Making mandalas and meeting bodhisattvas

·期刊原文
Making mandalas and meeting bodhisattvas: Raising awareness in religious education

by Clive Erricker
Religious Education

Vol. 89 No. 1 Winter.1994

Pp.109-120

Copyright by Religious Education

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The mind is like an eye that sees but cannot see itself (Eck, 1981).

INTRODUCTION

This article addresses two issues germane to the teaching of religious
education. The first is the place of "spirituality" within the subject. The
second is the value of including the teaching of faiths other than
Christianity within the curriculum. Historically, the teaching of
spirituality has been associated with nurture. In schools with a religious
foundation it is understood that there is a need to address the spiritual
or faith development of pupils. In Catholic schools, particularly, this
task will be central to the school's ethos. In state schools without
religious affiliation, at least in the United Kingdom, the term
"spirituality" retains a ghostly presence despite attempts at exorcism, but
it is most often identified with moral education. We can teach rules, but
the spiritual is something more nebulous. The teaching of world religions
in schools has invited two main criticisms, namely that it is purely
informational and therefore neglects important educational goals and that
it offers subject matter for older pupils but is less relevant to primary
education.

My contention in this article is as follows. First, our concept of
spirituality must be reassessed. It is central to our curriculum aims
concerning the development of the child, and religious education is
well-equipped to inform this concept. Second, the teaching of world
religions does not have to be purely descriptive or reserved for older
pupils. Rather, in the teaching and practices of different traditions we
find methods appropriate to the spiritual development of children. This
article draws upon the Buddhist tradition by way of illustration.

Spirituality was a term lost to religious education for some time, but
recently a new debate has focused around the concept. It is unlikely that
this debate will penetrate primary teaching to any degree unless some of
the preconceptions surrounding the notion of spirituality are dispelled.
Historically, spirituality is associated with the Christian tradition, and
it is often hard for teachers to overcome so many negative assumptions,
antipathetic to their educational goals, connoted by this fact. I hope that
what follows may dispel some of the anxieties primary-school teachers have
about the place of religious education in the primary curriculum; may
introduce a broader, deeper, and more open concept of the "spiritual"; and
might even revitalize some of our thinking about what we are educating for.
I am not concerned here with adding something to the burden of the
curriculum load, but with introducing a richer perception of what it may
mean to educate a child.

This article arose from planning a course on Buddhism for primary-school
teachers. My interest in this stemmed from my belief that Buddhism could be
introduced in an integrated way to the primary-school curriculum and be
very valuable to children of this age range. Planning the course set me to
thinking exactly how this could be accomplished and what approach to
religious education in primary schools would underpin it. I isolated two
issues: (1) How could we get to the heart of the Buddhist tradition? (2)
How could we get to the heart of primary religious education and marry the
two?

THE CHARACTER OF BUDDHIST PRACTICE

Buddhism does not start with belief but with practice; it does not begin
with commitment to a creed but with reflection on human experience. The
first step in this reflection is observing and then training the mind to
observe and reflect more skillfully. This process is often referred to as
bhavana, meaning mental culture or mental development. These qualities are
clearly important to cultivate in any educational context. The significant
aspect of this process that Buddhism emphasizes is to look within; to watch
the mind itself as well as what the mind watches; to watch it at work and
watch it at play; to use it skillfully as an instrument for exploring,
understanding, and expressing ourselves and our potential. This does not
have to be a somber and introverted business as western connotations of
mind-watching might suggest; it does not produce melancholy and
introversion; it does not introduce us to unreachable things lying dormant
in the darker recesses of our character which, if we were to once glimpse
them, would do irreparable harm. In fact the aim of bhavana is to give rise
to happiness and confidence and to enable us to live healthier lives,
whatever our age.

Here are two quotations which illustrate this well. The first is by a Thai
meditation teacher, Ajahn Chah, whose forest retreat order is now firmly
rooted in Britain under the direction of Ajahn Sumedho, an American monk,
and is itself concerned with the educational value of Buddhism for children
in classes and summer schools offered at their main center, "Amaravati," in
Hertfordshire. Ajahn Chah succinctly and imaginatively sums up Buddhist
practice in this statement:

Try to be mindful, and let things take their natural course. Then your
mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool.
All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool,
and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many
strange and wonderful things come and go, but you will be still. This
is the happiness of the Buddha (Kornfield and Breiter 1985, preface).

Keeping in mind western readers concerned with the balance of stress and
efficiency in their lives, Joel Levey sums up the basic skills cultivated
in Buddhism in the title of his book The Fine Arts of Relaxation,
Concentration and Meditation--Ancient Skills for Modern Minds. Though
drawing eclectically on different sources for his material and not
representing Buddhism as a tradition in his work, he nevertheless
illustrates the important point that the "practice" of these skills is not
restricted to belonging to a particular religious context. However, like
all skillful endeavor and training, it will not work if the overall context
in which it works is not understood. In other words, to develop activities
that play fast and loose with the overall context in which skills and
capacities are developed would undermine their effectiveness. The Buddhist
tradition offers not a training for paid-up Buddhists but rather
educational practices for human beings which will work well if they
understand how to use them effectively. So, with a Buddhistic flavor, Levey
writes in his introduction under the heading "Relaxation and Beyond":

This book is for everyone interested in learning methods to master
stress and enhance the quality of their life. It is also a handbook
for those who wish to understand and master such skills in order to
teach them to others. Whatever your motivation, you will find that the
ideas and techniques in this collection have been presented with an
emphasis on practical application in our modern lives, whilst
preserving a sense of the depth and sacredness of such inner arts of
mental development. I suggest that you consider these ideas with your
mind, sense their meaning for you in your heart, and test and confirm
the power and practicality of these skills with your experience
(1987,13).

This was my starting point at the heart of the Buddhist tradition, to work
with the practice of bhavana or mental development.

THE PRACTICE OF PRIMARY EDUCATION

Bruno Bettelheim writes:

Today, as in times past, the most important and also the most
difficult task in raising a child is helping him to find meaning in
life. Many growth experiences are needed to achieve this. The child,
as he develops, must learn step by step to understand himself better;
with this he becomes more able to understand others, and eventually
can relate to them in ways which are mutually satisfying and
meaningful (1989, 3).

Bettelheim's observations link closely with the purpose of the Buddhist
practice I have just described. Bettelheim stresses the need to find
meaning as a way of making sense of human experience right from the
beginning of our conscious lives. This is not an exercise in rationality
that starts to occur at a certain level of intellectual development but an
unstoppable interpretative activity, as natural and necessary as a
straightforward physiological function like breathing. It is as unstoppable
as consciousness itself, but without nourishment and nurture the result is
a crippled consciousness. Apart from the material and emotional stability
we seek to provide for children, we must also help them develop their inner
environment, which is shaped by their ability to achieve this task of
constructing meaning. A word I like to use for it is "mythos" or
"mythology," meaning not that which is fake or fantasy as opposed to fact,
but that construction of reality which provides meaning as a foundation for
the use of all of our energy: emotional, volitional, or intellectual.
Without it, our consciousness is fragmented, our energy dissipated, and
our identity in ruins. Bhavana or mental development is one means to this
end. It provides a way of accomplishing this task well. If attention to
this does not occur within primary education, children in their later
schooling will already be disadvantaged.

However, it is interesting that, though we have traditionally recognized
the importance of certain capabilities in primary education such as
language and mathematical skills, we have still tended to treat them as
things to be learned. Their raison d'etre lies in themselves. It is as
though a collection of these skills well-learned solves the problem of how
children mature into adults- actually gain maturity as human beings. This
lack of holistic awareness, which is what the question of meaning
addresses, is of course indicative of the character of our culture
generally; and so it is not surprising to find a medical analogy for such
impoverished thinking.

Oliver Sachs writes in Awakenings, a commentary on his time as a
neurologist working with patients suffering from sleeping sickness, about
the effects of L-Dopa, a miracle drug that awoke patients to a "normal"
life after years without consciousness of their existence. The belief that
they are now well, whole and cured, is based on the assumption that there
exists no psychological or even spiritual aspect of such an awakening to
life. To be alive is to have those faculties and capacities that normal
people have.

The chimerical concept which now takes its place is one of the
delusions of vitalism or materialism, the notion that "health,"
"well-being," "happiness," etc. can be reduced to certain "factors" or
"elements"--principles, fluids, humours, commodities--things which can
be measured and weighed, bought and sold. Health, thus conceived, is
reduced to a level, something to be titrated or topped-up in a
mechanical way (1982 8).

Sachs explains this fraudulent medical expectation--that all will be well
and the job done once the wonder drug is produced--as the result of lacking
an adequate metaphysical understanding of well-being:

It is from this debased metaphysics that there arises the notion of a
mystical substance, a miraculous drug, something which will assuage
all our hungers and ills, and deliver us instantly from our miserable
state: metaphorical equivalents of the elixir of life (1982, 28).

So it is in education. Just as Sachs's patients are expected to wake up to
a life that has no history as far as they are concerned, so we expect
children to construct their own history without any holistic notion of how
this is to be done. Again, like breathing, it just happens, so we presume
it is done well. There is no attention paid to how it is to be done. I
don't mean simply rules about it but developing an awareness of what is
actually happening and how. People cannot deal with their own prejudices
unless they are able to identify them for themselves and see how, when, and
why they arise, yet we tell children not to be prejudiced as though
prejudice were the easiest thing in the world to cure, without thought as
to how it arises in the first place. It arises in us all as part of our
mythology--the story we construct about ourselves in relation to the world
in which our identity is based. Our prejudices are an integral part of that
blemished picture, which provides the meaning and energy for our lives. To
construct such meaning-pictures well, we need to introduce into our
education system generally, and into primary education especially, a
concept of "mental development."

If we break this concept down into three first steps as a foundation for
primary-school practice, it may not sound so unusual. For example, it would
involve:

(i) enquiry and the ability to enquire;

(ii) self-worth and the capacity for self-discovery;

(iii) an understanding of relationships between all phenomena: things,
events, and people.

MARRYING BUDDHIST PRACTICE AND PRIMARY EDUCATION

As a consequence of this thinking, my course on Buddhism centered upon an
introduction to basic techniques taken and adapted from across the Buddhist
tradition, which would be instrumental in fulfilling the following aims
across the curriculum and provide a focus for religious education.
Aims

To show:

(i) how, by drawing on the techniques and structures of a religious
tradition in terms of how that tradition nurtures the 'spiritual"
development of its adherents, we could see corresponding educational aims
being fulfilled for the personal development of children in primary
education without this resulting in any way in a "confessional nurturing"
approach.

(ii) that, in terms of religious education, here was an opportunity to
acquaint children with the spirituality inherent in religious traditions in
an implicit way, laying the foundations for an understanding of religion at
an explicit level at a later stage.

(iii) how teachers themselves might, through this "process model" of
approaching religious education in primary school, be stimulated and
informed as to how the subject could integrate and enrich the curriculum
and their teaching methods generally.

Method

The method has to take teachers through experiences that they feel would be
educationally rewarding to their pupils in an adapted

form. The basic techniques employed can be grouped under five headings:
relaxation, concentration, visualization, response, and recollection. These
headings do not indicate techniques exclusive of each other, but rather
that together they develop awareness. Here is an example to illustrate
this, based upon the use of the mandala.

The Stimulus from the traditional Mandala

The two pictures below are of much-used symbolic designs in Tibetan
Buddhism. This branch of the Buddhist tradition, whilst little understood
before the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 and the subsequent exile of
the Dalai Lama, is now represented by communities across the world, some of
which can be found in the United Kingdom and the United States. Initially
often established by Tibetan lames (meditation teachers), these centers
have drawn westerners to this form ofh as monks or nuns and lay
practitioners. There is now a prodigious output of publications explaining
the Tibetan teachings. The first picture is called a mandala. Mandalas are
basic geometric shapes which are used within Buddhist meditation practice.
The name itself means circle. Mandalas are sometimes described as
psychocosmograms focusing the mind on particular aspirations or qualities
which represent aspects of Buddhahood or enlightenment, for example wisdom
or compassion. The mandala acts like an inner mental map by means of which
the meditator can purify the mind and develop the quality aspired to within
him or herself. This quality is then projected into the world by the
Buddhist through his or her actions, and thus the world itself becomes
transformed. In this sense the mandala might be compared to the purpose of
contemplative prayer in the Christian tradition.

The second picture is a bodhisattva, or helping Buddha, called
Avalokateshvara or Chenresig. He embodies the quality of compassion, and
that is what he gives out to those who are experiencing suffering in this
world. Iconographically this is depicted in his one thousand hands, each
with an eye, which are stretched out to help and represent his all-seeing
wisdom. Bodhisattvas are beings who resolved to achieve Buddhahood or
perfect enlightenment for the sake of others. Buddhists understand these
beings to be worthy of the highest respect and devotion because they have
realized the ideal to which they themselves aspire. They also believe that
these beings exist to help others realize the same goal; therefore, in
meditation, they will make offerings to them in order that they may
generate the same bodhisattva motivation. In this sense, the role of
bodhisattvas may be compared to that of saints within the Christian
tradition.

Though highly elaborate and colorful, the mandala structure is very simple
and clear, as shown in Figure 1. For the Buddhist, the quality aspired to
will be found within the inner circle, embodied in the usual iconic form:
compassion and Avalokateshvara, for example. The four gates or entrances
are ways to this quality and so may be represented by other iconic forms of
Buddhas or bodhisattvas representing qualities such as wisdom or mercy.
Outside these gates is our world of tendencies such as worry, doubt, and
fear, which arise from our desires, aversions, and delusions. Desire,
aversion, and delusion are known to Buddhists as the three poisons,
hindrances to the spiritual life. They represent the opposite of that which
Buddhists aspire to and put their trust in: Buddha or Buddhahood, meaning
enlightenment; Dharma, meaning the Truth, the way things really are;
Sangha, the Buddhist community, committed to living a virtuous life. These
are known as the three jewels. The message of the mandala is clear. At the
center is our aspiration; the gates provide the ways to it that we must
cultivate; and the outer circle encloses those habits and failings we must
let go of in order to transform ourselves and to realize our full
potential.

Using the stimulus in an educational context

The following activity illustrates how we can bridge the gap from the
ritual practice within the tradition to a use of the forms and techniques
in our own educational setting.

1. Look at the mandala; carefully follow its shape with your eyes as
though you are "walking it." For a short while slowly "walk" around it
in this way and then continue doing so with your eyes closed.

2. Think of someone whom you admire for a quality this person has,
someone you would like to be like in this way. See the person's image
as clearly as you can. If this is difficult, think of something simple
that reminds you of the person. Put this at the center of your
mandala. Again walk around it in your mind.

3. What qualities do you think you have that could help you to be like
this person? Try to think of four, and put them at the entrances of
your mandala. If words are difficult to see, use colors to represent
them, or shapes or objects. Again "walk around," stopping at each one
and recollecting a time when you have used that quality. If qualities
are difficult to find, then think of four things you could do that
would help you be more like your central figure. They may be small
things like making the tea in the morning or being more patient when
the bus is late. Put an image or word, representing these things, at
the entrances. 4. What would you like to let go of in yourself to help
you achieve these qualities? What hindrances can you think of? Let
your mind recall them and name them as they arise. Walk around the
mandala in your mind naming all the things now in it as you pass them:

- the hindrances in the outer circle - the qualities in the square -
the name of the person at the center of the inner circle

5. After doing this, stand just outside your mandala and make a
gesture, a response to it and the person in it in any way that you
wish. As you do so, however small or large it is, put all your energy
into it through your concentration.

6. Having created this mandala, bring it to mind whenever you want to
aspire to the qualities it represents.

The construction of a whole mandala in this way is a sophisticated task,
but it teaches us a number of things, not least that we often do not
concentrate well, that we cannot relax, that we are not sure what our mind
is doing a lot of the time, that we drift off and become unaware, that our
visual imagination has not been well motivated, that our memory is unclear,
that we are not sure what our aspirations and resolves are, and that we
often have no practical ways of trying to achieve them. This is the
beginning of learning about ourselves. To be aware of one hindrance and see
its effect clearly or one quality and see how it transforms us when we
allow it to is a great step forward. To resolve to put our energy into that
happening again and not be forgetful of it is yet a greater step. In order
to create this awareness, clear observation, concentration, and the
imaginative creativity of the mind have all been important. The mandala is
like a summing up of the connection between the educational quality of
Buddhist practice and the"spiritual" character of education.

Adapting and simplifying the stimulus

For primary school pupils, it is a question of developing this way of
learning step by step; focusing on themselves, going out from themselves,
developing the qualities they need to fulfil their aspirations. In this,
three educational principles must be pursued:

1. An open approach, which allows children to formulate their own
aspirations and to see what they see and wish to tell you, not what
they think you want to hear.

2. Engagement through a strategy for response: that is, giving a
structure that directs attention and activity so that the children are
not just receiving. 3.

3. Stillness and awareness. I put these together because that is how
they occur. Where there is stillness--a lack of chatter in the
mind--awareness arises: a clear seeing or listening to what is there.
This is the basis of a worthwhile response that the child can value.

An activity based on an adapted and simplified stimulus

-- Draw a circle on a big piece of paper and put it on the ground in front
of you.

-- Sit quietly and comfortably and just look at it.

-- Let your eyes follow the circle round.

-- Now close your eyes and think of someone close to you whom you are
really fond of.

-- See the person as clearly as you can and put the person in your circle
with your imagination.

-- Now walk round the circle in your mind. Remember what it is like to be
with the person and thin\` of the reasons why you are so fond of him or
her.

-- Repeat the reasons to yourself as you think of them.

-- Imagine the reasons are flowers, and throw them down around the circle
as you walk it in your mind.

-- Open your eyes. Now draw the person in your circle, or something that
reminds you of the person, and the flowers around it.

-- Put next to each flower one thing you have remembered about the person
in your circle.

CONCLUSION

What conclusions can we draw from this attempt to marry Buddhist practice
and religious education in the primary school? I wish to argue it is not a
marriage of convenience but one of necessity. It addresses, in a direct
way, the question of how our educational system can accommodate the notion
of spirituality in a positive and child-centered fashion. It recognizes the
plurality of religious practice in western society. It illustrates that we
can be enriched by conversing across the boundaries of religious and
secular worldviews. The ramifications for religious education are
considerable. It must investigate the value of understanding religious
practice in providing strategies for growth in an educational context. It
must address the inner life of the child as well as considering children's
responses to their natural and social environments. Most importantly, it
must affirm that children's worldviews are constructed at a metaphorical
level which takes account of their individual experiences and
relationships, expressed in iconic forms.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Picture 1: A traditional mandala

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Picture 2: The one-thousand-armed Avalokateshvara

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 1

An inner circle. A surrounding square with four gates or entrances. An
outer circle.

REFERENCES

Bettelheim, B. 1989. The uses of enchantment. New York: Random House.

Eck, D. 1981. Darsan: Seeing the divine image in India. Chambersberg:
Animal

Kornfield, J. and P. Breiter, eds. 1985. A still forest pool. London:
Quest.

Levey, J. 1987. Relaxation, concentration and meditation: Ancient skills
for modern minds. London: Wisdom.

Sachs, O. 1982. Awakenings. London: Picador.

This article was previously published in Education 3(13), March 1992, pp.
54-60 (Longman Group, Harlow, UK).

~~~~~~~~

By Clive Erricker West Sussex Institute of Higher Education

Clive Erricker is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at West Sussex
Institute of Higher Education, Chichester, West Sussex, England.