Story #1 Figura Mundi

The first Mandala of the Modern West

The Latin name of this image is “Figura mundi,” in English “image of the world.” It is the earliest representation of a Buddhist maṇḍala (Sanskrit for “circle”) in modern Europe. The maṇḍala represents the world as conceived in Buddhist scriptures.

The “Figura mundi” first appeared in a book called Alphabetum Tibetanum, published in Rome in 1782. The author was Antonio Agostino Giorgi (1711-1797), an Italian friar of the Order of Saint Augustine.

The long account of the world of Buddhism in the Alphabetum Tibetanum was based on translations made in Lhasa by Francesco Orazio della Penna (1680-1745,) a Capuchin friar and founder of the mission to Tibet of the early eighteenth century. Della Penna’s Lexicon Tibetanum, a Tibetan-Italian dictionary published in Lhasa in 1732, had become the main source for Giorgi’s work.

Giorgi described the world of Buddhism in the section of the book entitled “Explicatio Mundi Sincera” (or “True Exposition of the World”), based sections of the Abhidharmakośa of the Indian master Vasubandhu, which Della Penna had translated from Tibetan into Italian. Giorgi appended to the section a table entitled “Figura mundi.” This was an engraved image that reproduced a Tibetan maṇḍala of a “single world” of Buddhism, named lokadhātu in Sanskrit.

From the signatures in the lower left- and right-hand corners of the engraving, it appears that the original painted scrollof the maṇḍala had been made in Tibet by an artist named Yonden (d. u.), and had become part of the collections of the missionaries of the Propaganda Fide in Rome during the early eighteenth century.

Giorgi commissioned the painter Paolo Antonio Ciccolini (d. u.) of Macerata, Italy, to draw a copy of Yonden’s original maṇḍala, so that an engraved image could be carved. Giorgi would then commission Alessio Giardoni (d. 1791), an engraver who was active in Rome and in London during the second half of the eighteenth century, to engrave the drawing on a plate from which copies could be printed and enclosed as tables to the volume.

In the Alphabetum Tibetanum, Giorgi also employed the Figura Mundi, along with the scriptures of the Augustinian Order, as sources for the refutation of the national idolatry of Tibet. He relied for example on Saint Augustine’s (354-430) condemnation of Manichaeism, the heresy from which the saint himself had initially converted to Christianity.

Still, Giorgi was cautious about making the Tibetan maṇḍala available to the great public, because of the hazard of spreading the representation of a flat world. The maṇḍala, depicting the continents on a flat ocean, raised the implications of an ancient debate about the shape of the world by the founding fathers of the Christian Church.