Download or read book Buddhist Practice and Visual Culture written by Julie Gifford and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2011-03-16 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an overall interpretation of the Buddhist monument Borobudur in Indonesia, this book looks at Mahayana Buddhist religious ideas and practices that could have informed Borobudur, including both the narrative reliefs and the Buddha images. The author explores a version of the classical Mahayana that foregrounds the importance of the visual in relation to Buddhist philosophy, meditation, devotion, and ritual. The book goes on to show that the architects of Borobudur designed a visual world in which the Buddha appeared in a variety of forms and could be interpreted in three ways: by realizing the true nature of his teaching, through visionary experience, and by encountering his numinous presence in images. Furthermore, the book analyses a particularly comprehensive and programmatic expression of Mahayana Buddhist visual culture so as to enrich the theoretical discussion of the monument. It argues that the relief panels of Borobudur do not passively illustrate, but rather creatively "picture" selected passages from texts. Presenting new material, the book contributes immensely to a new and better understanding of the significance of the Borobudur for the field of Buddhist and Religious Studies.
Download or read book Ma alas in the Making written by Michelle C. Wang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-12-18 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the Maṇḍala of Eight Great Bodhisattvas during the Tibetan (786–848) and post-Tibetan Guiyijun (848–1036) periods at Dunhuang, focusing on the intersections between political authority, religious praxis, and visual language.
Download or read book Performing the Visual written by Sarah Elizabeth Fraser and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an insightful new study, drawn from the largely unpublished Buddhist paintings at Dunhuang, of medieval Chinese wall painting, workshop production, and artistic performance in theory and practice.
Download or read book Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture written by Hung Wu and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditionally the "Chinese body" was approached as a totality and explained by sweeping comparisons of the differences that distinguished Chinese examples from their Western counterparts. Recently, scholars have argued that we must look at particular examples of Chinese images of the body and explore their intrinsic conceptual complexity and historical specificity. The twelve contributors to this volume adopt a middle position. They agree that Chinese images are conditioned by indigenous traditions and dynamics of social interaction, but they seek to explain a general Chinese body and face by charting multiple, specific bodies and faces. All of the chapters are historical case studies and investigate particular images, such as Han dynasty tomb figurines; Buddhist texts and illustrations; pictures of deprivation, illness, deformity, and ghosts; clothing; formal portraiture; and modern photographs and films. From the diversity of art forms and historical periods studied, there emerges a more complex picture of ways that the visual culture of the body and face in China has served to depict the living, memorialize the dead, and present the unrepresentable in art.
Download or read book The Sacred Gaze written by David Morgan and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sacred gaze" denotes any way of seeing that invests its object—an image, a person, a time, a place—with spiritual significance. Drawing from many different fields, David Morgan investigates key aspects of vision and imagery in a variety of religious traditions. His lively, innovative book explores how viewers absorb and process religious imagery and how their experience contributes to the social, intellectual, and perceptual construction of reality. Ranging widely from thirteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century Tibet to contemporary America, Thailand, and Africa, The Sacred Gaze discusses the religious functions of images and the tools viewers use to interpret them. Morgan questions how fear and disgust of images relate to one another and explains how scholars study the long and evolving histories of images as they pass from culture to culture. An intriguing strand of the narrative details how images have helped to shape popular conceptions of gender and masculinity. The opening chapter considers definitions of "visual culture" and how these relate to the traditional practice of art history. Amply illustrated with more than seventy images from diverse religious traditions, this masterful interdisciplinary study provides a comprehensive and accessible resource for everyone interested in how religious images and visual practice order space and time, communicate with the transcendent, and embody forms of communion with the divine. The Sacred Gaze is a vital introduction to the study of the visual culture of religions.
Download or read book Refiguring East Asian Religious Art written by Wu Hung and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Refiguring East Asian Religious Art consists of twelve chapters organized in four sections, titled "Death of the Buddha and Buddhist Icons," "Kinship and Commemoration," "Filial Piety and Politics," and "Constructing Ritual Space." Instead of designating self-contained entities, these subtitles point to four general themes of the volume, around which the authors address interrelated issues from different perspectives. Co-editors Paul Copp and Wu Hung have brought together these essays (richly illustrated with images and photos) by leading scholars to compose an outstanding text. This book reflects on the roles that the integration and interpenetration of Buddhist devotion and ancestor veneration played in creating images, objects, and architectural forms in premodern East Asia. These reflections are occasioned by specific historical cases, not motivated by abstract theoretical agendas. The case analyses, in turn, revolve in various degrees around the phenomenon and concept of death, whether the passing of the Buddha, the departure of family members, or the destruction of religious icons"--
Download or read book Buddhist Visual Cultures Rhetoric and Narrative in Late Burmese Wall Paintings written by Alexandra Green and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-04 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Step into a Burmese temple built between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries and you are surrounded by a riot of color and imagery. The majority of the highly detailed wall paintings displays Buddhist biographical narratives, inspiring the devotees to follow the Buddha’s teachings. Alexandra Green goes one step further to consider the temples and their contents as a whole, arguing that the wall paintings mediate the relationship between the architecture and the main Buddha statues in the temples. This forges a unified space for the devotees to interact with the Buddha and his community, with the aim of transforming the devotees’ current and future lives. These temples were a cohesively articulated and represented Burmese Buddhist world to which the devotees belonged. Green’s visits to more than 160 sites with identifiable subject matter form the basis of this richly illustrated volume, which draws upon art historical, anthropological, and religious studies methodologies to analyze the wall paintings and elucidate the contemporary religious, political, and social concepts that drove the creation of this lively art form. “Buddhist Visual Cultures, Rhetoric, and Narrative in Late Burmese Wall Paintings is truly a tour de force that allows us to see Burmese temple paintings of the Life of the Buddha and similar themes as an open-ended genre that, like literary discourse, participates in wider social, intellectual, and religious contexts.” —Juliane Schober, Arizona State University “Alexandra Green introduces this relatively unknown material and subjects it to sophisticated analysis. This study is major step towards creating a template that could be used for analyzing other late traditions of Buddhist painting.” —Janice Leoshko, University of Texas at Austin
Download or read book Picturing the True Form written by Shih-shan Susan Huang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to both earlier and later times. In this richly illustrated book, Shih-shan Susan Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images in various media, including Dunhuang manuscripts, funerary artifacts, and paintings, as well as other charts, illustrations, and talismans preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon. True form (zhenxing), the key concept behind Daoist visuality, is not static, but entails an active journey of seeing underlying and secret phenomena.This book’s structure mirrors the two-part Daoist journey from inner to outer. Part I focuses on inner images associated with meditation and visualization practices for self-cultivation and longevity. Part II investigates the visual and material dimensions of Daoist ritual. Interwoven through these discussions is the idea that the inner and outer mirror each other and the boundary demarcating the two is fluid. Huang also reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism—aniconic, immaterial, and ephemeral—and shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart."
Download or read book Shaping the Lotus Sutra written by Eugene Yuejin Wang and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lotus Sutra has been the most widely read and most revered Buddhist scripture in East Asia since its translation in the third century. The miracles and parables in the "king of sutras" inspired a variety of images in China, in particular the sweeping compositions known as transformation tableaux that developed between the seventh and ninth centuries. Surviving examples in murals painted on cave walls or carved in relief on Buddhist monuments depict celestial journeys, bodily metamorphoses, cycles of rebirth, and the achievement of nirvana. Yet the cosmos revealed in these tableaux is strikingly different from that found in the text of the sutra. Shaping the Lotus Sutra explores this visual world. Challenging long-held assumptions about Buddhist art, Eugene Wang treats it as a window to an animated and spirited world. Rather than focus on individual murals as isolated compositions, Wang views the entire body of pictures adorning a cave shrine or a pagoda as a visual mapping of an imaginary topography that encompasses different temporal and spatial domains. He demonstrates that the text of the Lotus Sutra does not fully explain the pictures and that a picture, or a series of them, constitutes its own "text." In exploring how religious pictures sublimate cultural aspirations, he shows that they can serve both political and religious agendas and that different social forces can co-exist within the same visual program. These pictures inspired meditative journeys through sophisticated formal devices such as mirroring, mapping, and spatial programming - analytical categories newly identified by Wang. The book examines murals in cave shrines at Binglingsi and Dunhuang in northwestern China and relief sculptures in the grottoes of Yungang in Shanxi, on stelae from Sichuan, and on the Dragon-and-Tiger pagoda in Shandong, among other sites. By tracing formal impulses in medieval Chinese picture-making, such as topographic mapping and pictorial illusionism, the author pieces together a wide range of visual evidence and textual sources to reconstruct the medieval Chinese cognitive style and mental world. The book is ultimately a history of the Chinese imagination. Read an interview with the author: http: //dgeneratefilms.com/cinematalk/cinematalk-interview-with-professor-eugene-wang-on-chinese-art-and-film/
Download or read book Medicine Master Buddha The Iconic Worship of Yakushi in Heian Japan written by Yui Suzuki and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-12-23 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through analysis of sculptural representations of the Medicine Buddha (J: Yakushi Nyorai), this book offers a fresh perspective on the seminal role played by Saich? and the Tendai school in disseminating this devotional cult throughout Japan during the Heian period.
Download or read book Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art 1600 2005 written by Patricia J. Graham and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2007-09-30 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art explores the transformation of Buddhism from the premodern to the contemporary era in Japan and the central role its visual culture has played in this transformation. Although Buddhism is generally regarded as peripheral to modern Japanese society, this book demonstrates otherwise. Its chapters elucidate the thread of change over time in the practice of Buddhism as revealed in temple worship halls and other sites of devotion and in imagery representing the religion’s most popular deities and religious practices. It also introduces the work of modern and contemporary artists who are not generally associated with institutional Buddhism and its canonical visual requirements but whose faith inspires their art. The author makes a persuasive argument that the neglect of these materials by scholars results from erroneous presumptions about the aesthetic superiority of early Japanese Buddhist artifacts and an asserted decline in the institutional power of the religion after the sixteenth century. She demonstrates that recent works constitute a significant contribution to the history of Japanese art and architecture, providing evidence of Buddhism’s compelling presence at all levels of Japanese society and its evolution in response to the needs of new generations of supporters.
Download or read book Zen and Material Culture written by Pamela D. Winfield and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stereotype of Zen Buddhism as a minimalistic or even immaterial meditative tradition persists in the Euro-American cultural imagination. This volume calls attention to the vast range of "stuff" in Zen by highlighting the material abundance and iconic range of the Soto, Rinzai, and Obaku sects in Japan. Chapters on beads, bowls, buildings, staffs, statues, rags, robes, and even retail commodities in America all shed new light on overlooked items of lay and monastic practice in both historical and contemporary perspectives. Nine authors from the cognate fields of art history, religious studies, and the history of material culture analyze these "Zen matters" in all four senses of the phrase: the interdisciplinary study of Zen's matters (objects and images) ultimately speaks to larger Zen matters (ideas, ideals) that matter (in the predicate sense) to both male and female practitioners, often because such matters (economic considerations) help to ensure the cultural and institutional survival of the tradition. Zen and Material Culture expands the study of Japanese Zen Buddhism to include material inquiry as an important complement to mainly textual, institutional, or ritual studies. It also broadens the traditional purview of art history by incorporating the visual culture of everyday Zen objects and images into the canon of recognized masterpieces by elite artists. Finally, the volume extends Japanese material and visual cultural studies into new research territory by taking up Zen's rich trove of materia liturgica and supplementing the largely secular approach to studying Japanese popular culture. This groundbreaking volume will be a resource for anyone whose interests lie at the intersection of Zen art, architecture, history, ritual, tea ceremony, women's studies, and the fine line between Buddhist materiality and materialism.
Download or read book Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art written by Jacquelynn Baas and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Eminently readable and extremely meaningful. The contributors tackle essential questions about the relationship of art and life. The book is also very timely, offering a way to approach Buddhism through unexpected channels."--Lynn Gumpert, Director, Grey Art Gallery, New York University
Download or read book The Art of Buddhism written by Denise Patry Leidy and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2008 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than two hundred photographs-most in stunning full color-provide the visual context for this tour of the world of Buddhist art. From the earliest second-century b.c.e. archaeological evidence to the nineteenth century this book showcases the marvelous variety of Buddhist art through the ages, from every country and region where Buddhism has influenced the culture in a significant way, including India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and all the regions of Southeast Asia. Included in the rich variety of forms are architecture and monumental art, statuary, paintings, calligraphy, fresco, brushwork, and textile arts.
Download or read book Senses of Devotion written by William Dyrness and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2013-03-29 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ethnographic study focuses on the religious imagery and practices of a sample of Buddhist temples and Muslim mosques in the greater Los Angeles area. As a way of expanding interfaith dialogue, it is framed as a conversation between the largely Christian researchers and the seventy-five respondents, who were asked about the images, space, and practices of their religious experience. From the respondents in their various religious settings, it seeks to distill the specific religious imaginations and aesthetic profiles that might be said to characterize their experience--to discover what might be considered the living images of these faiths. Set in the context of contemporary discussions of the nature of religion and visual culture, this richly textured study of visual and sensory practices in religion raises fundamental questions about the place of belief and ritual practice and the role these play in our increasingly pluralistic religious culture.
Download or read book The Art of Buddhism written by Denise Patry Leidy and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As its teachings spread from the Indian subcontinent in all directions across Asia, Buddhism influenced every culture it touched—from Afghanistan to Korea, from Mongolia to Java. Buddhist art is a radiant reflection of the encounter of the Buddha’s teachings with the diverse civilizations that came under their sway. It is also an intriguing visual record of the evolution of Buddhist practice and philosophy over a period of more than two millennia. More than two hundred photographs provide the visual context for this tour of the world of Buddhist art. Included in the rich variety of forms are architecture and monumental art, statuary, paintings, calligraphy, fresco, brushwork, and textile arts. Denise Leidy’s guide is the perfect introductory text for all those intrigued by this splendid aesthetic tradition. It also an essential resource for all who seek to understand Buddhist art as teaching.
Download or read book How to Read Buddhist Art written by Kurt Behrendt and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended to inspire the devout and provide a focus for religious practice, Buddhist artworks stand at the center of a great religious tradition that swept across Asia during the first millennia. How to Read Buddhist Art assembles fifty-four masterpieces from The Met collection to explore how images of the Buddha crossed linguistic and cultural barriers, and how they took on different (yet remarkably consistent) characteristics in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Himalayas, China, Korea, Japan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Works highlighted in this rich, concise overview include reliquaries, images of the Buddha that attempt to capture his transcendence, diverse bodhisattvas who protect and help the devout on their personal path, and representations of important teachers. The book offers the essential iconographic frameworks needed to understand Buddhist art and practice, helping the reader to appreciate how artists gave form to subtle aspects of the teachings, especially in the sublime expression of the Buddha himself.
