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deal with this powerful phenomenon. By the late twelfth century, the
growing belief in the exclusive power and practice of the nenbutsu
had polarized religious thinkers, and in 1207 esoteric Tendai
authorities on Mount Hiei petitioned the government to ban
the exclusive nenbutsu practice and defrock and exile its most influ-
ential exponent, Hōnen. Other thinkers reacted more positively to
the religious debates of the day, including the esoteric Shingon monk
Kakuban, who is credited with the Shingi Shingon reform movement
in the twelfth century that must have helped justify esotericizing
images and devotional objects focused on sacred syllables, many of
which incorporated human hair.
Kakuban did not consider practices in which the name of Amida was
chanted or that led to birth in the Pure Land to lie outside the scope of
esoteric Shingon thought. But he explained that these practices had to
be conducted in the correct, Shingon way if they were to be efficacious,
because everything, including Amida and Amidist practices, had been
brought into existence by Dainichi’s great compassion. Wishing to
reconstruct an orthodox position, Kakuban was always a loyal expo-
nent of the teachings of Kūkai (774–835, posthumous title Kōbō
Daishi ), the Japanese monk who introduced Shingon eso-
teric Buddhism from China into Japan in the early ninth century. One
of Kūkai’s teachings was called the “secret mandala teaching” (himitsu
mandara kyō ). This mandala teaching is based on the
concept of honpushō (fundamental no-birth), which asserts
that all elements of existence, including human beings, are originally
uncreated without a first cause and that all of existence is contained in
the Samaya Mandala of Dainichi. The totality of existence is character-
ized by the state represented by the seed-syllable A (aji ), which
marks or symbolizes honpushō (van der Veere 2000, 85).
Visualization practices on the A syllable, called ajikan , were
described by Kūkai and also by a number of his disciples (Payne 1998,
1999b). Kakuban himself wrote ten texts on these visualizations, based
in large part on earlier writings. There are two fundamental forms of
A-syllable visualizations. The first relates to the Diamond World and its
object of devotion (honzon ), the Diamond World Mandala; the
second relates to the Womb World and its object of devotion, the Womb
World Mandala. In the Diamond World, the syllable representing
Dainichi is visualized on a lotus, and these two elements are placed
within a moon disk. In the Womb World, the syllable representing