Sannō Miya Mandara: The Iconography of Pure Land on this Earth.

Abstract

The Sannō miya mandara, now in the collection of the Nara National Museum, is a well-known image, often mentioned to illustrate the shinbutsu shūgō (kami-buddha combination) aspect of the belief in the kami Sannō of the Hie Shrine in the province of Omi (the present day Shiga Prefecture). The shrine flourished in close association with the nearby Enryakuji temple on Mount Hiei during the medieval period. The rows of Siddham characters and the figures of twenty-one Buddhist deities with corresponding kami, neatly arranged in three registers at the top of the composition, clearly explain the honji suijaku (origin and trace) relationships of the Buddhist deities (honji) and the kami Sannō (suijaku). The appellation Sannō was a collective term commonly used for the twenty-one kami enshrined at Hie, and the deities were interpreted as the manifestations of buddhas and bodhisattvas in Japan. However, the main subject matter of this mandara is not images of Buddhist deities, but the monumental image of the sacred mountain, which occupies the major portion of the picture space. This essay will focus on the iconography of sacred landscape, and considers how the concept of Buddhist Pure Lands was appropriated in the topographical painting of the shrine landscapes, especially in this example from the genre of medieval miya mandara.