742 pamela d. winfield
In the Diamond World Mandala palace, we observed striking visual
analogies to the ideal wang cheng emperor’s city plan. The influence
of secular geography on the mandala’s sacred geometry seems most
striking here: the municipal grid so integral to the ward and well-land
systems seems to have been invoked in the Diamond World’s three-
by-three checkerboard format. However, although the mandala does
create an auspicious space of nine courts, and although Dainichi’s theo-
retical center is in the middle square, we observed that the visual focus
gravitates up to the single imperially clad figure of Dainichi holding
court in the top center mandala. Likewise, we observed a parallel shift
in the location of Chinese palace-cities by the Tang dynasty—precisely
when the mandala’s designer would have been formulating this ideal
mental map.
Finally, we considered the Two World Mandalas as a pair. Taken
together, they can be seen as reflecting the double-palace system estab-
lished during the Han dynasty and extended into the eighth century
at Chang’an and its copycat capitals in Japan at Heijō, Nagaoka, and
Heian. The symmetrical emplacement of these two painted images
mirrors the metropolitan and political orders of the day. The bilateral
bureaucratic structure of the state, and the bipartisan balance necessary
for its proper functioning, provide added resonance to the numerous
imperial metaphors in the source scriptures for the two mandalas.
Finally, this investigation provides an interesting reversal of the
symbiotic equation between church and state. One often reads about
political institutions invoking religion for self-legitimization, but here
a religious institution seems to have invoked the physical and political
structures of its day to model the realm of self-perfection, or enlight-
enment. This evocation of the city in the mandalas demonstrates the
symbiotic relationship that exists between political and religious sym-
bolism, between secular and sacred architecture, and between impe-
rial and Buddhist topologies. This symbiosis, itself reminiscent of the
double-palace system, compels art historians, Buddhologists, political
scientists, and urban studies scholars to accommodate and integrate
one another’s constructs into their own architectures of understand-
ing. It also opens up the field to future scholarship in at least two
interrelated areas.
First, the uniquely Japanese pairing of the mandalas (a configuration
that apparently did not exist in China at the time) raises interesting
questions about the nature of Chinese-Japanese Dharma transmis-