Mandala Base (early 1400s): Art, History and Details

Mandala Base (early 1400s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

A ritual object of Tibetan Buddhism, this cloisonné disc is used as the base for a three-dimensional mandala composed of miniature buildings. The decoration includes the lotus flowers and the Eight Buddhist Treasures: the wheel, the conch, the umbrella, the canopy, the lotus, the paired fish, the vase, and the endless knot.

Object facts

• Title: Mandala Base
• Date: early 1400s
• Culture: China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
• Type: Enamel
• Technique: cloisonné enamel
• Dimensions: Diameter: 30.8 cm (12 1/8 in.)
• Collection: China - Ming Dynasty
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1987.58

A detail from the museum

In a meditation ritual known as Offering the Universe, the disc functioned as a mandala or cosmic diagram.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1987." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 2 (1988): 30-71.
• Cunningham, Michael R., Stanislaw J. Czuma, Anne E. Wardwell, and J. Keith Wilson. Masterworks of Asian Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1998.
• Huntington, John C., Dina Bangdel, and Robert A. F. Thurman. The Circle of Bliss: Buddhist Meditational Art. Chicago: Serindia Publications, 2003.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.