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Surviving Nirvana
The Buddha's nirvana marks the end of the life of a great spiritual figure and the beginning of Buddhism as a world religion. Surviving Nirvana is the first book in the English language to examine how this historic moment was represented and received in the visual culture of China, of which the nirvana image has been a part for over 1,500 years. --Mining a selection of well-documented and well-preserved examples from the sixth to twelfth centuries, Sonya Lee offers a reassessment of medieval Chinese Buddhism by focusing on practices of devotion and image-making that were inspired by the Buddha's "complete extinction." The nirvana image, comprised of a reclining Buddha and a mourning audience...
Countless Sands
Countless Sands presents engaging analyses of the diverse relationships between Buddhism and the environment that existed in medieval Asia. Recent years have witnessed a surge in publications across the humanities that advance powerful ethical and political arguments to account for the human failure to respond effectively to global climate change. While the contributors to this volume are attuned to this challenge, rather than present explicit political arguments, they pursue a subtler effort to historicize the environment as a site and subject of Buddhist practice while providing research grounded in rigorous analysis of complex and fragmentary sources. The volume thereby mitigates against ...
Visualizing Dunhuang
"Located at the crossroads of the northern and southern routes of the ancient Silk Road on the edge of the Taklamakan desert in western China, Dunhuang is one of the richest Buddhist sites in China with nearly 500 cave temples constructed between the fourth and the fourteenth century. The sculptures, murals, portable paintings, and manuscripts found in the caves represent every aspect of Buddhism, both doctrinally and artistically. From its earliest construction to the present, Dunhuang has been visualized in many ways by the architects, builders, and artists who made the caves to twentieth-century explorers and photographers, conservators, and contemporary artists. This book explores ways in which Dunhuang has been visualized from its creation to contemporary times. Essays by leading scholars from the U.S., Europe, and China cover a wide range of topics, from the architecture of cave temples to painting and sculptural programs, Buddhist ritual practices, expeditionary photography, conservation, and the contributions of Dunhuang to art history"--
Rethinking Visual Narratives from Asia
Rethinking Visual Narratives covers topics from the first millennium B.C.E. through the present day, testifying to the enduring significance of visual stories in shaping and affirming cultural practices in Asia. Contributors analyze how visual narratives function in different Asian cultures and reveal the multiplicity of ways that images can be narrated beyond temporal progression through a particular space. The study of local art forms advances our knowledge of regional iterations and theoretical boundaries, illustrating the enduring importance of pictorial stories to the cultural traditions of Asia. Contributors include Dominik Bonatz (Archaeologist Free University of Berlin), Sandra Cate ...
Jewels, Jewelry, and Other Shiny Things in the Buddhist Imaginary
Renunciation is a core value in the Buddhist tradition, but Buddhism is not necessarily austere. Jewels—along with heavenly flowers, rays of rainbow light, and dazzling deities—shape the literature and the material reality of the tradition. They decorate temples, fill reliquaries, are used as metaphors, and sprout out of imagined Buddha fields. Moreover, jewels reflect a particular type of currency often used to make the Buddhist world go round: merit in exchange for wealth. Regardless of whether the Buddhist community has theoretically transcended the need for them or not, jewels—and the paradox they represent—are everywhere. Scholarship has often looked past this splendor, favoring...
Chinese Painting and Its Audiences
A history of the reception of Chinese painting from the sixteenth century to the present What is Chinese painting? When did it begin? And what are the different associations of this term in China and the West? In Chinese Painting and Its Audiences, which is based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art, leading art historian Craig Clunas draws from a wealth of artistic masterpieces and lesser-known pictures, some of them discussed here in English for the first time, to show how Chinese painting has been understood by a range of audiences over five centuries, from the Ming Dynasty to today. Chinese Painting and Its Audiences demonstrates that viewers...
Buddhist Visual Cultures, Rhetoric, and Narrative in Late Burmese Wall Paintings
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 wer...
Secularizing Buddhism
A timely essay collection on the development and influence of secular expressions of Buddhism in the West and beyond. How do secular values impact Buddhism in the modern world? What versions of Buddhism are being transmitted to the West? Is it possible to know whether an interpretation of the Buddha’s words is correct? In this new essay collection, opposing ideas that often define Buddhist communities—secular versus religious, modern versus traditional, Western versus Eastern—are unpacked and critically examined. These reflections by contemporary scholars and practitioners reveal the dynamic process of reinterpreting and reimagining Buddhism in secular contexts, from the mindfulness mo...
Picturing the True Form
"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-pa...
The Four Sonyas
Translated from the Czech by William Harkins. Tells the story of Sonya whose only possession is a fairy-tale dream that someday a prince will come and rescue her from drudgery. The princes do come but in the form of frogs who are out to trick and deceive her. A stunning novel from Czechoslovakia's greatest stylist.
