Mandalas and Reiki

If you step into the main hall of a Shingon temple, you'll often see two large hanging scrolls on either side of the altar, full of gold, Buddhas, bodhisattvas and protective beings, arranged in geometric patterns that remind you a bit of the street plan of a cosmic city. These are the two great mandalas, and the space between them is where the ritual practice takes place.

Many people know mandalas mainly as round coloring patterns for relaxation, which is perfectly fine. In Shingon Buddhism, however, mandalas are ritual diagrams that represent the whole universe and, at the same time, the path to awakening.

The two realms 両部

At the center of Shingon there are two great mandalas, called together ryōbu 両部, "both parts." Each shows one side of reality, and together they form the whole.

The first is the Taizōkai mandala 胎蔵界曼荼羅, the Womb Realm. It stands for compassion and for the principle (ri) that holds and nourishes all beings, like a mother's womb. At its center sits Dainichi Nyorai 大日如来 in an eight-petaled lotus, surrounded by courts of Buddhas, bodhisattvas and protective beings, which unfold outward like the petals of a flower.

The second is the Kongōkai mandala 金剛界曼荼羅, the Diamond Realm. It stands for wisdom (chi), indestructible and clear like a diamond. It's divided into nine squares, the nine assemblies, which show the same truth from different perspectives. Dainichi Nyorai sits at the center of the central assembly and appears in most of the others as well.

In the temple, the two mandalas hang opposite each other, and the priest performs the rituals between them. In other words, he sits between compassion and wisdom. Shingon expresses this unity with the phrase ryōbu funi 両部不二, "the two parts are not two."

Siddham in the mandala 梵字

If you look at the mandalas more closely, you'll see not only figures but also characters. Siddham 悉曇, the sacred script of esoteric Buddhism, runs through the whole tradition. Every Buddha, bodhisattva and protective being has a seed syllable (shuji 種子), its essence written as a single sound.

Kūkai brought this tradition back from China in 806, together with the rituals, the transmissions and the art of writing Siddham (Bonji in Japanese). For him, these characters were more than symbols in the modern sense. They were the voice of the Buddhas, made visible in ink. That's why there are also mandalas that consist only of Siddham seed syllables, the so-called shuji mandara 種子曼荼羅. This isn't a simplification, but another level of representation, in which sound, image and meaning come together in one character.

The body as mandala 五輪

Shingon mandalas don't only exist on scrolls. One of the most far-reaching ideas of this tradition is that the human body itself is a mandala, a small universe that carries the structure of the large one within it.

This is expressed above all through the five great elements, earth, water, fire, wind and space, which are also called the five rings (gorin 五輪). The Shingon reformer Kakuban (1095–1143) connected them with the body, from earth in the lower body up to space at the crown, each with its own Siddham syllable. You can see the same five elements in the shape of the five-tiered stone pagodas (gorintō) that stand in great numbers on Kōyasan, and you'll find more about the body and the chakras in the corresponding article.

Mandala and Reiki symbols

How do the Reiki symbols relate to this world? At least one of them leads directly into it. The second Reiki symbol, Sei He Ki, goes back to the Siddham seed syllable hrīḥ, which stands for Amida Nyorai and Senju Kannon, two beings who have their place in the mandala. And the master symbol Dai Kō Myō shares its language of light with Dainichi Nyorai at the center of both mandalas. I explain both in detail in the articles on the individual symbols.

What exactly happens in practice, which mantras and mudras belong to it and how mandala and energy work come together, belongs to the transmission in the live events and not on a website. That the connection exists, though, is no secret. It's documented in the writings of Kūkai and Kakuban and still alive in the temples of Japan today.

Dainichi Nyorai at the center 大日

At the center of both mandalas sits Dainichi Nyorai 大日如来, the Great Sun Buddha. In the Womb Realm he sits in meditation, with his hands in the meditation mudra. In the Diamond Realm he forms the mudra chiken-in, in which the right hand encloses the raised index finger of the left hand.

Dainichi isn't one Buddha among many, but the principle from which all Buddhas arise. You could compare the mandalas to light passing through a prism and unfolding into countless colors. Every Buddha in the mandala is one aspect of Dainichi. From the Shingon point of view, this means that when we work with Reiki, we work with a power whose origin lies in Dainichi, in the world of esoteric Buddhism, Shugendō, Shintō and shamanic Daoism that Usui drew on.

If you're interested in the mandalas of Shingon, you're at the beginning of a path that goes far beyond coloring pages. Have you ever stood in front of one of the great mandalas in a temple or a museum?