From the archive record
Man carving Prayer stone or Mani stone with Buddhist mantras, in order to sell them during 32nd Kalachakra at Bodhgaya in 2012. Mani stones are stone plates, rocks and/or pebbles, inscribed with the mantras, as a form of prayer in Tibetan Buddhism. 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 to atoms, the body and our experience of l