For most people outside Japan, the country’s Buddhist art is something of a mystery. Aside from a handful of American and European museums, there are few important Buddhist works on permanent view, and, except in the US, Western undergraduate courses and texts dealing with pre-Modern Japanese art history tend to focus on secular art from the Edo period (1615-1868).
As John Rosenfeld boldly generalises in his introduction to Preserving the Dharma, this secular art expresses Japanese “rapport with the natural world and gift for abstract design, and [conveys] deeply personal emotions” in contrast to “the supernatural vision of devout Buddhists”, embodied in works that are “tranquil and meditative, some fierce and even terrifying”.
Conditioned by exposure to depictions of everyday or natural scenes, we can be baffled by Japan’s Buddhist icons, often even finding it difficult to distinguish them from works of Chinese or Korean origin. Given the overwhelming influence of Buddhism in Japanese culture from the seventh century, one might argue that Europeans in particular approach the whole of Japanese art through the wrong end of the chronological telescope.
Rosenfield was a titan of Asian art studies, mainly but not exclusively Japanese. His scholarship, although extremely wide-ranging, was rooted in Buddhism, starting with an analysis of early Indian sculpture. This intriguing and beautifully illustrated short book has its origins in the last of a series of lectures on the history of Japanese Buddhist art that he delivered in 2008. The first two centred on the monk Chōgen (1122-1206) and his campaign to remake religious buildings and images destroyed during decades of civil war. The third and final lecture focused on the much less famous Hōzan Tankai (1629–1716) and his role in the transmission of Buddhist art and culture.
Preserving the Dharma analyses the life and work of this upwardly mobile, deeply pious monk, who devoted the first four decades of his adult life to stringent spiritual discipline and mastery of the complex rituals associated with Shingon, the branch of esoteric Buddhism that he followed, along with the iconography of its 1,660-odd deities.
After a long search for a suitable permanent abode, in 1678 Tankai discovered a tiny, neglected temple on Mount Ikoma, a rugged peak with a long tradition of asceticism. There he settled for the remainder of his days, rebuilding the temple and turning the area into the popular religious centre which it remains to this day. Celibate, ascetic, and reclusive, Tankai saw Ikoma as a sanctuary that offered protection from the influence of a rapidly changing cultural climate and gave him the opportunity to excel not just as spiritual leader but also as religious artist.
The question of agency looms large in a consideration of Tankai’s achievement. Even after 1678, much of his time was taken up with massive textual studies, stringent austerities and rituals including, it is said, the recital of 200,000 incantations in a single day. It’s a lifestyle that might seem inimical to the production of over 150 elaborate paintings, sculptures and ritual implements. The author tackles this problem head on, noting that there is no doubt about Tankai’s intense visual imagination, early artistic bent, and talents as a draughtsman.
He proposes that it was none other than Tankai’s energetic, dream-driven spirituality that spurred him to create preliminary drawings for new icons, to be developed into finished works through fundraising, commissioning of specialist artists, detailed oversight, ritual “enlivenment”, and finally a dedication service at which Tankai, as the temple’s abbot, would preside. His signature on a work would thus “indicate that the object had emerged from his spiritual milieu, its potency enhanced by his exalted reputation”.
Tankai’s reputation has suffered from a tendency, inside and outside Japan, to dismiss all Buddhist sculpture after about 1300 as artistically inferior to the great works of earlier periods. Rosenfield’s assessment, by contrast, is that “the most accomplished works from [Tankai’s] orbit bear witness to the intensity of his commitment; they are eminently worthy of our attention”.
The main body of the text is devoted to an erudite yet lively account of Tankai’s oeuvre, illuminated throughout by the author’s unrivalled familiarity with the Buddhist art of the preceding 1,000 years and buttressed by a formidable scholarly apparatus of notes and appendices. Taking the reader down countless fascinating doctrinal and artistic byways, he addresses such topics as the influence of earlier icons, patronage—including requests for ritual intervention from both the imperial palace and the shogun’s castle—and the role played by Tankai’s probable collaborators.
Published posthumously, Preserving the Dharma has been lovingly completed by Rosenfield’s admirers and Harvard disciples, who have succeeded in preserving the pithy, jargon-free and insightful expression that characterises all of his writings.
Joe Earle was the director of the Japan Society Gallery in New York until October 2012 and was previously the head of the Asian art departments at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His current projects include a catalogue of Japanese baskets of the past 150 years, as well as ongoing work on 20th-century painting, and Meiji-era and later decorative arts
Preserving the Dharma: Hōzan Tankai and Japanese Buddhist Art of the Early Modern Era
John Rosenfield
Princeton University Press, 160pp, £49.95, $70 (pb)