Nichiren Shonin Gohonzon Shu O'Mandalas by St. Nichiren [1222-1282]

Secret Transmissions in the Hokkeshu
by Dr. Jacquie Stone

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The individual figures whose names are written on the mandala are also interpreted as representing not themselves as historical or legendary personages, but the originally inherent reality of the practitioner. For example, the Honzon sando soden, a transmission of the Fuji school, discusses the two Buddhas, Sakyamuni and Many Jewels, who appear in the Lotus Sutra and whose names flank the central inscription of the daimoku on Nichiren's mandala. In Chih-i's interpretation of the Lotus, these two Buddha's seated side by side in the jeweled stupa are said to represent the nonduality, realized in meditative practice, of truth of object of contemplation (kyo, represented by Many Jewels) and the wisdom by which it is cognized (chi, represented by Sakyamuni). The Honzon sando soden appropriated this reading as follows:

What is the nonduality of object and wisdom? It is precisely the [round of] birth and death that we living beings have undergone since the beginningless past until the present.... Many Jewels having already entered nirvana represents death. Sakyamuni having not yet entered nirvana represents birth.... Many Jewels represent the aspect of death in our repeated deaths, and Sakyamuni represents the aspect of birth in our successive births. The two Buddhas seated in the stupa represent precisely birth and death and also death and birth. This oneness of birth and death is the great nirvana that is unborn and unperishing.

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Source: Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism by Jacqueline Ilyse Stone. (Studies in East Asian Buddhism 12) University of Hawai'i Press: Honolulu. 1999. pp. 331.