Images of Enlightenment: Tibetan Art in Practice

Especially recommended for students, scholars, and practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism........2006-11-05

It had all the answers that you had always wanted to ask in the past. For illustration why some deities look so wraughtful, fierce and the significance of those implements or objects they hold.

I like the most is the explaination on the deity background concise, full illustrated, very well elaborated and accurate description.

The actually images of different Buddhas, which constitute most of the book, are extremely interesting, varying widely in style, media, composition, and even subject matter. (It is fascinating how many different forms of the Buddha have been created.) The differing Buddhas vary from serene to silly (such as Jim Crump's photo of the Putt Putt Buddha.) More famous Buddhas include those done by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Nam June Paik. Some images are awesome (as in inspiring awe), but a few just aren't very good.

Becoming the Buddha is the first book-length study of a key ritual of Buddhist practice in Asia: the consecration of a Buddha image or "new Buddha," a ceremony by which the Buddha becomes present or alive. Through a richly detailed, accessible exploration of this ritual in northern Thailand, an exploration that stands apart from standard text-based or anthropological approaches, Donald Swearer makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Buddha image, its role in Buddhist devotional life, and its relationship to the veneration of Buddha relics. Blending ethnography, analysis, and Buddhist texts related to this mimetic reenactment of the night of the Buddha's enlightenment, he demonstrates that the image becomes the Buddha's surrogate by being invested with the Buddha's story and charged with the extraordinary power of Buddhahood. The process by which this transformation occurs through chant, sermon, meditation, and the presence of charismatic monks is at the heart of this book.

Known as "opening the eyes of the Buddha," image consecration traditions throughout Buddhist Asia share much in common. Within the cultural context of northern Thailand, Becoming the Buddha illuminates scriptural accounts of the making of the first Buddha image; looks at debates over the ritual's historical origin, at Buddhological insights achieved, and at the hermeneutics of absence and presence; and provides a thematic comparison of several Buddhist traditions.

Buddhist images are ubiquitous in Japan, yet they are rarely accorded much attention in studies of Buddhist monastic traditions. Scholars of religion tend to regard Buddhist images as mere symbols or representations of religious ideals, commemorations of saints and patriarchs, ancillary aids to meditative practice, or the focus of lay piety. Art historians approach these images as works of art suitable for stylistic and iconographic analysis. Yet neither of these groups of scholars has adequately appreciated the centrality and significance of images and image worship in Japanese monastic practice.

The essays in this volume focus on the historical, institutional, and ritual context of a number of Japanese Buddhist paintings, sculptures, calligraphies, and relics—some celebrated, others long overlooked. Robert H. Sharf’s introduction examines the reasons for the marginalization of images by modern Buddhist apologists and Western scholars alike, tackling the thorny question of whether Buddhists were in fact idolators.

The essays by Paul Groner and Karen Brock document and explicate the crucial role that sacred images played in the lives of two eminent medieval clerics, Eison and Myoe. James Dobbins looks at Shin representations of Shinran, founder of the Shin school of Pure Land Buddhism, and finds that early Shin piety was centered as much on Shinran and his images as on the Buddha Amida himself. Robert H. Sharf’s essay on the use of Tantric mandalas reveals that, contrary to received opinion, such mandalas were not used as aids to ritual visualization but rather as vivified entities whose presence ensured the efficacy of the rite.

In each case, the authors find that the images were treated, by elite monks and unlettered laypersons alike, as living presences with considerable apotropaic and salvific power, and that Japanese Buddhist monastic life was centered around the management and veneration of these numinous beings.

Visually the book has an academic appeal, and certainly it betrays the labor that has gone into it. Illustrated books like "Buddha & Christ" have a way of sparking off the latent curiosity in the free thinker as only visual aids can do. Unfortunately, I was not much impressed by the text, not because it was not written clearly, or that it flouts the rules of grammer, but because it misses the organizing principle that could have shed a bright light on such a topic. I am confident that such a work is on the horizon.

Often, mainstraem biblical historians, and scholars of religion are leery to admit that there was a common nursery for Judiasim, Chrisianity, Islam, Buddhism, Gnosticism, and Zorasterianism, to mention a few. In many cases, the leeriness comes from unwillingness to admit that Judaism predates Moses, Chrisianity predates Jesus, and Buddhism predates Gautama Sakayamuni by millennia. This is to say that much as they strive to show us the conspicuous parallels that exist between the various religious traditions or philospophical/theosophical traditions, scholars fall short of describing the elephant in toto. This, in my opinion, is the least forceful aspect of the text. Yet, overall, I believe Mr. Elinor's effort moves the quest forward, however slightly.

Hagiographies or idealized biographies which recount the lives of saints, bodhisattvas and other charismatic figures have been the meeting place for myth and experience. In medieval Europe, the "lives of saints" were read during liturgical celebrations and the texts themselves were treated as sacred objects. In Japan, it was believed that those who read the biographies of lofty monks would acquire merit. Since hagiographies were written or compiled by "believers," the line between fantasy and reality was often obscured. This study of the bodhisattva Gyoki - regarded as the monk who started the largest social welfare movement in Japan - illustrates how Japanese Buddhist hagiographers chose to regard a single monk's charitable activities as a miraculous achievement that shaped the course of Japanese history.

After situating the ideas and practices of Pure Land Buddhism in the context of the actual living conditions of thirteenth-century Japan, Dobbins examines the portrayal of women in Pure Land Buddhism, the great range of lifestyles found among medieval women and nuns, and how they constructed a meaningful religious life amid negative stereotypes. He goes on to analyze aspects of medieval religion that have been omitted in our modern-day account of Pure Land and tries to reconstruct the religious assumptions of Eshinni and Shinran in their own day. A prevailing theme that runs throughout the book is the need to look beyond idealized images of Buddhism found in doctrine to discover the religion as it was lived and practiced.

Scholars and students of Buddhism, Japanese history, women's studies, and religious studies will find much in this engaging work that is thought-provoking and insightful.