Wind, waters, stupas, mandalas: Fetal Buddhahood in Shingon

Abstract

Buddhist medical theory often describes the early stages of human gestation in terms of five one-week long stages.Certain Shingon texts take this theory and make of it a spiritual motif in which these five weeks, and by exten sion the whole term of human gestation, is construed of as a privileged period of nirvanic experience spent in a pre-samsaric pocket universe.In its developed representations this notion involves the mandalization of the maternal womb and the divinization of the growing fetus.The formula tion of five steps further allows the motif to incorporate and deploy a num ber of other immanental pentads that ultimately implicate all of reality in a modality of nondual sacrality.This study examines five Shingon texts in which this theme emerges and develops.Symbolization that construes spiritual transformation as a form of rebirth is virtually universal.In the case of Christianity such a w conversion" is often characterized as a partial or preliminary death from an old, unregenerate life into a new state of being that prefigures an eter nal afterlife in another world.For Buddhism, however, in which each sentient being has a number of lives and deaths that give way one to the next in an almost unending cycle (the attainment of nirvana being considered a rare event)，the symbolic ramifications of birth, death, and spiritual transformation take on forms that would not be expected in a Western setting.Indeed, since one life normally leads to another in Buddhism, the gap between one lifetime and the next-its span, its nature, its stages-becomes an issue of considerable concern and speculation.This concern is typically directed to two separate post-mortem, pre-(re)birth periods:1 ) the period from the physiological death of the former body to the conception of a new bodily holder, the embryo, * I would like to thank my colleague, Thomas A. Tweed, for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.