. the mandala as metropolis 733
Kongōchōkyō and the Ninnōkyō make his imperial associations
explicit.^8 Accordingly, the mandala’s three-by-three grid plan strongly
resembles the ideal wang cheng or prototypical emperor’s city (figure
10), which is also characterized by ritual compounds surrounding the
imperial palace within the central ward.
The wang cheng plan first appears in the “Records of Trade” section
(“Kaogonji” )^9 of the ancient Rites of Zhou. This text dates
from the tumultuous Warring States period (fifth to third centuries
B.C.E.) and nostalgically idealizes the perfect centralized urbanism of
the ancient twelfth-century B.C.E. Zhou capital at Luoyi.^10 Supposedly
laid out according to the proper yin/yang principles of feng shui geo-
mancy, with building supervision by the exemplary Duke of Zhou,
Luoyi reportedly measured
nine li on each side; each side [with] three gates. Within the capital are
nine north-south and nine east-west streets. The north-south streets are
nine carriage tracks in width. On the left is the Ancestral Temple, and
to the right are the Altars of Soil and Grain. In the front is the Hall of
Audience and behind, the markets. (Steinhardt 1990, 34)This passage describes a perfectly square, walled city that is divided
into a grid of nine wards by three gates on each side. The Diamond
World Mandala as well is a perfect quadrilateral made up of nine
squares, though only the top row of three mini-mandalas has gates at
the cardinal directions. The wang cheng’s nine municipal wards is thus
mirrored by the Diamond World’s nine assembly halls, and its men-
tion of three gates piercing each outer wall finds its echo in at least the
upper registers of the Diamond World Mandala.
Furthermore, the numerological significance of nine, the highest
yang number (nine li squared, nine axial streets, and nine carriage
widths), resonates with numerous other representations of impe-
rial geography in China, all of which strike uncanny visual analogies
with the Diamond World Mandala. The wang cheng’s tic-tac-toe–like
(^8) For more on the role of these scriptures in East Asian statecraft, see Yoritomi and
Tachikawa, ed. 1999, 141–53; Orzech 1998; Osabe 1996.
(^9) Hung Wu 1995, 354 also translates this as the “Regulations of Workmanship”
section. In this instance, the reading of as kao is accurate.
(^10) Luoyi is by far the most talked about capital palace-city in the early Chinese his-
tories, but to date no remains of any such site have been excavated. However, other
excavated early capitals such as the Warring States-period Anyi and the Northern
Wei-period Luoyang did situate their imperial palaces in the center according to the
wang cheng centralized plan (Steinhardt 1990, 47, 83).