TANTRIC BUDDHISM (INCLUDING CHINA AND JAPAN)the suffering who become saviors who make offerings to those who saved them,
and so on.
Thus, enlightenment, the fully initiated iiciirya, and the world of suffering
and those beings in it form a "strange loop," and like the Two Truths, are both
identical and not identical in the process of ritual action. Such "application" of
Vajrayana principles, far from being "degraded," is precisely what the
Vajrayana is all about.
The mai:J."ala without precedentAt the opposite end of the spectrum from the popularly dispersed rites for
hungry ghosts is another Chen-yen phenomenon which is perhaps more wide-
spread and just as "invisible." The ma!Jcfalas of esoteric Buddhism, particularly
the Garbhakosadhiitu ma!Jcfala largely derived from the Mahiivairocana Siitra,
and the Vajradhiitu ma!Jcfala based on the Sarvatathiigatatattva-Sa1Jlgraha
belong to the esoteric and "elite" realm, and their relationship to eighth-century
China is problematic. Yet there are no two pieces of graphic art which have
enjoyed wider distribution and greater influence in East, Central, and Southeast
Asia. The Vajradhiitu ma!Jcfala, derived from the STTS, is particularly wide-
spread. It appears in monuments such as Chandi Sewu in Java, in Tibetan
temples, and in numerous painted reproductions, not to mention its structural
clones in hundreds of ritual mafJcfalas for rites such as that described above.
The problem, stated succinctly, is where certain features of these ma!Jcfalas
came from. Obviously, the mafJcfalas are derived from constructions described
in the texts. They are therefore "Indian," Chinese style notwithstanding. But the
actual paintings do not wholly agree with the textual descriptions, and, in the
case of the Vajradhiitu ma!Jcfala derived from the STTS, there is a great degree
of difference: The mafJcfala is commonly arranged as a composite of nine separ-
ate ma!Jcfalas in a three-by-three square. The text of the STTS presents a series of
four sets of six ma!Jcfalas in a fashion typical of Vajrayiina ritual texts. The ma!J-
cjalas are integrated vertically in the text through their identical structural prin-
ciples. But during the last half of the eighth century a standard Vajradhiitu
ma!Jcfala emerged. This ma!Jcfala is based on the Mahii-ma!Jcfala partially
described in both the texts of Amoghavajra and of Vajrabodhi. The Mahii-
ma!Jcfala is constituted by a central court surrounded by eight other courts. The
first six courts beginning with the central court are drawn from the first segment
of the Sarvatathiigatatattvasa1Jlgraha, the seventh is said to be drawn from the
second segment, while the two last courts are drawn from later sections of the
text.^66
This odd configuration is ascribed to East Asian interpretation, particularly in
the person ofKiikai, the founder of Japanese Shingon Buddhism, or, at most, to
his Chinese teacher Hui-kuo. Recent work on the topic has sought explanation
for the strange configuration in Indo-Tibetan exegetical categories.
Ninefold configurations may indeed be derived from the Indo-Tibetan tradi-