Buddhist medical theory often describes the early stages of human gestation in terms of five one-week long stages. Certain Shingon texts take this theory and make of it a spiritual motif in which these five weeks, and by extension the whole term of human gestation, is construed of as a privileged period of nirvanic experience spent in a pre-samsaric pocket universe. In its developed representations this notion involves the mandalization of the maternal womb and the divinization of the growing fetus. The formulation of five steps further allows the motif to incorporate and deploy a number of other immanental pentads that ultimately implicate all of reality in a modality of nondual sacrality. This study examines five Shingon texts in which this theme emerges and develops.
