Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kūkai and Dōgen on the Art of Enlightenment By Pamela D.Winfield. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xix + 207. Hardcover, $115.00; paper, $28.55.

Abstract

Here is a book that raises a fundamentally contentious question in Japanese Buddhism—”Do images help or hinder the realization of Buddhahood … Can art ever represent the experience of enlightenment itself?” The author explores this question by choosing two of the most significant figures in Heian and Kamakura Buddhism—Kūkai, the founder of the Shingon School of esoteric Buddhism, who champions the use of mandala paintings and deity visualization to attain Buddhahood in this very body (sokushin jōbutsu), and Dōgen, the founder of the Sōtō sect of Zen, who champions a non-locative, aniconic view of the ineffability of enlightenment, symbolized by the practice of casting off of body and mind (shinjin datsuraku). What follows is an exciting comparative study of Kūkai and Dōgen's “opposing but complementary” “religio-artistic theories” of image and experience in Japanese Buddhism. Chapter 1, “Introduction to the Art of Enlightenment,” offers an important critique in how the Protestant bias in Buddhist scholarship has overly accentuated the claims that an iconoclastic Zen, stripped of images, is somehow at the core of the Buddhist tradition. Both Zen and Esoteric Buddhism, in varying ways, reveal “the validity and importance of both imagistic and non-imagistic experience and expression.” Chapter 2, “Mikkyō-Space, Zen Time,” argues that, while both have their roots in Kegon cosmology, Kūkai's vision of enlightenment can be best described as “holographic,” in which enlightenment is visualized microcosmically and macrocosmically spatially as Dainichi's body, while Dōgen is “holochronic,” the enlightenment experience is that “the form of emptiness is time.” Chapters 3, “Kūkai on the Art of the Ultimate,” and 4, “Dōgen on the Art of Engaging,” go into the particulars of their respective theories. The former examines Kūkai's own calligraphy and the famous Two World Mandalas to explore his theory that world forms constitute a sacred language of word-images (monji) and visual texts revealing the dharma. The latter argues that while Dōgen adopts a Zen iconoclastic view he is not strictly so, but is ultimately concerned with “practice-realization,” and believes enlightened experience is ultimately not representable. This is a superb, edifying study that merits reading for anyone interested in religious visual culture and Buddhism.