Chapter Five

Buddhist Reliquaries and Somatic Profusions

aking the Buddha present in absentia is perhaps the ultimate basis for much of the material and visual culture of Buddhism. The parinirvāṇa, Mor physical death, of Siddhārtha Gautama made the issue of absence unavoid- able, sparking complex and creative ontological understandings of the Buddha’s nature and raising philosophical questions about how to “presentize” the abstract and absent. However, it is the concretized, obvious absence after the parinirvāṇa and the need to visualize Buddhist teachings as manifest, accessible concepts that give shape and form to the intangible, thus greatly enriching the presence in the absence. Understanding the Buddha in absentia necessitated theories of the Buddha’s bodies and manifested materially in such things as relics, pagodas, sutras, and icons. The jeweled pagoda mandalas are no exception. By presentiz- ing the Buddha narratively, textually, and architecturally, the mandalas suggest the many forms in which the Buddha is embodied and his salvific power thus accessed. In the previous chapter, I addressed the issue of the sacred text’s privileged status as the mandalas’ most prominent and certainly innovative feature, suggest- ing that the power imbued in scripture and the prolific practice of copying were compelling forces ushering the mandalas into existence. This chapter continues the discussion of the mandalas’ reflection of doctrine and praxis by addressing the question of the pagoda form and revealing it to be inextricably linked to Buddha body theory. I will explore the multiplicity of Buddha bodies as the unifying theory under- pinning the jeweled pagoda mandalas’ construction as the visual locus of what I call the salvific matrix of text and body, which ultimately conflates text, dharma,

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body, relic and pagoda. In order for the bodies of the Buddha to be revealed as the foundational denominator for building the mandalas, a brief discussion of the complexities and ambiguities of Buddha body doctrine must be undertaken to ascertain the theory’s relationship with them. What is attempted is by no means a complete survey of Buddha body doctrine—which is, as one scholar appropri- ately described it, “notorious for its complexity”—or the discourse and debates surrounding it.1 This chapter presents a broad trajectory of Buddha body concep- tions across several schools, periods, and geographies in order to establish the phil- osophical shifts that had already been performed before these ideas reached early medieval Japan. It is also important to consider the place of body in the Lotus Sutra and the Golden Light Sutra, the texts specifically used to construct the dharma reli- quary of the mandalas. I also address the choice of the pagoda for the visual format of the text. Building on the Lotus Sutra claim that the earthly body of the Buddha is a pagoda, I examine another concept of the reliquary as dharmakāya. Such an interpretation suggests further conflation of the bodies of the Buddha as manifested in the mandalas, once again revealing another aspect of the interconnections within the soterio- logical web constructing the paintings. I maintain that the identification of the pagoda in medieval Japan as a salvifically charged, architectural body of the Buddha—a structure housing other bodies of the Buddha in the form of corporeal relics, dharma relics, and anthropomorphic figures—argues for its selection as the monument for the central icon of the mandalas. Through these avenues of inves- tigation, I conclude that the centrality of the paintings’ dharma reliquaries is not a random or conceptually light choice—salvific power and multiple iterations of body resonate in the form of the pagoda as the iconic image of the jeweled pagoda mandalas.

The Bodies of the Buddha

Introduction to Buddha Body Theory Plotting the precise development of Buddha body doctrine from a single-bodied Buddha (as at least one scholar argues)2 to a two-, three-, four-, or even ten-bodied theory, is an impossible task fraught with anachronistic traps. Presenting evidence from texts, archaeological sites, and visual culture long predating and geograph- ically distant from the eleventh- through thirteenth-century Japanese context in which the mandalas were produced is in no way to imply that Buddhism and

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