Session 98: Reconfiguring Material Objects and Structures in East Asian Buddhism

Organizer and Chair: Sonya S. Lee, University of Southern California

Discussant: Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Yale University

Keywords: Buddhism, China, Japan, religious art and architecture.

This panel focuses on the dynamic relationship between material objects and structures in understanding the significance that built environments came to acquire within East Asian Buddhist contexts. The four papers in the panel deal individually with religious sites dating from the 7th to 9th centuries in China and Japan. Until recently scholarship has tended to treat such spaces as static in category or unchanging in meaning through time, with certain features in architecture or material contents highlighted as the site’s prime significance. One underlying goal of this panel, then, is to rethink conceptual models like this and instead emphasize fluidity between structure and content in the analysis of Buddhist "temples" and "cave shrines." To this end, each paper relies variedly on strategies of reconfiguration to illuminate the relation of a built structure to the objects emplaced and represented within, as well as sponsorship and usage to which the place was subject at one point in history. This reconfiguration of form and function is further historicized by retracing the course of transformation that a place underwent through time, and/or by reconstructing patterns of mutual borrowing across different categories of spaces. With four distinctive cases at hand—ranging from Cave Leiyin at Fangshan, Cave 231 at Dunhuang, to the Kokubunji in Osaka and Natsumji haiji at Nabari—it is hoped that the panel will yield new insights into the religious landscape of medieval China and Japan.

Cave Leiyin at Fangshan: Jingwan’s Response to the Buddhist Prophecy of Decline

Sonya S. Lee, University of Southern California

Cave Leiyin was among the earliest cave shrines to have been initiated at Fangshan in the early 7th century by the monk Jingwan in anticipation for the imminent decline of the Buddhist dharma. Commonly referred to as "mofa" or "Final Dharma" thinking, this decline prophecy had had profound impact on the lives of Chinese Buddhists since the mid 6th century. The way Fangshan—a site located outside Beijing—was initially conceived and constructed represents a distinct, monumental response unlike any of Jingwan’s contemporaries. This paper discusses the broader historical implications of Jingwan’s plan with a particular focus on Cave Leiyin, arguably the centerpiece of the entire project. An examination of the structure’s layout, material contents, and course of construction points to a radical reformulation of a cave shrine’s form and function as it had been understood hitherto. In lining the four interior walls with inscribed Buddhist scriptures in stone and adorning the center with sculpted images and relics, Cave Leiyin was unique in its decorative configuration when compared to most other cave complexes in the northeastern region. In intending the structure to be sealed off immediately upon completion, Jingwan drastically redefined the usage and viewership of an architectural type that had been meant for continuous visitation. The logic of such a building program was likely fueled by an unconventional conception of temporality and transmission of knowledge as well as an essentially practice-oriented mode of religious devotionalism.

Homeland Security and Other Ritual Currencies: The Esoteric Sanctuary of Kokubunji, Japan

Pamela D. Winfield, Meredith College

The eighth-century national Buddhist temple of Kokubunji in Osaka provides a model study for the forms and functions of ritual space in Japan. This paper analyzes how this temple negotiated the road from state sponsorship in the Nara period to its private ownership in the present day. As the financial foundations of Kokubunji shifted, the temple dramatically reconfigured its forms and functions. Under state sponsorship in the Nara period, Kokubunji served two primary roles: protection of the state and defense against physical illness. Since the integrity of the nation depended upon the health of the populace, the Medicine Buddha Yakushi Nyorai was installed as Kokubunji’s honzon or main image. The addition of Heian-period esoteric mandalas to Yakushi’s sculptural arrangement further enhanced Buddhism’s traditional role in healing and the ‘pacification and protection of the country’ (chingo kokka bukkyō). When Kokubunji was forced into financial self-sufficiency in the modern period, however, it adapted its forms and functions for fundraising effect. Typically, it secured both the fixed patronage of funerary Buddhism and the fluid patronage of tourist/pilgrimage Buddhism. It constructed a memorial ihai tablet hall for departed ancestors and installed a statue of the psychopomp Jizō within. It also integrated itself into the Kansai region’s pilgrimage circuits by constructing a new Fudō hall and a larger-than-life-size statue of Kūkai in pilgrim garb. This paper looks at these and other monuments in Kokubunji’s temple compound to reveal its historically-defined financial, politico-social, and artistic dimensions.

The Ruined Temple Natsumi in Mie Prefecture during the Late 7th to 8th Centuries: Memorial Temple and Protector?

Yoko Shirai, UCLA

The ruined temple of Natsumi haiji at Nabari, Mie prefecture, is a small complex situated en route to Ise Shrine. Built on a slope, a small Golden Hall enclosed by a fence was first constructed during the late 7th century, possibly by Princess Ôku, Emperor Tenmu’s daughter. About fifty years later, during the mid-Nara period, a radical reconfiguration occurred in both architectural layout of the temple and objects installed inside the buildings: the Golden Hall’s fence was dismantled and over it a Lecture Hall and Pagoda were newly built, perhaps under the patronage of Emperor Shômu or members of his immediate family. This paper aims to explain these changes in terms of court politics, the confluence between a family’s interpersonal relationships to political rule and religious belief, and the use of Buddhist objects to achieve protection for the self and state. What makes Natsumi haiji particularly significant and unusual are the amount, variety, quality, and type of excavated figured tiles with Buddhist subject matter (J. senbutsu). It is the only site to have yielded senbutsu with a mold-made svastika on the Buddha’s chest, a feature which points to a close connection with the monumental bronze pedestal at Tôdaiji, dated concurrently to Shômu’s reign. While Natsumi haiji was not documented as a major, official temple, a close examination of the site’s location, its later transformation, and the objects found inside the halls may expand our understanding of the unofficial activities and shifting intentions of the governing tennô family over several generations.

Trading Spaces: Sutra Painting, Interior Decoration and Family Fashioning in Dunhuang Cave 231

Winston Kyan, University of Chicago

This paper discusses the integration of ancestral commemoration and family identity into the construction and decoration of Buddhist cave-chapels at Dunhuang through a case study of Mogao Cave 231 (ca. 839). By investigating references to family space along three broad themes—figural, epigraphic, and decorative—I reconsider conventional cultural and spatial boundaries between public and private, secular and sacred, and the living and the dead. Figural representation includes images of cave donors and "portraits" of their deceased parents depicted in the interior. The latter are particularly significant as the earliest surviving ancestor portraits in China. Epigraphic evidence includes inscriptions that survive in the caves themselves and the transcribed texts of commemorative steles that once stood outside important family caves. These transcriptions provide invaluable insights into the motivations of cave construction and the self-fashioning of leading local families. Decorative references include two changes that distinguish 9th- and 10th-century Dunhuang murals from earlier examples: the use of pictorial screens and frames to organize sutra paintings and the development of a deep, couch-like niche for the main divinities. Arguably, these representations of screens, frames, and couches domesticate the otherworldly space of the Buddhist cave interior through references to the worldly space of domestic luxury. Finally, this paper relates the development of family space in Dunhuang caves to shifting attitudes toward the family in Dunhuang society during the 9th and 10th centuries (when local families assumed unprecedented power) by considering how specific socio-political changes illuminate the construction and decoration of contemporary Buddhist caves.