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World Conqueror and World Renouncer Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2010
In this chapter we have to make the transition from the rhetoric of grand religio-politico-moral conceptions of kingship to their implementation and and realization in historical circumstances. But this transition is best made through an intervening term that mediates and unites theory and practice, namely, certain cosmological cum topographical models of the polity that were employed as blueprints of political form.
Cosmological Topography
It is the concept of mandala that prompted me to coin the label “galactic polity.” According to a common Indo-Tibetan tradition, mandala is composed of two elements – a core (manda) and a container or enclosing element (-la). A frequent manifestation of mandala is in the form of designs and diagrams painted on textiles or drawn with powdered colors. Again at quite different levels of symbolization and arrangement great architectural monuments like Borobudur, Bayon and Angkor Wat have been called mandala (Figures 7.4a and 7.4b); the human body has been likened to a mandala; and cosmological schemes of various sorts in both tantric Hinduism and Buddhism have been referred to as mandala (e.g., Vajravarman's elucidation of “the receptacle mandala”). Most interestingly, Kautilya in his Arthashastra also used mandala to discuss the spatial configuration of friendly and enemy states from the point of view of a particular kingdom; that is, mandala as a geopolitical concept. All these examples share the basic format of a central image and surrounding entities, the simplest being quinary grouping.
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