Sun discDharma wheelVajraWhite lotusThe five buddha mandala
Mythology Summary
Vairocana, the Great Sun, is the Buddha of the centre in the five-Buddha mandala and the figure the esoteric schools take as the dharmakaya itself — the body of the teaching rather than a person in a heaven. He is the central deity of two foundational tantras, the Mahavairocana-abhisambodhi tantra and the Sarvatathagatatattvasamgraha (Vajrasekhara), and so of the Shingon and Tendai traditions in Japan, where the great bronze at Todai-ji in Nara is him. In the Avatamsaka (Huayan) sutra he is the cosmic Buddha whose body is the whole of reality, a vision that shaped Chinese Huayan and Japanese Kegon. The Tibetan schools give the place of a single primordial Buddha to Samantabhadra (Nyingma) or Vajradhara (Gelug) instead, which is a difference of scheme rather than a denial of Vairocana.
Modern Practice
He is worked as light: the sun-disc at the heart, the luminosity practices at death in the Tibetan clear-light teachings, and the East Asian meditations on the seed syllable A or the letter VAM. Much Western interest in him comes from Jung's psychologising of Dainichi; the Shingon account is of an initiation into two mandalas, not of a symbol of the psyche.