. the tji lecture hall statue mandala 955
The 847 ritual record provides other important details. It identifies
the twenty-one sculptures by divinity group or name, important not
only for iconographic identification but also because listing the names
indicates that identities mattered. The earlier government records note
only “Shingon statues” or the new mikkyō divinities; in the 844 temple
record the karma mandala is the focus, so each divinity is mentioned.
It tells us that upon their completion, sūtras were chanted before the
statues. The Denpō-e, a Dharma transmission ceremony, was part of
many Buddhist (sectarian) traditions; it has specific parameters in the
mikkyō ritual corpus relating to the concept of sokushin jōbutsu
, or “attaining enlightenment in this very body” (i.e, this lifetime)—
a key concept in Kūkai’s teachings and one found in the Diamond Peak
Sūtra. The rite involves sūtra recitation. Although the divinities were
new, the rite continued earlier Buddhist praxis: there was continuity
between “exoteric”^24 and new mikkyō rites, icons, and goals.
Although Kūkai wanted to initiate his disciples at Tōji and at a Shin-
gon mountain training center at Kongōbuji on Mount Kōya
(present-day Wakayama prefecture), far south of the former Nara cap-
ital (map, figure 10), he was part of the state-sponsored clerical hierar-
chy still based in Nara;^25 moreover, state support for the Abhiṣeka Hall
at Tōdaiji in Nara continued.
At the end of his life, Kūkai created a ritual site for lay initiations,
the Shingon’in, within the imperial palace. The Abhiseka Hall Kūkai ̣
planned for Tōji was not completed until 843, under Jichie. Could Tōji
have functioned as a primary site (konpon dōjō ) for mikkyō
practice during Kūkai’s lifetime without an Abhiseka Hall? If Kūkai ̣
initiated priests in mikkyō mandala rituals at Tōji, the occurrences are
unrecorded. I will return to this subject below.
(^24) The term “exoteric” ( Jpn. kengyō ) is commonly used in the literature, fol-
lowing the influence of Shingon sectarian writings.
(^25) Kūkai was appointed to the chief ecclesiastical order, the Sōgō, in 824, only
two years after he established the Tōdaiji Kanjō’in, with the title junior priest gen-
eral, and is listed as Kūkai of the “Tōji Shingon school.” By 836, the year after Kūkai
died, twenty-one jōgakusō (fixed appointment priests) were assigned to “Shingonshū
Tōdaiji,” indicating the importance of the lineage there; the next year, twenty-one
jōgakusō were appointed to Tōji (not the fifty originally promised to Kūkai),
most of whom were from Tōdaiji.