From the archive record
Woman decorates Bodhgaya with flowers as people worship there during 32nd Kalachakra in 2012. Wearing an air mask, a worker fills oil lamps with oil. Buddhist men prostrate themselves on the ground, as they pay obeisance. They place their foreheads and hands on little mitts to avoid dust. The word kalachakra means cycles of time, and the Kalachakra system presents three such cycles -- external, internal and alternative. The external and internal cycles deal with time as we normally know it, while the alternative cycles are practices for gaining liberation from these two. The structures of the external and internal cycles are analogous, similar to the parallel between macrocosm and microcosm discussed in Western philosophy. This means that the same laws that govern a universe also pertain t