shiki mandara　敷曼荼羅

KEY WORD :　art history / iconography

A mandala produced for a specific ceremony or ritual use. Lit. *mandara 曼荼羅 for laying out, so called because during esoteric rites of initiation kanjou 潅頂 (Sk: abhiseka) it is spread out like a carpet on top of a wooden altar. Originally in India on the occasion of important rites such as initiation ceremonies an earthen altar would be constructed and a mandala would be drawn using powdered pigment or colored sand. Today, with Buddhism no longer alive in India, such powder or sand mandalas are found only in Tibet and Nepal, and the shiki mandara was devised (probably in China) to serve as a substitute for these, which were destroyed after having been used only once. The shiki mandara is produced for ritual use, and it wears easily because vases and other ritual implements are placed it and during the initiation rite the initiand casts a flower on it in order to select his/her tutelary deity. For this reason there are few early examples, and the pair of shiki mandara *Ryoukai mandara 両界曼荼羅 preserved at Touji 東寺 (Kyoto, thought to date from 1112), are the oldest extant examples. Since, unlike in the case of mandalas executed in the form of murals or hanging scrolls, the shiki mandara is produced for the purpose of spreading over an altar, all the deities are shown facing the center, a characteristic shared with the mandala of Tibet and Nepal, and in this sense it may be said to reflect the original Indian format of the mandala. There are also many examples of shiki mandara that assume the form of a *shuji mandara 種字曼荼羅, in which the deities are indicated by Sanskrit syllables, or a *sanmaya mandara 三昧耶曼荼羅, in which they are represented by means of symbolic objects, and there are even cases in which the names of the deities have been written in Chinese characters. These different styles all represent devices to facilitate the identification of the deity on which the flower cast by the initiand during the initiation rite has fallen, and they indicate that the shiki mandara was produced for a practical purpose.

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