Mrs. Sawyer: But he called a square a Mandala. [Footnote 15: Hauer stated: “In his description of the muladharara chakra, Hauer referred to the “square or mandala of the earth” (HS, 71). ]

Dr. Jung: Yes, he calls that a mandala, and naturally anything within is a mandala too, and this is exactly what you see in the Lamaistic pictures:

The mandala, the lotus, is inside, as well as the temple, and the cloister with the square walls, the whole surrounded by the magic circle; then above are the gods, and mountains below.

The term mandala with us has taken on an importance which it does not possess in India, where it is merely one of the Yantras, an instrument of worship in the Lamaistic cult and in tantric yoga.

And mind you, the tantric school is little known in India—you could ask millions of Hindus, and they would not have the faintest idea of what it was.

It would be as if you asked the honorable citizens of Zurich what they had to tell you of scholasticism; they would know about as much as the Hindu knows about tantric yoga. And if you asked a Hindu what a mandala was, he would say that a round table, or anything circular, was a mandala.

But to us it is a specific term.

Even within the frame of the tantric school the mandala has not the importance that it has with us. Our idea of it would come nearest to Lamaism, the Tibetan religion, but this is hardly known, and its textbooks have been translated only very recently, hardly ten years ago.

One of the fundamental sources is the Shrichakrasambhara, a tantric text translated by Sir John Woodroffe. ~Carl Jung, Seminar on Kundalini Yoga, Page 12.

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