Japanese Mandalas: Representations of Sacred Geography

Chapter 1 The Taima Mandara

The believers who ate theTaima mandara in Fukushima prefecture regarded this painting as a sacred icon that was capable of curing physical as well as spiritual ills. But how did the Taima mandara come to embody such power? How was its sacred form determined? This chapter will present the iconography of theTaima mandara and will trace its roots in India and China. Although the basic teachings of the Pure Land tradition were established in India, subtle but powerful transformations took place as those ideas were appropriated in China. Those changes are particularly apparent in the Taima mandara. The Indian legacy of the configuration will be discussed in terms of the large central court of the mandara.The Chinese contribution will be discussed in terms of the three framing rows (also called courts) of the mandara,the two vertical courts and the one horizontal court at the bottom. It is my contention that notions of pre-Buddhist Chinese geography as well as a pre-Buddhist Chinese categorizing system were incorporated into the speci fic text on which theTaima mandara was based.These preBuddhist ideas were pictorialized in the three outer courts of the mandara.An investigation of theTaima mandara with its four courts, then, will reveal a central core based on ideas assimilated from India,embraced and framed by three outer courts informed by indigenous Chinese concepts. This presentation will refer to a traditional diagrammatic representation of theTaima mandara (Figure ),to my own more three-dimensional diagrammatic representation (Figure ),and to details of an exceptionally beautiful,earlyfourteenth -century Japanese painting of the theme in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (Plates –; Figures –).2 The numerous extant Japanese painted and woodblock-printed versions of the Taima mandara, dating fromthethirteenthcenturyandlater,arebasedonaneighthcentury tapestry imported from China that exists today in fragmentary condition at Taimadera, a temple in Nara prefecture . Scholars speculate that it probably took a team of skilled weavers some ten years to create the almost fourmeter -square tapestry that, in its original state, must have«  » In the late s a curator from a major national museum in Japan stopped at a village called Aizubange in Fukushima prefecture on an official mission to register artworks for the central government. One of the objects that he investigated was an eighteenth-century painting of a Taima mandara. But there was something unusual about this mandara. The narrow vertical rows of pictures always found at the left and right sides of a Taima mandara were gone, leaving only frayed edges.The curator was perplexed. He had never seen a painting in this condition before. Finally, the oldest man in the village, who was ninety-five years of age, came forward to solve the mystery.This old man told of events recounted by his grandfather that had taken place in the s.A plague had struck the region and many people were dying. The priest of the temple in which the Taima mandara was enshrined urged the villagers to come and pluck bits of the painting off its two vertical sides and to eat the sacred icon as medicine.1 C        The Taima Mandara been a brilliantly colored, overwhelmingly splendid depiction of an otherworldly realm.3 Now the memory of that eighth-century Chinese tapestry remains in the thirteenthand post-thirteenth-century versions of the theme. Asmentionedearlier,althoughthisconfigurationiscalled a mandara in Japan,strictly speaking it ought more properly to be called a hensôzu (C. bianxiangdu).Translated literally as pictures of “changed aspect” or “transformed vision,” and more elegantly as “transformation tableaux,” these pictures are visual representations of doctrinal themes or legends, interpretations of literary themes in pictorial terms.4 When the Taima tapestry was rediscovered in the late twelfth century in Japan, the influence of Esoterism and Esoteric nomenclature was still so strong that this depiction of a sacred realm where devotees would ultimately experience enlightenment was called a mandara.5 These developments in the history of the Taima mandara will be recounted in detail in chapter . Iconography of the Central Court of the Taima Mandara: The Indian Legacy Upon first confronting theTaima mandara,the viewer’s eyes are drawn to the large figure of the buddha Amida (S.Amit âbha,“Measureless Light,” orAmitâyus,“Measureless Life”) in the center of the configuration (Plate ; Figure ). Amida is presented in the Cleveland painting as a golden-bodied buddha with the tuft of wisdom between his eyebrows and the...