720 pamela d. winfield
from either scripture. Like many other Buddhist texts, the Dainichikyō
does mention various buddha assemblies residing in various cardi-
nal or ordinal locations within celestial palaces, but nowhere does it
mention the specific layout of the Womb World Mandala’s twelve
halls and central Lotus Court. Likewise, the Kongōchōkyō remains
silent regarding the Diamond World Mandala’s three-by-three grid
of nine mini-mandala palaces. Kūkai’s esoteric master Huiguo (Keika
; 746–805) was initiated into the lineages of both Amoghavajra
and Śubhākarasiṃha and is often credited with bringing their two
strains of Buddhist thought together, but he leaves no record as to how
or when these thought-architectures may have been first envisioned or
graphically rendered.
The lack of textual evidence for these mandalas opens the door to
other modes of understanding their forms. Art historian Elizabeth
ten Grotenhuis (1999) has already pointed out several similarities
between the Two World Mandalas and Chinese imperial geographies,
and this essay builds upon her theory as well as her method of visual
analogy. It is precisely because the texts are silent on this matter that
we should investigate other Chinese principles for structuring ideal
environments.
From what, then, did the organizational layout for the two manda-
las stem? What mental maps might have helped to shape the format
of these visual aids designed to empower ritual spaces? What classify-
ing and categorizing templates would be immediately accessible and
familiar to ninth-century mikkyō adepts in China and, by extension,
in Japan? The thesis of this investigation is that long-standing Chi-
nese ideals of perfect urban spaces can provide a helpful clue, and
there is enough evidence to indicate that ubiquitous tropes of Chinese
imperial geography may have influenced the sacred geometry of these
mandalas.
Like all mandalas, the Two World Mandalas are two-dimensional
architectural plans for three-dimensional palaces. Accordingly, from a
purely formalistic standpoint, their bird’s-eye-view floor plans exhibit
striking similarities to long-standing East Asian ideals for perfect reli-
gio-political spaces. The first section of this analysis argues that the
layout of the Womb World Mandala evokes the I-shaped gong
the mandalas’ ubiquitous twin displays soon collapsed this distinction and led to the
convention of calling them the Two World Mandalas.