This book is a carefully constructed, well-researched study of Japanese mandala paintings. Within the broader context of pan-Asian Buddhism the most famous mandalas are those associated with Esoteric or Tantric Buddhist theology. Another important and influential type of mandala, the Taima mandala, was created to represent Buddhist doctrine of the Pure Land sect. The appearance of Japanese Esoteric and Pure Land mandalas is unquestionably derived from Chinese prototypes, but this study reveals the remarkable creativity of Japanese religious leaders and their artists as they transformed these continental models into recognizably Japanese images. This assimilation culminated with the creation of mandalas devised to represent deities and sites associated with the native Japanese Shinto religion, defined in this text as the “kami-worshiping tradition.” In order to encompass imagery of these diverse religious ideologies under the rubric of “mandala,” ten Grotenhuis broadly defines the term as “representations of sanctified realms where identification between the human and sacred occurs” (p. 1). The author follows Japanese usage of the word “mandala,” which in eleventh-century Japan was transliterated as “mandara.” This term came to define a wide range of religious paintings associated with Buddhism and Shinto. Ten Grotenhuis defines mandara as “a kind of cosmic ground...