Tenjukoku Shūchō Mandala made from material gauze
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The mandala depicts the Buddhist realm of Tenjukoku (天寿国), or the "Land of Infinite Life", and presents a number of different elements representing various Buddhist concepts. The building in the bottom right is assumed by most scholars to represent the heavenly palace of Zenpōdō from the Maitreya Sutra. The main pattern of tortoises contains characters spelling the names of Shōtoku, Hashihito and Ōiratsume, arranged as a Buddhist triad, and represents Shōtoku's genealogy; other tortoises contain further characters recorded in the Jōgū Shōtoku Hōō Teisetsu, including the death dates of Shōtoku and his mother, and the story of the mandala's creation. The original version of the work contained 100 such tortoises. An inscription, purportedly a statement by Shōtoku, was originally appended: "The world is folly. Only the Buddha is real."The original base fabric on which the images are embroidered is a woven purple gauze, which may have been imported; the later replica sections are stitched onto purple twill or plain white silk. The embroidery threads of the original are z-twisted (right laid) and are sewn exclusively in backstitch while the replica uses looser s-twisted yarn and a variety of different stitches. The looser twist of the yarn may be one of the reasons that the replica sections are less well-preserved.Some researchers argue that the similarity of the mandala's iconography to Chinese and Korean funeral monuments, together with the gauze fabric on which it was originally stitched, indicate that it is not in fact a Buddhist artefact. This theory suggests that the artwork does not represent Tenjukoku, but rather constitutes a record of the memorial rites performed for Shōtoku, and that the association with Buddhism was a later development.
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