736 pamela d. winfield
Doctrinally speaking, the miniscule figure of Dainichi in the cen-
trally located perfected body assembly is the source for all the other
Diamond World figures throughout the mandala. However, visually
speaking, the focus of the Diamond World as a whole is unquestion-
ably drawn to the top center of the grid, where the single large fig-
ure of the imperially clad Dainichi dominates all nine mini-mandala
wards. That is, the Diamond World’s doctrinal source mandala may
theoretically be located in the core ward like the wang cheng’s palatial
epicenter, but in terms of visual emphasis, the focus of both plans
gravitates to the top center of the ideal three-by-three ward system.
This tension between the mandala’s doctrinal and visual foci mir-
rors the tension between ideal and real Chinese urban planning, as the
old centralized ideal of the wang cheng emperor’s city rarely translated
precisely according to plan. By the eighth century, the Tang capital
of Chang’an as well as Japanese capitals that copied it, for example,
Heijō (710–785), Nagaoka (785–795), and Heian (794–1192), no lon-
ger resembled the centralized ideal emperor’s city. Rather, the perfect
magic square had turned into a rough rectangle bisected by the north-
south axis of Red Bird Road, with the matching halves of the city
( ; ) marked by Eastern and Western Markets (figure 11).
At Chang’an, the emperor’s palace that was once ideally located in
the interior was moved atop the newly created administrative imperial
city staffed by Confucian bureaucrats. This eighth-century shift in the
seat of imperial charisma to the top center may help to explain why
the Diamond World Mandala’s designer chose to seat the imperially
clad figure of Dainichi Buddha in the top center sector as well. To one
attuned to the spatial logic of Chinese imperial city planning (includ-
ing Kūkai’s pupils in Heian), the message here is familiar and imme-
diate: just as the emperor rules from atop his palace-city, so too does
Dainichi sit regally at the imperial head of his sacralized mandala-
palace system.
Let us now turn to a consideration of these two mandala-palace
cities as a pair. When displayed together, as they were in Japan,
the two mandalas may be seen to evoke certain East Asian political
structures.
Sharf 2001, 167–68, has problematized visualizing either direction in contemporary
ritual practice, but this does not affect the architectural symbolism of the image or its
interactive functionality, at least in the case of tenth-century Japanese initiates.