Is Esalen a Geographical Maṇḍala?

Sravana Borkataky-Varma, Esalen Board Member and Harvard Divinity School Scholar, is a practitioner of Śākta Tantra, informed by knowledge of Vajrayāna (Buddhist Tantra), which also includes engagement with the maṇḍala, which takes different forms (rūpa). Her practice started when she was eight years old in India; eventually, she earned a Ph.D. in the United States. 

“In maṇḍala practice, experiences arise and dissolve, just as thoughts evolve and devolve. And these maṇḍalas need not be restricted to images but can be, and dare I say should be, extended to the geography of the place we live,” said Borkataky-Varma. “They include nature, people, animals, and even mundane buildings.”

A maṇḍala (Sanskrit for “circle” or “discoid object,”) is a geometric design that holds a great deal of symbolism in Hindu and Buddhist cultures. A majority are depicted as spheres, but Borkataky-Varma encourages her students to build their own, in their own way, “allowing for spontaneous creation and dismantling,” she explained, “…the shape of a spiral, occasionally with sharp edges, and sometimes with no boundaries whatsoever” — an experience of macrocosm revealed through the mandala itself. 

In advance of her upcoming workshop, Borkataky-Varma shares her insight into The Esalen Mandala — a visual, physical, and boundless story told through sacred geometry and Tantra in the midst of cosmic nature.

The Esalen Maṇḍala: Sacred Geography Through The Lens of Tantra

By Sravana Borkataky-Varma

It is 2015, spring. Crisp air, bright sunshine. Children with sun-kissed hair play on the lush green lawns. The sound of the ocean. Fragrances mingle from the flower and fruit trees. 

All this welcomes me to the Esalen Institute. 

The last seven years, I visited Esalen several times, to my great fortune. On each occasion, I heard stories about the transformations people experience there. I was also transformed. People feel connection and wholeness. I started wondering what in these grounds brings such profound experiences. 

Esalen is a maṇḍala: a mystic representation that is also a truth, a cosmology that is living, breathing, ever-changing yet constant. I have come to see this. Maṇḍalas are complex, their meaning and use open to varied approaches.

In Buddhist Tantra (Vajrayāna), a maṇḍala is a sacred diagram. Practitioners ritualistically view and deploy a maṇḍala to transcend their microcosm, to actively engage the macrocosm, on the vertical plane, so to speak. Some consider that macrocosm to be the cosmos. 

The maṇḍala and cosmos are the perfected realm of the deity, attuned to the microcosmic world of practitioners’ psychological states. In other words, a maṇḍala practice transforms and translocates the cosmos to be centered on the practitioner. This power of transportability confers empowerment over reality through insight. Hence, a maṇḍala can be a type of cosmogram. 

Hindu Tantra uses yantras (symbolic figures, also contraptions). A yantra, in comparison to a maṇḍala, is made of simpler linear diagrams of concentric configurations. The center (bindu or drop) is the most important, for from it the full yantra emanates. The Kulārṇava Tantra (1000–1400 CE) establishes the importance of yantra in ritual space: “as the body to the soul, oil to the lamp, a yantra is to the deity.” (Avalon 1965, 154). The most popular yantra, also the most globally transmitted, is the Śrīyantra or the Śrīcakra, born from the Śrīvidyā school of Hindu Śākta Tantra, so-called goddess Tantra. 

The end goal for yantra is the same as maṇḍala. Practitioners realize their essential self and the universe to be empty of inherent existence, a mere construction, māyā, illusion. Realization of the gnostic truth. 

My maṇḍala is often dynamic, emblematic of creation and destruction. It is a space where binaries that govern our everyday lives dissolve. With each successful dissolution (even if it is fleeting) in me, the practice cultivates compassion, kindness, inclusiveness, and a degree of ineffable luminosity. That said, I am a flawed being, and I do not claim to have achieved any form of perfection.

Esalen Institute's tantric roots are laid out in Jeffrey Kripal's Esalen (2008). With the 1960s backdrop — including the sexual revolution, psychedelic revelation, and the American counterculture — Esalen provided an alternative to an alternative: "the religion of no religion promises a sexual orientation of no sexual orientation, a gender of no gender, that is, a polyamorous eroticism, a culture 'beyond gender' that refuses to be dogmatic about desire." (Kripal 2008, 462-63). All this is true.

 But, over the last seven years, I have wondered if this long and rich history was simply a product of Michael Murphy and Richard Price's vision, plus the sixties, plus the longings of a culture wounded by the Vietnam war and racial segregation. Or was there something more embedded in the land, in the hot springs, in the air? That wondering began my journey looking at the land as a geographical maṇḍala. 

I intentionally walk the land after soaking in the healing waters. I consciously stop to let the expanse of the ocean rest in me. I smell the flowers in the garden while simultaneously watching monarch butterflies. I dip my toes in the cold water of the creek. All the while, I speak to the universe in the nook tucked between the Murphy house and the Price house, and creative magic is revealed itself by the art barn, and, finally, I meditate in the serpent corner. The Esalen maṇḍala shines forth. 

Tantric cosmology emphasizes dynamic relationships between places and people. Nature and sentient beings are inextricably linked. Transformation emerges in the co-creative space of a “cosmic dance.” Being on the land consciously and unconsciously allows a maṇḍala to be constructed — the here and now collapses. 

Sitting under a star canopy, the ocean crashing against the mountain, the separation between the local and the cosmic dissolves, simultaneously transforming and translocating the geographical land into a cosmos centered on an individual being. The splendor of the manifested universe is expressed in its visual metaphysics, felt in the cells of our physical bodies, runs through subtle channels to generate experiences of the macrocosm. A deep realization of the incipient unity of male and female principles ensues. Some people even grasp a fleeting glimpse of the purified vision of reality. 

It is for good reason that so many return year after year.