Description
The Matrix and Diamond World Mandalas in Singon Buddhism surveys and re-interprets the vast work of traditional and modern Japanese scholarship on the twin Mandalas. Adrian Snodgrass of the University of Sydney (Australia) has spent several years of detail the iconography of each and every deity of these two Mandalas as well as to bring out their traditional symbolism that reflects the Tantric thought in its earliest phases. Tantrism or Mantrayana reached China and Japan earlier than it did in Tibet. Hence the great importance of Shingon, as Japanese Matrayana is known, for the history of Tantras and the earlier foundations of this philosophical system that blossomed into the overflow of art in Japan and Tibet, where it flourishes to this day.
