34 research outputs found
When the Buddha Came to Nagoya: Immersive Reading in Kōriki Enkōan’s Illustrated Accounts of Traveling Temple Exhibitions
No full textThe illustrated books of Kōriki Enkōan (1756–1831), a samurai and amateur illustrator from Owari domain, offer a unique window into the culture of spectacle and display that flourished in late Edo-period Japan. Included in his corpus are several manuscripts that document kaichō, public exhibitions of sacred icons and temple treasures hosted by Buddhist temples and other venues. While most studies of kaichō emphasize their popularity in the capital of Edo, this article focuses on Enkōan’s illustrated manuscript of an exhibition of the famous Seiryōji Shaka that was held in Nagoya in 1819. Situating the event and its visual documentation within the statue’s legendary history as a traveling icon, the study explores how Enkōan’s careful manipulation of text and image created an immersive reading experience that allowed its readers a kind of virtual access to the exhibition. Considering the author’s position within the contemporary social hierarchy, it also addresses the role that samurai values may have played in shaping the representation of kaichō and illuminates its intersections with urban spectacle and emerging exhibition practices in early modern Japan
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Hall of the Lotus King: Sculpture and Multiplicity in Early Medieval Japan
No full textThis study of the thirteenth-century Buddhist temple hall Sanjūsangendō in Kyoto and its ensemble of one thousand life-sized statues of the bodhisattva Thousand-Armed Avalokiteśvara (J. Senju Kannon) investigates the central role that large-scale production and multi-iterative iconographies played in the transformation of Buddhist visual, material, and ritual culture in Japan between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Dedicated in 1164 as the central ritual hall of Rengeōin (Cloister of the Lotus King), part of a sprawling temple-palace complex sponsored by the retired sovereign Goshirakawa (1127–1192), and later rebuilt in the thirteenth century by his great-great-grandson, Gosaga (1220–1272), Sanjūsangendō represents the only surviving example of an early medieval temple hall that integrated hundreds of iconic multiples into a symbolic form of monumental, elongated architecture. This scale of sculptural production was facilitated by transformations both in attitudes toward the nature of icons and their materials and in the working practices of a newly empowered class of Buddhist sculptor. Through close analysis of conservation records, Buddhist literature and period sources, as well as firsthand study of the hall’s statues, architecture, and related imagery, this study reconstructs the origins and production contexts of Sanjūsangendō’s original 1164 construction and its later restoration, while also integrating the hall’s sculptural program within a broader macroculture of East Asian Buddhist ritual practices that prescribed unique efficacy to multiplicity
The Presence of the Buddha: Transmission of Sacred Authority and the Function of Ornament in Seiryōji's Living Icon
No full textIn 985, a Japanese monk named Chōnen commissioned a statue of Śākyamuni Buddha during a pilgrimage to China, which was later enshrined in the temple Seiryōji near Kyoto, Japan. The statue was lavishly ornamented both on its exterior and interior and came to be considered a "living icon" modeled after the legendary first portrait of the historical Buddha made under the patronage of the Indian king Udāyana. Through a holistic examination of historical context, textual evidence, and the diverse forms of ritual adornment (shōgon), I argue that the Seiryōji statue was designed to function as a field for the perpetual generation of karmic merit (fukuden). This statue, through the careful selection of inserted objects and their resonance with its external appearance, embodies the multiplicity of the "Buddha body" as the "living" body of the historical Śāyamuni and the eternally present Buddha of the Lotus Sutra
