pp. 203-233. Try this. 

Roger A. Pack, “Almadel Auctor Pseudonymus: De Firmitate Sex Scientiarum,” Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age, vol. 42 (1975), pp. 147-181. At p. 153:

“What we find here is al-mandal, the ‘mandala’ or mystic symbol, either round or square or a combination of both, which the writings of C.G. Jung and his disciples have made familiar to us...”

Winfried Petri, “Colours of Lunar Eclipses According to Indian Tradition,” Indian Journal of the History of Science, vol. 3 (1968), pp. 91-98.

David Pingree, “Learned Magic in the Time of Frederick II,” contained in: Isabelle Pingree and John M. Steele, eds., Pathways into the Study of Ancient Sciences, Selected Essays by David Pingree, American Philosophical Society Press (Philadelphia 2013), a special issue of Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. vol. 104 (2014), pp. 477-484, at p. 486:

“[These Florence manuscript treatises] are all representative of Salomonic magic. The first two concern almandal of Salomon. This mandal is in shape and inscriptions completely conformable to an Indian mandala; it is remarkable to see the Sanskrit word transmitted so purely through Arabic, in which it is still used to refer to a magical object, to Latin. The figure is a square ‘wall’ with a circle in the center and spokes pointing to the four cardinal directions (indicated by ‘gates’) and to the four intermediate directions. On each of the four side walls are inscribed the names of angels...”

Anne Regourd, “Le Kitāb al-Mandal al-Sulaymānī, un ouvrage d'exorcisme yéménite postérieur au Ve/XIe S.?” Res Orientales, vol. 13 (2001), pp. 123-138. The first footnote has a long and valuable discussion about the meanings of al-mandal, without neglecting its Indic and Buddhist sourcing, but the rest is mainly about the dating of the manuscripts, the Solomonic lore of the lost and recovered magic seal (a seal of dominion over human, animal and spirit realms), and the question of how much local Yemeni herbal knowledge is represented in the text. I see it mentions misk, but this is not surprising since musk was Tibet’s primary claim to fame in the Middle East back in those centuries. And Yemen was a trading powerhouse for east-west commerce starting from Roman Empire days, just read into the five-volume set by S.D. Goitein on the Genizah documents from Cairo. Goitein wanted to find ‘rationally profit-motivated’ traders and so took minimal notice of the magic evident in those documents (see the Cohen essay, listed above). 

Anne Regourd, “A Twentieth-Century Manuscript of the Kitāb al-Mandal al-Sulaymānī (Ar IEW 286, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia): Texts on Practices & Texts in Practices,” contained in: Marcela A. Garcia Probert and Petra M. Sijpesteijn, eds., Amulets and Talismans of the Middle East and North Africa in Context: Transmission, Efficacy and Collections, Brill (Leiden 2022), pp. 47-77. I’ve just learned this article is open access (that means anybody) at the Brill site.

Lynn Thorndike, “Alfodhol and Almadel: Hitherto Unnoted Mediaeval Books of Magic in Florentine Manuscripts,” Speculum, vol. 2, no. 3 (July 1927), pp. 326-331.

——, “Alfodhol and Almadel Once More,” Speculum, vol. 20, no. 1 (January 1945), pp. 88-91. 

——, ”Solomon and the Ars Notoria,” a chapter in: Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science during the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era, Columbia University Press (New York 1923), vol. 2, pp. 279-289. Truly fascinating are the defensive justifications given by Honorius, “Master of Thebes,” for the Christian employment of magical arts that can make them turn out to be sacred arts. Notice, too, at p. 288: 

“Very elaborate directions are given for the composition of the seal of the living God. Circles are drawn of certain proportions emblematic of divine mysteries, a cross is made within, numerous letters are written down equidistant from one another. A pentagon and two hexagons have to be placed just so in relation to one another ; characters are inscribed in their angles ; and various sacred names of God, Raphael, Michael, and other angels are written along their sides. Different parts must be executed in different colors...” 

Jan R. Veenstra, “The Holy Almandal: Angels and the Intellectual Aims of Magic,” contained in: Jan N. Bremmer and Jan R. Veenstra, eds., The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, Peeters (Leuven 2002), pp. 189-229. This ends with some remarkable drawings of the mandal altar setup based on early manuscripts, so have a look at this if you can.

 

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What is your reaction to all this? Do leave a comment. 

 

Sana’a

PS (April 17, 2022):

I heard a qualm questioning how I could feel so certain that the Yemen magic text got its word al-mandal from Indian Buddhists. Why not from non-Buddhists, from Hindus? To the best of my knowledge, and the late famous Hindu tantric studies expert André Padoux once assured me (in Cambridge MA in 1993 or 1994) it is true, Hindus of various lines of tradition never made use of a ritual device they called maṇḍala before the 20th century. Some people in the art business made up the idea that “Hindu mandalas” did exist because the word ‘mandala’ was much better known to the international art public, because the word had purchase and they could fly with it.* Yes, various types of Hindu tantra did make use of objects like maṇḍalas, sometimes very like maṇḍalas, but they were called yantras. If the Yemeni contacts were non-Buddhists they would have borrowed the word yantra instead. Don’t get me wrong here, I actually think that the term yantra is the broader term. It has a lot of interesting usages that I’ve gone into in an earlier blog, Do Dampa’s Droids Dare Dream of Desire? It means a ‘device’ of any kind and for a variety of sublime and mundane purposes. Hindu tantra does use yantras for divine invocation and visualization practices, in general much like Buddhist Vajrayānists make use of their maṇḍalas.

(*But this understanding based on my memory more or less directly contradicts his position in a published work, an article on the use of maṇḍala in an 11th-century Kashmiri tantric work — André Padoux, “Maṇḍalas in Abhinavagupta's Tantrāloka,” contained in: Gudrun Bühnemann, ed., Maṇḍalas and Yantras in the Hindu Traditions, Brill (Leiden 2003),  pp. 225-235. When he lectured me 30 years ago he may have had in mind maṇḍalas of divine forms [the most typical but hardly the only kind of Tibetan དཀྱིལ་འཁོར་ / maṇḍala], since full depictions of the deities along with their retinues do not seem to appear in early Hindu artistic versions. In any case, Hindu tantric sources are more likely to use the terms yantra and even cakra or ‘wheel’ for their invocation devices, and these tend to be largely geometrical.)

Some of these examples of Hindu yantras do resemble Buddhist maṇḍalas.
and at the same time resemble al-mandal, at least in their form.

One more thing

Were Buddhists in those times sailing to Yemen? I can’t say for sure, but believe they very surely could have been. Socotra Island, off the coast of Yemen and today a part of Yemen, has some inscriptions in its coastal caves made by Indian sailors. Although they belong to a much earlier period than the Yemen magic text, some (not all) of their names indicate they were Buddhists. For clear evidence, look here:

Ingo Strauch and Michael D. Bukharin, “Indian Inscriptions from the Cave Ḥoq on Suquṭrā (Yemen),” Annali [Naples], vol. 64 (2004), pp. 121-138.

Or better yet, find the book:

Ingo Strauch, ed., Foreign Sailors on Socotra: The Inscriptions and Drawings from the Cave Hoq, Vergleichende Studien zu Antike und Orient no. 3, Hempen Verlag (Bremen 2012).

• There are a lot of reasons to care for and even love Socotra. One of them is the fact that it has been a preserve of numerous unusual and unique plant species. I say “has been” because it is reportedly under threat because of new-found wealth, leading to increasing goat ownership, and the resultant plant consumption by those goats that spells death for the Dragon Blood trees. Have a look at Hugh Bigger's essay about it here.

Of course, Yemenis themselves, not to mention Egyptians, were very much involved in the early trading networks, and we ought to be thinking about that as well.

Yes, there are inscriptions of Indian traders in Egypt, too. About them see this:

Richard Salomon, “Epigraphic Remains of Indian Traders in Egypt,”  Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 111, no. 4 (1991), pp.  731-736.  Added note in vol. 113, no. 4 (1993), p. 593.

 

Add on (May 18, 2022):

I located this curiously multiple (person, book, object) definition of Almadel in the “Biographical Dictionary” appended to the following:

Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, tr. by James Freake, Llewellyn Publications (St. Paul 1995), at p. 788:

“ALMADEL: The name of a medieval magician mentioned by the Abbot Johann Trithemius in his Antipalus maleficiorum (c. 1500) as the author of an edition of the Key of Solomon. Also the name of the fourth book of the manuscript collection that goes under the collective name Lesser Key of Solomon or Lemegeton; it is specifically applied to the wax table described therein.”

Add on to add on (August 6, 2024):

Two days ago this Zoom video dated November 5, 2022, was posted at YouTube:  Almandal & Almadel, From Jinns & Shayatin to Holy Angels of God, Texts & Methods, by Joseph H Peterson. The presenter somehow misunderstood why Padampa was mentioned in this blog, and gives the blog's author as one named Roger A. Pack, a person I've never heard of, except as author of an essay I listed in the Reading Suggestions. But apart from those two missteps, I found it all very interesting and illuminating, precisely on the topic, and well worth seeing.

I wonder if J.H.P. had noticed the follow-up blog posted on May 4, 2022: Maṇḍalas of Medieval Jewish Magic.