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Everyone’s heard of mandalas; now we have a uniquely rich history and explanation of their history and meaning. This book is a history of the genesis and development of the mandala from the fifth and sixth centuries, when the mandala first appeared in India, to the eleventh century, when the Kalacakratantra appeared just before the disappearance of Buddhism in India. The 600 years of Indian esoteric Buddhism that concluded the 1,700-year history of Indian Buddhism could be said to have been the history of the development of the mandala. (The Kalacakratantra integrated earlier mandala theories into a single system and established a monumental system unprecedented in the history of esoteric ...
This edited volume programmatically reconsiders the creative contribution of the littoral and insular regions of Maritime Asia to shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Far from being a mere southern conduit for the maritime circulation of Indic religions, in the period from ca. the 7th to the 14th century those regions transformed across mainland and island polities the rituals, icons, and architecture that embodied these religious insights with a dynamism that often eclipsed the established cultural centres in Northern India, Central Asia, and mainland China. This collective body of work brings together new research aiming to reca...
The first scholarly monograph on Buddhist maṇḍalas in China, this book examines the Maṇḍala of Eight Great Bodhisattvas. This iconographic template, in which a central Buddha is flanked by eight attendants, flourished during the Tibetan (786–848) and post-Tibetan Guiyijun (848–1036) periods at Dunhuang. A rare motif that appears in only four cave shrines at the Mogao and Yulin sites, the maṇḍala bore associations with political authority and received patronage from local rulers. Attending to the historical and cultural contexts surrounding this iconography, this book demonstrates that transcultural communication over the Silk Routes during this period, and the religious dialogue between the Chinese and Tibetan communities, were defining characteristics of the visual language of Buddhist maṇḍalas at Dunhuang.
Three mountains and the seven rivers is a collection of 56 essays to felicitate the sixtieth birthday of Doctor Musashi Techikawa, Professor at Aichi gakuin University in Nagoya. This volume consist of thirteen Sections; (1) Ancient Geography, (2) Buddhism, (3) Madhyamika, (4) Iconography, (5) Jainism, (6) Logic, (7) Poetics, (9) Social Practice, (10) Tibetan Themes, (11) Vedanta and Mimamsa, (12) Samkhya and Yoga and (13) Tantrism. these saetions throw new light on enduring themes in Indian studies as well as raises fresh issues.
It examines some of the Buddhist underpinning of the Qing view of rulership and shows just how central images were in the carefully reasoned rhetoric the court directed toward its Buddhist allies in inner Asia. The multi-lingual, culturally fluid Qing emperors put an extraordinary range of visual styles into practice - Chinese, Tibetan, Nepalese, and even the European Baroque brought to the court by Jesuit artists.
Garland of Visions explores the generative relationships between artistic intelligence and tantric vision practices in the construction and circulation of visual knowledge in medieval South Asia. Shifting away from the traditional connoisseur approach, Jinah Kim instead focuses on the materiality of painting: its mediums, its visions, and especially its colors. She argues that the adoption of a special type of manuscript called pothi enabled the material translation of a private and internal experience of "seeing" into a portable device. These mobile and intimate objects then became important conveyors of many forms of knowledge—ritual, artistic, social, scientific, and religious—and spurred the spread of visual knowledge of Indic Buddhism to distant lands. By taking color as the material link between a vision and its artistic output, Garland of Visions presents a fresh approach to the history of Indian painting.
Using a commentary on the influential text, the Mañjuśrī-nāmasaṃgīti, ‘The Chanting of the Names of Mañjuśrī’, this book deals with Buddhist tantric meditation practice and its doctrinal context in early-medieval India. The commentary was written by the 8th-9th century Indian tantric scholar Vilāsavajra, and the book contains a translation of the first five chapters. The translation is extensively annotated, and accompanied by introductions as well as a critical edition of the Sanskrit text based on eight Sanskrit manuscripts and two blockprint editions of the commentary’s Tibetan translation. The commentary interprets its root text within an elaborate framework of tantric v...
This book explores trans-cultural and cross-border transmission and transformation of Esoteric Buddhism in East Asia, focusing on its manuscript culture and the transborder transmission of Esoteric Buddhist texts. In East Asia, Esoteric Buddhism’s influences can be seen across all levels of society: not only in that it achieved a recognizable sectarian identity, but also because elements of esoteric teachings were absorbed by other religious schools, influencing their philosophical tenets and everyday practices. The influence was not confined to the religious sphere: scholars have been paying more and more attention to the significance of Tang Esoteric Buddhism in relation to material cult...