Icons and Iconoclasms in Japanese Buddhism
Icons and Iconoclasms in Japanese Buddhism
in Japanese Buddhism
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Icons and
Iconoclasm
in Japanese
Buddhism
Kūkai and Dōgen on the
Art of Enlightenment
z
PAMELA D. WINFIELD
1
1
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To my family, for their “utmost confidence”
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Editorial Notes xiii
Introduction xv
Notes 159
Glossary 179
Bibliography 193
Index 201
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Acknowledgments
No woman is an island.
I would like to extend my gratitude first to my family, friends, students,
and colleagues who have supported me through the many years of writing
this research, first as a dissertation and then rewriting it as a book. Thanks go
first to my parents, whose moral support, material sustenance, educational
opportunities, and cultural gifts can never be returned fully in kind. In addi-
tion to his unswerving emotional support, Jacques Fasan provided research
assistance at every level, from cleaning up my endnotes, glossary, and bibli-
ography to asking the deeper questions that helped me to connect the dots.
The Elon University students in my Religion and Art of Asia interdisciplinary
seminars prompted me to clarify, edit, and smooth over conceptual discon-
nects. The attentive listeners at conferences in Japan and in the United States
provided many constructive comments that helped make this a better book.
Portions of this research were presented in Japanese at the International
Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) and Kobe College
in 2002, and in English at Santa Clara University in 2005, the Chapel Hill
Zendō, and Elon University in 2006. I am also grateful to Yoritomi Motohiro
and Nichibunken for allowing me to reprint portions of chapter 2 that origi-
nally appeared in the Seinarumono katachi to ba (The Figure and Place of the
Sacred) conference proceedings.
At the institutional level, thanks are due first to Temple University for their
Russell Conwell Fellowship, Training Grant, and Dissertation Completion
Grants. The Cross Cultural Institute/Kobe College Corporation’s Margaret
S. Foley Graduate Fellowship for Research in Japan facilitated my research
under Yoritomi Motohiro at Nichibunken in Kyoto from 2001–2002.
My subsequent affiliation with Temple University Japan in Tokyo opened
many doors and library resources to me first as a graduate student and then
as a post-doctoral fellow and occasional visiting assistant professor in the
x Acknowledgments
summers. A Religion and Art Fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council
facilitated further research in Tokyo in 2007. I am extremely grateful to Ishii
Seijun of Komazawa University for his many kindnesses while working in
Tokyo during this time and for his indispensable assistance in obtaining the
shisho copyright permission from Eiheiji monastery in 2011. A publication
subvention for first-time authors from the Association for Asian Studies, and
a publication assistance grant from Elon University’s Faculty Research and
Development Fund provided the necessary financial support to cover image
reproduction costs.
I would also like to thank individually those who have been instrumen-
tal in helping me think through the issues and prepare this manuscript for
publication. Whether their influence is great or small, whether their guid-
ance has been direct or indirect, I am indebted to them all. In Philadelphia,
Nagatomo Shigenori, Nancy Steinhardt, Kurt Behrendt, Ellen Zhang, Lucy
Bregman, as well as Nathan Sivin and William LaFleur, helped me to first
conceptualize this material and bring it to fruition as a dissertation. Mikkyō
scholars Yoritomi Motohiro, Manabe Shunsho, Ryūichi Abé, Richard Payne,
and Itō Naoko, as well as Zen scholars Steven Heine, Ishii Seijun, Taigen
Daniel Leighton, Shohaku Okumura, Tanahashi Kazuaki, Norman Waddell,
Christian Steineck, Taitaku Josho Pat Phelan, and others have all been invalua-
ble resources for me over the years. Art historians Donald McCallum, Cynthea
Bogel, Melissa McCormick, Patricia Graham, Patricia Fister, Sherry Fowler,
Sonya Lee, and Winston Kyan have been encouraging, inspiring, and helpful
at every turn. Scholars of Japanese Buddhism Robert Sharf, James Dobbins,
Jacqueline Stone, William Waldron, Richard Jaffe, Barbara Ambros, as well as
other friends and colleagues in Japan, such as Yasuo Yuasa, François Lachaud,
Robert Duquesne, S. Silvio Vita, and Iwamoto Akemi were as generous with
their time as with their tomes. The Kawata family in Kyoto, the Kobayashi
family in Yokohama, my sempai and dōkyūsei from Temple University, former
colleagues at Meredith College, and friends and colleagues at Elon University
have been extremely supportive of my scholarship over the years.
In addition, I wish to acknowledge those who make our jobs possible and
yet rarely expect any thanks in return, namely all the librarians at Nichibunken,
Komazawa University, Kōyasan University (especially Kinoshita-san), Temple
University Japan (especially Tom Boardman), the Starr Library at Columbia
University (especially Noguchi Sachie), and Elon University (especially
Patrick Rudd, Susan Apple, and Lynn Melchor). In addition, I wish to thank
Grace Lin and Sun Lixia for their help with Chinese texts, and Hiroko Solari
who checked my Japanese grammar and style for one particularly important
Acknowledgments xi
We live in the age of Google images and YouTube. Our high resolution
scanners, iPhone cameras, instant video streams, and satellite news feeds make
images seem ubiquitous, free, open to the public, and taken for granted. But are
they? Photojournalists are still routinely rounded up by authoritarian regimes
intent on controlling public perception. Self-regulating television, movie, and
video-gaming industries continue to rate and even censor visual content for spe-
cific media outlets. Intellectual property lawyers profit enormously from protect-
ing and/or promoting the integrity of their clients’ images. Indeed, for anyone
reading the online version of this text with the occasional illustration omitted
because electronic copyright was not extended, it is evident that the problem of
imagery is with us still.1 Despite Walter Benjamin’s optimistic view that the work
of art in the age of mechanical reproduction is democratic and freely accessi-
ble, we nevertheless still have today our own mechanisms for image-control and
even image-removal.2 Especially when it comes to religious icons, there never-
theless remains the lingering presupposition that at least some images are par-
ticularly powerful and uniquely valuable mediators of meaning. Just as hibutsu
(“hidden Buddhas”) were secreted away from view for centuries, access to some
religious imagery in this book has been restricted to protect its perceived power
from the cheapening maw of mass consumption, as Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer would argue.3 Then, as now, inaccessibility ensures sanctity.
This presupposition lies at the heart of this study. What is it about the power
of the visual? Why do people debate whether a picture is worth a thousand
words or if the movie is better than the book? Which is correct, the old adage
that seeing is believing, or Jesus’ remark to doubting Thomas, “blessed are those
who have not seen and yet believe?”4 How does one render the invisible visi-
ble, and conversely, how does our visual thinking, to borrow Rudolf Arnheim’s
phrase, shape the contours for what we believe to be possible?5 Does the con-
creteness of form control, contradict, or conform to our ideas of the ultimate?
xvi Introduction
These questions and others were no less pressing in the premodern era.
This study approaches the problem of religious imagery by taking two great
Japanese Buddhist masters and comparing their thoughts and projects related
to Buddhist visual experience and expression. Certainly, there are significant
historical, art historical, doctrinal, and practical differences between Kūkai
(774–835), the ninth-century founder of Japan’s esoteric Shingon Mikkyō sect
on the one hand, and Dōgen (1200–1253), the thirteenth-century founder of
Japan’s Sōtō Zen sect on the other. To address these differences fully, however,
would constitute a volume in itself. Kūkai’s and Dōgen’s respective historical,
political, socioeconomic, and cultural locations will therefore be invoked only
when they pertain directly to the thematic focus of this study, that is, to their
ideas and projects specifically related to Buddhist imagery, image-experience,
representation, form, formlessness, and the nondistinction between the two.
Likewise, although it is evident that both patriarchs are inheritors of, and
contributors to, Buddhism’s rich religio-artistic legacy, the larger continen-
tal traditions and discourses surrounding Buddhist visual culture will only be
briefly outlined here and referenced specifically when they directly relate to
Kūkai’s or Dōgen’s oeuvres. This study is intended to be a focused and there-
fore necessarily selective exercise in comparative thought, not an exhaustive
survey of all Buddhist art, architecture, scripture, and commentary pertain-
ing to form. Nevertheless, the following brief survey is provided to orient
beginning readers and familiarize them with key developments in Theravada,
Mahāyāna, Vajrayāna ( Jp. Mikkyō), and Zen Buddhist art and doctrine.
The so-called an-iconic, nonfigural phase of early classical Indian or
Theravadin art advanced an iconography of absence to indicate the Buddha’s
complete and utter selflessness in the state of nirvana. Because Buddha had
transcended all suffering and all desires in the world of samsara, by defini-
tion this also meant that he had transcended all bodily desires. His realiza-
tion of no-self (an-ātman), therefore, was taken literally to mean no-body.
The Buddha, consequently, was not depicted in any anthropomorphic form
in this early period, but rather intimated only by such symbolic emblems as
dharma wheels, footprints, empty thrones, or parasols over riderless horses.
These nonfigural visual cues indicated his presence by his very absence.
Later Mahāyāna Buddhism, however, collapsed the philosophical divide
between samsara and nirvana. This Buddhist ideal of nondualism, defined
as the abrogation of any two extremes, inspired a new iconography of
embodiment to indicate the Buddha’s always-already enlightened nature in
all the forms of the universe. As this later phase of figural Buddhist art in
Gandhāra and Central Asia absorbed neighboring religious influences from
Introduction xvii
past sectarian scholarship that has primarily locked them into strictly
iconographic-ritualistic or philological-philosophical categories, respec-
tively. Moreover, the inherent interdisciplinary approach of this study
will help to restore the historical symbiosis between visuality and religion
(either in its affirmative or negative sense) and further contribute to bridg-
ing the text-image gap that has formed the basis for many of the turf wars
between the academic disciplines of art history and religious studies. This
study, therefore, seeks to provide a broad conceptual approach to the prob-
lem of imagery and experience in Japanese Buddhism, and selects these
two archetypal figures who model opposing yet complementary paradigms
for enlightenment with and without images. For both Kūkai and Dōgen
believed that awakening in the present lifetime was possible and that it was
somehow intimately connected with imagery (whether in a positive enhanc-
ing way or as something from which one needed to “break through”). Their
individual experiences studying abroad in China provide a case in point.
The Problem
When the esoteric master Kūkai returned to Japan in 806 after two years
of study in T’ang dynasty China, he arrived laden with hundreds of texts,
images, and ritual accoutrements for propagating his new esoteric doc-
trines in Japan. Kūkai’s Catalogue of Imported Items (Shōrai mokuroku)
records that he imported from China over two hundred scriptures and
commentaries, eighteen ritual implements, eight precious objects (i.e.,
relics), five mandala paintings, and five patriarch portraits. It asserts that
all of the iconic imagery and ritual paraphernalia associated with his new
Mikkyō esoteric teachings can hasten the initiate along the quick path of
awakening, and that the mandalas in particular condense all of Buddha’s
teachings into visual form and can “enlighten the beholder in a single
glance” (itto jōbutsu).4 When the governor of Sanuki province conse-
quently praised Kūkai fifteen years later in a letter dated 821, he extolled,
“He studied abroad to seek the Way; he went empty-handed and returned
fully-equipped” (kyoō jikki).5
By contrast, when the Sōtō Zen master Dōgen returned to Japan in 1227
from his four years abroad in Sung dynasty China, he turned the ancient gov-
ernor’s statement on its head. He declared that he too went abroad to seek the
Way, but that he proudly “returned empty-handed” from the continent (kūshu
genkyō).6 On one level, Dōgen’s counterclaim can be understood to mean sim-
ply that he carried back relatively few Chinese scriptures and pictures, but on
4 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
mystics throughout history who either describe the kataphatic (via positiva)
feelings of divine union and/or the apophatic (via negativa) feelings of abso-
lute selflessness in the void. Some of the methods used in these recent studies
of neurotheology have fallen under scrutiny, and their conclusions have been
critiqued as being overly reductionistic since brain states do not necessarily
correspond to mind states.
That being said, however, some interesting indications have emerged from
brain scans of Christian contemplatives and Buddhist practitioners while
engaged in meditation. In a series of experiments conducted at the University
of Pennsylvania in the late 1990s, neurologists d’Acquili and Newberg moni-
tored the brain states of advanced Christian and Buddhist practitioners. They
fitted them with electrodes, automatically injected chemical tracers into their
brains, and obtained freeze-frame brain scans of the moment they indicated
their meditative climax. The results of these studies distinguished two basic
kinds of contemplation, which d’Acquili and Newberg labeled either active or
passive meditation. In active meditation, one focuses one’s attention on a real
or imagined object and one experiences feelings of divine union. In passive
meditation, one attempts to shut the mind down completely of all thoughts,
perceptions, and emotions, and one experiences a moment of complete and
utter selflessness.19 These two paradigms indeed seem to correlate to Kūkai’s
and Dōgen’s respective arts of enlightenment.
In active meditation, one begins by intentionally focusing one’s attention
on a real or imagined object such as the ajikan disk depicting Dainichi’s seed
syllable. Neurologically speaking, this means that the brain’s right attention
association area (AAA) engages those parts of the brain responsible for visual
perception and spatiality. It also signals the hypothalamus (which controls the
body’s arousal or quiescent functions) to activate an ergotrophic or aroused
response. Sustained concentration on the visual image creates a feedback
loop between the AAA and the hypothalamus, so that the meditator enjoys
“a mildly pleasant state of excitation.”20 Usually for survival reasons, one’s qui-
escent functions are blocked when the hypothalamus goes into arousal mode,
but under certain conditions, neurologists have noted a “spillover effect.”21
When the hypothalamus reaches an extreme point of excitation, it actually
“rebounds”22 and sends out neural signals for extreme quietude as well. This
may help to explain numerous accounts of profound calm in the midst of
highly charged prayer or meditation. At this point, one’s cerebral circuits
are being overloaded by the explosion of neural signals for both excitement
and quietude. The entire system thus goes into overdrive, which enhances
the AAA’s ability to focus on the real or imagined object even further. This
Introduction to the Art of Enlightenment 9
one eventually had the sensation of merging with it. Also, according to the
Visudhimagga, one could reach the other early classical meditative ideal of
absolute cessation of all mental cognitions (Skt. nirodha samāpatti) with the
addition of vipassanā insight meditation.34 Its added insights into the radical
impermanence and insubstantiality of self and world could lead to ultimate
wisdom or prajñā, defined as the realization of selflessness. The combination
of these two image-filled and imageless meditative techniques lead to a curi-
ous double standard: in later Mahāyāna Buddhism, the word for wisdom
itself, prajñā, could equally indicate either a state of unified consciousness or
the complete eradication of all cognitive activity.35 Kūkai and Dōgen tend to
favor the former or the latter strain of this shared legacy, respectively.
This discussion of Buddhist meditative techniques also raises the issue of
space and time, the focus of chapter 2. Because images are fundamentally spatial
in nature, and the workings of the mind are active and temporally dynamic, the
presence or absence of mental images in meditation indicates a relatively spatial
or temporal mode of awareness. By their very nature, śamatha contemplations
on colored disks are spatially oriented, while vipassanā meditations are more
temporally oriented as they focus the mind on the passing nature of every sensa-
tion and fleeting thought. These two techniques are therefore designed to lead
to a feeling of nondual union in unobstructed meditative space, or a moment
of absolute cessation in unobstructed meditative time, respectively. These two
meditative goals, as well as their reciprocal vs. sequential ideals for religious
experience, are inherited legacies from the past that influenced Kūkai’s and
Dōgen’s respective views of imagery. Their prototypical models and inherited
religious ideals as expressed in both text and image were fundamentally shaped
by a relative emphasis on space or time and were present in varying forms and to
varying degrees from the very inception of Buddhism.
In other words, Kūkai’s textual and visual expressions of spatialized time
reflect and inform his meditative ideal of kaji’s nondual union. His visualized
unification of self with deity could not have been formulated without the prec-
edent of some early śamatha visualization practices with kasin. a man. d.alas, a
spatial and reflexive understanding of form and emptiness, bodhiman. d.a ritual
enclosures, and Mikkyō’s generally synthetic character. As explained further
in chapters 2 and 3, these factors allowed Kūkai to embrace form as empty,
and hence construct and deconstruct numerous interresonating architectures
of understanding.
By contrast, Dōgen’s textual-visual expressions of temporalized space reflect
and inform his ideal meditative moment of absolute cessation in shinjin datsur-
aku. Dōgen could not have advanced the notion of temporarily forgetting and
Introduction to the Art of Enlightenment 13
then reconstituting the self without being heir to the early Buddhist ideals of
cessation (nirodha samāpatti) brought about by vipassanā’s insight into imper-
manence. As we shall see in chapter 2, the threefold sequential understanding
of form and emptiness structures his enlightenment experience through unob-
structed time, as it did for his predecessors Bhāvaviveka (Ch. Ch’ing pien, Jp.
Shōben 490–570), Seigen (Ch. Ch’ing-yüan 660–740), and other readers of
the Diamond Sūtra before him. Other factors, such as the Zen-Taoist concern
for time, realization as practice in time, and an overwhelming preoccupation
with the transhistorical transmission of what he calls the True Dharma Eye, all
contributed to shape Dōgen’s inconstant view of imagery. Dōgen navigates an
extremely fine line in determining which or what kinds of images are amenable
to whom, and why some are incompatible with his overarching concern for
practice-realization in, through, and as time.
its statuary, its Renaissance triptych altarpieces, and its rosary beads for Hail
Mary recitations. They likewise noted the parallels between Dōgen or Shinran
(1173–1262) and Luther’s charismatic reform movements within their estab-
lished orthodoxies. They correlated Zen’s emphasis on jiriki or self-powered
personal illumination with the Protestant emphasis on the individual as the
agent of his own salvation (as opposed to relying on intermediary priests).
The lavish displays of esoteric ritual among the effeminate Heian courtiers
was contrasted with the militant Zen ascetic ideal among the Spartan sam-
urai warriors of the Kamakura period, and this easily recalled the decadent
displays of wealth, power, and prestige of the Medici popes vs. the disciplin-
ing wars of Reformation for which Luther wrote hymns such as “A Mighty
Fortress Is Our God.”
As a result of such Protestant concerns in Euro-American scholarship,
the historical and pan-Asian reality of Buddhist image and relic worship was
either wholly neglected or explained away as merely expedient means (upāya)
for the dull-witted masses. Other scholars simply tried to mitigate the per-
ceived power of images at the time. For example, Hakeda’s often-quoted trans-
lation of Kūkai’s Catalogue of Imported Items displays this Protestant anxiety
about possibly sounding too idolatrous. To soften Kūkai’s powerful claims
for his newly imported esoteric mandalas and to downplay the immanence of
the images, Hakeda inserts an expression of doubt into his translated phrase
“the sight of the [mandalas] may well enable one to attain Buddhahood.”41
However, as Robert Sharf has correctly pointed out, the classical Chinese
unequivocally asserts that the mandalas simply, directly, and emphatically
have the remarkable ability to do nothing other than “enlighten in a single
glance (itto jōbutsu).”42 This unambiguous declaration was made in the pro-
motional context of Kūkai trying to market his new sutras and visual aids
to the Heian court, where he was competing against his predecessor Saichō
(767–822). If anything, therefore, the sense of Kūkai’s sales pitch is to over-
state the mandalas’ efficacy, not to understate it as Hakeda did.
It was in the context of this so-called Protestantization of Buddhism in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Euro-American scholarship that D. T.
Suzuki first introduced Rinzai Zen Buddhism to the West. While he worked
with Paul Carus in the 1890s and while teaching at Columbia University after
World War II, Suzuki cast Zen primarily as a mystical tradition premised
on self-negation, not a religious faith involving elaborate rituals and a rich
artistic heritage in its own right. He tended to privilege Zen’s extralinguis-
tic, extra-imagistic, spaceless, timeless experience of supranormal conscious-
ness, saying, “Zen may lose all its literature, all its monasteries, and all its
Introduction to the Art of Enlightenment 15
all account for innovation within tradition. Thus, scholars of art history and
religious studies alike need to consider how philosophies of form, visual tra-
ditions, and different meditation techniques together constitute an inherited
religious tradition. Such traditions influence whether one has an image expe-
rience or a supposedly contentless one, and they influence to what extent one’s
textual, visual, or practical expression of that experience reinforces, revises, or
extends the tradition into new territory.
The result of these developments and general trends within religious stud-
ies is that many scholars of religion have now become interested once more in
investigating the visual and material culture of Japanese Buddhism. This sea
change has led to a resurgence of interest in Mikkyō, as evidenced by the pub-
lications of some important edited volumes, as well as other monographs.52
The consequence of these contributions is that Mikkyō’s reputation as a deca-
dent decline of original Buddhism is being corrected and that Zen’s reputation
for wholesale iconoclasm is now being qualified. Of course, no one can deny
Mikkyō’s overwhelming complexity of iconography and symbolism, and there
are infamous stories of antinomian, iconoclastic Zen antics. However, now
one is in a position to reconsider both of these assumptions and look closely
at both the texts and the images of Shingon and Zen in order to adjust and
update our vision of Buddhist art and experience in Japan’s premodern age.
The present study of Kūkai’s and Dōgen’s religio-artistic theory and prac-
tice builds upon this recent trend and attempts to restore the fundamental
concern of religion with art and art with religion. Investigating issues of ico-
nicity and iconoclasm brings the artificially separated academic disciplines
of art history and religious studies back together again in their historically
inseparable symbiosis. Historically speaking, it is evident that artists were
monks and monks were artists. Doctrinally speaking as well, it is evident that
Kūkai and Dōgen both believed that fully realizing Buddhahood within this
lifetime was possible, given their methods, affirming yet emptying form on the
one hand, and negating yet reconstituting form on the other. This study seeks
to bridge the altogether modern, artificial, and somewhat arbitrary academic
division of labor between art history and religious studies, and their atten-
dant offspring of material culture and mysticism studies. It is in this spirit that
the following chapters attempt to explicate both Kūkai’s and Dōgen’s views of
imagery vis-à-vis religious experience.
2
The Problem
When one considers the nature of form, one usually thinks in terms of mate-
rial substances that create and occupy physical space. Alternately, one some-
times thinks of forms in terms of their duration, or as events that unfold
in and through time. No form can be said to be wholly spatial or temporal
in nature, but in terms of relative emphasis, we use nouns and verbs to lin-
guistically express how we perceive the way objects and events abide in the
spatio-temporal matrix. The goal of Buddhist enlightenment is to see and
personally experience the emptiness of these primarily spatial or temporal
forms.
What then, one might ask, is the form of the enlightenment experience
itself ? Where or when does the realization of emptiness take place? How
did Buddhist practitioners themselves understand the place or the time of
their enlightenment? This chapter focuses on the thought of Kūkai and of
Dōgen in an attempt to address this question from a comparative point of
view. Certainly, ancient Indian notions of bodhimanda and Chinese geomet-
ric ideals influenced Shingon, while Taoist process-oriented philosophy influ-
enced Zen. What then, is the common denominator for considering them
together?
It is the thesis of this chapter that the common inheritance of Kegon cos-
mology can be the basis for a fruitful comparison of Kūkai’s and Dōgen’s
thought. It is important to establish this common denominator linking their
worldviews, otherwise one risks comparing apples to oranges. In addition, it
is important to find this common ground from within the Buddhist tradi-
tion itself, otherwise one runs the risk of colonizing Buddhism with Western
European phenomenological or Jungian-inspired categories. Certainly, a
shared Kegon worldview does not erase the very different historical and social
Mikkyō Space, Zen Time 23
first human patriarch Nāgārjuna receives two esoteric sutras from the bodhi-
sattva Vajrasattva (fig. 2.1). He specifically obtains the Dainichikyō (Skt.
Mahāvairocana sūtra) and the Kongōchōkyō (Skt. Vajraśekhara sūtra). These
two foundational texts are then eventually illustrated as the all-important
Womb and Diamond World mandalas, respectively, to be analyzed in icon-
ographic detail later in this chapter. From Shingon’s ultimate point of view,
these two foundational strains of textual and visual authority are said to be
nondual. This Mikkyō myth of origins thus provides a normative template for
understanding its ideal for acquiring wisdom. It clearly indicates that a supra-
normal space is required for the exchange of esoteric knowledge between
Buddhist deities and human patriarchs, as well as for the synthesis of two
sutras and two paradigmatic mandalas.
It is true that later clerics, such as Tokuitsu (781?–842?), questioned the
transmission of both scriptures at the iron tower, and that the Hossō priest
Shinkō (934–1004) ultimately separated the lineage into two separate scrip-
tural transmissions.5 More specifically, Shinkō speculated that Nāgārjuna only
received the Kongochōkyō in the iron tower and that it was the esoteric master
Śubhākarasimha who received the Dainichikyō scripture at Kaniska’s
five-story
pagoda in northern India. Shinkō’s two-transmission theory was later illus-
trated by Fujiwara Munehiro (active mid-twelfth century), who created a
famous pair of polychrome panels for Eikyūji temple in 1136. However, of the
two, only the Nāgārjuna image is pictured here, as Shinkō’s theory contravenes
Kūkai’s original thought as expressed in his commentary on the Kongōchōkyō
called the Kyōōkyō kaidai. Kūkai writes, “this sūtra [the Kongōchōkyō] and
the Dainichikyō are together the essence of the Tathāgata’s Secret Repository
which Nāgārjuna Bodhisattva discovered in the Iron Tower of South India.”6
By contrast, the legendary foundation of Zen’s dharma lineage is estab-
lished not by the cosmic Mahāvairocana Buddha, but rather by the his-
torical Śakyamuni Buddha. In the Zen narrative, Śakyamuni’s disciple
Mahākaśyapa immediately becomes enlightened when the Buddha simply
and silently holds up a flower. This mysterious mind-to-mind transmission
of the dharma also extends to Nāgārjuna, whom Zen recognizes as its four-
teenth patriarch.7 However, instead of ascending the towering tahōtō many-
jeweled pagoda above ground, in Zen lore Nāgārjuna descends to the deepest
ocean-floor negations undercutting the sea of conceptual dualisms. He
obtains the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras from the dragon king’s palace at the bot-
tom of the sea and resurfaces as the enlightened holder of the perfection of
wisdom. Nāgārjuna’s symbolic path thus follows a tripartite sequential par-
adigm. This involves a progression from everyday awareness on the surface,
Mikkyō Space, Zen Time 25
Figure 2.1. Nāgārjuna receiving esoteric scriptures from Vajrasattva in the iron tower,
southern India (Ryobu daikyō kantokuzu - Ryūmyō). Fujiwara Munehiro, c. 1136, National
Treasure, Fujita Museum of Art, Osaka. Used with permission.
26 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
Figure 2.2. Detail from the Kegon engi emaki: Gisho receiving the Kegonkyō at the dragon
king’s palace at the bottom of the sea. Before 1253, Kamakura Period, Kōzanji, Kyoto.
Used with permission.
space is contained within the matrix of time, for the dragon king’s palace
lies along the path of the prajñā-seeking pilgrim. One can therefore speak in
general of spatialized time in Kūkai’s paradigm, and temporalized space in
Dōgen’s.
Figure 2.3. Birushana Buddha. Tōshōdaiji, Nara, c. 759. Used with permission.
between thing and thing (jijimuge) is the hallmark of Kegon’s most enlight-
ened Buddha realm (dharmadhātu).
Kūkai was probably first exposed to Kegon-inspired imagery after he moved
to the capital of Nagaoka (ca. 791) to attend college. Nearby in the old capi-
tal of Nara, Kūkai may have encountered the impressive Birushana Buddhas
of Tōshōdaiji and Tōdaiji, either as a student or as a wandering shidosō self-
ordained priest. Commonly described as the cosmic Buddha, Birushana (Skt.
Vairocana) images preceded Kūkai’s introduction of Mahāvairocana imagery
in the ninth century. Also known as Dainichi or the “Great Sun” Buddha
in Japan, Mahāvairocana is directly equated with the dharmakāya (the uni-
versal body of Buddhist teaching) in the Dainichikyō and Kūkai’s extensive
writings.
Tōshōdaiji’s eighth-century dry-lacquer Birushana figure (fig. 2.3), for
example, measures over three meters tall and is framed by a magnificent gilt
bronze aureole of one thousand baby buddhas (senbutsuko). These miniature
figures, as well as miniature historical buddhas on each petal of its lotus base,
are understood to be unobstructed aspects of Birushana’s universally enlight-
ened and enlightening body. The cosmic monumentality and refracted iter-
ation of buddhas in this sculptural complex gives form to Kegon teachings
about the holographic nature of the dharmakāya.
Mikkyō Space, Zen Time 29
Figure 2.4. Birushana Buddha’s lotus base (detail), Tōdaiji, Nara, 752. Photograph by the
author.
Kūkai’s selection of sutra citations and his preoccupation with the size and
number of bhumi lands and Buddha bodies also helped him explain the
holographic spatial system of his newly imported Diamond and Womb
World mandalas. This pair of mandalas depicts the dharmadhātu realm of
enlightenment in two aspects, which Kūkai maintains are actually nondual
and nondistinct from oneself. Specifically, Kūkai samples Kegon metaphors
and phraseology to explain that Dainichi’s myriad but ultimately unified
aspects—as depicted in the Two World mandalas—are nothing other than
one’s own being. In The Precious Key to the Secret Treasury ( Jp. Hizō hōyaku)
Kūkai writes,
Kūkai also obliquely equates the physical and mental infinitude of the Two
World mandalas with the immensity of ultimate reality in The Meaning of the
Word Hum (Unji gi).
Furthermore, in his 817 treatise, Becoming a Buddha In This Very Body (Sokushin
jōbutsugi), Kūkai goes on to emphasize the spatiality of the dharmakāya by
Mikkyō Space, Zen Time 31
[Vairocana] taught that infinite time is in one moment and that one
moment is in infinite time; that one is in many and that many is in one,
that is, that the universal is in particulars and that the particulars are in
the universal. He illustrated this infinitely interdependent relationship
of time and space with the simile of Indra’s net and with that of the
interfusion of the rays of lighted lamps . . . (he taught that) one must
ascend the Five Ranks of Development of Bodhisattvahood20 . . . and
that since the attributes and the essence are nondual, the Ten Bodies of
the Buddha are to be returned equally to Vairocana Buddha. These are
the essentials of the Avatamsaka sūtra.21
32 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
From these comments, we can see that Kūkai ultimately recognized Kegon’s
theory of interdependent and interpenetrating space and time, but that he
emphasized Kegon spatiality when he was preoccupied with advancing
Mikkyō’s new doctrinal system in Japan. Kegon philosophy continued to
inform his thought even into his sixties, as he wrote in The Secret Key to the
Heart Sūtra (Hannya shingyō hiken) in 834, the year before his death:
Naturally, like any religion, the Mikkyō system is not entirely spatial in nature.
Mikkyō practitioners actively move through the Shikoku pilgrimage every year,
and Shingon’s elaborate eighteen-step ritual performances are fundamentally
time-oriented. Time does, in fact, figure prominently in Mikkyō’s discourse
regarding its role as the quick-as-lightning, clear-and-hard-as-diamonds vehi-
cle to enlightenment. This point in particular is worthy of further considera-
tion, since it supports Kūkai’s claim that the Mikkyō practitioner can attain
Buddhahood with the present body instead of reincarnating through multi-
ple kalpas or incalculable measurements of time.
Closer inspection of this claim, however, reveals that the Mikkyō dis-
course of speedy enlightenment is fundamentally spatialized, for as the
Japanese philosopher Yuasa Yasuo says, time often becomes envisioned as
“a quantity and a volume.”23 The reason the Mikkyō practitioner can rapidly
realize Buddhahood in Kūkai’s scheme is because it condenses and compacts
all time within its clearly delineated and specially consecrated spaces. Engage
with that space, and the practitioner engages with all times, everywhere, in
true Kegon fashion. Undergoing the abhiseka initiation ceremony within a
kanjōdō initiation hall, for example, encapsulates Nāgārjuna’s legendary eso-
teric dharma transmission within the iron tower in southern India, which
itself encapsulates Dainichi’s universal palace where resident buddhas of the
past, present, and future assist in the perpetual preaching of the dharma. As
Kūkai explains by quoting Vajrabodhi’s commentary on the Kongōchōkyō,
Figure 2.5. Central Perfected Body Assembly, Diamond World mandala. 855–89 Tōji,
Kyoto. Courtesy Benrido.
By enfolding and encapsulating the past, present, and future within micro-
macrocosmic architectural constructions (e.g., initiation halls, iron towers, and
universal palaces), Mikkyō subsumes temporal awareness under spatial bound-
aries and localizes time on physical, mythological, and cosmological planes.
This general tendency in Mikkyō to spatialize time is visually made explicit
in the central Perfected Body Assembly Hall of Dainichi’s palatial Diamond
World mandala. Here, the one thousand buddhas of past, present, and future
are depicted in six concentric layers of miniature faces within (fig. 2.5).
Now that we have demonstrated how Kūkai tends to spatialize time, let us
take a closer look at how his esoteric system envisions the realm of enlighten-
ment in spatial terms.
Figure 2.6 (a) The Diamond World mandala, c. 855–89. Tōji, Kyoto. Courtesy of
Benrido.
Figure 2.6 (b) Womb World mandala, c. 855–89. Tōji, Kyoto. Courtesy Benrido.
and thereby becoming one with Buddha; they do not function as prescriptive
soteriological aids for one’s own personal awakening, as does the ajikan disk
to be discussed in chapter 3. Rather, as Robert Sharf argues, the Two World
mandalas’ fundamentally spatialized mapping of enlightenment serves an
important ritual function: they condense and channel Dainichi’s macrocos-
mic power into the ritual hall, microcosmically make his palatial environment
present in the space, automatically transform it into a pure land, and hence
anyone in its vicinity into a Buddha.25 It is for this reason that Kūkai claimed
that one glance at them could enlighten.
It should further be noted that in Shingon temples, the Womb World
mandala is usually displayed to the right of the Diamond World mandala.
36 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
Given the Sino-Japanese convention of reading from right to left, the Shingon
school of esoteric Buddhism usually takes the right-hand Womb World as its
starting point and then progresses to the left-hand Diamond World. This her-
meneutic shall be followed here.
BUDDHA SECTION
1. The Lotus Court or Central Dais of the Eight Petals ( Jp. chūtai hachiyōin,
no Skt.)
2. Hall of Universal Knowledge ( Jp. henchiin, no Skt.)
3. Mantra Holders Hall ( Jp. jimyōin, Skt. Vidyādharas)
4. Shaka Hall ( Jp. shakain, Skt. Śākyamuni)
5. Kokūzō Hall ( Jp. kokūzōin, Skt. Ākāśagarbha)
6. Monju Hall ( Jp. monjuin, Skt. Mañjuśrī)
7. Soshitsuji Hall ( Jp. soshitsujiin, Skt. Susiddhikara)
East
12
6
4
2
9 8 1 10 11
LOTUS BUDDHA VAJRA
5
7
LOTUS SECTION
VAJRA SECTION
The 278 figures residing in these twelve halls personify forces necessary for
achieving enlightenment in this very body. They can be grouped concentrically
or perceived in the round in three or four layers, depending on whether one
adopts Amoghavajra or Śubhākarasimha’s commentary of the Dainichikyō.
This discussion of the Womb World layout, however, will follow the tradi-
tional tripartite grouping of halls. This organizing rubric spatially maps out
the path of awakening into three main groups: the seven halls of the central
capital I-shaped Buddha section personify aspects of one’s innate Buddha
potential, the two halls of the Lotus section to the viewer’s left exhibit aspects
of benign compassion, and the two halls of the Vajra section to the viewer’s
right house aspects of adamantine wisdom.
Seven Buddha halls in the center, top, and bottom of the mandala form the
capital I-shaped core of the Womb World (1-7). Specifically, above and below
the central Eight-Petaled Lotus Court (1), serene Buddha-mothers in Hall 2
and wrathful, yet compassionate Wisdom Kings below in Hall 3 give birth to
bodhisattvas residing in the flanking Lotus and Vajra sections. Atop this core
Buddha section resides Sakyamuni and his retinue in Hall 4, and below in
Kokūzo’s Hall 5 reside the multi-armed emanations of Kannon, symbolizing
compassion, and Kongōshū, symbolizing wisdom. Hall 6 above personifies as
Monju the wisdom that all sentient beings inherently possess; Hall 7 below
represents the susiddhi fruits of actualizing that innate wisdom through the
realization of emptiness. Halls 8 and 9 to the viewer’s left comprise the Lotus
Section, which houses Kannon and Jizō’s retinue of compassionate bodhisat-
tvas. Halls 10 and 11 to the viewer’s right comprise the Vajra Section, which
houses Kongōshū and Jōkaishō’s retinue of adamantine wisdom bodhisattvas.
The whole is surrounded by a peripheral hall (12) populated by guardians and
celestial deities in the realm of Pure Form. It even makes a gesture to the realm
of Formlessness here at the limits of the Womb World of Desire.
38 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
Four stupas in the upper left-hand corner of Hall 12 represent the four
formless dhyana states of infinite spatiality, infinite consciousness, nothing-
ness, and neither thought nor nonthought (fig. 2.8). This gesture to the triple
world of desire, form and formlessness will iconographically resonate with
the last two halls of the Diamond World mandala, where Dainichi wrathfully
manifests as Gōsanze in and as the triple world. As a result, the two mandalas
complement each other in expressing Dainichi’s universal presence.
5. Shiine 6. Ichiine
7. Rishue
(1-4) (1-5)
1. Jōjinne
4. Kuyōe (1-3)
Body
All Actions
(Mahā- 8. Gōsanze
(Karma-
mandala)
mandala)
6 elements
3. Misaie 2. Samayae
Speech Mind 9. Gōsanze-
(Dharma- (Samaya- Samayae
mandala) mandala)
up, around, and down until one reaches the bottom right-hand corner.26 This
mandala can be analyzed according to three major categories:
East
B
4 1
North E A C South
3 2
West
Four
Directions Immeasurables[Diamond Names] Womb Names of Bodhisattvas
also implied by the four pāramitā bodhisattvas (I-IV) around Dainichi in the
center, and the sixteen great bodhisattvas (1-16) around each wisdom Buddha
in the four directions. These figures personify the kaleidoscopic refractions of
Dainichi’s diamondlike wisdom, and are outlined below for future reference.
As we shall see in chapter 3, Kūkai will recombine select figures from these
mandalas at Tōji and at Kōyasan to create new kaleidoscopic and intericonic
patterns of Dainichi’s wisdom in the world.
West
o. a. o.
WATER AIR
12
10 D 11
i 9 i
7 III 14
South a. 8 C 5 II A IV 13 E 16 a. North
6 I 15
SPACE
i 1 i
3 B 2
FIRE 4 EARTH
o. a. o.
1,000 Buddhas of Past, Present & Future
East
Figure 2.13. Diamond World mandala detail: Central Perfected Body Hall
44 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
CENTER
A. Dainichi (Skt. Mahāvairocana) in the center moon disk personifies the pure
undefiled mind and perfect enlightened wisdom of the dharmadhātu realm
( Jp. hokkai-taishō-chi, Skt. āmala-vijñāna or dharmadhātu-svabhava-jñāna).
Dainichi Buddha is surrounded by four paramitā bodhisattvas:
B. Ashuku Buddha (Skt. Aksobhya) below Dainichi (to the east) personifies
the mirror-mind wisdom ( Jp. daienkyō-chi, Skt. ādarśa-jñāna) of pure
undistorted cognition. Ashuku Buddha is surrounded by four of sixteen
great bodhisattvas:
All of these figures are spatially fixed but doctrinally dynamic. To the ini-
tiate, they are actually considered to be emanations of Dainichi who reveals
himself to himself as four surrounding wisdom buddhas and all the auxiliary
bodhisattvas. This process of self-multiplying self-manifestation is couched in
the language of gift exchange, as Dainichi and the other four wisdom buddhas
are said to offer one another the sixteen great bodhisattvas, the four pāramitā
bodhisattvas, eight inner and outer offering (kuyō) bodhisattvas (i, o) as well as
four attraction bodhisattvas (a) who punctuate the outer band of one thousand
buddhas of past, present, and future. As a result, the central hall of the Diamond
World is populated with all the unobstructed, self-multiplying, kaleidoscopic
emanations of Dainichi’s universal body (which by definition includes mind).
In the above, we have observed just how spatial Kūkai is in his thinking. He
embodies and physically locates all the nondual aspects of Dainichi’s enlight-
ened worlds: its mind and matter, its noumena and phenomena, its ends and
means, its four mandalas and four immeasurables, its perfected wisdom, and its
principle of using compassionate method to actualize potential enlightenment.
In comparison to Kūkai’s highly spatialized system, Dōgen, by contrast,
will argue that all of Kūkai’s constructs of being are rather but momentary
46 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
What you should do is lay out yourself sequentially and see this (i.e.,
yourself ) to be the whole universe. Inspect each and every thing in that
universe as being a time. Things not obstructing each other, parallels
Mikkyō Space, Zen Time 47
times not obstructing each other. . . . Having laid yourself out sequen-
tially, you indeed see yourself. In this way, you have the fact that you
yourself are time.37
In keeping with this sequential observation of oneself as a time, one can con-
currently view all being-times in two ways. There is the aspect of an instan-
taneous individual “just now” being-time (nikon), and the dynamic range or
extension of being-time (kyōryaku). In the Uji fascicle, Dōgen explains the
function of individual and ranging time:
Strung out, all the beings in the whole universe are individual times. In
being-time (uji) there is the function of ranging; (being-time) ranges
from today to tomorrow, from today to yesterday, from yesterday
to today, from today to today, from tomorrow to tomorrow. This is so
because ranging itself is the function of time.38
This transmission of the dharma “from the past to the past, from the present
to the present, from the future to the future” makes no sense unless one keeps
a temporalized Kegon worldview in mind. Unless one abandons linear think-
ing and unless one understands Kegon’s holochronic notion of times within
times, Dōgen’s assertions simply make no sense.
Dōgen differs from Kūkai, however, in that he rarely quotes or references
the Kegonkyō directly. In contrast to Kūkai’s demonstrated and pervasive
reliance upon Kegon doctrines, imagery, and scripture, Dōgen’s historical
connection to Kegon is admittedly less direct. He inherits Kegon’s sense of
interpentration via the Lotus Sūtra, which he studied during his Tendai train-
ing on Mount Hiei as a young man. This principle Tendai scripture philo-
sophically builds on the holographic cosmology of Kegon’s Avatamsaka sūtra.
More specifically, the Lotus Sūtra teaches that all Buddhist teachings are
essentially one (ekayāna), but that they merely differ according to the phase
in which Buddha preached them. According to Tendai’s formal doctrine of
the Five Periods, the Buddha initially revealed Kegon’s main scripture, but no
one understood the fullness of his realization at the time. He consequently
accommodated his message to his audiences in four subsequent phases of
increasingly sophisticated teachings (i.e., the Sūtra pitaka, Mahāyāna sutras,
Perfection of Wisdom literature, and finally the Lotus and Nirvāna Sūtras).
As a result, the Lotus Sūtra, which Leighton has demonstrated exerted con-
siderable influence over Dōgen’s thought, constructs itself as the latest and
most sophisticated reformulation of the Kegonkyō itself. Because it is funda-
mentally premised on Kegon’s philosophy and imagery, it teaches, for exam-
ple, that the “three-thousand worlds are present in one moment of thought.”42
This famous line not only explains how multiplicity can be contained within
singularity, but also indicates how exterior reality can be contained within
interior mental perception and how expansive physical space can be sub-
sumed within one moment of time. Dōgen’s discourse of temporalized space
and temporal interpenetration is directly traceable to this common Kegon
inheritance.
In sum, we can tentatively conclude that Kegon philosophy can been seen
as the common denominator for directly juxtaposing Kūkai’s and Dōgen’s
thought. Kūkai tends to envision its holographic message of “one in all, all
in one” in terms of spatialized temporality, emphasizing universes within
universes and Buddha bodies within Buddha lands. Dōgen by contrast, tem-
poralizes space and put his own temporal spin on Kegon cosmology. He
stresses times within times in what I call “holochronic time,” an interpen-
etrating, ranging sense of time that links all sentient and insentient bodies
Mikkyō Space, Zen Time 49
(a)
(b)
Figure 2.14. (a) Shisho transmission certificate, thirteenth century, Eiheiji Temple, Fukui
Prefecture and (b) detail. Used with permission, courtesy of Ishii Seijun.
left and his own master Nyojō appears to his right, as if Dōgen is standing
shoulder to shoulder with them across time. Reading the progression clock-
wise starting from Mahākāśyapa at the bottom of the circle, Bodhidharma
( Jp. Bodaidaruma) appears slightly to the right of center above Buddha,
twenty-eight generations after Mahākāśyapa. The famous sixth patriarch
Hui-neng ( Jp. Enō 638–713) appears six generations after Bodhidharma, at
approximately the two o’clock position of the circle. Progressing clockwise,
Fu-jung Tao-kai ( Jp. Fuyō Dōkai), whose dharma robe Dōgen supposedly
inherited, appears twelve generations after Hui-neng approximately at the
four o’clock position of the circle. Dōgen’s lineage grandfather Chikan (Ch.
Chih-chien 1105–1192) appears sixteen generations after Hui-neng, while
Nyojō appears directly after Chikan, and Dōgen naturally follows directly
after Nyojō. The shisho can also be read counterclockwise, so that Dōgen
can trace his ancestral lineage backward through the generations to the first
Mikkyō Space, Zen Time 51
patriarch and directly to the Buddha’s enlightened mind. A thin red line out-
lining the transmission weaves in and out among each and every name, but
this miraculously reversible “arrow of time” ultimately meets in the center at
Buddha’s enlightened mind, which unifies them all.
This kechimyaku or surrogate bloodline for celibate dharma heirs may refer
to the legends about the Sōtō lineage founder Seigen, who copied a certificate
in his own blood, or a mixture of his and the sixth patriarch’s blood, or a mix-
ture of the first and second partriach’s blood.45 Dōgen himself comments in
the Shisho fascicle that some certificates are written in blood from a finger or
a tongue, though others write it in milk or oil.46 Three large red inka seals of
the monk Sanbō stamp both Buddha’s and Dōgen’s names in the circle and
also stamp the name of Dōgen’s master Nyojō, which appears at the bottom
left at the end of the accompanying inscription. Master Nyojō’s own name-
seal appears twice in the accompanying inscription below. His real name-seal
appears once over Dōgen’s name and his Buddhist name-seal appears once
over the last character (meaning End, I did it, or facit). Roughly translated,
the inscription says:
[ Just as] the lifeblood passes through the buddhas and patriarchs of
this certificate, [so too] does it pass through Dōgen (Nyojō seal).
The Great Sung, 3rd year of Pao Ch’ing (1227)
[signed] the living Tendō Nyojō (Sanbō seal).
Facit (Nyojō seal)47
Today in our lineage from Tōzan, [the way] the certificate is writ-
ten is different from [the way] it is written in the Rinzai and other
[lineages].”48 . . . Although he [the historical Buddha] realizes the truth
on the 8th day of the 12th month thirty years after his descent and
birth . . . it is the same realization of the truth shoulder to shoulder with,
and in time with, the many buddhas, it is realization of the truth before
the many buddhas; and it is realization of the truth after all the many
buddhas.49
with one another helps one to understand how their minds can transhistori-
cally “see” one another across the circle of time. It helps to explain how their
minds can “meet” in a momentary nikon that is simultaneously nondual with
that ranging circle of kyōryaku holochrony. It helps to explain Dōgen’s claim
that “there is no time that is not [the mutual transmission of ] the buddhas”50
and it helps to explain his opening line of the Enlightened Vision (Ganzei)
fascicle, which states: “If kotis of thousand myriad kalpas of learning in prac-
tice are gathered together into a happy circle, it will be eighty-four thousand
Eyes.”51 That is, if millions and millions of infinite periods of time were gath-
ered together, all the learning in practice that occurred therein would make
up a happy circle of countless True Dharma Eyes looking across the aeons at
one another. This image also helps to explain why Dōgen is so partial to his
oft-quoted Lotus Sūtra phrase, stating that only a buddha can know other
buddhas despite the centuries between them. In this way, it becomes evident
that looking at Dōgen’s writings in light of the important images in his life
can yield significant insights that mere textual exegesis alone cannot. Thus,
despite Dōgen’s iconoclastic tendencies, one has to acknowledge that he nev-
ertheless relies upon these particular kinds of Zen icons to shape and mold
his thinking.
In addition, one has to acknowledge that Dōgen valorizes and reveres
these images as icons that paradoxically and uniquely fix the ineffable dharma
transmission in graphic form. The Shōbōgenzō recounts many instances when
Dōgen sought out and requested special displays of shisho transmission cer-
tificates. Dōgen’s overwhelming preoccupation with seeing and handling the
actual confirmation objects of transmission rival only a present-day art his-
torian’s passion for getting access to museum storage or private collections.
Dōgen’s account of one particular discovery is telling. It is unclear whether
this passage is written self-referentially, as Dōgen often did, or if a later hand
added to it.
from among the robes and pātra (almsbowl) of an old veteran monk;
it was not that of the venerable I-ichi himself. The way it was written
is as follows: “The first Patriarch Mahākaśyapa realized the truth under
Śākyamuni Buddha, Śākyamuni Buddha realized the truth under
Kāśyapa Buddha.” It was written like this. Seeing it, Dōgen decisively
believed in the succession of the Dharma from rightful successor to
rightful successor. [The certificate] was Dharma that I had never seen
before. It was a moment in which the Buddhist patriarchs mystically
respond to and protect their descendants. The feeling of gratitude was
beyond endurance.52
This passage thus communicates Dōgen’s awe and reverence for the scroll itself,
for it teaches him the continuous enlightenment of buddhas to buddhas from
aeon to aeon. This particular trace of dharma transmission posits that the last
of the seven buddhas of the past named Kāśyapa enlightened the historical
Śākyamuni Buddha, and that Śākyamuni Buddha then enlightened his disciple
Mahākaśyapa in one unbroken meeting of the minds. Dōgen thereby learns
that Śākyamuni Buddha’s awakening did not occur spontaneously for the first
time sui generis, but rather that it was but the latest succession in a series of age-
less and mutually validating awakenings throughout seven (that is, a symbolic
perfect number of ) world ages.53 He therefore states in the Shisho fascicle that
he has come to understand the Zen teaching that there were forty patriarchs
from the seven buddhas of the past to the thirty-third patriarch Hui-neng, and
more interestingly, vice versa as well. In this way, he comes to understand that
“the so-called Seven Buddhas of the Past appeared in the infinite past and yet
they appear at the present. Therefore, what permeates the face-to-face transmis-
sion throughout the forty patriarchs is the way of the buddhas and the succes-
sion of the buddhas.”54 This confirmation of buddhas mutually meeting eye
to eye “alone together with buddhas” was revelatory for Dōgen, and for this
reason, he is understandably awed and grateful for this new manifestation of
the dharma. The format of the scroll itself reveals the timeless ranging of the
dharma transmission forward and backward from master to disciple and back
again, so Dōgen is overcome with gratitude for being able to see (i.e., meet
and participate in) their timeless mind-to-mind transmission. In a sentiment
of pseudosynchronicity, he remarks that it is almost as if the patriarchs knew
and mystically answered his wish to “see” them. They consequently revealed
the truth of their realization to him in this scroll.
Thus, for Dōgen, the scroll itself embodies and materializes enlighten-
ment directly and exemplifies how insentient objects can preach the dharma.
54 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
This is a doctrinal formula known as mujō seppō that will be discussed further
in chapter 4. The scroll itself may be a fixed, spatial object, but it was material
evidence that disclosed the true nature of realization in and through time.
For him, the shisho reconciled the tensions between original and acquired
enlightenment, universal and individual enlightenment, eternal and momen-
tary awakening, realization and practice. It showed all the patriarchs who had
practiced and automatically realized their innate potential across the aeons,
and as such it was to be revered.
This was especially the case as Dōgen strove to widen the circle of under-
standing and extend the lineage to his own dharma successors in Japan. For
this reason, as his fatal illness markedly worsens in the seventh month of 1253,
Dōgen knowingly instructs his pupil Gikai (1219–1309) to dedicate the merit
of seeing the shisho to his fellow monk Ekan, a former Daruma-shū adept who
had joined Dōgen in 1241 and died c. 1251. Dōgen did this just a week before
he officially bestows his robe to his dharma heir Ejō (1198–1280).55 These final
acts of a dying Zen master indicate the important status that these visual and
material markers of enlightenment held for him.
Like Kūkai, who later acknowledged the temporal dimension after he
established Mikkyō on the ground, Dōgen does specifically discuss space after
establishing the Sōtō Zen lineage in Japanese history. After sixteen years of
gathering students in Kyoto and Fukakusa, he moves to Echizen province,
establishes Eiheiji Temple in 1243, and writes a fascicle on Space (Kokū) in
1245. Yet even in this fascicle, Dōgen relativizes the importance of space and
recognizes the interdependence of space and time together. Dōgen opens the
fascicle by citing Ch’an master Huang-po’s question to Emperor Xuan:
Put simply, because there is space, there is time and vice versa. That is,
Huang-po’s very act of asking a spatially locative question occasions the unob-
structed manifestation of all buddhas and ancestors who transmit the way in
and throughout ranging time. Conversely, because buddhas and patriarchs
transmit from rightful successor to rightful successor in time, the whole
body of enlightenment (i.e., the dharmakāya metonymically represented by
various constituent body parts) itself abides in space, as if it were hanging in
emptiness.
Mikkyō Space, Zen Time 55
Yet even Dōgen’s last sentiment of “the whole body hanging in space” con-
notes his typical temporalization of space, for it alludes to a special poetic
reference involving nondirectionality, formlessness, and the eternal wisdom
of buddhas and patriarchs. In his Makahannyaharamita fascicle, a commen-
tary on the eponymous Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra, Dōgen quotes an ode to
a windbell by his teacher Nyojō and then comments on it. Nyojō’s original
poem reads: “The whole body like a mouth, hanging in emptiness, does not
question whether the wind is north, south, east or west, but simply rings out
prajñā to all others equally, with the [tinkling chattering chime] teichin tōro
teichin tō”57 Dōgen comments on this onomatopoeia, saying, “This is the chat-
tering of prajñā [transmitted] by Buddhist patriarchs from rightful successor
to rightful successor.”58 By sampling Nyojō’s imagery in his Kokū and other
fascicles, Dōgen therefore problematizes spatial location, empties out the sub-
stance of the whole body of the bell, and seizes upon yet another opportunity
to emphasize the transmission of buddhas and patriarchs from generation to
generation throughout unobstructed time.
body. One can recall that Nāgārjuna ascended the iron tower in southern
India to obtain the esoteric teachings, and that Kūkai mentioned ascending
the five ranks of bodhisattvahood. Likewise, one can recall Nāgārjuna’s heroic
journey to the dragon king’s palace at the bottom of the sea and Dōgen’s
advice to drop off body and mind. These directional metaphors indicate that
Kūkai locates Dainichi’s cosmic, mysterious power externally, and that one
must rise up to merge with it (that is, until one gets enlightened and realizes
nonduality between inside and outside, upward and downward). Dōgen, by
contrast, locates the energy source internally, so that one must journey deep
down within oneself to realize it (again, until one gets enlightened and real-
izes nonduality).
To use the analogy of electricity, in the Mikkyō context, one first “plugs
into” Dainichi’s self-illuminating power by the three ritual prongs of body,
speech, and mind. Figure 2.15, for example, illustrates an esoteric visualiza-
tion for circulating mantras in order to achieve kaji mutual empowerment
between self and Buddha. By connecting one’s own speech and by exten-
sion body and mind to Dainichi’s, a mutual exchange of energy (kaji) occurs
Deity
Practitioner
Figure 2.15. Shingon visualization for circulating mantras in order to achieve kaji mutual
empowerment between self and Buddha. From Shingon, by Taiko Yamasaki, © 1988 by
Taiko Yamasaki and David Kidd. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications
Inc., Boston, MA. www.shambhala.com.
Mikkyō Space, Zen Time 57
as form, Dainichi unfolds into self, and Buddha enters me. In the Shingon
Mikkyō system, these two views of reality are nondual. They are graphically
schematized in the colorful Womb and Diamond World mandalas, whose
iconographic interresonances reveal the nonduality of Daincihi’s phenome-
nal and noumenal realms of potential and perfected enlightenment. Again,
in order to realize the reciprocal nonduality of self and Buddha, form and
emptiness, as well as Womb and Diamond World mandalas, Kūkai must con-
struct a special field or spatial system where such syntheses might occur. This
exchange can be schematized as follows, noting the upward directionality
inherent in Mikkyō’s foundation legend (fig. 2.16).
It should be noted that Kūkai’s notion of nondual union is not the same
as oneness. Union presupposes that there are two entities that come together,
whereas oneness refers to a single singularity or monism, which reduces
all difference into sameness. Union, and particularly the nondual union of
which Kūkai speaks, recognizes the continued existence of self and world as
personified by Dainichi, but dissolves both self and world into emptiness so
that the usual lines distinguishing the two become blurred. Again, this para-
digm requires an open, unobstructed, Kegon-like space in which to occur.
In contradistinction to Kūkai’s “plugging in” to the external source of his
enlightenment, Dōgen relies on jiriki or self-power, which means that the
body-mind complex contains its own battery pack so to speak (fig. 2.17).62
One’s “on” switch gets flipped when one practices zazen seated meditation, in
particular. This is why Dōgen maintained that practice and realization are one
and why he exhorted his students to “just sit” (shikan taza).
According to Dōgen’s scheme, one begins naturally with an everyday sense
of one’s own body and mind, separate from other being-times. This is the first
movement of asserting the self. In time, after long practice, however, one for-
gets one’s everyday sense of self completely by “dropping off the body-mind of
Figure 2.16. Kūkai’s Unitive Model: nondual union in unobstructed space (kaji)
Mikkyō Space, Zen Time 59
Figure 2.17. Zen Meditation. Adapted from Shingon, by Taiko Yamasaki, © 1988 by Taiko
Yamasaki and David Kidd. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications Inc.,
Boston, MA. www.shambhala.com.
self and other completely.” This second movement of negation is the telltale
moment of shinjin datsuraku in which all sense of self evaporates within the
sphere of emptiness. In the third movement of reaffirmation, the forgotten self
within Dōgen’s special Kegon-inspired temporal matrix then gets reaffirmed
as a contemporaneous being-time by all other being-times before, during, and
after it. That is, when one negates one’s self into emptiness, from within the
sphere of emptiness all other forms rush back in to confirm one as but one of
many dharmas in an interconnected whole, which Dōgen elsewhere describes
as Total Dynamic Functioning (Zenki) or One Bright Pearl (Ikka myōju).
One consequently recognizes one’s interpenetrating and dynamic partici-
pation in all dharmas at all times, always. Dōgen claims the True Dharma
Eye of enlightened vision results when this threefold movement of assertion,
negation, and reaffirmation of self and world is completed in and through
unobstructed time. This purgative enlightenment paradigm is schematized in
figure 2.18, noting the downward directionality of Zen’s foundation legend.
Whereas Kūkai sets up and then synthesizes the dichotomous complex
that we construct for ourselves and our world, Dōgen simply starts with all
forms as a whole, everything. Then in a second movement, there is a radi-
cal and complete dropping off, then a third and final movement when the
60 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
Figure 2.18. Dōgen’s Purgative Model: assertion, negation (shinjin datsuraku), and reaf-
firmation in unobstructed time
self gets reconfirmed by virtue of all the world’s myriad dharmas. The result
is a shift from relative self-centeredness to other-centeredness and the rec-
ognition that the self exists only by virtue of everything else. This traceless
enlightenment, Dōgen says, continues on and on endlessly within this special
temporal matrix.
Dōgen’s sequential threefold movement is not unique, however. Rather,
it relies upon a standard trope in Buddhist dialectics. Dōgen’s lineage mas-
ter, Seigen, famously remarked that when he first began Zen practice, he saw
mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers. As his practice gradually deep-
ened, he said he no longer saw mountains as mountains or rivers as rivers, but
that when he truly understood Zen, he once more saw mountains as moun-
tains and rivers as rivers. This triple movement from form, to nonform, back
to transformed form once more also appears in the Diamond Sūtra. Shigenori
Nagatomo has identified this dynamic sequence as The Logic Of Not, formally
articulated as “A is Not-A; Therefore it is A” (A,~A, ∴A), while Shohaku
Okumura simply describes it with the pithy formula “Is, Is Not, Is.”63 Malcolm
David Eckel has also noted the triple movement characterizing Bhāvaviveka’s
sixth-century Madhyamaka logic. He writes,
Dōgen is thus following this standard trope when he famously remarks in the
Genjōkōan fascicle
“The Buddha Way is originally beyond fullness and lack, and for this
reason there is generation and extinction, illusion and enlightenment,
sentient beings and Buddhas.”
In a fourth and final wrap-up, Dōgen asserts his own individual sentiment in
recollapsing the collapsed dualism and reassuming an everyday stance that
has nonetheless been transformed by the rigorous process of asserting, negat-
ing, and reaffirming form. Enlightened vision has been acquired in the third
movement, but that should not prevent one from engaging with the world in
a compassionate and realistic manner.
“In spite of this, flowers fall always amid our grudging, and weeds
flourish in our chagrin.”68
Kūkai Dōgen
Form = Emptiness Form → Emptiness
Emptiness = Form Emptiness → Form (transformed)
“I enter Buddha; To study the self is to forget the self;
Buddha enters me” to forget the self is to be confirmed by all
dharmas.”
Mikkyō Space, Zen Time 63
This shift to highlighting the order of experience and not the spatial-
ized order of being is what gives Dōgen’s work its temporal spin. It is also
what makes it so difficult for him to recognize fixed, unmoving graphic art
as legitimate, unless it is an exceptional Zen icon such as the shisho certificate
mentioned earlier. That is, Dōgen experiences awakening as a time-oriented,
sequential assertion, negation, and then reaffirmation of the body-mind in
unobstructed time. Because enlightenment for Dōgen is fundamentally
a lived event of time and in time, icons can never represent the moment of
enlightenment in the very literal sense of making it present again. One simply
has to live it. As soon as one tries to freeze-frame that ineffable lived moment
in a fixed graphic format, it’s lost.
Thus Kūkai’s and Dōgen’s experience of emptiness by necessity is condi-
tioned by their primarily spatial or temporal understandings of the world.
Kūkai’s unitive goal of nondual union or kaji requires an expansive, unob-
structed space in which unification may take place, and Dōgen’s purgative
shinjin datsuraku experience of absolute cessation requires a special unob-
structed time within which that moment of ineffability may occur. The
Mikkyō enlightenment experience envisions a certain bidirectional energy
exchange and eventual unification within the open space of meditation. The
Zen enlightenment experience sequentially asserts, negates, and reaffirms the
self in time.
Summary
To conclude, in this chapter we established Kegon cosmology as the com-
mon denominator for comparing Kūkai’s and Dōgen’s practical philosophies.
It was argued that relatively speaking, Kūkai places emphasis on holographic
space, whereas Dōgen emphasizes holochronic time. For Kūkai, the form of
emptiness is the micro-macrocosmic space of Dainichi’s body, speech, and
mind. This means that enlightenment involves realizing the emptiness of
every single mental and material thing in the universe.
For Dōgen, however, the form of emptiness is time. All beings are times,
all things are temporary occurrences. For Dōgen, therefore, the form of emp-
tiness is realizing the instant and eternal time of the buddhas and patriarchs.
This means that enlightenment involves realizing the emptiness of every sin-
gle action and event whenever it occurs.
Consequently, Kūkai tries to locate or visualize oneself as the dharmadhātu
realm of enlightenment, which he says is “as vast as empty space.” Dōgen, by
contrast, attempts to live or actualize the total dynamic functioning (zenki) of
64 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
and Dōgen’s principally iconoclastic views. For Kūkai, seeing the mandalas
in a single glance can automatically enlighten the viewer, but for Dōgen, the
True Dharma Eye is only gained through experiencing emptiness directly in
meditation. For Kūkai, the two mandalas are better than scriptures at directly
conveying the dharma, but for Dōgen, fixed graphic art can never fully rep-
resent the lived experience of awakening, apart from a few exceptional cases.
Chapters 3 and 4 in particular will analyze the specific religious images that
Kūkai and Dōgen valued highly (and qualified each in their own ways) and
will contextualize them both within their experiential systems.
3
Kūkai reiterates all of these visual themes toward the end of his life in two
monumental works known as The Ten Stages of Mind (Jūjūshinron), later
summarized as The Precious Key to the Secret Treasury (Hizō hōyaku). Written
in 830 at the age of fifty-seven, these texts systematically rank Buddhist doc-
trines in typical kyōhan11 fashion and conclude with Shingon occupying pride
of place as the tenth and ultimate doctrine. He opens his treatise with a poem
lamenting the fact that blind men in samsara cannot see their own blindness,
just as madmen are oblivious to their own madness. Thankfully, however, he
explains that Buddha has compassionately provided a range of teachings to
address each and every one of our blind spots. In the fourth stage of mind,
after discussing non-Buddhist doctrines, Kūkai credits Tripitaka masters with
at least providing men with a Buddhist path to clear their vision, open their
eye of wisdom, and attain nirvana. In the fifth stage of mind Kūkai warns
against the cessation of body and mind discussed previously. In the sixth stage,
he applauds the Yogācāra sect for severing attachments to real and imagined
sense objects12 and in the seventh Madhyamaka stage, he continues to analyze
the inseparable relationship between form and emptiness.
In the eighth stage of mind, when discussing the Tendai sect, Kūkai says
that the mind of enlightenment is identical to empty space and reflects all
images fully and clearly just like still water or a golden mirror. This enlightened
state permits no gap between the reflecting mind and the reflected image. It
is “signless” and “without aspect” (musō).13 This state of mind is like empty
space because it transcends all characteristics (e.g., all colors, dimensions, and
gender), all locations in the Buddhist cosmology (specifically in the realms
of desire, form, or formlessness), all perceptions, and even the categories of
being and nonbeing. It negates all distinctions and dualities, but Kūkai never-
theless maintains that this One Mind of Tendai is still only preliminary from
the esoteric point of view. He fundamentally reiterates this message in the
Kūkai on the Art of the Ultimate 71
ninth stage of mind addressing Kegon view, so it is only in the final and tenth
Shingon stage that Kūkai’s ultimate last word on form and imagery appears.
In the tenth Secret Magnificent Stage of Mind (Himitsu shogon shin),14
Kūkai claims that Mikkyō alone removes stains from the mind’s eye to gradu-
ally discern the magnificence of the mandala realm. He does not deny the
insubstantiality, emptiness, and interpenetration of forms that is articulated
in Tendai and Kegon doctines, but he claims to transcend their abstract doc-
trines and theoretical speculations about emptiness. He instead extols all the
forms of the universe such as they are, and embraces their unique capacity to
elicit enlightenment. To provide an example and a method for doing so, he
outlines the ajikan visualization to be discussed in detail below. This medita-
tive practice exploits the full capacity of one’s entire being; one’s eyes, mantric
invocations, and mental images of enlightenment are fully mobilized to mir-
ror and mimic the projected idea of Dainichi’s enlightened body, speech, and
mind. By practicing this esoteric path that locates Dainichi within one’s very
being, one comes to realize speedily that one can indeed become a Buddha in
this very embodiment.
One can tentatively conclude here that out of Tendai’s emptying negation
of nondualism and out of Kegon’s theoretical interlace of cosmic existence,
Kūkai concretely extols all the physical, verbal, and mental forms of originally
enlightened existence. This dynamic interaction of all three secrets of object,
idiom, and image-idea brings us to a discussion of Kūkai’s theory of monji and
the unmediated expression of truth in and as the word-images of the world.
will consider the word-art of Kūkai’s calligraphy, as well as the visual texts of
the two-world mandalas.
Most textual scholars trained in religious studies tend to focus on purely
linguistic issues in Kūkai’s newly imported mantrayāna. Scholars such
as Kasulis (1988), Ingram (1990), Rambelli (1994), and Abé (1999) have
explored in depth Kūkai’s linguistic theory and his systematic justifications
for the power of mantra invocation. Yet as Rambelli has demonstrated, texts
also functioned as material and performative bodies. Sutras were treated as
liturgical performance objects, fanned out accordion style, and symbolically
“read” with dramatic flourish as part of Buddhist ritual theater.16 Conversely,
material and performative bodies also functioned as texts. More specifically
for Kūkai, everyday objects and events were considered to be sacred texts.
They were considered to be but shape-shifting aspects of the dharmakāya’s
universally enlightened world-body. It is therefore important to remember
that for every reference that Kūkai makes to the power of speech and mantra,
there are an equal number of references to images and forms.
Kūkai views the entire cosmos as a massive visual text whose alpha-
bet of empty forms spell out suchness, the truth of the way things are. The
recombinant components of this vast visual alphabet are called monji (lit.
pattern-letters). These are the idea-graphic shapes that compose reality writ
large. They are the created and creating factors of existence, empty of any
fixed essence and therefore free to change and compose new monji. Such
image-letters emerge as an infinite netscape of mutually implicit composite
forms that spell out reality in a never-ending narrative of linked verse. Monji
are the formed and formative factors of existence that convey the truth of
things in linguistic-imagistic name-form permutations. The problem of names
and real or imagined forms (nama-rūpa) in samsara as opposed to nirvana had
plagued early classical Buddhism, but Kūkai’s fully developed theory of monji
links sights with sounds, forms with names, and objects of vision with objects
of thought to disclose Dainchi’s enlightened realm in and as the world. Monji
are thus the basic building blocks for Kūkai’s entire cosmological and soterio-
logical system, as they directly constitute and reveal the unobstructed realm
of enlightenment. This unobstructed, enlightened realm is accessible to all
provided that one refine one’s visual literacy and learn how to perceive and
participate in it properly through esoteric training. To read Dainichi’s cosmic
code of intertextual, intericonic signs correctly is to be enlightened.17
More specifically, in essays such as Sound-Letter-Reality and The Meaning
of the Word Hūm. , Kūkai explains that everything in the world, every physi-
cal, verbal, and mental object, appears as a particular pattern (mon). These
Kūkai on the Art of the Ultimate 73
The five elements [of earth, water, fire, air and space] have sounds
The ten realms [i.e., the six realms of samsara and the four Buddha
realms] have words
The six worldly objects [of sense] are monji
The dharmakāya is their true reality.19
In this passage Kūkai equates all the elements, existential realms, and sense
objects contained within Dainichi’s universal body with his enlightened
speech. Kūkai further stresses that these monji are not signifiers, but rather
nothing other than signs, manifestations or the “true reality” of the dharmakāya
itself. The basic elements constituting sentient and insentient forms in all ten
dimensions, as well as the six objects of sense (i.e., all the sights, sounds, smells,
tastes, textures, and thoughts in the world) are nothing other than Dainchi’s
world-body of emptiness. Their very lack of fixed essence allows them to appear
temporarily in the world such as they are. The enlightened person is one who
can “read” the monji of the world; he or she can hear, see, taste, touch, and smell
them all as empty and as therefore constituting the world-body of enlighten-
ment. Although personified as Dainichi, this world-body of Buddhahood is
not to be envisioned as any separate, transcendent deity, but rather as merely
the personification of the true empty nature of the thing-words themselves.
One can thus understand that monji are not merely man-made letters that
mediate reality through arbitrary human language. They are not just symbols,
referents, or signifiers to some displaced transcendent signified. Rather, for
Kūkai, each and every thing is a sign of enlightenment, onself included.
In the Catalogue, Kūkai further elucidates that “The dharma is beyond
speech but without speech it cannot be revealed. Suchness transcends forms,
74 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
Hōsshin seppō
Kūkai’s unequivocal declaration that the dharma is both within and with-
out linguistic form or visual format challenged the long-held beliefs of the
Nara Buddhist establishment. This establishment adhered to a traditional
scholastic view that the dharmakāya or Dainchi Buddha, as the cosmic
embodiment of emptiness, was utterly beyond verbalization or concep-
tualization. For them, only the nirman. akāya or historical transformation
body of Śākyamuni Buddha actively preached the dharma using the expe-
dient means of words and forms, such as his famous flower sermon that
silently enlightened the disciple Mahākāśyapa. In contrast to the exoteric
Nara establishment that held that the dharmakāya is beyond form and
words, however, Kūkai proposed that the dharmakāya itself transcends
the distinction between words vs. silence, appearance vs. disappearance.
Rather, “like a gem hidden in the ground” as the Catalogue versifies, the
level of an individual’s awareness determines whether it is seen or unseen.21
For one who has gained this enlightened insight, one sees that Dainichi
incessantly preaches the dharma through the empty forms and images of
the world. In this vision of the universe, as mentioned in chapter 2, empti-
ness self-manifests as forms and forms self-dissolve into emptiness. Even
plants, trees, and insentient entities disclose the dharma for Kūkai, a theme
that Dōgen will later take up and formally call mujō seppō or the insentient
preaching of the dharma.
In his own historical context, however, Kūkai’s worldview was radical.
He first addresses the topic by rhetorically positing a mock debate between
exoteric and esoteric figures in The Difference Between Exoteric and Esoteric
Buddhism (Benkenmitsu nikkyōron), written in 814 at the age of forty-one.22
Kūkai argues that the dharmakāya embodies emptiness yet always and eve-
rywhere discloses itself as nothing other than physical, verbal, and mental
forms. One’s level of awakening merely determines whether one sees this or
not. Kūkai claims that evidence for his argument already exists in exoteric
sutras, but that scholastic clerics either ignore or misinterpret these scrip-
tures to fit their own sectarian doctrines. To support his esoteric argument,
Kūkai on the Art of the Ultimate 75
In this passage, mountains are likened to brushes that write out reality
(i.e., heaven and earth) with the ink of oceans. These mountain-brushes
and ink-oceans simultaneously write the world and are the world; they are
self-inscribing agents and referents of the world-text. Heaven and earth, con-
sequently, contain the sacred and secular texts of life (lit. sutras and regis-
ters [keiseki]). Kūkai here emphasizes that all the word-forms of the world
coauthor one another’s suchness in an essentially tautological process, since
all the world (mountains and oceans) draws the entire world (heaven and
earth) into being and writes all its own self-contained, self-referential truth
(world-as-scripture). Furthermore, in keeping with Kegon’s unobstructed
worldview, every miniscule dot or point in every stroke-element of every one
of these character-things contains all the other monji in the world. In this way
Kūkai stresses that all forms are enfolded in, and can unfold from, language.27
76 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
As he reiterates in the Precious Key to the Secret Treasury, “Each mantra con-
tains the ten thousand images of the universe.”28
Kūkai’s all-embracing vision in the Seireishū verse includes even one’s
deluded desires born from the six objects of sense (i.e., sight, hearing, smell,
taste, touch, and thought). In true Mikkyō fashion, even deluded states and
sensory desires can originally spell out emptiness to an awakened mind. As
stated in the Rishukyō (Skt. Adhyarthaśatrikā-prajñāpāramitā sūtra), lust,
desire, touch, sight, ecstasy, pride, solemnity, bright lights, bodily pleasure,
voice, smell, taste, and all dharmas are originally pure (seisei, shōjō).
In the last lines of the Seireishū poem, Dainichi’s cosmic movements reso-
nate throughout the world like a bell in a valley, announcing his own such-
ness in a dynamic, self-echoing conversation that cuts through delusion like
a knife. This book of life, therefore, is not only written but also proclaimed
aloud with resounding truth. In this way, Kūkai reiterates the refrain that
all things constantly express their innate enlightenment in and as Dainichi’s
empty body of interfusing, interresonating monji.
Finally, this same confluence of self-expressive sights and sounds is taken
one step further in Kūkai’s fascicle on The Secret Treasury (Hizōki). Here he
sets up a triad between the sights and sounds of reality, their direct re-presen-
tation as the myriad deities of the mandala, and their direct re-presentation
in the mirror of the perceiving mind. Ultimately, all three versions of these
seen and heard monji are coequal in the unobstructed space of emptiness. He
writes:
Thus, for Kūkai, Buddhist truth incessantly reveals itself either as material
or immaterial form, but it is never without form. Dainichi, the Great Sun
Buddha who personifies the universal illumination of the dharmakāya, in
a sense represents the overarching principle of forms’ original enlighten-
ment, but it is never separate from forms themselves—ourselves included.
When abstracted from concrete beings, it is too big to depict even with
“the earth as ink and Mount Sumeru as brush” as he versifies in the Unjigi.30
Kūkai on the Art of the Ultimate 77
However, this stance does not negate the fact that emptiness as personified
by Dainichi actively and continually constructs a universal palace of such-
ness by disclosing itself as monji in a blissful, never-ending monologue of
self-expression.
Calligraphy as Monji
Kūkai’s overarching concern for phonetic, semantic, and ontic relationships
amongst forms is fully explored in his Shōji jissōgi essay on the sounds (shō)
of pattern-letters (ji) and their real world referents (jissō). However, if one
departs from such doctrinal tracts and instead looks to Kūkai’s calligraphic
works, one begins to appreciate the expressive value of his monji word-imagery.
One begins to see that Kūkai considers the shape of the character itself to be
but another unobstructed form of the dharmakāya’s body, and its pronunci-
ation but another unobstructed expression of Dainichi’s speech. In this way,
marrying the doctrinal insights from religious studies with the expertise of
art history and literary studies may further amplify our previous understand-
ing of Kūkai’s view of imagery. For him, words are pictorial forms; objects of
vision are texts, and texts are equally objects of vision.
It should be noted at the outset that Kūkai’s roles as linguist, calligrapher,
court poet, and literary ambassador were unparalleled in an age when such
accomplishments were the hallmark of erudition and style. When Emperor
Saga (786–842) appointed Kūkai to the Ministry of Secretarial Affairs
(Nakatsukasa shō) in 819, Kūkai compiled a treatise on the rules and conven-
tions of classical Chinese poetry called The Secret City of the Mirror of Writing
(Bunkyō hifuron). This was later condensed into The Essentials of Poetry and
Prose (Bumpitsu ganshinshō). In terms of poetry’s related calligraphic arts,
Kūkai is also esteemed as one of the three great brushes of the Heian period
along with Emperor Saga and Tachibana Hayanari (782–844). Kūkai has
been mistakenly credited with formulating the cursive hiragana syllabary,
which probably traces its origins to the seventh-century Asuka period, but he
is responsible for writing one of the first dictionaries in Japan. He compiled
and edited the Dictionary of Ten- and Rei-Style Letters (Tenrei banshō myōgi;
alt. meigi) in his fifties, providing both ways of writing seal-style and square-
style characters, as well as furnishing the pronunciations and meanings of
each term.31 Kūkai also resuscitated in Japan one particularly decorative style
of Chinese calligraphy that based its fanciful designs on the standardized ten
and rei ways of rendering ideographs. This zattai-sho style of calligraphy was
a form of writing that was extremely popular at the T’ang dynasty court that
78 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
adds cursive flourishes and finials to each stroke. Figure 3.1, for example, is a
tenth-century copy of Kūkai’s 825 preface and inscription commemorating
the completion of Lake Masuda in Yamato Province (Yamatokuni masudaike
himei narabinijo). These title characters appear to the extreme right of the
scroll, embellished with Kūkai’s zattai variations. The rest of the text com-
memorates the gifts of water to all sentient beings who benefit from it:
Mandarin ducks and snipe sport on the waters, singing. The long-lived
black crane and the snow goose vie with each other in dancing play-
fully at the water’s edge. . . . When one man has joy, the myriad people
put their faith in him. They dance and skip, slap their bellies, and, clap-
ping their hands and stamping their feet, shout “Long live” and so for-
get their labors.32
Instead of writing in standard scripts, such as the ten and rei seal and square
styles, however, or in the semicursive gyōsho or cursive grass sōsho styles, most
of the characters in this poetic document exhibit the combined zattai style,
though the document does also exhibit some characters written in the con-
temporary T’ang dynasty style of sokuten calligraphy.33 All of these styles indi-
cate that for Kūkai, the visuality of language and the meaning of images are
inseparable.
Early examples of zattai-sho had already entered into the Nara court in
Japan earlier in the eighth century along with many other kinds of script, but
Kūkai helped to update and popularize it at the Heian court. The Shōsōin
Figure 3.1. Yamatokuni masudaike himei narabinijo with zattai-sho decorative calligraphy,
Kōyasan Reihōkan. Used with permission.
Kūkai on the Art of the Ultimate 79
collection of Emperor Shōmu (r. 724–749) for example, housed his wife
Empress Kōmyō’s (701–760) collection of one hundred folding screens of
Chinese aphorisms rendered in zattai-sho variations above standard characters.
Extraordinarily, on three of these screens, the characters are covered with the
feathers of the Japanese copper pheasant.34 This aviary reference calls to mind
another calligraphic form called the hihaku flying white script. Also called the
hake brush-style script, the finial strokes of hihaku characters wave like banners
in the wind as if flying off the white paper or silk. Examples of the hihaku style
can be seen on the portraits of the seven esoteric patriarchs at Tōji, Kyoto. The
images of five Mikkyō patriarchs (Śubhākarsimha, Amoghavajra, Vajrabodhi,
I-hsing, and Hui-kuo) were painted and inscribed with the flying white
script in China in 805 and imported to Japan by Kūkai in 806. The matching
inscribed portraits of Nāgārjuna and Nāgabodhi are ascribed to Kūkai c. 821.
Figure 3.2 depicts the patriarch Nāgabodhi. The pairing of text and image in
this picture demonstrates yet again that writing portraits and imaging inscrip-
tions are symbiotic operations for Kūkai. One may read the iconography of
each patriarch’s pose, their mudras, their robes, and their water pitchers signi-
fying the direct transmission of esoteric teachings from one vessel to another,
Figure 3.2. Nāgabodhi Portrait and Inscription by Kūkai, Tōji Temple, Kyoto c. 821.
Courtesy Benrido.
80 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
just as one may aesthetically appreciate the calligraphic qualities of the hihaku
rendering of the Siddham letters surrounding each image.
One final example of monji word-art in whimsical hihaku script is depicted
in figures 3.3a-c. These show three extant examples of an original series of Ten
Factors of Existence, also known as the Ten Examples of Suchness (jūnyoze).35
This tenfold list first appears in the Lotus Sūtra, and characterizes the world
in terms of form, nature, substance, power, activities, primary causes, environ-
mental causes, effects, rewards and retributions, and the totality of the above
nine factors.36 The three surviving images artfully render the Chinese charac-
ters for forms, activities, and substance. These three calligraphic images are
undated and unsigned, though scholars attribute them to Kūkai due to their
mastery and provenance. They continued to exist into the modern period at
Jingoji, Kūkai’s first temple on Mount Takao in Kyoto, but exist today only as
photographs. In the late nineteenth century, Emperor Meiji and the Minister
of Education Machida Hisanari (1838–1897) saw them in 1872, remarking
how rare and “unique” (mezurashii) they were. After being photographed
and returned to Jingōji, however, they were soon reported stolen. This caused
great public outcry, which allegedly prompted the nervous thieves to then
destroy the images by fire.37 Despite their uncertain attribution, they are note-
worthy for their explicit illustration of Kūkai’s views regarding the intimate
relationship amongst sound, written letter, and the image of reality. They are
therefore included here for consideration.
The images themselves are brushed with hinoki cypress bark instead of
the more common animal hair brushes, and they fully exploit the expressive
qualities of the medium. The first two characters for nyoze or suchness, for
example, are rendered with staccato, punctuated rhythms or flowing, liquid
lines. They visually convey the reverberation and phonic power of the word
for thusness itself; as if the mantric energy of the sound of suchness is chanted
aloud here in graphic form.38 Furthermore, the calligrapher artfully writes the
first two characters for suchness (nyoze), but alters the radical of the third
character significantly to show the factor of existence such as it actually is.
In 3.3a, the character for the verb “to make” or “to do” (saku作) indicates the
fifth factor of existence “activities,” but the calligrapher does not write the
standard stylized radical for person. Rather, he draws an actual cap-wearing,
baton-wielding Confucian gentleman in the left-hand radical, then completes
the character with the swirling flights of the hihaku flying white script. In
figure 3.3b, the ancient character for “body” (tai 體) indicates the third factor
of existence “substance,” but the presence of an actual butterfly in the char-
acter visually communicates the impermanence of such substances, just as a
butterfly’s body is but the result of the chrysalis’ transformation. In figure 3.3c,
the word for “mark” or “aspect” (sō相) indicates the first factor of existence
“form,” but it is not written with the standard radical for tree. Rather, the
calligrapher draws an actual tree, then populates it with birds by using imag-
inative strokes instead of straight lines in the right-hand element of the char-
acter. The representational figures in these examples, like the staggered setting
down of the bark-brush in the nyoze-saku example, show a more intimate and
direct correspondence between sound, written letter, and the actual forms
of reality that they embody. As a result, the viewer comes to understand that
this calligraphy does not merely symbolize, but rather procreates a new form
of reality, based on reality. It is a meditation on monji (images, reality, words,
sounds) made with monji (cypress bark, paper, ideas, hands) that makes new
monji (calligraphic illustrations, new thusnesses, new scripts). This reciproc-
ity of text and image, and the transformation of infinitely recycling, inspir-
ing, feedback-looping monji reinforces the notion of Dainichi’s continuous
preaching of the dharma.
in the world. To paraphrase George Orwell, however, some monji are more
equal than others. For Kūkai, everything is Dainichi, but some esoteric things
are more Dainichi than others.
This kind of logic is not at all surprising when considered in light of
Kūkai’s early mountaineering practices. Theoretically speaking, idealized
constructions of Japan’s indigenous worldview considers all of nature to be
sacred, yet historically and in actual practice only individual mountains, spe-
cific trees, or selected rock formations are singled out and revered as kami.
They are specifically identified as somehow being uniquely endowed with
more sacred presence than others. This provides the rationale for activities
such as purification, pilgrimage, mountain climbing, and other austerities, for
one automatically participates in the divine nature of kami when in proxim-
ity to their sacred sites. Likewise, in Kūkai’s esoteric Buddhism, in principle
all monji including oneself have the same enlightened nature, yet they dif-
fer according to the potency, intensity, and level of realization of that innate
potential. When in proximity to the monji of the Two World mandalas or
other esoteric objects, likewise, one automatically gets reconnected with and
empowered by Dainichi’s nature, which is one’s own nature, only perfected.
When speaking of everyday monji vis-à-vis esoteric artforms, therefore, it is
not a question of kind, but of degree.
The Ajikan visualization is a case in point. The sacred Sanskrit syllable
A illustrated in figure 3.4 immediately abbreviates, invokes, condenses, and
Figure 3.4. Ajikan disk. Sankrit syllable A rendered in Siddham script on a lotus base and
moon disk. Photograph by the author.
Kūkai on the Art of the Ultimate 83
The word-art of the Siddham script, however, is not the only visible means to
Shingon’s enlightened end. Rather, the lotus and moon disk imagery in the
Ajikan visualization borrows from the paradigmatic Two World mandalas,
which likewise are considered to be especially empowering agents of enlight-
enment. Specifically, the lotus symbolizes potential enlightenment most fully
expressed by the central Lotus Court in the Womb World mandala, and the
moon disk symbolizes perfected enlightenment most fully expressed in the
Diamond World mandala’s many courts.
Everyday monji, therefore, are the primary carriers and constituents of the
Buddha’s enlightened and enlightening power, but this power can also be con-
densed and compacted into powerful corporal, scriptural, or pictorial formats.
For example, relics were believed to possess supernatural capacities,45 and some
esoteric scriptures were held up as being super-concentrated forms of Dainichi’s
power.46 However, Kūkai occasionally subordinates the importance of texts to the
primacy of image. For example, Kūkai’s 806 Catalogue of Imported Items states
that the Two World mandalas are the best forms for condensing and presenting
the deepest meaning of all the esoteric teachings. According to this text, Kūkai’s
master Hui-kuo initiated Kūkai into both the Womb and Diamond World man-
dalas before his death in 806, affirming that “the sutras and commentaries of the
secret treasury of Shingon are so mysterious that they can only be transmitted
through images (zuga).”47 Earlier in the same text, Kūkai also clearly asserts that:
The Esoteric teachings are so profound and mysterious that they are
difficult to record with quill and ink [that is, in writing]. Thus we
Kūkai on the Art of the Ultimate 85
In this oft-quoted passage, there is a presupposition that these two pictures are
worth a thousand words. They directly reveal Dainichi’s assemblies of aspect-
deities in all their relationality, functionality, and enlightening ability instead
of describing them, their attributes, and their significances in words. This is not
merely a question of didactic art making rarefied doctrines accessible to illiterate,
unenlightened masses, though it certainly did help to do this. Rather, on a more
profound level, Kūkai genuinely argues here that the depth of Mikkyō doctrines
cannot be expressed fully in writing, but that their mysterious secret power is
best conveyed through diagrams and images. These mandalas are so powerful,
he claims, that one glance at them can enlighten one immediately. They are so
indispensable, by extension, that he claims that the true dharma would be lost
if the images were lost. Consequently, in this case, Kūkai actually privileges the
supremacy of vision over language and argues that images can signify and lead
to enlightenment even better than scriptures can. He believes that the Two
World mandalas are better than texts at mirroring and condensing the entirety,
truth, and power of the dharmakāya as personified by Dainichi Buddha in all his
aspects. For this reason, after he provides a typically nondual expression of the
dharma’s visible and invisible nature, he concludes the Catalogue with a prayer
that squarely reveals his belief in the efficacy of the visible mandalas:
The Catalogue represents Kūkai’s early and clearly self-interested claims for
the power and efficacy of his newly imported mandalas, but Kūkai did also
86 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
earnestly continue to stress the primacy of image over text throughout his life.
In particular, he emphasizes their indispensable role in ritual practice. In late
834, only a few months before his death in the spring of 835, Kūkai requested
imperial permission to inaugurate a new Buddhist state-protecting ritual at the
start of the New Year. He proposed a Latter Seven-Day Rite (Goshichinichi
mishuhō), known simply as the Mishuhō, that would provide a Buddhist com-
plement to other ceremonies and celebrations that were held during the first
week of the year. For this new esoteric Buddhist ceremony, Kūkai insisted on
the necessity of proper imagery. In his letter to Emperor Ninmei (833–850),
Kūkai reasoned that the old Nara establishment’s state-protecting Golden
Light Sūtra51 had long been chanted ritually and explained during the annual
Misae sermon, but that
it is [merely] read and its meaning is emptily discussed. Images are not
drawn, and an [esoteric] altar is not established nor is a ritual con-
ducted. Although lectures on the nectar [of practice] are heard, its
sublime taste is probably not acquired.52
In this passage, Kūkai implies that the Misae’s scriptural chanting and ana-
lytical lectures insufficiently describe the sweet taste of the dharma, but that
the Mishuhō’s full enactment of the ritual with painted images and proper
esoteric altar arrangements allow one to actually taste and be nourished by the
nectar of the sutra’s content. He explains earlier in the same letter by means of
medical analogy that extracting the sutra’s essence and explaining it to the ill
does not cure them of their disease-delusions. Only properly combining med-
icines (i.e., arranging specific combinations of image-ingredients appropriate
to the delusion) and actually ingesting the cure (i.e., viewing and performing
rituals before these visual medicines) will actually eliminate the problem and
preserve life, or in this context, protect the state.53 Consequently, in this case,
images assume not only a theoretical, but also a ritual-functional priority over
words. For Kūkai, the state-protecting powers suggested in the sutra can only
be fully mobilized in image-filled ritual; for him only visible images and ritual
performance can immediately make present the potency and protection of
esoteric forces. Specifically, the Mishuhō rites in the newly built Shingon’in
sanctuary would telescope the macrocosmic structures and powers of
Dainichi’s universal palace into increasingly condensed, microcosmic spaces.
Dainichi’s universal palace would first be replicated by the Heian Imperial
Palace, which, like a Russian doll, would contain the ritual Shingon’in hall
protected by wrathful deities, the Two World mandala-palace paintings, two
Kūkai on the Art of the Ultimate 87
Figure 3.5. Mandala installation and altar arrangements for the Mishuhō, Shingon’in
chapel of the Heian Imperial Palace. Detail of Sumiyoshi Jokei’s seventeenth-century copy
of Tokiwa Mitsunaga’s late twelfth-century Handscroll of Annual Ceremonies (Nenjū gyōgi
emaki). Private collection, used with permission.
ritual altars featuring Dainichi’s symbolic gorintō reliquary, and within this,
the Buddha’s relics themselves. This ultracondensed and empowered esoteric
mini-universe would replicate the dharmadhātu on earth and manipulate
Dainichi Buddha’s enlightened powers for the protection of the state as a
whole. As a result, in response to Kūkai’s request, Emperor Ninmei sponsors
the ritual and in 835 constructs the Shingon’in chapel for the Latter Seven-
Day Rite within the Imperial Palace grounds. It is only the third Buddhist
temple allowed in the new capital after Tōji and Saiji.
One cannot be certain of Kūkai’s original iconographic arrangement for
the Mishuhō rite, but an undated anonymous diary describing the ritual in
921, another anonymous diary dated 1142, and a copy of a late twelfth-century
hand scroll illustration of the Shingon’in provide the earliest clues.54 According
to these sources, the Two World mandalas are suspended flush against the side
walls of the Shingon’in with the Womb World mandala on the viewer’s right
confronting the Diamond World mandala directly across the hall to the left
(fig. 3.5). Two altar platforms are placed on the floor directly below each man-
dala painting; each altar accommodates the mandalic arrangement of vajras,
bells, offertory cups, vases, and other ritual paraphernalia.55 The focus of the
Mishuhō state-protecting rites shifts between these two altars every year, as
a miniature five-element stupa (gorintō) containing precious relics alternates
between the two mandalic altars each year. This stupa represents the samaya
or symbolic form of Dainichi and contains the relics that Kūkai supposedly
88 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
Intericonicity
Mikkyō’s figural code of deities, each with its own identifying mudra, attri-
bute, and adornment, constitutes an alphabet of forms or a musical scale
of notes, which can be rearranged in infinite permutations to compose
different iconographic expressions of enlightenment. Just as the world of
92 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
Kōmukuten
13. 1. Tamonten
Daiitoku Kongō FUKŪJŌJU ASHUKU
yasha
mandala is usually hung to the viewer’s right, but at Tōji sculpted versions of
the Womb World’s five wisdom kings appear to the viewer’s left.72 Moreover,
the Diamond World is usually associated with strong, vajra-wielding dei-
ties, but at Tōji the five great bodhisattvas exhibit only the serenest forms
of Dainichi’s adamantine wisdom. The Womb World, likewise, is often asso-
ciated with soft, beneficent forms of Dainichi’s compassionate method, but
here the five wisdom kings exhibit only the most wrathful aspects of this
compassion.
Finally, on a more general level of analysis, Tōji’s central Dainichi group
of Buddha sculptures clearly replicate Diamond World iconography.73
However, the flanking sculptural groups of bodhisattvas representing com-
passion on the left and wisdom on the right clearly invoke the Womb World’s
layout for Lotus and Vajra families. As a result, even as the viewer regards the
central Dainichi group of Diamond World Buddhas, the Womb World man-
dala’s central Buddha section is invoked. To one attuned to the usual icono-
graphic cues of the paradigmatic mandalas, reading the reconfigurations of
sculpted deities at Tōji means seeing the metonymy at work and sensing the
interresonance of all of Dainichi’s aspects. In this way, the esoteric message
of the nondualism of richi funi is conveyed in and as the sacred space of the
lecture hall.
94 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
(a) (b)
Figure 3.7. (a) Kongōbuji West Pagoda circa 1835, 27 meters high, 9 meters wide on each
side (Courtesy Kongōbūji, Kōyasan); (b) Kongōbuji East konpon daitō circa 1937, 48.5
meters high, 23.5 meters wide on each side (Photograph by the author). (Continued )
Kūkai on the Art of the Ultimate 95
(c)
(d)
Figure 3.7. (c) Kongōbuji West Pagoda: Interior Diamond Dainichi circa 887, surrounded
by wisdom buddhas circa nineteenth century (Courtesy Reihōkan, Kōyasan. Used with
permission); (d) Kongōbuji East konpon daitō: Interior Womb Dainichi surrounded by
Diamond World buddhas, bodhisattvas circa 1942 (Courtesy Kongōbūji, Kōyasan).
96 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
Kong ōbuji two stūpas that represent Vairocana as the Essential Nature of
the Dharmadhātu [i.e., as depicted in] the two mandalas of the Womb and
Vajra realms.”74 He had started building the eastern pagoda during his life-
time, harvesting the timber for the central pillar in 819, but Kūkai’s dou-
ble vision was only actualized posthumously in 887 when Emperor Kōkō
(884–887) ordered Kūkai’s disciple Shinzen Daitoku (804–891) to build
the western pagoda according to his master’s plans.75 This second western
pagoda for a Diamond World Dainichi was reconstructed in 1127, repaired
in 1240, and destroyed by fire in 1377 (fig. 3.7a).76 It appears in the bottom
register of a Kūkai portrait dated to the fourteenth century,77 but does not
appear again in any maps or drawings of the garan owned by Kong ōbuji
until the late Edo period. After the fire of 1377, therefore, the western
pagoda seems to have languished for centuries until the present rebuild
dated 1835. Its central chiken-in Dainichi accordingly dates from c. 887, but
its four surrounding wisdom buddhas date from the nineteenth century
(fig. 3.7c).78
Consequently, sometime between the late fourteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries, the one eastern stupa began to take over the function of
both. Shingon clerics promoted a familiar Mikkyō discourse to explicate the
exterior symbolism of the single-stupa garan, while the interior symbolism
of the eastern tower iconographically collapsed both mandalas into its one
sacred space (figs. 3.7d, 3.8).
Specifically, according to Mikkyō rhetoric, the exterior symbolism
of Kōyasan’s location replicates a jewel in the lotus, or the presence of
Diamond mind in the Womblike matrix of the material realm. Specifically,
a single tahōtō many-jeweled pagoda rises up within a ring of eight petal-like
d d
W w W
W d d W
W W
W W
mountain peaks that are said to surround the temple complex. Converse to
the exterior jewel-within-lotus symbolism, the interior of the great pagoda
exhibits lotus-within-jewel symbolism. The interior iconographic program
represents the seed of potential Buddhahood that lies at the heart of per-
fected wisdom in all its sculpted and painted aspects. Specifically, its interior
iconography as it appears today symbolically surrounds a central sculp-
ture of a Womb World Dainichi in jō-in with statues of the four Diamond
World wisdom buddhas and paintings of the Diamond World’s sixteen great
bodhisattvas on supporting pillars (fig. 3.6d).79 These present-day paintings
were completed in 1942 by the famed Mikkyō -trained iconographer turned
avant-garde artist Dōmoto Inshō (1891–1975) who records that he “rever-
ently copied (haisha) every single figure on these pillar paintings with strong,
brilliant colors, and determined their magnificent adornments (shōgon)”
according to textual sources.80 Thus, seen from the outside and the inside,
the mixing and matching of Womb and Diamond World deities convey the
esoteric message of nondualism.
At Kōyasan, therefore, the Diamond and Womb World imagery of jewel/
vajra and lotus is thus manipulated in both directions. Kōyasan telescopes the
external lotuslike ring of mountains into the one internal Womb World figure
of Dainichi in jō-in, and it refracts the single exterior jewel-like tahōtō tower
into Dainichi’s interior four wisdom buddhas and sixteen great bodhisatt-
vas. Condensing multiplicity down into metonymy and/or blowing apart
singularity into refracted plurality is the hallmark of intericonicity. In the
Kegon-influenced Shingon view, everything mutually implies everything else
in the unobstructed space of the infinite dharmakāya. The same can be said
of Dōgen’s view of intertemporality, as singular nikon just-now moments and
plural kyōryaku rangings are infinitely interchangeable. More of this will be
said in the next chapter.
between, within, and without the walls of the world. In this way, “Kūkai’s
deconstructive strategy is a path by which he constructs and reconstructs a
concrete model of the cosmos.”81
This results in a series of apparent contradictions within Kūkai’s writ-
ings, though such contradictions usually resolve themselves when they are
read with either a conventional or ultimate perspective in mind.82 That is,
from a conventional standpoint that focuses on the dependent-arising of
forms in the world, Kūkai embraces esoteric imagery as the visible embodi-
ment of the dharmakāya and argues for its unparalleled power to enlighten.
From the ultimate perspective, however, Kūkai shifts his emphasis from
soteriology to ontology as he focuses on the empty nature of these real, tan-
gible forms of the dharmakāya. As he explains in the Shōji jissōgi, all objects
of sight can be seen in either their conditioned or unconditioned aspects,83
and as he explains in the Catalogue, suchness ultimately transcends forms
but it cannot be realized without them. Only one’s level of enlightenment
determines whether this is discerned or not. This section will examine three
representative examples that demonstrate Kūkai’s facility in navigating
between these two conventional and ultimate discourses when addressing
the power of images.
First, Kūkai occasionally samples the anti-imagistic rhetoric of early Buddhism
to remind adherents that esoteric images are ultimately essenceless. For example,
he cautions his audience not to fixate or reify esoteric images too much:
In his Catalogue, Kūkai claimed that the mandalas could enlighten in a single
glance, yet here he considers the moment of perceiving Mikkyō’s many lumi-
nous images to be only “provisional.” Also in the Catalogue, Kūkai claimed
that the entire dharma would vanish if the Two World mandalas were lost,
yet here he urges that we do “away with all images.” Certainly the promo-
tional context of the Catalogue and his competition with Saichō color Kūkai’s
Kūkai on the Art of the Ultimate 99
claims for the mandalas’ efficacy. Beyond this, however, it is also important
to acknowledge that Kūkai occasionally employs anti-imagistic rhetorical
devices to exhibit the flexibility of mind required to embrace all dualities in
true Mahāyāna fashion, both form and emptiness, speech and silence, seeing
and seen, Diamond and Womb worlds.
Second, Kūkai’s intermittent deconstructionist reminders are partic-
ularly salient given his tendency to spatialize the realm of enlightenment
and use architectural metaphors in both his writings and in his practice.
As argued at length above, both Kūkai’s doctrinal treatises and his man-
dalic mise-en-scène for ritual activity reiterate the metaphor and replicate
the model of Mahāvairocana’s universal palace of suchness. However, in
his more poetic moments, Kūkai does also occasionally deconstruct these
architectures of enlightenment. In Poems That Contemplate the Ten Images
of Illusion (Jūyukan) written in 827 at the age of fifty-four, Kūkai consid-
ers the insubstantiality of ten analogies for emptiness first mentioned in the
Dainichikyō.85 These are namely phantoms, heat waves, dreams, shadows in
a mirror, Gandharva Castle, echoes, images of water moons, foam, flowers
in the sky, and a whirling ring of fire.86 Of particular note to the present
discussion is his poem inspired by the image of Gandharva Castle, where
the god Gandharva plays exquisite music to entertain the divine Indra in his
heavenly palace. This poem serves to remind the reader to empty all real and
imagined images of reality, even ones as seemingly solid and substantial as
castles.87 Kūkai versifies:
In this way, Kūkai undercuts all the imperial and palatial double entendres
that he employed in addressing his imperial patrons or in making claims
for Shingon Mikkyō’s ability to protect the state. To say that all heav-
enly halls, temples, and earthly palaces of the world are temporary, empty,
and ultimately return to nothing, is to dissolve all of the metaphorical and
100 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
In this passage, Kūkai urges the reader to see through samsara’s worst nāma-
rūpa illusions with the ultimate eye of enlightenment, and instead see their
“secret identity,” which is the dharmakāya qua emptiness. On a conventional
level, however, at other times Kūkai is genuinely perplexed and scared by fear-
some appearances. In a previously untranslated letter, Kūkai lists terrifying
environmental and psychological effects that can be synchronous with the
installation of ritual imagery and paraphernalia. He writes
any reason at all, a strange wind will blow and scatter everything; it
blows away the sand and uproots trees. Suddenly a beautiful woman
will appear, different from any decent figure or ordinary person. 90
Mahāvairocana defends his reason for creating and teaching the mandala,
announcing:
Introduction
Now that we have a better understanding of Kūkai’s conventional and
ultimate views of imagery, we are now in a position to consider Dōgen’s
equally nuanced views. At first reading, it is often difficult to discern whether
Dōgen approves or disapproves of art. Within his writings, as well as within
his own artistic production and collection, Dōgen’s take on the problem of
form is hard to pin down. Depending on the image under consideration or
the audience he is addressing, Dōgen will at times reject an image out of hand,
endorse its veneration wholeheartedly, or undercut it with text but let both
text and image stand in nondual coexistence. A closer look at the specifics of
his aesthetic theory and philosophy of form is therefore warranted.
As Roger T. Ames has observed, “the comparative approach is the best
way to learn about anything.”1 In this spirit, the structure of this chapter will
follow that of the last. For every topic heading in the previous chapter on
Kūkai, this chapter will demonstrate that Dōgen extends but shifts Kūkai’s
themes to formulate his own unique view of imagery. This is not to say that
Dōgen’s thought is derivative in any way. On the contrary, he is perhaps one
of the most original, innovative, and unique thinkers in all of Japanese reli-
gious history. His ideas, however, are directly juxtaposed here against Kūkai’s
in order to facilitate a more systematic comparative perspective.
In terms of representation and especially supercondensed representations
of Buddhahood (e.g., ajikan and mandalas), Dōgen adopts Zen’s iconoclastic
rhetoric when he wants to make a point about practice-realization. A case in
point is his analysis of Nāgārjuna’s full-moon body samādhi in the Buddha
Nature fascicle. This topic will be taken up in the section On Full Moons, Rice
Cakes, and the Inability of Art to Re-present Enlightenment.
106 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
In terms of Kūkai’s theory of monji, Dōgen shifts the emphasis away from
Kūkai’s notion of image-as-text and instead models his typical threefold pro-
cess of image-then-text-then-both. Especially when discussing chinzō master
portraits, Dōgen uses words about practice to undercut and therefore under-
stand images of realization in an appropriate light. As he creates this dynamic
tension, he skillfully mediates the dichotomy between text vs. image, practice
vs. realization, experience vs. expression, and epistemological vs. ontological
views. This topic will be taken up in the section on What’s Wrong with This
Picture? The Treachery of the Image
In terms of Kūkai’s theory of hosshin seppō, a section entitled Mujō Seppō
and Objects-as-Actions will address how Dōgen shifts the emphasis from
objects-as-words to objects-as-verbs, from the dharma’s basic building blocks
to its total dynamic functioning (Zenki, the title of another of his Shōbōgezō
fascicles).
In terms of perception, the section entitled Zen Sights & Sounds will address
how Dōgen shifts the emphasis away from Kūkai’s onto-lexicographical focus
on sound, letter, and reality to a more intuitive epistemology that is obtained
by “seeing through the ears” and “hearing through eyes.” A further section
on developing and refreshing the True Dharma Eye follows, for it is this
enlightened perception that allows Dōgen to adjudicate if an image is valid
or not. He obviously approved of several kinds of Buddhist figure portraits
as evidenced by his Chinese praise poems of Ānanda and others in the Eihei
kōroku, Dōgen’s extensive record of sermons, poems, and other collected writ-
ings that date from the mid-1230s to his death in 1253.
In contrast to Kūkai’s ubiquitous trope of imperial palace-cities, Dōgen
considers his presence in the mountains of Echizen to be like a spiritual home-
coming. He poetically links his urban youth with his rural adulthood through
skillful alliteration and phonetic approximation, but ultimately collapses the
distinction between city and country in his unique understanding of unob-
structed time. It is also this unique temporal matrix that facilitates his inter-
temporal spin on “the house of the buddhas.” This topic will be addressed in
the section on The Form of Enlightenment: Times. The following section on
Intertemporality will extend Kūkai’s mandalic intericonicity to consider time-
less buddhas and patriarchs and all concrete phenomena, which he also casts
as interpenetrating being-times.
Finally, in terms of nuancing and deconstructing the master’s views,
Dōgen’s uneasy relationship with imagery can be explained not only by ulti-
mate and conventional perspectives as with Kūkai, but also by attending to
his intended audience of either advanced or beginner students. This issue of
Dōgen on the Art of Engaging 107
She craftily asks him “I have heard that the Diamond Sūtra says that
past, present, and future mind is ungraspable. Which mind do you hope to
somehow refresh with a rice cake?”4 In landing this rhetorical jab squarely
on the jaw of his false pride, the woman uses the term dian xin. This is a
rare Chinese homonym that uses the same characters 點心to indicate two
meanings: (1) light refreshments like dim sum rice cakes that metaphori-
cally provide one with “a little bit of heart”; and (2) a phrase that can be
read literally as “pointing to the mind,” which the Diamond Sūtra says is
ungraspable since it flows ineffably through past, present, and future. In
rhetorically asking him to pinpoint the mind (dian xin) that he wishes to
refresh with a “little bit of heart” (dian xin), the woman’s pun aims directly
at the false source of his self-attachment. The added irony of the situa-
tion, of course, is that it is the Diamond Sūtra itself, the supposed area of
his expertise, that teaches that the mind is ungraspable, and yet he obvi-
ously hasn’t learned its lesson despite his supposed intellectual acumen.
As a result, the woman automatically challenges Te-shan’s reputed mastery
of the scripture and reveals herself to be the true possessor of its enlight-
ened meaning. By transforming a simple, tangible, graspable rice cake into
an upāya for automatically revealing the intangible, ungraspable nature of
mind, her witty turn of phrase strikes Te-shan speechless and she wins the
bout.5
When Dōgen then rhetorically suggests that the painting of Nāgārjuna’s
full-moon samādhi looks just like a painting of a rice cake, he is deliberately
and jokingly hinting that this visible, optically graspable, and fixed painting
should ideally point to the ungraspable, ineffable emptiness of Nāgārjuna’s
experience. However, his Chinese guide doesn’t seem to get Dōgen’s humor-
ous reference. Perhaps he was unfamiliar with Te-shan’s rice cake kōan, or per-
haps Dōgen’s Chinese pronunciation left him unsure as to his meaning, or
perhaps he was even offended by Dōgen’s off-putting remark but neverthe-
less laughed politely. Regardless, Dōgen reports that the monk gave a loud
laugh “but there was no edge on it. It couldn’t have broken through a painted
rice-cake.”6
Thus when Dōgen further tries to engage the monk in a typical joust of
Zen repartée and one-upmanship, the monk laughs but it has no Zen edge to
it. Dōgen’s crack about the painting resembling a rice cake is not itself cracked
by the monk’s laugh. In Dōgen’s estimation, the exchange reveals the monk’s
lack of understanding and inability to distinguish between authentic and inau-
thentic expressions of enlightenment. It simultaneously reveals Dōgen’s own
disappointment with, and sense of superiority over, these simplistic monks,
110 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
who nevertheless reside at one of the great temples of the Five Mountains
of China. Dōgen’s critique of the Chinese art thus serves to make a larger
point about his superior wisdom, and one discerns that his ulterior motive in
recounting this story is to establish himself as a legitimate authority and Zen
master back in Japan. However, the way in which he makes his point speaks
to his temporal-experiential priorities. Dōgen rants,
For a long time people in the land of the Sung have endeavored to illus-
trate this episode in painting, but they have never been able to paint
it in their bodies, paint it in their minds, paint it in the sky, or paint it
on walls. In vain attempts to paint it with a brush tip, they have made
depictions of a round mirrorlike circle on a Dharma seat, and made it
out to be the moon-round shape of Nagarjuna’s manifesting body. In
the hundreds of years that have come and gone since then, these depic-
tions have been like gold dust in the eyes, blinding people, yet no one
has pointed out the error. How sad that matters have been allowed
to go unremedied like this! If you understand that the round moon
shape manifested by the body is an all-round shape, it is no more than
a painted rice cake. It would be ludicrous in the extreme to divert your-
self by playing with that.7
at that very time Nagarjuna was just sitting there on the high seat. The
form in which he manifested his body was no different from the form
of any one of us sitting here right now. Right now our own bodies are
manifesting a round moon shape. . . . Although clearly and distinctly
embodying the form of the full moon/Buddha nature, it is not a round
moon shape set out on display.9
In this passage, one observes Dōgen’s insistence upon seeing everyday forms
in a transformed light. He urges his audience to see the normal body of
Nāgārjuna as the manifestation of the whole realm of enlightenment, met-
aphorically referred to here as a full moon, or elsewhere as One Bright Pearl
(Ikka myōju). From Dōgen’s perspective, only those who have gone through
the experience of awakening and acquired the True Dharma Eye can see the
immaterial emptiness of material suchness. Only one who has tasted shin-
jin datsuraku can see, in the sense of “meeting” Buddha to Buddha, how
Nāgārjuna’s physical body can, like the round full moon, manifest the com-
plete, transparent and full enlightenment of Buddhahood. For those who still
have not experienced shinjin datsuraku, however, Nāgārjuna’s formless expe-
rience is invisible and indistinguishable. Dōgen explains that “[t]hey could
not see or hear it because their eyes and ears were obstructed. As their bodies
had not yet experienced it, it was not possible for them to discern it.”10 For
those like Dōgen, however, whose eyes and ears have opened and whose bod-
ies and minds have experienced awakening for themselves, they already see
the full-moonness of forms and no miraculous bodily transformation occurs.
In Dōgen’s estimation, therefore, artists mistake simile for reality, the map
for the terrain, and the menu for the meal. They imagine that external or
objective appearance necessarily describes or recreates the description of an
inner experiential state. Because of their delusion, he charges that their senses
are obstructed and that they lack experiential discrimination. They vainly
visualize it as an event external to themselves; they cannot render their own
inner experience within an everyday outward form. They therefore literally
depict a full-moon form, though this is actually a third-generation loss from
the actual lived state of samādhi to its metaphorical verbal description to a
graphic redescription of the literally taken metaphor.
By adopting this stance against images, Dōgen intimates that an enlight-
ened painter perhaps could somehow be able to render directly within the
112 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
outer form of a regular man’s body his own personal inner experience of
meeting Nāgārjuna’s inner full-moonlike realization. Dōgen himself, as a self-
avowed enlightened master, is reputed to have drawn his own likeness gazing
at the full harvest moon (to be discussed presently), but in his writings Dōgen
does not say anywhere how exactly this feat can or should be accomplished.
He never explains what he means by painting a normal everyday figure in a
direct, unmediated, enlightened fashion. Even if one could understand what
it means to paint directly, immediately, with realization, Dōgen never out-
lines what that image might look like or what qualities it might have. Dōgen
concludes:
Things that are undepictable are best left unpainted. If they must be
painted at all, they can only be painted straight to the point. Yet the
body manifesting the shape of the round moon has never yet been
painted.11
Dōgen does grudgingly accept in the Summer Retreat (Ango) fascicle, that if
one is going to paint spring, for example, one should paint it directly. One
should not use cliché symbols, such as peach or plum blossoms to signify the
referent spring, but rather, simply paint it directly. Again, Dōgen in no way
tells one how to do this in terms of technique, for he is not really talking
about art here, but rather practice-realization. Thus, when he says to paint
spring directly, he really means to practice zazen and see how it is already the
awakened self.
This insistence on the identity of practice-realization is further echoed in
his fascicle on Painting of a Rice Cake. Here Dōgen does acknowledge that
the realization of Buddhahood would not be possible without an already
established notion or image of Buddhahood in the mind’s eye. As a result,
he does recognize the value of depicting buddhas through stupas, through
the thirty-two characteristic laksana signs, a blade of grass, or even through
the imagined idea of aeons of discipline. “Because a picture of a Buddha has
always been drawn like this,” he says, “all the buddhas are picture-buddhas and
all picture-buddhas are buddhas.”12 That is, because the physical or mental rep-
resentation of enlightenment already exists, one can conceivably toggle as he
does between the post-enlightenment stance that nirvana is samsara, and the
pre-enlightenment stance that samsara is nirvana. In this way, enlightenment
and delusion, nirvana and samsara, ontology and epistemology, realizing
practice and practicing for realization can all coexist (from the enlightened
perspective) as coequal painted and actualized buddhas. All of Dōgen’s
Dōgen on the Art of Engaging 113
remaining scriptural exegeses on the theme of pictures and rice cakes in this
fascicle underscore this same nondual outlook.
Thus, Dōgen’s aesthetic theory must always be read in light of his larger
religious project, which focuses on living and engaging with life authentically.
For Dōgen, true painting means living life authentically with full actualiza-
tion of the body-mind of self and other through meditation. It means real-
izing the essential identity and difference of all the forms and colors swirling
around one. It means not just being a part of the painting of life, but being the
painting of life. For this reason, Dōgen says in the Painting of a Rice Cake fas-
cicle “Unsurpassed enlightenment is a painting. The entire phenomenal uni-
verse and the empty sky are nothing but a painting.”13
By reading the word “painting,” not in the artistic sense, but with
Dōgen’s more existential spin on it, we can see that Buddha-nature itself is
a free and expressive life-activity whose very open and formless unbound-
edness informs the realm of forms. Dōgen writes that the painting of
this true, authentic existence in and through the realm of painted forms
involves practice. If one is authentically going to “paint” enlightenment
in the sense of truly manifesting and expressing realization, then one must
practice with one’s whole body and mind. If one is going to pursue the
formless experience from within this realm of forms, one must sit zazen.
As he articulates in the Buddha-Nature fascicle, “You must know that in
[truly] painting the form of the body manifesting a round moon shape,
the form of the manifesting body must be there on the Dharma seat.”14
Eyes must be half-closed and eyebrows raised and the body positioned in
zazen meditation. If one sits in this way even for a short period of time
as the Bendōwa fascicle says, then one will, without intention or human
agency, become a Buddha and expound the dharma by one’s very being.
Anything less than this is deplorable and pointless for Dōgen. He writes in
the Buddha-Nature fascicle:
not to paint the body manifesting, not to paint the round moon, not
to paint the full moon shape, not to trace the body of Buddhas, not to
be thereby expressing, not to trace the preaching Dharma, (in short, not
practicing zazen) and to trace in vain a picture of rice cake—what can
possibly come of that?15
For this reason, Dōgen urges one and all: “Old Buddhas! New Buddhas!
Encounter the real manifesting body! Do not waste your time admiring a
painted rice cake!”16
114 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
emptiness he embodies into two distinct moments. This is the same presup-
posed temporal logic that enables Dōgen’s sequential assertion (image), nega-
tion (verse), and ultimately reaffirmation of self (both image and verse seen
together) previously mentioned in chapter 2. This third uneasy coexistence of
visual mimesis and its textually emptied nemesis in the end actively expresses
the enlightened realization of nonduality. Consider the counterexample: a
strict iconoclast would have simply and one-sidedly destroyed the image in an
extreme intolerance for anything but the real thing. For Dōgen, by contrast,
the best chinzō images are ones that can directly reveal this threefold enlight-
enment process and ultimately show its transformed, and ideally transforma-
tive, nondual view to the spectator-reader.
In juxtaposing image and text in this way, Zen master portraits create a
dialectical tension at best, or cognitive dissonance at worst, between the vis-
ual and conceptual spheres as they wrestle with representation and reality. It
is this same tension that René Magritte wrestled with in his painting entitled
The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des Images 1928–29), which provides the
anachronistic, yet nevertheless helpful, title for this section heading.
In figure 4.1, Magritte paints a realistic picture of a pipe, but directly
below it also provocatively writes “This is not a pipe” (Ceci n’est pas une pipe).
In keeping with semiotic theory, Magritte’s combination of image and text
underscores the gap between representation and reality and between images
of pipes hanging on museum walls and real pipes that can be stuffed with
Figure 4.1. René Magritte La Trahison des Images, 1928–1929. Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, Los Angeles. © 2011 C. Herscovici, London/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York.
116 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
tobacco and actually smoked. It is in this same spirit of actually realizing one’s
internal Buddha-mind, not objectifying external Buddha-images, that Zen
masters inscribe many of their own chinzō portraits.
In Dōgen’s case, several extant inscribed portraits are said to survive from
his lifetime, though some scholars question all but his 1249 moon-viewing self-
portrait to be discussed presently.17 Twenty verses about his own image called
jisan, however, do survive in the earliest unrevised version of his Eihei kōroku,
and thus can be attributed to Dōgen himself. In keeping with the Yü-lu Ch’an
literary tradition, some of these verses by Dōgen are but thought-poems or
word-pictures about his character, and therefore do not correspond to any
literal image of him. Other verses, however, were deliberately composed by
Dōgen himself as either poems of praise or as self-deprecating inscriptions
for his own painted portraits.18 Zen art historian Helmut Brinker further
explains that this latter genre of jisan were usually brushed for a living sitter
(juzō), and were probably not composed for any future posthumous effigy
(izō). “In the case of contemporaneous portraits, [jisan] were composed and
written on the scroll by the master himself (Ch. zizan, Jp. jisan), not rarely
upon the request of his disciples, confrères, lay adherents or patrons.”19 On a
side note, in his Shisho fascicle, Dōgen is highly critical of Rinzai Zen masters
who peddled their inscribed portraits and calligraphy samples to anyone who
asked or paid a donation for them, and Dōgen is equally disdainful of unin-
itiated priests parlaying these collected images into evidence for establishing
their own temples, even though they hadn’t truly received Zen transmis-
sion. As a result of his disdain for this then-common practice, we can deduce
that Dōgen maintained a healthy regard for his own “brand identity” as an
enlightened master so to speak, and guarded the integrity of both his texts
and images fairly closely.
The first portrait of Dōgen to be considered is housed at Honmyōji
temple in Kumamoto prefecture, Kyūshū (fig. 4.2). Although a late copy, this
example provides evidence for the dating of Dōgen’s earliest poem explicitly
composed for portrait inscription, namely jisan no. 18 dated 1227.20
According to temple records, the figure itself is 54.6 cm x 26.5 cm and
is a severely abraded Muromachi-period copy of an original portrait of
the master from Ankokuji temple (no date or location given).21 Above the
Muromachi-period seated figure, there are two Edo-period colophon fields
located in the upper register. The first inscription about opening a mountain is
signed by the monk Sonkai, includes a pressed flower, and is dated to the sixth
year of Meiwa (1770). The second inscription is also by Sonkai, or perhaps
his same-named successor, and is dated to the seventh year of Bunsei (1825).
Dōgen on the Art of Engaging 117
In this second colophon, Sonkai explains that he excerpted the extant orig-
inal lines of Dōgen’s poetic jisan no. 18 from the Ankokuji image and added
them here. He then rewrites this poem of Dōgen’s about a fish swimming in
the deep waters of meditation, unperturbed by the snares of life. Before sign-
ing off with his own name, Sonkai finally writes, or perhaps copies from the
Ankokuji image, the explanatory coda “Karoku 3 (1227), Dōgen jisan, Eiheiji’s
first patriarch’s portrait.”22
Even though it appears on a late copy, the poem’s purported date of 1227
would place it precisely upon Dōgen’s return from China. It is even possi-
ble that Dōgen wrote this poem for chinzō inscription in Kyūshū en route
back up to his home temple of Kenninji in Kyoto. However, this jisan appears
in vol. 10, no. 18 in Dōgen’s Eihei kōroku. Since all the writings in the Eihei
kōroku tend to date from the mid-1230s after he had established himself as
a recognized Zen master at Kōshōji temple in southeast Kyoto, it is also
118 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
possible that this inscription for a formal master portrait was not completed
until sometime after Dōgen’s return to the capital. Regardless, Dōgen explic-
itly composed the poem for his own portrait, and the juxtaposition of text
and image creates an artistic tension that serves to both subvert and sustain
Dōgen’s image as a young Zen master. The poem reads:
The cold lake reflecting the clear blue sky for thousands of miles
A gold-scaled fish moves along the bottom in the quiet of night,
Swimming back and forth while fishing poles snap off
On the endless surface of water appears the bright white light
of the moon.23
On the one hand, visually speaking, the formal chinzō image of a seated Zen
master communicates the individual identity, solidity, and public face of the
monastery. Poetically speaking, however, the text communicates the fluidity
and private movements of the golden-bodied master hidden deep below the
expanse of his fully illumined, white light moon-mind. In this case, the visual
and poetic idioms simultaneously serve to concretize and dissolve the image
of Dōgen as both an individual man and an abstract symbol of Zen awak-
ening, as the fish is a stock metaphor for Zen enlightenment since it never
blinks.24
In this regard, this example serves as an interesting comparative piece to
Kūkai’s calligraphic poem about the birds and fowl frolicking at the surface
of Lake Masuda. Whereas Kūkai’s poem lauds the joy and life-giving waters
of the man-made irrigation lake, Dōgen here literally dives below the cold
surface at night to the meditative depths below. He thus not only redirects
one’s attention from the image to the ideal, but also shifts the emphasis away
from public works to private states, and from the calls of frolicking birds
to the still, quiet coldness of night. How different this inscribed portrait
is from the exuberance of Nāgabodhi’s image at Tōji with its flying white
hihaku script!
The second inscribed chinzō to be considered is definitively dated to 1249
(fig. 4.3). This reputed self-portrait by Dōgen at age forty-nine is said to cap-
ture a moment when he viewed the harvest moon in Echizen on the fifteenth
day of the eighth month of 1249. Above his self-portrait, Dōgen brushes a
Chinese poem that again invokes the stock images of harvest moons and fish
swimming back and forth. It is modeled on a poem by Hung-chih Cheng-
chüeh ( Jp. Wanshi Shōgaku 1091–1157), the abbot of Tiantong monastery
before Nyojō. Hung-chih was renowned for his silent meditation method,
Dōgen on the Art of Engaging 119
Figure 4.3. Dōgen self-portrait viewing the harvest moon in 1249. Provided courtesy of
Hōkyōji. Hōkyōji temple, Fukui prefecture. Used with permission.
but also for his kōan collections and poetry, which were much admired by
Nyojō as well. Dōgen versifies in jisan no. 3 in the Eihei kōroku,
In this enigmatic poem, the old mountain monk Dōgen initially sets up a standard
Zen dichotomy between the reflected moon floating in well water and the real
moon floating in the sky. This dichotomy denigrates representation over reality
120 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
and maligns the finger pointing to the moon instead of becoming the real moon
itself, that is, imagining, talking, or thinking about awakening instead of actually
experiencing awakening directly. He underscores the split between the moon’s
false illusion below and its true illumination above by saying that only a donkey
(i.e., himself, perhaps)26 gazes at the well instead of the real moon. Grammatically
speaking as well, Dōgen intimates that asinine subjects-dualistically-perceiving-
objects (“donkey observes the sky in the well”) are inferior to simply floating in the
sky of one’s own accord (“white moon floating”).
Subsequently, in the next two lines, however, Dōgen begins to break down
this established bifurcation between reflection and realization, representation
and reality, samsara and nirvana.
When he says that “one does not depend” and “one does not contain,” he
is toggling between two vantage points (fig. 4.4). In saying that “one does
not depend,” he means that the real moon above does not depend on the well
below for its existence or appearance. Translated from Dōgen’s poetic code
speak, this means that satori realization does not need the well of samsaric
forms below to manifest its full illumination, nor does it depend on grad-
ual practice for its manifestation. For Dōgen, illumination is not the causal
product or effect of practice, it already exists before, during, and after prac-
tice, though paradoxically one must practice zazen in order to realize this
fact. Thus, in this line, Dōgen adopts an ontological stance that speaks from
the bird’s-eye enlightened perspective of the moon looking down unto the
totality of existence. This vantage point automatically establishes, yet simul-
taneously collapses, the dualistic worldview of nirvana vs. samsara. Like the
ubiquitous light of original enlightenment that it so aptly symbolizes, the full
moonlight of the real moon already and everywhere just is.
In the next line, however, Dōgen adopts a more epistemological stance
and says that “One (i.e., the well) cannot contain.” This statement conversely
Dōgen on the Art of Engaging 121
speaks from the everyday unenlightened perspective of the well below aspir-
ing upward toward the moon. From this vantage point, one cannot say that
the well already contains the real moon of full realization, since the well really
only contains but the moon’s reflection. That is, one cannot say that one is
already fully enlightened without practice. For Dōgen, therefore, realization
does not need practice to exist, but cannot happen without it. They are nond-
ual and coequal partners in the continual and paradoxical process of recover-
ing what was never lost to begin with. Consequently, samsara and nirvana, or
more poetically, well-floating reflections as well as sky-floating moons, freely
appear suspended in the infinitely open water-sky of emptiness.
Thus, like a well-fed fish free to swim in the waters of contemplation,
Dōgen frolics in the open expanse of this nondual space, while clouds above
and water below float freely by him. He locates himself squarely in the samsa-
ric realm as a fish swimming in water, but he nevertheless finds freedom and
joy in his environment. He delights in the swirling moon-images floating in
the water all around him and relishes the interfusion of moon (nirvana) and
water (samsara) thoroughly. In this perfect realization of nonduality, “from
head to tail, above and below the heavens, clouds and water are free.”
The fact that “clouds and water” can also be read literally as unsui (雲水)
or novice monk, expresses the typically Zen paradox that extols the recov-
ered beginner’s mind of a true master. It simultaneously constitutes a last-line
self-deprecating jab at one who nevertheless has masterfully expressed his
grasp of nondualism. The poem therefore follows Dōgen’s threefold trajec-
tory that progresses from an unenlightened donkey fixated on appearances, to
a radical realization of emptiness that abrogates dualisms, to a third and final
enlightened return that humbles one’s sense of self-importance.
It is in this light that Dōgen self-referentially justifies yet qualifies this
painted likeness of himself. Visually speaking, it is interesting to note that
the portrait itself only depicts the figure of Dōgen. No picture of the moon,
whether suspended in air or in water, is shown. This implicitly indicates that
the moon lies above and beyond the contours of the hanging scroll, and ana-
logically speaking, connotes that real lived practice-realization lies above and
beyond formal representation or stock symbolism. True to his earlier critiques
of Nāgārjuna’s full-moon body, he does not paint a white circle on a dharma
seat, but rather shows the suchness of his anthropomorphic form even as he
communes with the moon. It is further interesting to note that Dōgen’s gaze
points directly upward as he looks above into the night sky. Despite his non-
dual rhetoric, his upturned line of vision indicates that he nevertheless pre-
fers to be pictured in his fully enlightened aspect, and not mired in mirages
122 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
In this verse, Dōgen takes up the old conundrum of reality and representa-
tion in the form of three conditional questions. First, he rhetorically asks
which is more real, himself or a picture of himself. This automatically calls
into question the ontological status of both the painting and the sitter him-
self. Second, he rhetorically asks whether displaying his portrait now can
somehow lead others to realization later on. This more functional, tempo-
ral, and epistemological query automatically destabilizes the then-current
assumption that venerating the master’s painted “double” could help advance
Dōgen on the Art of Engaging 123
Figure 4.5. Dōgen chinzō. Eiheiji temple, Fukui prefecture. Used with permission.
one’s practice.28 Third, he rhetorically asks if the enlightened eye viewing the
portrait in a correct, nondualistic, and emptied-out way can really discern
the nondualism of form and emptiness. That is, by asking if one can per-
ceive this image of Dōgen in the enlightened sense of “seeing” a Buddha eye-
to-eye, then “this body hanging in emptiness” itself is called into question.
“Body in emptiness” can refer to the painted figure suspended on the wall, to
124 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
Figure 4.6. Chinzō portrait of Dōgen’s Master Nyojō. Provided courtesy of Hōkyōji.
Hōkyōji temple, Fukui prefecture. Used with permission.
the spectator’s body floating before it, to the living Dōgen hanging in empti-
ness like Nyojō’s bell already discussed in chapter 2, or to form and emptiness
more generally. Combined with doubting the value of viewing his double
in the previous line, the entire matter of form and emptiness itself remains
uncertain, which after all, is Dōgen’s main objective. The final line of Dōgen’s
verse does nothing to resolve matters either. His cryptic allusion to fences
and walls literally leaves the reader-viewer hanging as well. Here he refers to
Nan-yang Huichung’s (675–775) response about the mind of ancient bud-
dhas being “fences, walls, tiles and pebbles.”29 He calls his realization only
partially complete, but does not say what complete realization would be. In
the end, the verse is designed to destabilize his students and remind them
not to mistake the painting for the real thing or somehow substitute the
Dōgen on the Art of Engaging 125
In this verse, Nyojō opens with a poetic line expressing the eternity of prac-
tice, which produces golden-bodied patriarchs such as his own former master
Chikan, and by extension, himself, pictured here sitting on his dharma seat.
In the context of this painted portrait, however, Nyojō immediately questions
this lofty golden ideal, and rhetorically asks what a monk should really look
126 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
like. He crashes from the sacred to the profane in a single line by suggest-
ing that the various bald, shiny, shaven heads of individual monks resemble
the various shapes and sizes of melons, gourds, and eggplants in the market.
He suggests that his own funny vegetable-shaped monk-head depicted here
looks even sillier than real vegetables, ostensibly because it is dressed up in
serious Zen robes and posed on a chair. He concludes by imagining an even
more hilarious scene: a plum tree that yields monk-heads like fruit, dangling
down from on high. This last image can be read as Nyojō simply extending
the metaphor of monk-heads resembling various fruits and vegetables, or it
can be read as an even deeper deconstructive parody of himself and of his
own likeness. The plum tree was a more indigenous Chinese substitute for
the Buddha’s bodhi tree of enlightenment, so this line obliquely suggests that
as a vajra or diamond monk, he has obtained the full fruit of enlightenment.
At the same time, however, he imagines himself hanging upside down from
this tree, without any lofty ideas or ideals about enlightenment but with his
gaze set firmly on the ground. He literally seeks to overturn or upend any pre-
conceived notions about the appearance of awakening. In typical Zen style,
therefore, Nyojō’s text follows the threefold sequence that presents him as a
Zen master, negates him as a self-deprecating eggplant head, and represents
him as enlightened precisely because he is so down-to-earth and funny. As a
result, his combination of formal image and amusing text validates yet also
undercuts the image of enlightenment, overturns conventional expectations,
and relegates the realm of heaven and the sublime to the realm of the hum-
ble squash. Even his signature line “Written in earnest for disciple Je-chen
[also] of Mt. T’aipai” contains a twist. T’aipai-shan, literally meaning Grand
Old White Mountain, is one of the five famous Gozan temple mountains in
China,32 but “T’aipai” can also literally mean “potato” in Chinese. Given the
content of the preceding inscription, this double entendre could suggest that
he is simultaneously signing off on his portrait as both the esteemed abbot of
one of China’s most prestigious temples, as well as signing off as Zen Master
Potato Head. In light of such parody and satire, the treachery of the image
doesn’t stand a chance. No wonder Dōgen held the portrait of his master in
such high esteem.
Thus, despite Dōgen’s protests in his Buddha-Nature fascicle that “things
that are undepictable would best be left unpainted,” he was keenly interested
in artistic depictions of fully realized beings. He writes two poems praising
the image of Śākyamuni Descending from the Mountains, which is a Chinese
pictorial convention that reimagines how Buddha emerged from his first
meditative realization of nirvana. Dōgen also writes a prose poem on the first
Dōgen on the Art of Engaging 127
In this poem praising Ānanda’s portrait painting, the first line explains that
according to the Mumonkan or The Gateless Gate, Ānanda removed the flag of
dharma debate after Mahākaśyāpa refused to tell him what the Buddha trans-
mitted to him in his famously silent flower sermon. The second and third
lines explain that according to the Transmission of the Lamp (Ch. Ching-te
Ch’uan teng lu), Ānanda broke through the great barrier of life and death
along the Ganges river between two rival kingdoms so that both sides could
share equally in his relic-remains. The fourth line explains that in the past,
Ānanda served the Buddha both before and after his parinirvāna as both the
Buddha’s attendant and the credited source of all of his reported sayings in
the sutras, which have lived on to the present day.34 These first four lines thus
establish Ānanda as truly a nondual figure. He transcended both speech and
nonspeech, and even within samsara’s dream of life and death, broke through
the great barrier between the two, straddled both sides of the Ganges, and
facilitated the dharma both during and after Buddha’s lifetime.
In the last three lines, however, Dōgen jolts the spectator awake with
an alarming “Watch out!” (totsu!) and then treads the razor’s edge between
eschewing and embracing the form of the painted figure. This coda to the
poem follows Dōgen’s characteristic tripartite deconstructive and recon-
structive strategy. That is, after asserting the everyday hagiographic view of
Ānanda in the first four lines of the poem, Dōgen then empties it out before
reasserting its venerable position in Buddhist lore and practice. He empties
the image of meaning by telling the viewer not to fixate on Ānanda’s physical
128 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
image appearing before the eyes, for it is not a portrait per se, but rather
a mere anachronistic imagining of the figure. In the very next line, how-
ever, he then encourages the viewer to venerate this image of Ānanda with
a sincere mind and make prostrations before it. Some Protestant-inspired
exegetes might interpret this to mean that Dōgen wanted the viewer to ven-
erate the idea of Ānanda, or see him as a symbol, exemplar, or role model
of nondualism to be emulated. This is certainly true on some level, but on a
deeper, more experiential and existential level, Dōgen here is himself mod-
eling and expressing the process for achieving a truly nondualistic stance.
This process can both reject, but then also reclaim, the form of the figure
in all but the same breath. This polarizing ambivalence of the inscription,
when paired with the actual figure of Ānanda himself, would simultane-
ously reinforce both the treachery and the attraction of the image. It would
thus show Dōgen’s skillful negotiation of false dichotomies to be on a par
with Buddha’s closest disciple, and would ideally elicit the realization of
nondualism within the viewer himself.
and “Wherever buddhas and patriarchs are, water is, and wherever water
is, buddhas and patriarchs manifest.”38 In Dōgen’s temporalized worldview,
Kūkai’s word-forms become dynamic verb-forms. Kūkai’s static, discreet
monji instead now move and flow and unfold the truth in a continual pro-
cess of impermanence and change. Even mountains can move forward and
backward in ranging time, for “walking ahead does not oppose walking back,
walking back does not oppose walking ahead. This virtue is called flowing
mountain; mountain flowing.”39 Dōgen’s surprising claim that mountains are
flowing and his even more surprising counterclaim that rivers are still, only
makes sense when one considers shifting viewpoints within the universe’s
total dynamic functioning. That is, Dōgen believes that mountains and riv-
ers, and ultimately everything else in the entire universe, are all moving and
thereby unfolding the truth. However, like viewing a moving train, it depends
whether one perceives this flow from the outside (in which case the train
appears to move from point A to point B on the horizon) or whether one
sees it from the inside (in which case it doesn’t feel like the train is moving
at all). As a result, when viewed from afar, mountains can be seen as part of
the unfolding truth of becoming, and seen from within, flowing river water
doesn’t seem to move at all as long as one moves perfectly along with it. It is in
this sense that there is both ranging or flowing being-time (kyōryaku), as well
as temporarily abiding or dwelling being-times (nikon). This sentiment of
the world-as-a-verb, heightened by Dōgen’s attention to relative perspective,
impermanence, and coarising of being-times, puts a unique spin on Kūkai’s
original theory of monji and hosshin seppō.
Moreover, given Dōgen’s epistemological concern with experience and
the acquisition of enlightened perception, he believes that it is not enough
to simply state ontological truths or articulate doctrines, such as hosshin
seppō, as Kūkai does. What counts for Dōgen is the actual realization of
such truths through the acquisition of the enlightened perception of the
True Dharma Eye.
Dōgen reasons in the Mujō seppō fascicle that if nature was always and
everywhere already preaching the dharma as Kūkai states, then no one could
fail to see it and everyone would awaken instantaneously. This is obviously
not the case. Although the Mahāyāna hongaku doctrine of universal origi-
nal enlightenment theoretically teaches that everything already is enlight-
ened on a fundamental level, it is nevertheless obvious that on the practical
level, sentient beings cannot awaken using ordinary perception. As a result,
Dōgen proposes that only zazen practice-realization can lead to the kind of
enlightened vision that can perceive the world in this illumined manner. The
130 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
ordinary, visible form of nature may remain the same, but from the awakened
perspective, the light in which it is perceived is altered.
Dōgen also emphasizes the need for direct experience over doctrinal spec-
ulation in the Bendōwa fascicle. Here, Dōgen directly responds to a hypo-
thetical interlocutor who asks the difference between Shingon and Zen. After
diplomatically stating that true Buddhists do not quibble over sectarian dis-
tinctions, he essentially agrees with Kūkai that insentient forms preach the
dharma and have led some to enlightenment, that monji make up the entire
universe, and that the dharma is holographically contained in every molecule.
However, Dōgen cautions against becoming caught up in doctrinal complexi-
ties and linguistic traps. He even self-deprecatingly deconstructs his own spin
on Kūkai’s teachings, saying that sokushin zebutsu and sokuza jōbutsu are but
indicative mediations, not direct actualizations of the dharma. He writes,
Some have entered into the stream of the Buddha’s truth at the invita-
tion of grass, flowers, mountains, and rivers. Some have received and
maintained the stamp of Buddha by grasping soil, stones, sand and
pebbles. Furthermore, the Vast and Great Word (kodai no monji) is
even more abundant than the myriad phenomena. And the turning of
the great Dharma-wheel is contained in every molecule.
This being so, the words Mind here and now is the Buddha (sokushin
zebutsu) are only the moon in water, and the idea Just to sit is to become
Buddha (sokuza jōbutsu) is also a reflection in a mirror. We should not
be caught by the skillfulness of the words.40
Dōgen here is urging his students to hear and realize intuitively the
dharma-preaching-world in each of their own eyes. One can tentatively call
this intuitive perception that accompanies meditative experience, transensory
perception.
This transensory synesthesia of sound and sight is not unlike Kūkai’s con-
flation of language and image in monji patterns of name and form (nāma-
rūpa). The difference however, between Kūkai’s notion of monji image-letters
and Dōgen’s intuitive “hearing through the eyes,” is that the former is pre-
sented as an ontological reality; the latter is urged as an intuitive activity.
Dōgen’s two stock examples for sudden intuitive realization, in fact, are the
two famous episodes when Hsiang-yen Chih-hsien achieved enlightenment
by hearing a ceramic roof tile strike bamboo, and when Ling-yun Chih-ch’in
awakened when viewing plum blossoms. Dōgen deliberately chooses these
two examples and regularly invokes them together to show, like monji, that
hearing and seeing nāma-rūpa correspond. In doing so, Dōgen was able to
appeal to his audience as a whole as some individuals tend to be more dis-
posed toward sound (temporally oriented hearing types) or sight (spatially
oriented seeing types).
132 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
Figure 4.7. Shokanzeon Kannon, seated image in the Dharma Hall, Eiheiji. temple, Fukui
prefecture. Used with permission.
Nishijima and Cross point out that the terms henshin and tsūshin both mean
“whole body,” but that Dogo’s dynamic kanji tsū (通) describes active move-
ment or passage, as opposed to Ungan’s more general hen (徧), which liter-
ally means “everywhere on the surface.” This is another interesting instance in
which a spatial term is less effective than a temporal one in expressing Zen’s
process-oriented vision. A whole body that is “everywhere” is only 80 or 90
percent as effective as one that actively “passes or moves through” reality. For
this reason, henshin is translated as “whole body,” but tsūshin is translated as
“thoroughly realized body” in the sense that there is thorough permeation
and activity of “hands and eyes.” Because Dōgen’s lineage descends from both
of these dharma brothers, he does not take sides, but rather declares that both
are appropriate expressions of Kannon’s “limitless abundance” (nyokyota). The
point here, however, is that Dōgen believes that Kannon’s enlightened vision
involves the intuitive perception of and active participation in the world. For
him, this perceptive and dynamic dharma eye does not see the forms of the
world objectively as something other than oneself. Rather, because one has
gone through the shinjin datsuraku experience and been confirmed by all
dharmas, the resultant enlightened vision is an intimate, wise, and compas-
sionate understanding that allows one to intuit perfectly where and how to
engage with forms.
Like Kukai, Dōgen in the Shōbōgenzō often invokes the stock image of
the Buddhist mirror of the enlightened mind, which reflects reality wholly
and without distortion. However, whereas Kūkai prefers to focus on grasping
the totality of spatially fixed objects, such as elephants and dragons, Dōgen
stresses how this mirror of the enlightened mind can take in the totality of
unobstructed time. This mirror-mind, he claims, perceives and reflects all the
other buddhas and patriarchs throughout unobstructed time, just as the shisho
transmission certificate indicates. In addition, whereas Kūkai’s interresonat-
ing bell of Dainichi self-echoed its own dharma truth throughout the valley,
Dōgen stresses that the wind bell ringing out wisdom hangs in emptiness,
which allows all the myriad buddhas and patriarchs to view one another (i.e.,
view themselves) across the aeons. In this way, Dōgen puts his typical tem-
poral spin on the mirror metaphor, which he appropriately calls The Eternal
Mirror (Kokyō).47 In this eponymous fascicle, Dōgen writes:
What all the buddhas and all the patriarchs have received and retained,
and transmitted one-to-one, is the eternal mirror. They have the same
view and the same face, the same image and the same cast; they share
the same state and realize the same experience. A foreigner appears, a
foreigner is reflected—one hundred and eight thousand of them. A
Chinaman appears, a Chinaman is reflected—for a moment and for
ten thousand years. The past appears, the past is reflected; the pre-
sent appears, the present is reflected; a Buddha appears, a Buddha is
reflected; a patriarch appears, a patriarch is reflected.48
In this passage, Dōgen claims that all buddhas effectively have the same
experience and therefore resemble one another in the eternal mirror of the
mind. Chinese masters and foreign disciples, such as Dōgen himself, have the
same face and the same shape, he says, and both the quantity and duration of
such buddhas and patriarchs extend throughout the world and throughout
time. “One hundred and eight” is a stock Buddhist numerological moniker
for “many,” or in contemporary parlance, “millions” of reflections in time’s
endless hall of mirrors. Buddhas and patriarchs appearing “for a moment
and forever” recall again the characteristic notion of embedded momentary
nikons nested within the wide-ranging kyōraku of being-time. This great and
eternal self-reflective mirror of enlightenment, furthermore, can be infinitely
recast and replicated, for “Buddhas are the cast image of the great round mir-
ror.”49 This metaphor of the mirror’s mold shaping generation after genera-
tion of buddhas in its own image indicates the creative repeatability of the
Dōgen on the Art of Engaging 135
enlightenment experience. This poetic expression does not negate the agency
or potency of the individual Zen practitioner relying on his own efforts
(jiriki), nor does it indicate that anything is transmitted, transferred, or taken
away from one mirror to the next. Adding one more layer to the eternal hall
of mirrors simply adds another endless interreflection.
To further clarify and distinguish his unique understanding of the mirror
metaphor from Kūkai’s, however, later in the Kokyō fascicle Dōgen specifi-
cally makes clear that “The great round mirror is neither wisdom (chi) nor
principle (ri), neither the underlying essence or nature of things (shō) nor
their formed aspects (sō).”50 He thereby distinguishes Zen’s mind-to-mind
and eye-to-eye reflective vision from Mikkyō’s by the well-known Two World
mandalas of wisdom and principle in the noumenal Diamond or phenom-
enal Womb Worlds. In addition, he distinguishes Zen’s great round mirror
from the notions of essence and formed aspect that Kūkai reputedly calli-
graphed in the Ten Factors of Existence/Ten Examples of Suchness (jūnyoze;
see chapter 3, figs. 13a, b, c). Dōgen thereby implicitly posits the superiority of
Zen vision over and against codified Mikkyō imagery. This is because Dōgen
believes that Zen’s dynamic insight is reached only through real experience; it
should not be theorized or even visualized in esoteric images. It should only
be continually renewed and shared over time.
The importance of refreshing one’s True Dharma Eye is indicated in the
Ganzei Enlightened Vision fascicle. Here Dōgen recounts his late master’s stay
at Zuiganji temple, in Chekiang Province, eastern China. He says that Nyojō
entered the dharma hall there and said:
Pure the autumn wind, bright the autumn moon; Earth, mountains,
and rivers are clear in the Eye; Zuigan blinks and we meet afresh;
Sending staffs and shouts [katsu] by turns, they test the patch-robed
monk.51
the same kind of momentary freshness that blinking produces, and tested or
manifested with the kind of force that Zen shouts express. Only then can one
approach the permanent awakening that characterizes the unblinking fish
idealized in Dōgen’s chinzō inscriptions discussed above. Furthermore, every
time one blinks, one sees Buddhahood anew, for as Dōgen writes, “Renewing
our vision is the same as meeting”52 in the sense of meeting or seeing eye-to-
eye with all the other buddhas in time again. Dōgen concludes that when this
happens, “They meet like thunder and lightning.”53
This moment of seeing eye-to-eye with Buddha is further explained in
the Kenbutsu Seeing the Buddha fascicle already mentioned in chapter 2.
The subtext to this fascicle is the well-known Zen kōan, which admonishes
“When you see the Buddha, kill him! When you see the Patriarch, kill him!”
This anti-imagistic, anticonceptual tool is designed to empty the mind of
any preconceived attachments to obtaining enlightenment, so that one can
in fact, realize emptiness and obtain enlightenment.54 Dōgen, however, in
this fascicle heartily asserts that buddhas and patriarchs can see their realized
interactivity in an eye-to-eye, mind-to-mind, or shoulder-to-shoulder meet-
ing. For Dōgen, this enlightened meeting of dharma eye vision can only be
used in connection with special zazen practice-realization, as one enlightened
master-buddha sees it in another enlightened student-buddha. In the con-
text of this mind-to-mind transmission, which is better described as a meet-
ing of minds in what Yuasa calls the “symmetry of time,”55 the dharma eye of
practically realized Buddhahood can only be recognized after the third move-
ment in Dōgen’s Logic of Not. Only after a zazen practitioner experiences the
threefold enlightenment process can one see the world in light of the True
Dharma Eye; only now can one properly and moreover experientially see how
each and every bright leaf-time, blade of grass-time, tree-time, flower-time,
and self-time reciprocally manifest the dharma teaching.
Doctrinally speaking, Dōgen’s poem says that seeking the Buddha Way in the
mountains is nothing other than a spiritual homecoming. He says that trav-
eling among the venerable and deep mountains (miyamaみやま, 御山、深
山) has brought him back to his primordial home, where he can recover the
body of his original enlightenment. His return to his idealized home village
or sato deep within the mountainous landscape thus automatically invokes
satori, or realization.
13 8 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
At the same time, however, his last line explodes this rural idyll with an
astonishingly unexpected word choice. In contrast to Echizen’s mountains
(miyamaみやま), Dōgen says that his primordial home is actually nothing
other than the old capital of Heian itself (miyako京), where Dōgen was, in
fact, born and raised. That is, after hinting that he has returned home and
regained the spiritual insight of a child in the mountains, he now says that
his true birthplace was actually none other than the metropolitan center.
The apparent contradiction between city and country, however, is none-
theless immediately dissolved again through Dōgen’s poetic alliteration
and wordplay. As Steven Heine points out, when the syllables are broken
up, mi-yama literally means “the body of mountains”身山 and mi-ya-ko
literally means “body and child身や子.” The alliterative resonance of the
words miyama and miyako thus conflate the body of mountains with the
body of his childhood in the capital, and signal the rediscovery of his orig-
inal nature in the rural present through the recovery of his urban past.
Dōgen’s word choice thus links the rugged with the refined, the mountains
with the metropolis, and even cursive Japanese hiragana with the more
formal Chinese kanji writing. It simultaneously and importantly points
to the recovery of all the time that has passed from his childhood to the
present.59
In Dōgen’s case, therefore, his true homecoming and rebirthing in the
mountains is not without its urban references. However, all of his metro-
politan hints and wordplays serve the purpose of highlighting the timeliness
of the trek, the collapse of linear time frames, and the fusion of childhood
bodies in the city with their now-adult bodies in the mountains. His take on
the city that so structured Kūkai’s thought and activity is now fundamen-
tally temporalized and relativized within the larger flux and flow of nature,
human-nature, and Buddha-nature.
Dōgen elsewhere invokes the architectural spaces so typical of Kūkai, but
again, temporalizes them in his writings. Dōgen does, in fact, recommend
placing oneself into “the house of the Buddhas” in order to be enlightened. In
his Shōji fascicle on Life and Death, Dōgen says,
when you simply release and forget both your body and mind and
throw yourself into the house of the buddhas, and when functioning
comes from the direction of Buddha and you go in accord with it, then
with no strength needed and no thought expended, freed from birth
and death, you become Buddha. Then there can be no obstacle in any
man’s mind.60
Dōgen on the Art of Engaging 139
This house of the buddhas can be seen as an esoteric inheritance, but the main
thrust of Dōgen’s message is a very Taoist-inspired going in accord with the
functioning of the buddhas. It is this laissez-faire forgetting of the self à la
Chuang Tzu that allows one to effortlessly escape the cycle of birth and death.
Dōgen scholar Takahashi Masanobu states that the phrase “the house of the
Buddha,” in fact, should be understood
Intertemporality
Kūkai and Dōgen may see eye to eye, so to speak, in perceiving how forms
preach the dharma, and may agree that special condensations of the dharma,
such as mandalas and ajikan disks, or inscribed chinzō or shisho certificates
are particularly efficacious in revealing truth. However, given Dōgen’s highly
dynamic and temporalized vision of the universe, he prefers that these forms
not be fixed in space as they are in Kūkai’s scheme. If, as Ryūichi Abé suggests,
140 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
For the time being, I stand astride the highest mountain peaks.
For the time being, I move on the deepest depths of the ocean floor.
For the time being, I’m three heads and eight arms [i.e., a demon]
For the time being, I’m eight or sixteen feet [tall, i.e., a Buddha]
For the time being, I’m a staff or a whisk.
For the time being, I’m a pillar or lantern.
For the time being, I’m Mr. Chang or Mr. Li [i.e., somebody or other]
For the time being, I’m the great earth and heavens above.65
One final example taken from the Zuimonki talks adds another dimension
to Dōgen’s views on art and imagery. Simply put, this other dimension is
the necessity of adapting to circumstances. No hard and fast rule should be
mandated about either revering or destroying images. Although it is good for
beginners to revere the Buddha, in some cases it is also acceptable and even
admirable to treat the Buddha’s image less than honorably. Dōgen relates the
story of a poor man living near Kenninji, his old training monastery in Kyoto.
The poor man asks the Abbot Eisai for help, but the temple itself was without
adequate food or funds at the time. Eisai gives him a scrap of leftover copper
from the halo that was being made for the temple’s main image of Yakushi
Buddha, and tells him to exchange it for food. Eisai’s students asked, “Isn’t it
a crime to make personal use of what belongs to the Buddha?” Eisai replies
that they are correct, but that saving people from starvation is worth commit-
ting such an egregious crime and falling into hell. Dōgen remarks, “Students
today would do well to reflect on the excellence of Eisai’s attitude. Do not
forget this.”78
With regard to such temple images, it is interesting to note that Eisai’s
Kenninji is reputed to have been installing a Yakushi Medicine Buddha, and
not the standard Mañjuśrī images associated with Zen monasteries. This
either compels us to reevaluate our understanding of medieval Zen imagery,
or of the Zuimonki, or both. A propos, Dōgen, too, is reputed to have solic-
ited funds for the installation and consecration of a Mañjuśrī image in his
proposed Monks’ Hall at Kannondōri in Fukakusa south of Heian in 1235,
but the Chinese letter attributed to him only appears in a late biography of
the master dated to 1754 and is therefore questionable. He supposedly writes,
“a sacred figure of Mañjuśrī will be enshrined in the center of the hall. . . . We
will acknowledge the gifts by installing the donors’ names inside the sacred
image of Mañjuśrī. The enshrined names will form myriad syllables as seeds
of wisdom illuminating everyone.”79 The mention of the mantric value of the
donors’ enshrined names, and the esoteric assumption that they could serve
as bīja seed syllables that would help enlighten the monks within the hall,
14 6 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
Concluding Remarks
if, as the critical theorist Theodor Adorno observed, “art is the magic deliv-
ered from the lie of being truth,”1 then this study has demonstrated that reli-
gious art, in a sense like magic, can both be and not be true. For Kūkai, the
magic of art meant graphically constructing, but also poetically deconstruct-
ing, the absolute truth embodied in the Two World mandalas. For Dōgen, it
meant embracing select Zen icons, but also using text and time to qualify the
treachery of the image. For both, ultimately speaking, perception was reality.
In reconsidering our opening questions, therefore, it is necessary to keep
these nuanced perspectives in mind.
In response to our first question, “Do images help or hinder the realization
of Buddhahood?” the answer is an equivocating Yes. Both masters believed
that images could help but also hinder one’s realization of emptiness, though
their emphases differ. Kukai’s esoteric art could trigger awakening in a single
glance and also express the entirety of the dharma better than words, but
ultimately speaking, even the mandalas had to be emptied of their doctrinal
value and substance. Ajikan visualizations could well facilitate the religious
experience of kaji, and proximity to the mandalas or their intericonic rear-
rangements could automatically empower one’s spatial location with the
microcosmic palace of Dainichi in all of his personified aspects, but Kūkai’s
poetry also recognizes the ultimate ineffability of these provisional castles in
the air. For Dōgen, conversely, Zen art could mislead as easily as it could inspire
practice-realization. Full moons reflected in well water were as problematic as
full moons resembling rice cakes painted on Chinese temple walls, and master
portraits had to be paired with nondualizing text so that they could stand as
enigmatic emblems of emptiness. At the same time, however, even crudely
fashioned Buddha statues could inspire beginners, and other select Zen icons
such as the shisho could trigger profound understanding in the spectator. For
14 8 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
Rishukyō states. For Kūkai, therefore, all forms of the world can potentially
be vehicles to awakening as they all disclose the dharma, but there neverthe-
less are some esoteric art forms that do it faster and better than others. The
ajikan disk is a case in point, and the Two World mandalas, as well as all the
painted and sculpted versions of its figures at key Shingon sites were consid-
ered to be the most efficacious images for illuminating anyone present in their
proximity. Therefore, when speaking publicly to the court on the level of con-
ventional truth, Kūkai makes unprecedented claims for his newly imported
images to gain political favor over his predecessor Saichō. In his more private
poetry, however, he speaks from the standpoint of ultimacy and deconstructs
the images’ value and power to enlighten. His deconstructive writings appear
separately from the impact of his imagery, however, and to the average viewer,
the overwhelming power of his elaborate iconographic system remains the
method par excellence for representing the dharma.
Dōgen, by contrast, believes that images like Nāgārjuna’s full-moon body
can be extremely misleading, and he repeatedly cautions students that sym-
bolic representations of spring, for example, are but mere stereotypes, not
the actual prototypes. These examples demonstrate his disdain for imagery,
since it can never reproduce the lived experience of samādhi or spring itself.
At the same time, however, these apparently anti-image cautionary tales need
to be read with a grain of salt. In these fascicles, Dōgen presents himself to
his students as more enlightened than Chinese monks and better able to dis-
cern direct painting than anyone else, and as such, may have been told with
ecclesiastical motivations in mind. That is, they should not be read only as evi-
dence of Dōgen’s iconoclastic tendencies, but also as a means for institution
building centered around himself as superior. He therefore uses anti-image
rhetoric to make a larger point about his ability to establish, lead, and extend
his master’s lineage in Japan. Given this fact, and Dōgen’s active engagement
in image-inscription and arguably even image-production, one is compelled
to reassess Zen’s purely iconoclastic reputation. For Dōgen, some extraordi-
nary Zen images can re-present enlightenment provided that one see and read
them with the True Dharma Eye and the kind of experiential, synesthetic sen-
sibility that “seeing with the ears” and “hearing with the eyes” affords. This is
certainly the case with the shisho certificate, which Dōgen says, made the age-
less dharma transmission visible and present to him in a mysterious moment
of illumination by the myriad compassionate buddhas. It is also the case in
Dōgen’s chinzō portraits and inscribed patriarch pictures, wherein he mas-
terfully walks the tightrope of nondualism between public face and private
moment, reflected and real moons, conventional and ultimate reality. He
Concluding Remarks 151
does not think that this art can ever replicate the experience itself, but it can
approximate it and ideally even inspire unrealized beginners and advanced
viewers alike to practice-realization.
Thus, Kūkai and Dōgen’s enlightenment experiences do differ accord-
ing to their unitive or purgative models, but their views on imagery and
the nonduality of form and emptiness are fairly close in the end. In Kūkai’s
ontology, form and emptiness are by nature nondual, that is, forms already
everywhere are empty of inherent essence, but he occasionally slips into more
or less conventional or ultimate voices to stress the images’ efficacy or emp-
tiness, respectively. Dōgen does not believe the average viewer sees form as
already empty, however, so his soteriology insists on emptying out conven-
tional forms (oneself included) first before they can be perceived in that same
ultimately nondual light. As a result, Kūkai emphasizes the primacy of already
empty esoteric art forms to trigger and illustrate enlightenment. Dōgen first
concentrates on the trigger experience itself, so that the image’s ability to illus-
trate enlightenment in the end depends upon whether the beholder has that
experientially gained True Dharma Eye or not. Kūkai concentrates on forms
as already and everywhere empty, Dōgen concentrates on emptiness, which
then ideally can be seen as concretized in and as form.
Space/Time
First, in terms of form or methodology, this comparative study has sought to
break new methodological ground by proposing space and time as organiz-
ing principles for analyzing both meditative experience as well as visual and
material culture. In this way, it has attempted to find a kind of “middle path”
between the old insights of phenomenology and the more recent scholarly
focus on the sociology of religion. Scholarship on the phenomenology of reli-
gion emerged from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “inward
turn,” that is, the overarching concern with inner psychological states and
supranormal consciousness. Consequently, Shingon became “Tibetanized,”
that is, all mandalas were understood to be visual aids for blissful personal
awakening, and Zen became “Zenified,” that is, idealized as the epitome of
self-realization through an impossible and ritually myopic economy of means.
Recent revisionist scholarship focusing on the social, political, material, and
altogether constructed nature of religion, however, has debunked much of this
old scholarship. Robert Sharf, for example, has demonstrated that Shingon’s
Two World mandalas are not actively visualized by meditators in contempla-
tion as in Tibet, but rather function primarily to empower ritual space.3 In
addition, Steven Heine and Dale Wright have recovered the many histori-
cal, political, and sociological aspects of Zen ritual that D. T. Suzuki either
consciously or unconsciously omitted in his reverse-Orientalist presentation
of Zen minimalism to the West.4 As a result of this latest pendular swing in
academe, the baby (i.e., religious experience) has been thrown out with the
bathwater so to speak. This study, however, attempts to resuscitate the role of
Concluding Remarks 153
Text/Image
Second, in terms of methodology, this study has attempted to use text and
image analysis, that is, the traditional tools of religious studies scholars, as
well as art historians, to make Mikkyō and Zen Buddhist art and doctrine
accessible and understandable to audiences today. This interdisciplinary
approach makes good common sense given the nature of Buddhism itself,
which was promulgated throughout the pan-Asian sphere as a teaching of
images. This combined hermeneutical approach, which situates Kūkai and
Dōgen along India’s two parallel strains of imagistic and nonimagistic medi-
tative traditions, has helped to relativize, or at least contextualize, Suzuki’s
overblown claims for the superiority of Zen over all other kinds of Buddhism.
Certainly every Buddhist sect ranked themselves first in their kyōhan doctri-
nal classifications; Kūkai’s masterful Ten Stages of Mind is no different in this
regard. What is different, is the disproportionate reception that Suzuki’s Zen
has enjoyed in the American popular imagination, and the ways in which he
was able to capture America’s Protestant predilection for biblical text over
154 I co n s a n d I co n o c l a sm i n Ja pa n es e B u d d h i sm
image, and individual charism over priestly ritual mediation. This legacy of
Zen’s reception in American scholarship necessitates not a knee-jerk debunk-
ing of Zen as other scholars have done, but rather a more reasoned and bal-
anced assessment of both Kūkai’s and Dōgen’s views on imagery.
In terms of content, moreover, this religio-artistic analysis has revealed that
Kūkai’s and Dōgen’s respective reputations for iconicity and iconoclasm are
certainly understandable, though hopefully now more qualified and nuanced
than before. By looking closely at Kūkai’s and Dōgen’s philosophies of form
and by analyzing their writings and projects related to religious imagery, we
come to understand how and why they alternately embraced and rejected the
visual power of fixed images.
Expression/Experience
Finally, in terms of methodology, this study concurs with Katz’s position that
context, or the inherited expressions of a religious tradition, will influence
what kind of mystical experience one has. It further elaborates on his central
argument, however, by highlighting the important role that imagery plays in
priming the subject for a particular experience. In Kūkai’s case, viewing the
Diamond and Womb World mandalas in China and ritually establishing a
karmic tie with Dainichi pictured in the center was a crucial step or initiation
that was designed to lead the adept into a much deeper, broader and sustained
ritual-meditative practice for kaji. By comparison, in Dōgen’s case, we have
shown that viewing the circular format shisho certificates in Sung dynasty
China were essential to shaping his understanding of the eternal dharma
transmission, and thus to facilitating his transhistorical claims about the shin-
jin datsuraku experience. His Hōkyōki note distinguishing different colored
lions under Nyojō’s one dharma lotus canopy was also a key image for him, as
he also toggles between experiential dualism and One Bright Pearl monistic
rhetoric in his writings.
This careful attention to voice, as well as to context, intended audience,
and motivating intent, is crucial to understanding Kūkai’s and Dōgen’s views,
not only of imagery, but also of enlightenment itself. The term enlighten-
ment or Buddhahood can equally refer to a state of mind, a description of
the universe, a process of awakening, or a means of perception. It is impor-
tant to recognize which mode of meaning Kūkai, or Dōgen, or any other
Buddhist writer for that matter intends when analyzing their views. The
ontological ordo essendi or ultimate perspective is descriptive, it is an expres-
sion of the equality and reflexivity of form and emptiness as it acknowledges
Concluding Remarks 155
“association” of Allah with any lesser entity or limited concept) may explain
some of the world’s monotheistic iconoclasms, but Zen iconoclasm is primar-
ily motivated by the urge to demonstrate one’s grasp of impermanence and
emptiness by not attaching to any reified image of Buddhahood. There is no
strict dogma to adhere to in Zen, other than perhaps the imperative to eschew
dogma itself.
Moreover, the ways that Russian Orthodox or Roman Catholic icons func-
tion theologically have little to no relation to the ways that animated Shingon
Buddhist icons functioned in Japan. Byzantine icons in the Christian tradi-
tion functioned as two-way windows onto the divine, that is, they permitted
the human to gaze upon the face of God and conversely, they allowed the
light of God, materially rendered as gold leaf or silver plate, to be discerned
visually on Earth. Japanese icons, by contrast, were usually sculpted and con-
secrated as “living images,” that is, ritually animated with relics, scriptures, or
preceptor-name rolls to symbolize the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha
community of practitioners. Their function to provide “this-worldly benefits”
( Jp. genze riyaku) for healing, rainmaking, state protection, and other practi-
cal effects is a far cry from Christianity’s theological and doctrinal rationales
for making the likeness (Gk. eikon) of God.
Thus, the limited scope but potential relevance of this comparative study
hopefully will spark new interdisciplinary research and deeper methodologi-
cal insights into the questions of iconicity and iconoclasm in religious studies,
art history, and studies of mysticism, and visual culture. These interrelated
fields have much to gain and much to give to one another. Kūkai and Dōgen’s
shared leitmotif of nondualism, therefore, might serve here as a helpful
reminder that such disciplinary distinctions both are, and are not, useful cat-
egories. Each area of inquiry certainly provides its own expertise and meth-
odological rigor, but ultimately, these disciplines can and should be brought
together into conversation with one another. Otherwise, to borrow Kūkai’s
old Indian analogy, we risk resembling the blind men discerning only but a
part of the entire elephant. Far better, it would seem, to be like Dōgen’s “bud-
dhas alone, together with buddhas,” so that each individual scholar, in unob-
structed collaboration with others, might pool their unique talents, resources,
and enthusiasms to see the one bright pearl of imaged experience.
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Notes
Introduction
1. All images can be viewed in the print version of this publication.
2. See Benjamin, “The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
3. For more on cultural criticism, see Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” For more on hibutsu, see Rambelli, “Secrecy in
Japanese Esoteric Buddhism,” 107–129.
4. John 20:29 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible).
5. Arnheim, Visual Thinking.
6. For more on Gandhāran syncretism, see Rosenfield, “Prologue: Some Debating
Points on Gandhāran Buddhism and Kusāna History,” 16.
7. Yoritomi locates the roots of esoteric Buddhist culture in the southeast Indian
region around Orissa in the sixth to seventh centuries. See Yoritomi, Indo bukkyō;
Yoritomi, Dainichikyō nyūmon, 47–60. Ch’an/Zen’s origins are traditionally traced
back to Bodhidharma’s sixth-century introduction of dhyana meditation to Shaolin
monastery, China.
Chapter 1
1. Matsunaga and Matsunaga, Foundation of Japanese Buddhism, vol. 1, 204–7;
Matsunaga and Matsunaga, Foundation of Japanese Buddhism, vol. 2, 2–3. For more
on constructions of Kūkai, see Nicholoff, Sacred Kōyasan, 31–74; Reader, Making
Pilgrimages, 42–45.
2. Matsunaga and Matsunaga, Foundation of Japanese Buddhism, vol. 2, 4–7; Kitagawa,
Religion in Japanese History, 126–28. For more on constructions of Dōgen, see
Heine, Did Dōgen Go to China?
3. See Shaner, The Bodymind Experience in Japanese Buddhism; Yuasa Yasuo, The
Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory, 111–56.
4. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works 145–46; KDZ 2:553.
5. 海外求道虚往實帰, Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 52; KZ 5:433–34.
6. Dōgen’s empty-handed return is found in chapter 1 of the Dōgen oshō kōroku. DZZ
2: 18 n. 48. For more on this, see Kodera, Dōgen’s Formative Years in China, 75–78;
Heine, Did Dōgen Go to China? 260 n. 85.
160 Notes
7. Originally, Kūkai only used the term “world” in reference to the Diamond World
mandala (kongōkai金剛界), not to the Womb Treasure Ocean mandala (taizōkai胎
蔵海). However, the twin homonyms for world (kai 界) and ocean (kai海) and the
mandalas’ ubiquitous twin displays soon collapsed this distinction and led to the
convention of calling them the Two World mandalas.
8. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 148; KDZ 2:558.
9. Matsunaga and Matsunaga, Foundation of Japanese Buddhism, vol. 2, 239.
10. Mention of Myōzen’s relics is found in the Shari sōdenki (DZZ 2:235–36). Mention
of Ju-ching’s portrait, Fu-jung’s dharma robe and the two texts appear in the 1753
publication of Kenzei’s (1417–1474) Biography of the Founder Dōgen of Eihei (Eihei
kaisan gyōjō kenzei-ki), also known as the Kenzei-ki, though this late source should
be considered with care. For more on this text, see Kawamura, Eihei kaisan. Mention
of Fu-jung’s robe also appears in the Shisho fascicle (Nishijima and Cross, Master
Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 1:196; DZZ 1:342), the Hōkyōki (Kodera, Dōgen’s Formative
Years in China, 132; DZZ 2:384) and in the Eiheiji sanso gyōgōki (DZZ 2:398). No
mention of receiving Nyojō’s shisho certificate actually appears in the Shisho fascicle,
but Dōgen explains that Nyojō cautioned against bragging about one’s succession.
Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 1:195; DZZ 1:342. For more on
this, see Kodera, Dōgen’s Formative Years in China, 75–78; Heine, Did Dōgen Go To
China?, 24–26, 50, 260 n. 86.
11. By the Kamakura period, Kūkai’s phrase for becoming a Buddha in this very body
had become well-known in the esoteric strain of Tendai (taimitsu) monasteries on
Mount Hiei where Dōgen studied.
12. DZZ 1:735
13. おのれをしるとき、密行をしるなり. DZZ 1:395.
14. Dōgen’s enlightenment experience may have been the result of miscommunication
and/or insightful wordplay. He may have heard his master encouraging his students
either to “cast off the dust of the mind” (心塵脱落, Ch. hsin-chen t’o lo) or “cast off
body-mind” (身心脱落, Ch. shen-hsin t’o lo). Both are pronounced shinjin datsur-
aku in Japanese.
15. Otto, Mysticism East and West; Underhill, Mysticism, 125–48. Underhill also pro-
poses a third type of pilgrim mystic.
16. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 166.
17. Kohn, Early Chinese Mysticism, vii.
18. d’Acquili, Newberg, and Rouse, Why God Won’t Go Away, 28.
19. Ibid., 117–23.
20. Ibid., 121.
21. Ibid., 118.
22. Davidson, “The Physiology of Meditation and Mystical States of Consciousness,”
386.
23. d’Acquili, Newberg, and Rouse, Why God Won’t Go Away, 122.
24. Ibid., 118.
Notes 161
50. For more on the history of religion and art in the academy, see DeConcini, “Crisis
of Meaning.”
51. It is important to note, however, that not all art historians were provenance-hunters
and all religion scholars philologists. Art historians like Soper intimately knew
images’ associated texts, and religion scholars such as Maspero, Tucci, and Eliade
saw the connections between religious art and scriptural ideas.
52. See for example, Payne, Tantras in East Asia; Orzech, Esoteric Buddhism and the
Tantras in East Asia; Abé, The Weaving of Mantra; Unno, Shingon Refractions;
Sharf and Sharf, Living Images; Nicholoff, Sacred Kōyasan; Ruppert, Jewel in the
Ashes; Rambelli, Buddhist Materiality.
Chapter 2
1. See Corbin, Temple and Contemplation; Eliade, The Sacred and Profane.
2. Abé, “Mandala as a Time Machine: Sexual Symbolism and the Figuration of Time
in Shingon Buddhist Iconography”; Leighton, Visions of Awakening Space and
Time.
3. Chronos is not an ideal word choice since it presupposes a linear time line.
Nevertheless, it can be used to connote both an ongoing duration of temporal
activity, as well as an instantaneous moment (e.g., a chronic condition that both
extends throughout time and flares up at particular points in time). This double
sense can provide a helpful subtext to understanding Dōgen’s “ranging” (kyōryaku)
and “just-now” (nikon) times, provided one discards the linear temporality that
chronos presupposes.
4. Yamasaki, Shingon, 86–89; Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 221–27.
5. Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 211, 428.
6. Yamasaki, Shingon, 88; KZ 1:719. For more on Mikkyō’s two-transmission theory,
see Abé, “Capturing the Dharma.”
7. It is unclear whether the esoteric and exoteric Nāgārjunas refer to the same figure,
however. See Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 231.
8. A purely psychosymbolic reading of this episode would indicate that it is necessary
to overcome the wild fears and forces in the waters of the subconscious in order
to obtain profound wisdom. In Asian mythology, makaras are specifically associ-
ated with the svādhis..thāna cakra or lower tanden located near “the waters of the
body,” that is, the urogenital tracts. As a result, these ichymorphous symbols of
sexual, procreative energy must be surpassed if one is to obtain profound wisdom
in meditation. A full discussion of this topic, however, exceeds the confines of this
investigation.
9. See Yampolsky, The Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch, 6 n. 8; T 50, 297–322.
10. While the Gandavyūha section of the sutra metaphorically describes young
Sudhana’s visit to over fifty good friends as a pilgrimage through a spiritual land-
scape, Kūkai adopts a more vertically oriented “heavenly ladder” paradigm of ascent
Notes 163
each Buddha or bodhisattva. He further argues that the mandalas’ automatic ability
to transform the ritual hall into a pure land (and hence anyone in its presence into
a Buddha) means that the presence of the mandalas “does not so much serve as an
aid for visualizing the deity as it abrogates the need for visualization at all.” Sharf,
“Visualization and Mandala in Shingon Buddhism,” 192.
26. The order for discussing the nine halls of the Diamond World mandala follows
Gengō’s (914–95) clockwise spiral analysis outlined in the Kongōkai kuemikki.
Gengō, however, also provides a counterclockwise analysis starting in the lower
right-hand corner and ascending up and around to the left.
27. Kūkai first articulates Dainichi’s four modes of self-expression in his Becoming a
Buddha in This Very Body, but Kūkai invokes these four categories of Dainichi’s
enlightened nature elsewhere, as well. In the opening invocation and culminating
poem of The Precious Key to the Secret Treasury (Hizō hōyaku), for example, Kūkai
first takes refuge in Dainichi, then in his silence and his syllables (dharma-mandala,
secret of speech), his symbols (samaya-mandala, secret of mind), his personifica-
tions (mahā-mandala, secret of body), and his activities (karma-mandala, summary
of all secret activities). In the concluding poem summarizing the tenth and ulti-
mate stage of mind, Kūkai likewise invokes Dainichi of the Diamond and Womb
Worlds (mahā-mandala), his mantras that represent and communicate reality
(dharma-mandala), and his symbols of his mind-power, such as vajras and swords
(samaya- mandala). We are able to be enlightened in this very body, he concludes,
if we can but realize these ubiquitous activities of his (karma-mandala) (Hakeda,
Kūkai Major Works, 217 n. 222; KDZ 2:128). The Diamond World mandala puts
all of these associated teachings into visual format, though it rearranges their order
(Yamamoto, Introduction to the Mandala, 30).
28. The Interpretations of the Six Kinds of Mandalas ( Jp. Rokushu mandara
ryakushaku), which the Tendai monk Enchin (814–889) brought back to Japan in
858, is a two-fascicle oral commentary on the six-hall Diamond World that is based
on Śubhākarasimha’s earliest translation of the Kongōchōkyō. The gobushinkan
scroll of iconographic drawings predating 855, also imported by Enchin, further
illustrates the deities of the Buddha, Vajra, Ratna, Padma, and Karma halls and con-
cludes with Śubhākarasimha’s portrait. See Ono, Bukkyō no bijutsu to rekishi, chap.
4. Ono Genmyō (1883–1939) first discovered the six-mandala oral commentary at
Shōren-in in Awata, Kyoto. The gobushinkan is preserved today at the Emman-in
sub-temple of Onjōji temple in Shiga Prefecture.
29. Lokesh Chandra and other scholars theorize that Kūkai’s nine-hall version may
reflect Vajrabodhi’s later translation of a short version of the Kongōchōkyō com-
pleted after Śubhākarasimha’s and may have been designed to conform to Chinese
ideals of imperial and sacred space. For more on this, see Winfield, “Mandala as
Metropolis.”
30. ten Grotenhuis, Japanese Mandalas, 45–46.
31. Komine, “Satori no tenkai,” 142.
Notes 165
32. As a result, such jewel vases are often used in ritual kanjō (Skt. abhisekha) initiations
to carry the water of pure transmission; and consequently, as mentioned above, are
also pictured in esoteric patriarch portraits.
33. Yamamoto, Introduction to the Mandala, 17.
34. Earth (Skt. Prthivī), Fire (Skt. Agni), Air (Skt. Vāyu); Water (Skt. Varuna).
35. Kiyota, “Shingon Mikkyō’s Twofold Mandala,” 102; Nichiei bukkyō daijiten, 78l.
36. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 175 (italics mine); DZZ 1:264.
37. Kasulis, “Uji (Being-Time),” 2; DZZ 1:190.
38. Ibid., 4–5 (italics mine); DZZ 1:191.
39. British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington first coined this phrase during his
1927 Gifford Lectures. See Eddington, The Physical World, chap. 6.
40. The Lotus Sūtra passage reads in full, “Buddhas alone, together with buddhas,
can perfectly realize that all dharmas are real form.” Nishijima and Cross, Master
Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 1:52 n. 13; DZZ 1: 780–86; T 262.9, 5c11.
41. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 1:156–57 (italics mine); DZZ
1:292.
42. 3000 worlds = 1000 worlds (10 worlds with 10 distinguishing characteristics each)
X 3 periods of past, present, and future.
43. Kodera, Dōgen’s Formative Years in China, 69. See Heine, Did Dōgen Go to China?,
160 n. 85.
44. Kasulis, “Uji (Being-Time),” 4; DZZ 1:191.
45. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 1: 200; DZZ 1:345.
46. Ibid., 192; DZZ 1:339.
47. 佛祖命脈證契即通、道元即通。大宋法寳慶丁亥,住天童如浄.
48. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 1:200; DZZ 1:345.
49. Ibid., 191 (italics mine); DZZ 1:338.
50. Kodera, Dōgen’s Formative Years in China, 46 (brackets in original); DZZ 1: 337.
51. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 3:215; DZZ 1:494.
52. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 1:192–93; DZZ 1:339–40.
53. Kodera, Dōgen’s Formative Years in China, 73–74, 160 n.186.
54. Ibid., 71; DZZ 1:338.
55. Heine, Did Dōgen Go to China?, 236.
56. Tanahashi, Enlightenment Unfolds, 201; DZZ 1:561.
57. DZZ 1:12.
58. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 1:29; DZZ 1:12. Another com-
mentary on the verse that further stresses the formlessness of the bell’s emptiness
appears in Dōgen’s Hōkyōki journal, which he supposedly kept during his stud-
ies in China from 1223–1227. Hōkyōki entry no. 38 reports a clarifying exchange
between Dōgen and his Chinese master. Dōgen rhetorically asks, “The so-called
emptiness does not refer to the form of emptiness, does it? Skeptics always think
of emptiness as a form. Today’s students . . . see the blue sky and call it emptiness.
I truly feel sorry for them.” Ju-ching replied with compassion: “What is called
166 Notes
emptiness is prajñā, and not the emptiness as in the form of emptiness. . . . Not
one of the abbots in all corners of the world realizes even the nature of forms;
how much less can they illuminate emptiness?” Kodera, Dōgen’s Formative Years
in China, 135. For the questionable dating of this journal, see Heine, Did Dōgen Go
to China?, 36–38.
59. Yuasa, Overcoming Modernity, 188.
60. Sharf, “Visualization and Mandala in Shingon Buddhism,” 183.
61. KDZ 3:483.
62. In this expedient visual metaphor, the negative node above indicates a state of
no-mind, the positive node below indicates gathering one’s vital energies at the
lower tanden, which prevents so-called Zen sickness. The eighteenth-century
Rinzai monk Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1768) was one of the most famous sufferers
of Zen sickness. Hakuyū’s prognosis was: “Your meditation has been too unmeas-
ured and your asceticism too strict. . . . Facing your previous overmeditation, you are
now seeing severe sickness. . . . Gather together the flames of your heart and place
them under your navel and below your feet, then your whole chest will become
cool. . . . Energetically fill the lower part of your body with spiritual energy, this is
essential for nourishing life.” Addiss, The Art of Zen, 105.
63. Nagatomo, “The Logic of The Diamond Sūtra.” Okumura, Realizing Genjōkōan,
iii.
64. Eckel, To See the Buddha, 29.
65. Waddell and Abe, “Genjōkōan,” 129–30; DZZ 1:7–8.
66. Ibid., 130; DZZ 1:8.
67. DZZ 1:480. Given Dōgen’s particular temporal framework, the term for form (sō)
is better translated as aspect-phases, so that Tathāgata indicates a “whole state of
action.” Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 3:191 n.2.
68. Waddell and Abe, “Genjōkōan,”128; DZZ 1:7.
69. Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, 86.
C h a p t er 3
1. These three modes or dimensions of Dainichi’s self-expression, as well as the fourth
summative dimension of Dainichi’s combined activities (karma-mandala) are pic-
tured in the first four mini-mandalas of the Diamond World outlined in chapter 2.
2. I adapt this phrase from Kitagawa, who relies on Haas to describe the Neo-Confucian
shogunate of the Edo period. See Kitagawa, Religion in Japanese History, 154, n. 54.
3. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 145–46; KDZ 2:552–53.
4. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 128; KDZ 6:83.
5. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 234; KDZ 2:253. Originally, mirrorlike wisdom is
associated with Yogācāra’s deepest eighth ālayavijñāna, which enables access to the
enlightened wisdom of the dharmadhātu.
6. KDZ 2:307–308, 341 n. 24.
Notes 167
7. Scholars have debated for centuries whether this text is incomplete, but this is
improbable as Kūkai considered it required reading for his Sanskrit students. It is
also possible that Kūkai only focused on objects of sight after his analysis of lan-
guage in order to bridge the relationship between text and image, sound and form,
nāma-rūpa in a fully developed theory of monji.
8. In phenomenological terminology, nōen refers to the noetic act and shoen refers
to the noematic content. Shaner, The Bodymind Experience in Japanese Buddhism,
108.
9. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 246; KDZ 2:293–94.
10. Ibid., 229–30; KDZ 2:234–36.
11. Kyōhan is an abbreviation of the term kyōsō hanjaku, which refers to the “classifica-
tion of the various tenets of Buddhism from some particular sectarian standpoint.”
Nichiei bukkyō daijiten, 190L–191R.
12. Yogācāra identifies three sources for the arising of existences: imagination (Skt.
parikalpita), dependent origination (Skt. paratantra), and perfect existence or such-
ness (Skt. parinis.panna). See Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 197 n. 128.
13. KDZ 2:106
14. KDZ 2:127.
15. Kūkai was influenced by two very different language systems: ideographic Chinese,
as well as alphabetic Sanskrit. He mastered classical Chinese under his maternal
uncle Atō and at the state university in Nagaoka c. 791, and was familiar with
China’s I-ching philosophy that symbolically condensed the world’s yin/yang
energy combinations into microcosmic diagrams and trigrams. Kūkai specifically
mentions the Eight Trigrams of Fu-hsi in the opening lines of his earliest known
work, the Indications of the Goals of the Three Teachings (Sangō shiiki), written c. 727
at age twenty-four. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 101–39; KDZ 6:5–121. Yet Kūkai
also studied Sanskrit and Siddham calligraphy under the Indian masters Prajñā and
Muniśrī while in Chang’an from 804–806, and Indian mantrayāna that condensed
universal energies into microphonic sound bites. His Catalogue of Imported Items
stresses the need for maintaining the original pronunciation of the Sanskrit man-
tras, as transliterating their sounds into Chinese characters can only approximate
or mix up the long and short vowels, thereby warping their meaning and ultimate
efficacy. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 144; KDZ 2:549. Finally, Kūkai absorbed the
ancient Chinese and Vedic theories that Chinese characters and Sankrit bīja sound
syllables actually exist on a suprahuman plane. According to Chinese mythology,
written characters emerged from the primordial waters of creation on the back of a
world-bearing tortoise, and according to Vedic lore, the Hindu goddess of speech,
Vac, first uttered the primordial mantras of creation when she spoke the world into
being. Kūkai’s familiarity with these mythologies is evidenced by his commentary
on the Heart Sūtra written in 834, the year before he died. In the Secret Key to the
Heart Sūtra (Hannya shingyō hiken), Kūkai proclaims that the scripture’s words
are tantamount to the characters that appeared on the shell of the primordial
168 Notes
tortoise, the signs on divination stalks, the interpenetrating nodes of Indra’s net, or
of Sanskrit grammar that contains myriad meanings. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works,
265; KDZ 2:352–55.
16. Rambelli, Buddhist Materiality, 88–128.
17. An interesting analogy can be drawn with Psalm 19:1–4, which states that “The
heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day
after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They
have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice
goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world” (New International
Version). It can also be compared with the late nineteenth-century European liter-
ary and artistic movement of Symbolism, which theorized the direct expression of
ideas through signs. As the art critic Albert Aurier wrote in March of 1891, “in the
eyes of the artist, that is, the one who must express absolute beings . . . [objects] can
only appear to him as signs. These are the letters of an immense alphabet which
only the man of genius knows how to spell.” Aurier, “Le Symbolisme en Peinture:
Paul Gaugin,” 160. Conversely, the Symbolist poet Saint-Pol Roux also saw words
as “setting sail for sculpturality.” See Delevoy, Symbolists and Symbolism, 80.
18. Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 339; KZ 1:251–52.
19. KDZ 2:274.
20. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 145; KDZ 2:552.
21. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 150; KDZ 2:563.
22. See Gardiner, “Kūkai and the Beginnings of Shingon Buddhism in Japan,” for a
detailed analysis of this text.
23. T 16, 525b.
24. This text is a one-hundred-fascicle commentary on the Mahāprajñāpāramitā sūtra,
attributed to Nāgārjuna and translated by Kumarājiva. T 25, 13c.
25. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 247; KDZ 2:302; T 39, 656a.
26. KDZ 6:163. My translation of the last two lines is more literal than Hakeda’s poetic
interpretation, which reads: “It is open or closed depending on how we look at it;/
His silence or eloquence make incisive tongues numb.” Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works,
91. Hakeda’s interpretation would suggest that our own level of enlightenment deter-
mines our reading comprehension of the book of life, and the experience of reading
between the lines of Dainichi’s silence and speech itself cannot be put into words.
27. This notion that words are tantamount to real forms gave rise to at least one medi-
eval miracle tale in which Kūkai ends a devastating drought. He traces the character
for “dragon” on the water surface of a dwindling creek bed, and the fluid character
magically transforms into an actual rain-bearing dragon. See Tanabe, “Kōbō Daishi
and the Art of Esoteric Buddhism,” 410. This gives a new twist to Kūkai’s earlier
admonitions against water-painting, for in the Shingon context, mantras and other
power-words (in this case, dragons) can fully mirror and manifest their actual
referents.
28. KDZ 2:128.
Notes 169
outlines but the tip of Dainichi’s iceberg, literally calling its descriptions but “the
antennae of a snail” (kuwakaku). See KDZ 3:139.
47. KDZ 2:558.
48. As mentioned earlier in the Introduction, Hakeda mitigates this claim by translat-
ing it as “the sight of them may well enable one to attain Buddhahood.” Hakeda,
Kūkai Major Works 145–46.
49. Sharf, “Visualization and Mandala in Shingon Buddhism,” 187–88. DeBary trans-
lates this last sentence, “Art is what reveals to us the state of perfection.” deBary, The
Buddhist Tradition, 138; KDZ 2:553.
50. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 150. KDZ 2:563. The ambivalence regarding visibil-
ity of the dharma reflects Madhyamaka influence; the image of the recovered gem
in the dirt and opening one’s spiritual eyes is an expression of Tathāgatagarbha
thought. Dōgen’s One Bright Pearl (Ikka myōju) also references this Lotus Sūtra
episode in which a poor man remains oblivious of a precious pearl sewn into the
lining of his coat by a dharma friend. T 262, 9, 1c3.
51. Various versions of this sutra had been used for over a century to refresh the four
deva kings’ vow to safeguard the four corners of the land from calamity and ill-
ness by virtue of the Buddha’s golden purifying light. Specifically, Emperor Shōmu
first issued ten copies of the latest version of The Sūtra of the Victorious Kings of the
Golden Light Ray (Konkōmyō saishōōkyō) to every province in the twelfth month of
728. Kokubunji, 147.
52. Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes, 103–4 (brackets in original); KZ 3:518–19.
53. Yamaori, Wandering Spirits and Temporary Corpses, 155.
54. The anonymous Origin and Practice of the Mishuhō (Goshichinichi mishuhō yuisho
sahō) describes how Tōji’s Abbot Kangen performed the ritual in 921, and the Diary
of the Mishuhō at the Imperial Mantra Chapel in the Second Year of Eichi (Eichi ninen
shingon-in mishuhōki) describes how the Tōji Abbot Kanjin (1084–1153) performed
the ritual in 1142. Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 349. The Shingon’in Mishuhō arrange-
ment is illustrated in Scroll 6, section 4 of Sumiyoshi Jokei’s seventeenth-century
copy of Tokiwa Mitsunaga’s late twelfth-century Handscroll of Annual Ceremonies
(Nenjū gyōgi emaki). See figure 158, Mason, History of Japanese Art, 135.
55. This parallel confrontation model, in which the two mandalas are hung parallel to
the hall’s side walls facing each other with altars extending out into the open space
of the room, has been a standard Shingon arrangement for initiations since at least
the founding of Murōji’s Kanjōdō in 1308. Fowler, Murōji, 120. It continues to be set
up today at Kongōbuji’s Golden Hall for the annual kechien kanjō (Skt. abhisekha)
lay initiation rituals, which alternate between the two mandalas every May (for
Womb World initiations) and October (for Diamond World initiations).
56. For more on this, see Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes.
57. For more on the Mishuhō see Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, chap. 8; Ruppert,
Jewel in the Ashes, chap. 4; Yamaori, Wandering Spirits and Temporary Corpses
chapter 5; Mack, “A Reconsideration of the Goshichinichi mishuhō.” For rare
Notes 171
photographs of how this secret annual ritual is arranged at Tōji today, see Tōji
soken issen-nihyakunen kinen shuppan hensan iinkai, Shin tōbōki, 119–23.
58. Duara, Culture, Power and The State, 146.
59. KDZ 2:532.
60. The Kongōchōkyō was translated into Chinese by both Vajrabodhi (Ch. Chin-kang
chih; Jp. Kongōchi, 671–741) and his disciple Amoghavajra (Ch. Pu-k’ung
Chin-kang; Jp. Fukū kongō, 705–74) in the mid-eighth century. The Dainchikyō is
a mid-seventh-century text translated into Chinese in 724 by Śubhākarasimha (Ch.
Shan Wu-wei; Jp. Zemmui, 637–735) and I-hsing ( Jp. Ichigyō, 684–727).
61. ten Grotenhuis, Japanese Mandalas, 53–57.
62. For more on this see Winfield, “Mandala as Metropolis.”
63. Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning, 109–18.
64. For more on the role of these scriptures in East Asian statecraft, see Orzech, Politics
and Transcendent Wisdom; Osabe, Tenno wa doko kara kita ka; Yoritomi and
Tachikawa, Chūgoku mikkyō, 141–53.
65. For more on this text, see Abé, The Weaving of Mantra,193–204; KDZ 4:321–53;
KZ 2:157–72.
66. KDZ 4:328; KZ 2:156.
67. Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 195.
68. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 53; KZ 3:476.
69. For an example of this, see Hershock, Liberating Intimacy.
70. Bogel, With a Single Glance, 322.
71. This pentad selects one bodhisattva from each of the five moon disks in the Diamond
World’s central Perfected Body Hall (nos. 1, 5, 9 and 13 from figure 2.13). Dainchi’s
Kongōharamitsu (Skt. Vajrapāramitā) in the center functions metonymically for
all four perfection (pāramitā) bodhisattvas in the center disk of the Diamond
World mandala. Ashuku’s Kongōsatta (Skt. Vajrasattva), Hōshō’s Kongōhō (Skt.
Vajtaratna), Amida’s Kongōhō (Skt. Vajradharma), and Fukūjōju’s Kongōgō (Skt.
Vajrakarma) are four select great bodhisattvas who function metynomically for all
sixteen great bodhisattvas in the four cardinal disks of the Perfected Body Hall of
the Diamond World mandala.
72. At Tōji, Fudō Myōō (Skt. Acalanātha) is surrounded by Kongō yasha (Skt. Vajrayaksa ,
alt. Vajrahūṁkara), Gozanze (Skt. Trailokyavijaya), Daiitoku (Skt. Yamāntaka), and
Gundari (Skt. Kundali). Technically, in the Womb World mandala, Fudō appears
to the extreme right of Hall 3, Hannya bosatsu (Skt. Prajñāpāramitā) appears in the
center and Gundari does not appear at all.
73. Ashuku Hōshō, Fukūjōju, Muryōju.
74. Gardiner, “Mandala, Mandala on the Wall,” 255.
75. Gardiner, Kōyasan, 25.
76. Tanjō garan to okunoin, 123.
77. Ibid., no. 46, 118–22.
78. Sawa, Mikkyō no bijutsu, 19.
172 Notes
79. Hakeda erroneously identifies these figures as “the Mahāvairocana of the Diamond
Realm, surrounded by the four buddhas of the Matrix (Womb) realm placed to the
east, south, west, and north.” Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 50.
80. Dōmoto, Dōmoto Inshō: gushōga hen, 286. Dōmoto only specifies consulting The
Precious Key to the Secret Treasury and The Catalogue of Imported Items, but in pre-
paring his sketches he also consulted zuzō iconographic manuals.
81. Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 280.
82. These two levels of perceiving the world technically derive from Nāgārjuna’s mid-
dle way school of Madhyamaka, or, more specifically, from its Svātantrika subsect,
which asserts that dharmas exist on the conventional level but cannot be said to
exist as discrete dharmas on the ultimate level.
83. KDZ 2:294.
84. Hakeda, Kūkai Major Works, 99; KZ 3:554.
85. Gibson and Murakami, Tantric Poetry of Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi), Japan’s Buddhist
Saint, 23–34; KDZ 6:677–88. This list originally appears in the Mahāvairocana
sūtra’s section on Entering the Shingon Gate: The Mind for Staying There. T 18, 3b.
86. Kūkai also references this list of empty analogies when discussing Yogācāra in the
sixth stage of mind of the Precious Key to Secret Treasury. Hakeda, Kukai Major
Works, 200; KDZ 2:93.
87. Kūkai’s intended reader here is Master Kōchi (770–?) of the Eastern Mountains
(tōzan) in Shimotsuke Province (present-day Tochigi prefecture). Kūkai is also
known to have sent Kōchi the Vajraśekhara sūtra and the Kanensho appeal for dis-
seminating esoteric texts twelve years earlier in 815. See Gardiner, “Kūkai and the
Beginnings of Shingon Buddhism in Japan,” 34, 48–51; “Transmission Problems.”
88. Gibson and Murakami, Tantric Poetry of Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi), Japan’s Buddhist
Saint, 28; KDZ 6:683–84.
89. Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 338; KZ 1:830.
90. Letter 84, KDZ 4:207–8.
91. KDZ 6:511–12.
92. Ibid., 513–14.
93. Ibid., 512.
94. Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 132; T 18, 1c.
95. Ibid., 133 (parentheses in original, brackets mine); T 18, 4c.
96. Enlightened mind is the cause, great compassion is the foundation, and skillful
means are the ultimate. Yamasaki, Shingon, 105; T 18, 1c.
97. Yamasaki, Shingon, 105; T 18, 1c.
C h a p t er 4
1. Remarks delivered at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Divisional
meeting, Philadelphia, PA, 2003, in response to a panel dedicated to his Focusing
the Familiar.
Notes 173
2. Waddell and Abe, The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 77; DZZ 1:22; T 51, 2076
3. Ibid., 83; DZZ 1:26.
4. 金剛經云。過去心不可得。現在心不可得。未來心不可得。上座欲點
那箇心; T2003.048.0143c06-c07.
5. Heine, Opening a Mountain, 94–96.
6. Waddell and Abe, The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 83; DZZ 1:26.
7. Ibid., 81–82; DZZ 1:25.
8. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 2:278; DZZ 1:210.
9. Waddell and Abe, The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 79; DZZ 1:23.
10. Ibid., 81; DZZ 1:24.
11. Ibid., 84; DZZ 1:26.
12. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 2:280; DZZ 1:212.
13. Tanahashi, Moon in a Dewdrop, 136; DZZ 1:212.
14. Waddell and Abe, The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 82; DZZ 1:25.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Thanks are due to Shohaku Okumura for clarifying Ingen’s (1592–1673)
seventeenth-century inscription on a famous Dōgen portrait housed at Kōshōji
(personal communication with the author, 7/17/11). Ingen’s inscription on this
later portrait reads, “the appearance of ‘appearance as no appearance’ can’t be seen
visually but can only be known by means of wisdom. Therefore, not using the mind
to look for reality is awareness.” Thanks to Prof. Grace Lin of Elon University for
her assistance in reading Ingen’s highly abraded and stylized calligraphy.
18. Many thanks to Taigen Dan Leighton for this clarification (personal communica-
tion with the author, 6/29/11).
19. Brinker and Kanazawa, Zen Masters of Meditation in Images and Writings, 161.
20. This portrait from Honmyōji in Kumamoto should not be confused with another
image that Leighton reports seeing at Honmyōji in Kumamoto in 1992. According
to Leighton, he saw what “indeed looks like a young Dōgen, a bit more round-faced
than the later portraits, but recognizably the same monk.” Leighton and Okumura,
Dōgen’s Extensive Record, 42. That image was signed “Monk Dōgen of Kenninji,
Karoku 3,” and was a brighter line-drawn image of a smiling Dōgen with jisan no. 18
inscribed in calligraphy attributed to Dōgen’s own hand (personal communication
with the author, 8/14/11). This author’s efforts to locate that image at Honmyōji in
Kumamoto were unsuccessful.
21. Honmyōji, 23. The Ankokuji temple system for national pacification was created by
the Ashikaga shōgunate between 1362–1367, but like its Nara-period Kokubunji
predecessors, many already extant temples throughout the country simply changed
their names. Without further information from Sonkai, therefore, it is all but
impossible to determine the date or the location of this Ankokuji reference with
any certainty.
22. Honmyōji, 24.
174 Notes
23. Heine, Did Dōgen Go To China?, 123; DZZ 2:188. Also translated in Leighton
and Okumura, Dōgen’s Extensive Record, 608; Tanahashi Enlightenment
Unfolds, 29.
24. For this reason a fish-shaped hollow wooden drum (mokugyō) is traditionally sus-
pended and struck outside of the monks’ hall to signal the start and end times of
meditation.
25. Leighton and Okumura, Dōgen’s Extensive Record, 602 (italics mine); DZZ
2:187.
26. Heine, Zen Poetry of Dōgen, 130–31 and Genryū Kagamishima’s 1988 edition of the
DZZ omits the donkey reference, but Tanahashi, Enlightenment Unfolds, 260 also
includes it. Leighton and Okumura explain that the character for donkey may have
been added later, and that Manzan’s revision of the verse in his edition of the Eihei
kōroku invokes Ts’ao-shan’s exchange about donkeys and wells observing each other.
Leighton and Okumura, Dōgen’s Extensive Record, 602 n. 15.
27. Leighton and Okumura, Dōgen’s Extensive Record, 605; DZZ 2:188. Heine trans-
lates this verse alternately:
If you take this portrait of me to be real, Then what am I, really? But why hang it
there, If not to anticipate people getting to know me? Looking at this portrait,
Can you say that what is hanging there [on the wall] Is really me? In that case
your mind will never be Fully united with the wall (as in Bodhidharma’s wall-
gazing meditation cave) Heine, Zen Poetry of Dōgen, 131 (brackets mine).
28. For more on chinzō veneration in Sung China, see Foulk and Sharf, “On the Ritual
Use of Ch’an Portraiture.”
29. Leighton and Okumura, Dōgen’s Extensive Record, 605 n. 30
30. Ju-ching’s portrait was located at Eiheiji according to an entry in the Honkō kokushi
nikki dated 1611, and according to Itō Keidō, this may have been moved to nearby
Hōkyōji in Echizen Province. Other versions of this chinzō exist at Kōshōji in
Uji and in the private collection of Okazaki Masaya of Tokyo. Kodera, Dōgen’s
Formative Years, 77.
31. Many thanks to Profs. Sun Lixia (Dalian University) and Grace Lin (Elon
University) for their translation help.
32. Ning-tsung (r. 1194–1224), an emperor of the Southern Sung dynasty, determined
the rank of the five major monasteries of the Lin-chi School of Ch’an, modeling
after the five major vihāras of India: (1) Hsing-sheng Wan-shou monastery on
Mount Ching; (2) Ching-te Ling-yin monastery on Mount Pei; (3) T’ien Tung
Ching-te monastery on Mount T’aipai; (4) Ching-tz’u Pai-en-kuang shiao mon-
astery on Mount Nan; and (5) Kuang-li Monastery on Mount Ayu wang. Kodera,
Dōgen’s Formative Years in China, 152 n. 23.
33. Ibid., 600–601: DZZ 2:186.
34. Ibid., 600–1, n. 6–9.
Notes 175
35. Nishijima and Cross translate this title and catch-phrase as The Non-Emotional
Preaches the dharma, maintaining that “nature can only teach us the truth when
we ourselves are balanced (non-emotional).” Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s
Shōbōgenzō, 3: 115. I, however, prefer the traditional translation of “the insentient
preaching of the dharma.” I have therefore replaced “non-emotional” with “insen-
tient” in citations from the Mujō seppō fascicle.
36. Waddell and Abe, The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 61; DZZ 1:14. See also Kim,
“‘The Reason of Words and Letters’: Dōgen and Kōan Language.”
37. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 1: 12; DZZ 1:737. This is a favorite
set phrase of Dōgen’s in the Bendōwa and other fascicles.
38. DZZ 1:258, 264.
39. DZZ 1:259.
40. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 1: 9 (parentheses mine); DZZ 1:735.
41. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 3:117 (brackets mine); DZZ 1:400.
42. Ibid., 117 n. 15.
43. Ibid., 122; DZZ 1:403.
44. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 2: 212; DZZ 1:169.
45. For more on the various twelve, twenty-six, sixty, seventy-five, or ninety-five fascicle
Shōbōgenzō collections, see Heine, Did Dōgen Go to China?, 70.
46. Nishiyama and Stevens, Shōbōgenzō (The Eye and Treasury of the True Law), vol. 2,
102; DZZ 1:497.
47. For more on Dōgen’s source material for this fascicle, see Heine, Did Dōgen Go to
China?, 120.
48. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 1:239–40; DZZ 1:175.
49. Ibid., 241; DZZ 1:176.
50. DZZ 1:176.
51. Nishijima and Cross, Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō,3:215; DZZ 1:494. Nishiyama and
Stevens translate this as “The autumn breeze is pure and fresh, the autumn moon
is clear and bright. With enlightened vision we can see the real form of the great
earth, mountains and rivers. Staying at Zuiganji has renewed my vision. The sound
of the stick and the shout of a katsu are again lively as we test each other.” Nishiyama
and Stevens, Shōbōgenzō (The Eye and Treasury of the True Law), vol. 2, 99.
52. Nishiyama and Stevens, Shōbōgenzō (The Eye and Treasury of the True Law), vol. 2,
99; DZZ 1:494.
53. Ibid.
54. See McFarland, “If You Meet the Patriach, Kill Him! Dispensing With
Bodhidharma.”
55. Yuasa, Overcoming Modernity, 191
56. For more on Dōgen’s move to Echizen, see Heine, Did Dōgen Go to China?, 155–72.
57. Ōkubō notes that the character for body 身mi can also be read as the character for
eye 眼 manako. See note at bottom of DZZ 2:412. Heine accordingly translates
176 Notes
the alternate title Fubo shoshō no manako as “True Seeing Received At Birth,” a
title which references two Lotus Sūtra passages about returning to one’s original
home. See Heine, The Zen Poetry of Dōgen, 84, 102, 170 n. 11. However, given all of
the poem’s corporeal double entendres, I have chosen to translate Dōgen’s original
character more literally to capture his sentiment of recovering his original nature or
“true body” before his parents were born.
58. Heine, The Zen Poetry of Dōgen, 84. DZZ 2:412.
59. Ibid., 84–85.
60. Waddell and Abe, “Genjōkōan,” 79; DZZ 1:779.
61. Takahashi, The Essence of Dōgen, 41–43.
62. Waddell and Abe, The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 66; DZZ 1:16.
63. Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 280; Heine, A Blade of Grass, 6.
64. “[T]he term sūtra was translated into Chinese as ching ( Jp. kyō), [meaning] ‘verti-
cal (or temporal) thread,’ . . . [Buddhist sutras were thus the] ‘temporal thread’ pre-
serving the names impregnated with rectifying power given by the sages of ancient
India.” Abé, The Weaving of Mantra, 316. This lends further import to Kūkai’s claim
in the Sokushin jōbutsugi, for example, that “All of these existences (i.e., the three
kinds of symbols: letters, signs, and images) are interrelated horizontally and verti-
cally without end, like images in mirrors, or like the rays of lamps.” Hakeda, Kūkai
Major Works, 232.
65. Waddell and Abe, The Heart of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, 48 (brackets mine); DZZ 1:189.
Brackets inspired by Kasulis and Nagatomo’s unpublished 1976 translation, which
reads:
An old Buddha says:
There is a time [I am] standing on the highest mountain peak;
There is a time [I am] roaming about in the depths of the sea.
There is a time [I am] a three-headed, eight-armed [demon];
There is a time [I am] a sixteen-foot tall [Buddha].
There is a time [I am] a staff or hossu;
There is a time [I am] a pillar or stone lantern.
There is a time [I am] just somebody or other
(Mr. Chang or Mr. Li)
There is a time [I am] the vast earth or endless sky.
66. Here it should be noted that I use “reality” as a convenient collective singular for
the plurality of dharmas that are constantly coming and going out of existence. It
should be noted that Dōgen choses to itemize particular moment-beings in time
and does not fix or reify them into any overarching noun.
67. Waddell and Abe, “Buddha-Nature Part I,” 103; DZZ 1:16.
68. See Stone, Original Enlightenment, 272–88 for more on Nichiren’s daimoku gohon-
zon and related imagery. See Dobbins, “Portraits of Shinran,” 22–25 for more
on Shinran’s use of calligraphic scrolls invoking the illustrious name of Amida
Buddha.
Notes 177
Chapter 5
1. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 222.
2. For example, at the American Academy of Religion Annual Conference, modera-
tor Gary Laderman (Emory University) introduced a panel on “Icons, Idols and
Objects: Facets of Materiality in East Asian Buddhism” by saying “This panel on
Buddhist materiality is intended, in part, to remedy the logocentric emphasis on
texts and ideas in religious studies” (Nov. 22, 1999).
3. Sharf, Living Images, 151–97.
4. Heine and Wright, Zen Ritual.
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Glossary
Hakuyū 白幽
Han 漢
Hannya bosatsu 般若菩薩
Hannya shingyō hiken 般若心経秘鍵
happi 法被
Hatano Yoshishige 波多野義重
Heian 平安
Heijō 平城
Heizei 平城
Heizei tennō kanjōmon 平城天皇灌頂文
Hekiganroku 碧巌録
Henchiin 遍知院
Henjō hakki seireishū 偏照発揮性霊集
henshin 徧身
hensō 変相
hibutsu 秘仏
Hiei-zan 比叡山
hihaku 飛白
Himitsu mandara jū jūshinron 秘密曼荼羅十住心語
himitsu shōgon shin 秘密荘厳心
hisō 非相
Hizō hōyaku 秘蔵宝鑰
Hizōki 秘蔵記
Hōdō 宝幢
Hōgen 法眼
Hōharamitsu 宝波羅密
Hōharamitsu 法波羅密
hokkai taishō chi 法界體性智
hokkaig ū 法界宮
hokkaitaishō chi 法界體性智
Hōkyōji 宝慶寺
Hōkyōji 宝慶寺
Hōkyōki 寶慶記
Hommyō 本妙寺
Hōnen 法然
hongaku 本覺
Honkō kokushi nikki 本光国師日記
Honmyōji 本妙寺
honzon 本尊
Hōshō 法生
Hōshō 宝生
hosshin seppō 法身説法
Glossary 183
Hossō 法相
Hsiang-yen Chih-hsien See Kyōgen Chikan
hsin-chen t’o lo 心塵脱落
Hsing-sheng Wan-shou ssu 興聖万寿寺
Huang-long 黃龍
Huang-po 黄檗
Hua-yen See Kegon
Hua-yen jing See Kegonkyō
Hui-kuo 惠果
Hui-neng See Enō
Hung-chih Cheng-chüeh See Wanshi Shōgaku
I Ching 易経
Ichigyō 一行
I-hsiang See Gisho
I-hsing See Ichigyō
I-ichi Seido 惟一西堂
Ikka myōju 一顆明珠
Ikkyū Sōjun 一休宗純
Ingen 隱元
inka 印可
isuzō 椅子像
itto jōbutsu 一覩成仏
izō 遺像
ji 字
jijimuge 事事無礙
jiju hōraku 自受法楽
Jimyōin 持明院
Jingoji 神護寺
jiriki 自力
jisan 自賛
jissō 実相
Jizō 地蔵
Jizōin 地蔵院
jō -in 定印
Jōkaishō 除蓋障
Jōkaishōin 除蓋障院
jōshosa chi 成所作智
jōshosa chi 成所作智
Ju-ching See Tendō Nyojō
jūekō 十廻向
jūgyō 十行
jūhachidō 十八道
184 Glossary
jūji 十地
jūjū 十住
Jūjūshinron 十住心語
jūnyoze 十如是
Jūroku rakkan genhitsugi 十六羅漢現瑞記
jūsshin 十信
jūyukan 十喩觀
juzō 壽像
juzu 数珠
Kaifukeō 開敷華王
kaji 加持
Kamakura 鎌倉
Kamei kotsuji 仮名乞児
kami 神
Kanensho 勧縁流
Kangen 観賢
Kanjin 寛信
Kanjiten 歓喜天
Kanjizai 観自在
kanjō 灌頂
Kanjōdō 灌頂堂
Kanjōin 灌頂院
Kannon 観音
Kannondōri 観音導利
Kannonin 観音院
kanshi 漢詩
Karoku 嘉禄
katsu 喝
katsu 瞎
Katsumaharamitsu 磨波羅密
kechien kanjō 結縁灌頂
kechimyaku 血脈
kegare 汚れ
Kegon 華厳
Kegonkyō 華厳経
keiseki 経籍
Keizan Jōkin 螢山紹瑾
kekkafuza 結跏趺坐
Kenbutsu 見仏
Kenbutsu 見仏
Kenninji 建仁寺
Kenzeiki See Eihei kaisan gyōjō kenzei-ki
Glossary 185
Kenzei 建撕
Kinryūji 金龍寺
kōan 公案
Kōchi 広智
kodai no monji 広大の文字
Kōkō 光孝
Kokū 虚空
kokubunji 国分寺
Kokūzō 虚空蔵
Kokūzōin 虚空蔵院
Kokyō 古鏡
Kōmyō 光明
kongō hokkaig ū 金剛法界宮
Kongō yasha 金剛夜叉
Kongōai 金剛愛
Kongōbuji 金剛峰寺
Kongōchi 金剛智
Kongōchō giketsu 金剛頂義訣
Kongōchōkyō kaidai 金剛頂経開題
Kongōchōkyō 金剛頂経
Kongōge 金剛牙
Kongōgō 金剛業
Kongōgo 金剛語 (Skt. Vajrabhāsa)
Kongōgo 金剛護(Skt. Vajraraksa)
Kongōharamitsu 金剛波羅密
Kongōhō 金剛宝 (Skt. Vajraratna)
Kongōhō 金剛法 (Skt. Vajradharma)
Kongōin 金剛因
Kongōkai kuemikki 金剛界九会密記
kongōkai 金剛界
Kongōken 金剛拳
Kongōki 金剛喜
Kongōkō 金剛光
Kongōō 金剛王
Kongōri 金剛利
Kongōsatta 金剛薩埵
Kongōshō 金剛笑
Kongōshū 金剛手
Kongōshuin 金剛手院
Kongōtō 金剛
Konkōmyō saishōōkyō 金光明最勝王経
konpon daitō 根本大塔
186 Glossary
Murōji 室生寺
Muryōju 無量寿
mushikishin sanmai 無識身三昧
musō 無相
myōgaku 妙覺
myōgō honzon 名号本尊
myōkan-zatchi 妙觀察智
myōkan-zatchi 妙觀察智
Myōō 明王
Myōzen 明全
Nagaoka 長岡
Nakatsukasa shō 中務省
Nan-shan 南山
nanten tettō 南天鉄塔
Nan-yang Huichung 南陽慧忠
Nara 奈良
nembutsu 念仏
Nenjū gyōgi emaki 年中行事絵巻
Nichiren 日蓮
nikon 而今
Ning-tsung 寧宗
Ninmei 仁明
Ninnōkyō 仁王経
nōen 能縁
nōyuiyaku nōgō 能迷亦能悟
Nyojō See Tendō Nyojō
nyokyota 如許多
nyoze 如是
nyūga ganyū 入我我入
Nyūryōgakyō 楞伽經
Onjōji 園城寺
Pei-shan 北山
Pi-yen lu 碧巖錄
Pu-k’ung Chin-kang See Fukū kongō
Reiun shigon 霊雲志勤
ri 理
richi funi 理知不二
Rinzai 臨済
Rishukyō 理趣経
Rokushu mandara ryakushaku 六種曼荼羅略釈
Saga 嵯峨
188 Glossary
Saichō 最澄
Saiji 西寺
saku 作
Sanbō 三宝
Sangō shiiki 三教指帰
sanmistu 三密
Sansuikyō 山水経
sato 里
satori 悟り
Seigen 清源, alt.青原
Seireishū See Henjō hakki seireishū
seisei 清浄
senbutsuko 千仏子
Shakain 釈迦院
shakamuni bodaboji 繹迦牟尼勃陀勃地
Shan Wu-wei See Zemmui
Shari sōdenki 舎利相傳記
shen-hsin t’o lo 身心脱落
shidosō 私度僧
Shiga 滋賀
shikan taza 只管打坐
shikizō 色像
shimandara 四曼荼羅
Shimotsuke 下野
shin 心
shin 身
shinden 寝殿
shinden 心殿
Shinfukatoku 心不可得
Shingon 真言
Shingon’in 真言院
shinjin datsuraku 心塵脱落
shinjin datsuraku 身心脱落
Shinkō 真興
Shinran 親鸞
Shinzen Daitoku 真然大徳
Shisho 嗣書
shō 声
Shōben 淸辯
shōbōgen 正法眼
Shōbōgenzō 正法眼蔵
Shobutsu seiken 諸仏斉肩
Glossary 189
shoen 所縁
shōgon 荘厳
Shōji jissōgi 声字実相義
Shōji 生死
shōjō 清浄
Shokanzeon 聖観世音
Shōmu 聖武
Shōrai mokuroku 請来目録
Shōren-in 青蓮院
shosō 諸相
Shōsōin 正倉院
sō 相
sokushin jōbutsu 即身成仏
Sokushin jōbutsugi 即身成仏義
sokushin zebutsu 即心是仏
sokuten 則天
sokuza jōbutsu 即座成仏
Sonkai 尊海
Soshitsujiin 蘇悉地院
sōsho 草書
Sōtō 曹洞
ssu-he yüan 四各院
Sumiyoshi Jokei 住吉如慶
Sung 宋
T’aipai shan 太白山
T’ang 唐
T’ien Tung Ching-te 天童景徳
Tachibana Hayanari 橘逸勢
Ta-chih-tu lun See Daichidoron
tahōtō 多宝塔
tai 體
taimitsu 台密
T’aipai shan 太白山
Taiyūji 太融寺
taizōkai 胎蔵界 胎蔵海
Takaosan 高雄山
Takaosanji 高雄山寺
tanden 丹田
Tan-hsia T’ien-jan 丹霞天然
Tao-sheng 道生
Tendai 天台
Tendō Nyojō 天童如淨
190 Glossary
tenkatsu 点瞎
Tenkuraion 天鼓雷音
Tenrei banshō myōgi (alt. meigi) 篆隷万象名義
Te-shan Hsüan-chien See Tokuzan Senkan
T’ien t’ung Ju-ching See Tendō Nyojō
T’ien t’ung Ching-te ch’an ssu 天童慶徳禅寺
Tochigi 栃木
Tōdaiji 東大寺
Tofukuji 東福寺
tōgaku 等覺
Tōji 東寺
Tokiwa Mitsunaga 常盤光長
Tokuitsu 徳一
Tokuzan Senkan 德山宣鑑
tōmitsu 東密
Tōshōdaiji 唐招提寺
totsu 咄
tōzan 東山
Tōzan 洞山
Tōzan Gohon (Ryokai) 洞山悟本 (良价)
tsūshin 通身
Tung-shan Liang-chieh See Tōzan Gohon (Ryokai)
Tu-shun 杜順
Uji 有時
Ungan 雲巌
Unjigi 迂字義
unsui 雲水
waka 和歌
Wang cheng 王城
Wanshi Shōgaku 宏智正覺
Weiyangong 未央宮
Yakushi 薬師
Yamatokuni masudaike himei narabinijo 大和州益田池碑銘並序
yuibutsu yobutsu 唯仏与仏
yü-lu 語錄
zattaisho 雑体書
zazen 坐禅
Zemmui 善無畏
Zen 禅
Zenki 全機
Zentsūji 善通寺
Glossary 191
Zhouli 周禮
Zuigan 瑞巌
Zuiganji 瑞巌寺
Zuimonki 随聞記
zuga 図画
zuzō 図像
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198 Bibliography
Abhiseka of the Abdicated Emperor Bendōwa fascicle, 5, 113, 130, 175n37, 179
Heizei, 90–91, See Heizei tennō Benjamin, Walter, xv
kanjōmon Benkenmitsu nikkyōron, 74, 179, See
absolute cessation, 6, 12, 15, 63, 148, See Difference Between Exoteric and
nirodha samāpatti Esoteric Buddhism
Adorno, Theodor, xv, 147 Bhāvaviveka, 13, 60
ajikan visualization, 8, 35, 66, 71, 81, Birushana, 28, 29, 169n46
82–84, 102–3, 105, 139, 147, 150, Blue Cliff Record, 108, See Hekiganroku
Amoghavajra, 11, 37, 79 Buddhaghosa, 11
apophatic mysticism, xix, 8, 148, 156, See Buddha-Nature fascicle, 105, 107, 113, 126,
Dōgen (religious experience) 128, 139, 176n67, See Busshō
Arnheim, Rudolf, xv Bumpitsu ganshinshō, 77, 179 See
art history, 1, 3, 17, 18, 20, 26, 77, 151, 152, Essentials of Poetry and Prose
157, See religious studies Bunkyō hifuron, 77, 169n31, 179, See Secret
Avatamsaka-sūtra, 27, 29, 31, 48, See City of the Mirror of Writing
Kegonkyō Busshō, 139, 179, See Buddha-Nature
fascicle
becoming a Buddha in this very body
(concept), 1–2, 5, 37, 55, 66, 71, 149, calligraphy, 52, 72, 77–81, 103, 116,
153, 189 167n15, 178, See textual-visual
Becoming a Buddha in This Very Body analysis
(text), 30, 69, 70, See Sokushin hihaku script, 79,-81, 118, 182
jōbutsugi other styles, 78
being-time (concept), 46–49. 58–59, 61, zattai-sho, 77–79, 191
64, 67, 106, 129, 120, 134, 140–141, Catalogue of Imported Items, 3, 14, 29,
Being-Time (text), 46, 140, 165n37, 44, 73, 74, 84, 85, 89, 98, 102, 167n15,
See Uji fascicle 172n80, See Shōrai mokuroku
bells 14, 87, 149 chinzō, 4, 106, 114–127, 136, 139, 141, 142,
echoing the dharma, 75–76, 134 146, 150, 174n28, 30, 180
hanging in emptiness, 54–55, 122–124, Collection of Verses Expounding Spiritual
134 Essences, 75, See Seireishū
20 2 Index
Dainichi, xvii, 6–9, 23, 24, 28, 30, 32, 33, Enlightened Vision fascicle, 52, 134, 135,
35, 38–45, 49, 56- 58, 63, 64, 66, See Ganzei
67, 71–77, 81–97, 99, 101, 102, 134, Essentials of Poetry and Prose, 77, See
139, 140, 147, 154 , 164n27, 166n1, Bumpitsu ganshinshō
168n26, 170n46, 180 Eternal Mirror fascicle, 134, See Kokyō
Dainichikyō, 24, 28, 37, 99, 101, 159n7, expedient means, 11, 14, 41, 45, 74,
169n46, 180 101–103, 149, See skillful means
Den-e fascicle, 47, 180, See Transmission experience and expression, xvi, xvii, , 6,
of the Robe 15–16, 106, 125, 154–156
dharmadhātu, xvii 28, 30, 33, 34, 44, 63,
64, 67, 83, 87, 96, 148 five elements, 39, 41–43, 46, 73, 94
dharmakāya, xvii, 28, 30, 31, 54, 66, five wisdom buddhas, 39, 41–45, 92, 93,
72–77, 83, 85, 97, 98, 100–102 95, 96, 97
Diamond Sūtra, 13, 60, 61, 108, 109, five wisdom kings, 37, 88, 89, 93
166n63 form and emptiness, xviii, 7, 12, 13, 18, 23,
Diamond World, 4, 24, 30, 33–36, 32, 57, 58, 70, 99, 102, 103, 114, 123,
38–43, 45, 58, 66, 84, 87–97, 160n7, 124, 148, 149, 151, 154, 165n58
164n26, 27, 28, 166n1, 170n55, formlessness, 10, 38, 39, 55, 70, 156,
171n71 165n58
Dictionary of Ten- and Rei-Style Letters, of the dharmakāya, 74,-75
77, See Tenrei banshō myōgi foundation legends of Mikkyō and Zen,
Difference Between Exoteric and Esoteric 23–27
Buddhism, 74, See Benkenmitsu four mandalas, 39, 40, 45
nikkyōron Fubo shoshō no mi, 137, 175n57, See True
Dōgen Body Before Father and Mother’s
and art in China, 4, 107, 110, 125–126 Birth
144
and art in Japan, 116–125, 143–44 Gabyō, 108, 110, See Painting of a Rice
empty-handed return, 3–5 Cake, rice cakes
philosophy of form, See mujō seppō Gateless Gate, 127, See Mumonkan
religious experience, See apophatic Ganzei, 52, See Enlightened Vision fascicle
mysticism, dropping off body-mind, Genjōkōan, 60, 61, 166n62, 63, 65, 68,
neurotheology (passive medita- 176n60, 181
tion), purgative experience, shinjin Golden Light Sūtra, 86, 88, 100
datsuraku Konshōōmyōkyō himitsu kada com-
dragon king’s palace, 24, 26, 27, 56 mentary, 100
dropping off body-mind, 6, 7, 10, 11, 15,
58, 59, 61, 64, 142, See Dōgen Hannya shingyō hiken, 32, 167n15, 182, See
(religious experience) Secret Key to the Heart Sūtra
Heart Sūtra, xviii, 32, 57, 62, 149
Eihei kōroku, 106, 116, 117, 119, 122, Heian, 1, 2, 14, 77, 78, 86, 87, 90, 91, 137,
160n10 138, 145, 182
Index 20 3
Omens of the Sixteen Arhats, 144, See relics, 3, 4, 84, 87 , 144, 157
Jūroku rakkan genhitsugi religious studies, 1, 3, 13, 17–20, 72, 77,
One Bright Pearl, 59, 111, 154, 157, 170n50 151, 152, 153, 157, See art history
See Ikka myōju representation and reality, xviii, 67,
ordo cognoscendi, 62, 155 73–77, 103–104, 107, 110, 115,
ordo essendi, 62, 154 119–28, 142
rice cakes
Painting of a Rice Cake fascicle, 112, See kōan, 108–109, 114, 174
Gabyō, rice cakes painting of, xviii, 108–110, 113, 114,
patriarchs xvi, xvii, 2, 55 141, 147
in Mikkyō, 3, 4, 11, 24, 79, 165n32 Rishukyō, 76, 101, 149, 187, 150
in Zen, 4, 24, 47, 49–55, 61, 63, 106,
107, 108, 114, 117, 127, 129, 130, 131, śamatha, 11, 12
134, 136, 148, 150, 162n9 samsara, xvi, xvii, 67, 70, 72, 73, 100, 112,
portraits, 3, 4, 79, 96, 106, 107, 114– 120, 121, 127, 149
128, 141, 142, 146, 147, 150, 160n10, Sangō shiiki, 68, 167n15, 188, See
161n47, 164n18, 165n32, 173n17, 20, Indications of the Goals of the Three
174n17, 18, 30, 176n68, See chinzō Teachings
perception Sansuikyō, 46, 128, See Mountains and
in Dōgen, 61, 67, 106, 111, 130, 136, 142, Rivers fascicle
149, See True Dharma Eye Secret City of the Mirror of Writing, 77,
in Kūkai, 65, 68–71, 74, 85, 100, 103, See Bunkyō hifuron
170n50 Secret Key to the Heart Sūtra, 32, 167n15
Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra, 48, 55, See See Hannya shingyō hiken
Prajñāpāramitā sūtra Secret Words fascicle, 5, See Mitsugo
Poems That Contemplate the Ten Images Seeing the Buddha fascicle, 61, 136, See
of Illusion, 99–100, See Jūyukan Kenbutsu
practice-realization, 5, 13, 58, 105, 106, 107, Seigen, 13, 51, 60, 179, 188
112, 121, 122, 129, 130, 136, 142, 147, 151 Seireishū, 75, 76, 169n30, See Collection of
prajñā, 12, 27, 55, 83, 166n58 Verses Expounding Spiritual Essences
Prajñāpāramitā sūtra, 18, 24, See shikan taza, 5, 58, 188, See just sitting,
Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra zazen
Precious Key to the Secret Treasury, 11, 30, Shinfukatoku, 108, 188, See Ungraspable
70, 76, 83, 84, 90, 169n46, 172n80, Mind, rice cake (kōan)
n86, See Hizō hōyaku Shingon’in, 31, 67, 87, 88, 170n54
Protestantization of Buddhism, 13–15 shinjin datsuraku, xviii, 6, 7, 10, 12, 15, 22,
purgative experience, xviii, 6–7, 10, 16, 23, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 111, 133, 135,
22, 23, 59, 60, 63–64, 148, 151, See 143, 148, 149, 154, 160n14, 161n46,
Dōgen (religious experience) See Dōgen (religious experience)
shisho, x, xviii, 4, 7, 15, 49–54, 61, 63, 116,
ranging time, 47–54, 97, 104, 129, 134, 125, 134, 139, 141, 142, 146, 147, 150,
148, 162n3, See kyōryaku 153, 154, 160n10
206 Index
Shōji jissōgi, 29, 69, 73, 77, 189, See Sound- three secrets (of body, speech and mind),
Letter-Reality xvii, 5, 6, 23, 39, 56, 63, 66, 68, 71,
Shōrai mokuroku, 3, 29, 189, See Catalogue 72, 74, 84
of Imported Items Tōji, 31, 33, 34, 35, 38, 43, 67, 79, 87,
skillful means, 84, 101, 102, 172n96, See 92–93, 100, 103, 118, 149, 170n54,
expedient means 171n57, 171n72, 190
Sokushin jōbutsugi, 2, 5, 30, 55, 69, Total Dynamic Functioning fascicle, 96,
163n18, 176n64, 189, See Becoming a concept, 63, 102, 161, See Zenki
Buddha in This Very Body (text) Transmission of the Lamp, 127
sokushin zebutsu, 5, 130, 189, See this very Transmission of the Robe fascicle, 47, See
mind is Buddha Den-e
Sound-Letter-Reality, 69, 72, 106, See True Body Before Father and Mother’s
Shōji jisōgi Birth, 137–38, 175–766n57, See Fubo
Space fascicle, 54, See Kokū shoshō no mi
space and time, 10, 12, 21, 22, 23, 27, 32, 54, True Dharma Eye, xviii, 13, 46, 52, 59, 65,
64, 140, 152–153, 155 67, 106, 111, 129, 131, 133, 135, 136, 141,
spatialized time, 12, 27, 32–33, 48, 142, 149, 150, 151, See perception (in
55, 88, 153 Dōgen)
Śubhākarasimha, 79 Two World mandalas, vxiii, 7, 15, 30,
Sung dynasty, 3, 51, 52, 110, 141, 154, 33, 35, 41, 42, 55, 64, 66, 72, 81, 82,
174n28, 189 84–90, 92, 98, 100–103, 135, 147,
Suzuki, D.T., 10, 14, 16, 152, 153, 150, 152, 155, 160n7, 161n44
161n27,43 and landscape, 94–97, 136
and ritual, 67, 87–88, 90–91
T’ang dynasty, 3, 29, 77, 78, 89, 90, 189 and urban imperial imagery, 66–67,
temporalized space, 12, 27, 46, 48, 55, 129, 88–90, 106, 136, 138, 139
138, 139, 148, 153 and spatial empowerment, 67, 147, 152,
ten examples of suchness, 80–81, 135, 161n45, 164n25
169n35 See Diamond World, Womb World
Ten Stages of Mind, 11, 31, 70, 73, 153, See
Jūjūshinron Uji fascicle, 46, 47, 49, 140, 165n37, See
Tendai, 26, 40, 48, 70, 71, 143, 160n11, Being Time (text)
164n28, 190 Ungraspable Mind fascicle, 108, See
Tenrei banshō myōgi, 77, 190, See Shinfukatoku, rice cake (kōan)
Dictionary of Ten- and Rei-Style unitive experience, xviii, 6–7, 9–10, 16,
Letters 22–23, 57–58, 63–64, 148, 151 See
textual-visual analysis, xix, 2–3, 12, Kūkai (religious experience)
18–20, 21, 24, 66, 68, 71–74, Unjigi. 69, 75, 76, 190, See Meaning of the
77–86, 105, 106, 114–128, 131, Word Hūm
153–154, 156, 167n7, See calligraphy, unobstructed space, 12, 21, 22, 23, 46, 58, 63
monji unobstructed time, 6, 13, 21–23, 55,
this very mind is Buddha, 5, 149, 153 See 59–60, 63, 106, 134, 148,
sokushin zebutsu upāya, See expedient means, skillful means
Index 207