In this post, we argue that the film The Big Lebowski can be considered like a Mandala drawing practice for The Dude. This is because, just like Mandala drawing is about understanding the illusory nature of perceived reality if interpreted from the Vedantic point of view, The Big Lebowski ends up showing the illusory nature of reality from the point of view of The Dude.
The film is based on Bunny's German friends' tendency to act on false assumptions and The Dude's nature to model reality based on the actions of the Germans. This basically leads to the whole movie being about almost nothing, because the objective reality is one abstraction level above The Dude's perceived reality, and the whole movie is from the point of view of The Dude.
Let's look at the inputs and the outputs of the movie in terms of life, i.e., leaving out the property damage of the car, rug, etc.
Input: Donny dying of an unrelated heart attack, the German woman's toe, Walter beating the Germans, and The Dude getting beaten by a few characters.
Output: The Dude's offspring by Maude.
This is approximately all the direct effects on life in the movie, which is almost nothing. The rest is essentially a philosophical conflict between the Germans acting on false assumptions and The Dude modeling reality based on the Germans' actions.
Initially, the Germans believe that The Dude is the one with the money, and thrash his place, even when they see that he's clearly not a millionaire, thus their actions are based on false assumptions. The Dude gets really irate because his rug is spoiled and his place is thrashed, and he wants compensation for his rug.
Then, the Germans believe that The Dude is a crook who has stolen the money, which is again not the case. Once they make up their minds that they need to extort The Dude, they seem to naively go all in and wreak havoc on The Dude's life. The Germans take action first in the form of threatening and harassing The Dude and then realize that they were wrong only later towards the end of the film, which causes trouble in The Dude's otherwise peaceful life.
The Dude seems to be a firm believer in the "What's mine is mine" ethos, and totally trusts what the Germans and Lebowski say. His perceived reality is based on the words of The Big Lebowski and the actions of the Germans, in spite of being basically told by Walter exactly what was actually happening.
The natural justice of the film is that for all his travails, The Dude comes across a person with a complementary personality in the form of Maude, who's very serious about having a child with him.
Thus, in this post, we observe that The Big Lebowski can be considered as a Mandala drawing from the point of view of The Dude. This is because of Bunny's German friends' tendency to act on false assumptions and The Dude's basing his perceived reality on the actions of the Germans and the words of The Big Lebowski, who's the real crook. So, the movie ends up being about nothing, except being a Mandala drawing practice for The Dude, because only The Big Lebowski and Walter know what's actually happening.