ABSTRACT
The use of the term maala itself is a bit more extensive than this meditative aspect in South Asian cultures. Maala is a pan-Indic term that is utilized by most socio-cultural formations found in India, including traditions relating to what modern Euro-North Americans and Asians call Jain, Hindu, and of course, Buddhist. The idealization of the maala has become part of popular cultural parlance in Europe since the time of Carl Gustav Jung's absorption of early medieval Indian and Tibetan or Japanese forms of religious iconography. In brief, there are strands of South Asia Buddhist cultural memory where the Buddha and Cakravartin are not differentiated. Traditional Buddhist thinkers often posit that knowledge is based on a discernment of how things actually are as opposed to how things appear. A similar movement of thought, with a different basis and trajectory, may be found in the critical study of cultural formations.
