. the tji lecture hall statue mandala 965
To someone familiar with esoteric iconography, the complex dis-
position of the statues on the Tōji Lecture Hall altar convey and/or
suggest groupings, replications, and referents to a mandala through
size, placement (pentads, four corners), mudrās and hand-held imple-
ments, coloration and gilding, pedestals and mandorlas, and artistic
style of the statues, among other cues and forms. The four types of
mandalas are the great mandala, mahā mandala (daimandara
), which represents the divinities in their anthropomorphic form
and is usually painted; the symbolic-form mandala, samaya mandala
(sanmaya mandara ), which represents the divinities
with symbols such as their attributes; the seed-syllable form mandala,
the dharma mandala (hōmandara ) or bīja mandala, which
represents the divinities in their Siddham (Sanskrit) seed syllables
(bījas); and the three-dimensional mandala, karma mandala, which
represents the universal activity of Mahāvairocana. The karma man-
dala further instantiates ritual with three-dimensional anthropomor-
phic forms.
An undated, circa fourteenth-century drawing, the Tojikenzaiyō
(figure 12) (hereafter “Contemporaneous Plan”)^43 of the Tōji Lecture
Hall altar shows the four circumscribing buddhas of the central pentad
and the two deva statues to the sides, Bonten and Taishakuten, turned
to face inward toward the large central Dainichi Buddha.
This may have been the original arrangement. An inward-facing
position is rare on Japanese statue altars and may connote illusionism,
as in some Tang Chinese relief stele of pentads (figure 13).
If the drawing represents the original layout, then the “exoteric”
disposition assumed by scholars is doubly erroneous, as inward-fac-
ing divinities would be extremely unusual before the ninth century.
Inwardly facing Bonten and Taishakuten on the Tōji altar would
leave the Four Deva (Guardian) King statues in their traditional
(Nara-period) place and orientation at the four corners (i.e., rotated
45 degrees) and facing forward (south); but they would, in a mikkyō
mandala conceptual structure, “frame” the altar assembly as a group
by directing the gaze (metaphorical or real) from the edges to the cen-
ter. Painted mandalas use this form.
(^43) Tojikenzaiyō. Tōbōki 1, Buppō-jō, ZZGR 12: 11a, reproduced in
NCKSS-jys 1: 83 (shiryō 51). Tōji (Kyōōgokokuji), Shin Tōbōki, 113, compares three
drawings of the altar. See also Matsuura 1983, 83ff; and NCKSS-jys 1:81.