Mandalas

Smudge stood tall (or as tall as he could manage) at his desk and looked out at the crowd of animals now packed into the Sanctuary of Symmetry.

“Right then,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Welcome—welcome, one and all—to Mandala School. The place to learn everything there is to know about mandalas.”

“What’s a mandala?” the flamingo asked, wasting no time.

It was a good point—and a fair question.

“Straight to it, long-legs!” Smudge said with a smile. He picked up his chalk and drew a big, bold circle on the board.

“The word comes from an ancient language called Sanskrit,” he explained. “And it means… circle.”

“A circle? That’s it?” the jaguar scoffed.

“Not just any circle,” Smudge said, puffing out his chest. “A mandala is a circle that can hold patterns, stories, and sometimes the whole universe.”

Gasps fluttered through the room, and the animals erupted in disbelief.

“The whole universe?”

“He didn’t say the whole universe, did he?”

“He did!”

“Is he mad?”

“Smudge has gone mad!”

Smudge pinched the bridge of his nose, breathed deeply, and tried to get back on track.

“Look closely at the walls around you.”

Heads turned. The Sanctuary’s stone walls shimmered with concentric circles—spirals and starbursts rippling outward from tiny centres.

“These,” Smudge explained, “are mandalas. At the very centre is the starting point. It looks like nothing—and it is nothing, just a dot. But from that nothing, everything grows. Rings ripple outward like water, each one carrying infinite potential.”

He pointed to the chalk circle. “You see, a circle has no beginning and no end. There’s no place to start and no place to finish. And that’s why a mandala can hold everything—your family, your friends, your dreams… even the stars above. From the tiniest dot to the widest ring, it’s all connected. The circle—like the cycle—never ends on the page or within you. That’s the magic of mandalas.”

Spot the Mandala

Before we learn to create our own mandalas, let’s train our eyes to see them in the world around us.

• Look around your room or outside a window.
• Spot as many circles as you can: wheels, buttons, plates, the sun, the moon, even your eyes.
• Draw them on a fresh page, one by one, until you’ve made a collection of circles.
• Enclose them all with one giant circle.
• Join them together with lines or patterns.

Now look again and try to find where each one begins or ends. You can’t! That’s the magic of circles—just like Smudge said, they go on and on.