Well, I just got that from wikipedia, specifically the article on Wu Xing. Although now that I think about it there's a pretty big difference between a diagram and a symbol.
Indeed, it took an inventor to turn a diagram into a magical symbol. Perhaps Abe no Seimei, like all great sorcerers in history, was primarily a master of marketing.
A deeper examination on the matter of magical borders in Touhou.
The word 結界, pronounced
kekkai in Japanese, is translated from the Sanskrit "s?m?bandha" (most occurrences on the web spell it as "siimaabandha" or "simabandha"). According to
this dictionary, "s?m?" means "border", and "bandha" means "tying", with dozens of extended meanings such as "combining" and "arrangement". 結界, then, is a direct translation of this word, 結 = "tying" and 界 = "border".
In fact, "bandha" is etymologically from
the same root as the English words "bind", "band", "bond", "bend" and "bound".
The best source I've found on 結界 in Buddhism is a
Chinese article.
1. Areas delineated to ensure monks do not break moral taboos in everyday life. For example, cooking food at places of residency is forbidden, and must be done in a designated area.
2. Area of the temple.
The following meanings are mostly used in Japan:
3. Areas delineated by esoteric schools for training, which offers protection against demons, Almost the entirety of Japan's Mt. Koyasan and Mt. Hiei are this type of kekkai.
4. Areas delineated by Zen school for training.
5. Areas where taboos such as women, meat food, spicy food etc. are not allowed to enter, often marked by boundary stones.
By the way, the English wikipedia article currently corresponding to
kekkai is about
boundary stones in Thai temples.
Kekkai also has other expanded meanings in Japanese, but they are irrelevant to this discussion.
If you are familiar with religion studies, you can see that
kekkai is based on the concept of creating sacred space by defining its boundaries, which is universal to all human cultures. We'll get back to this later.
As everyone knows, in Japanese pop culture, the esoteric Buddhism function of
kekkai, "keeping demons out", has been greatly expanded. Now when
kekkai is brought up in anime, we think of powerful supernatural barriers that can separate space into pocket dimensions. No doubt ZUN started working from this place.
(To be continued)
