1050 richard k. payne
that opens the ritually defined enclosure, the practitioner (or his des-
ignate) performs the following:
The practitioner first washes the top of the altar and the mouth of the
hearth with the water for purification (argha water; aka misu ).
Visualize the syllable hāṃ above the altar. This changes, becoming a
wind cakra. This wind blows, destroying the hearth as well as everything
on top of the altar.
Next, dharmakāya gāthā:
Everything that exists is a composite event
Proceeding by way of causes and conditions,
And all events mutually cause and condition one another.
This fact is not understood by foolish people.^12
Next, take the wood pincers and draw them around the rim of the hearth,
destroying it. (According to an earlier explanation, this was done with
the single-pronged vajra. Follow your master’s direction.)The way in which these construction rites are organized points to a
mimetic understanding of how ritual is effective. These are ritual (that
is, symbolic) actions, but they work at the interface between mimick-
ing actual actions, such as hoeing up weeds to clear a space of ground,
and an imaginal realm of actions, such as installing the various deities
into their locations in the ritual space. Beyer refers to these two as
“public world” and “divine world” (Beyer 1973, 103). The ritual per-
formance then takes place at the mimetic interface between these two
realms, the actual and the imaginal.
Such construction rites for altars—or for dwellings and monas-
teries—seem to have been given relatively little attention, apparently
because most research has take place in an existing ritual setting,
dwelling, or monastery. The Vedic background becomes relevant here
because, as practiced by an originally nomadic culture, Vedic altars
were regularly established anew. However, in Japan, where the same
altars may have been in use for centuries, the question, “How does one
get started?” rarely arises, and so this ritual element is rarely used.
How, then, does one establish one location, one place as appro-
priate for the performance of such rituals? Clearly, since there is a
corresponding rite of dissolution, this was thought to be not only
a significant action but a definitive one as well—what might be called
(^12) Lalitavistāra, XIII.96.