Buddhist Art
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Caution! Under Construction
Please be aware that this tag is still under construction and as such is missing information and may be changed or removed at any time. For all the content under consideration for this tag, see the “Buddhist Art” folder on Google Drive.
Table of Contents
- Books (10)
- Canonical Works (2)
- Readings (52)
- Audio/Video (26)
- Reference Shelf (3)
- Related Topics (2)
Books (10)
Canonical Works (2)
Readings (52)
Featured:
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⭐ Recommended
Because of the war, the mission of the Shōjuin bell swung drastically…
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Buddhist art, if there is such a thing, is perhaps too important to be left to art historians
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An unprecedented number of multilevel pagodas were built in China from the tenth through the thirteenth century. This growing emphasis on verticality, in contrast to the usual horizontal sprawl of China’s building tradition, raises questions about what “height” meant in the history of Chinese architecture. This essay argues that the height of the multilevel pagoda was necessarily performative: not so much because the pagoda served as a means of ascending to that height, but because it drew the attention of the faithful.
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Where earlier stupas were icons and indexes of the Buddha encased within indexes of his presence, later stupas were symbols of the Buddha and Buddhist theology. This change in the material practice of Buddhism reduced stupas ’ emotional immediacy in favor of greater intellectual detachment. In the end, this shift in the meaning ascribed to stupas created the preconditions from which the Buddhist image cult and Mahayana Buddhism emerged in the first through fifth centuries A.D. The development of Mahayana Buddhism and Buddha images signified a return to iconic worship of the Buddha.
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Ritual theories almost always assume that ritual is a kind of human action, which makes it impossible to explain ritual spaces or objects that were designed to enact the ritual without human participation. The relic depository of Chaoyang North Pagoda was a completely sealed stone box that was clearly designed as a ritual space for chanting the Uṣṇīṣavijayā dhāraṇī. This ritual space—occluded from human access—contradicts contemporary understandings of ritual. By illuminating the relic depository from the emic perspective of medieval Buddhists and applying anthropological theories, this paper offers theoretical explanations for conditions in which religious rituals were primarily enacted through non-human agency.
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Beginning in the northwestern region of India, and spreading through Central Asia and the rest of Asia along the Silk Road, the making of colossal Buddha statues has been a major theme in Buddhist art. The colossal Buddha statues predominantly feature Śākyamuni (the Historical Buddha), Maitreya (the Future Buddha), and Vairocana (the Transcendant Buddha), and they were fashioned out of religious devotion and frequently in conjunction with notions of Buddhist kingship. This paper examines the religious, social and political circumstances under which these colossal statues were made, focusing on examples from Central and East Asia made during the first millennium CE. Beginning in the 1990s, there was a revival of making colossal Buddha statues across China and elsewhere. The paper also briefly compares the current wave of building colossal Buddha statues with historical examples.
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The article outlines some of the ways in which professional musicians and music virtuosos among the aristocracy conceptualized gagaku and bugaku instrumental music in Buddhist terms between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries. In addition to providing doctrinal justifications for artistic endeavors, they also contributed to the development of new ritual forms, such as bugaku hōyō and kangen kōshiki. This article explores influential Buddhist canonical ideas about music and shows how they were developed by musicians in medieval Japan.
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Miracle tales from medieval China recorded the ability of Buddhist statues to walk, speak, emit light, and even feel pain. Consecration ceremonies, however, emphasized the sense of vision and the agency of the ritual practitioner over the agency of the statue. This essay argues that by underscoring the corporeal agency of animated sculptures, which was manifested both in their extraordinary qualities and in their vulnerability to damage, the circulation of miracle tales enabled a participatory practice in which devotees, monks and laypeople alike, were able to engage in the performative act of writing statues into life.
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⭐ Recommended
… the history, myth and cult of a Burmese Buddha image standing in the middle of the [Shan] city of Chiang Tung and the ways in which religious visual culture expresses ethnic-religious identity.
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To present slowness and simplicity as prophetic counterpoints against the dizzying excesses of the contemporary metropolis; and to offer contemplative attentiveness as a therapeutic resource for life in the modern world.
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The Sutra of Druma, King of the Kinnara and the Buddhist Philosophy of Music (2021) – Fabio Rambelli
This chapter discusses a little-known Buddhist scripture, the Sutra of the Questions by Druma, King of the Kinnara (Daiju kinnara-ō shomon-gyō), translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva in the early fifth century. This sutra is unique in that it proposes a powerful, and sympathetic, philosophy of music rooted in the Mahayana doctrines of emptiness; it also offers a template for Buddhist rituals involving music and dance that have been performed in Japan since the eighth century as part of the Gagaku and Bugaku repertory.
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Tathagata Buddha songs, which this paper studies, has been specifically enabling for Dalit women as it gives them not only a sense of religiosity but it also opens them to the possibility of rationalizing their beliefs and practices. The paper will bring up an ethnographic account of some of these Dalit women singers and look into some of their composition and songs that have a specific invocation to Gautam Buddha and of political icons like Babasaheb Ambedkar, whom they revere.
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Our observations demonstrate that ancient Indian artists of the Gandhara region had a basic knowledge of human anatomy, especially surface anatomy and musculoskeletal features. They also possessed knowledge of the approximate size and position of the bones, joints and muscles, including their approximate origin and insertion points. However, certain errors of anatomical knowledge including an extra number of ribs and a segmented sternum were noticed.
See also:
Audio/Video (26)
Reference Shelf (3)
Featured:
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A large collection of 3D models of Buddhist statues.
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