Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism

Abstract

Abstract This study crosses the disciplinary lines of religious studies and art history/visual studies as it juxtaposes and qualifies two representative voices for and against the role of imagery in the enlightenment experience. Kūkai (774–835) believes that real and imagined forms are indispensable to his new esoteric Mikkyō method for “becoming a Buddha in this very body” (sokushin jōbutsu), yet he also deconstructs the significance of such imagery in his poetic and doctrinal works. Conversely, Dōgen (1200–1253) believes that “just sitting” in Zen meditation without any visual props or mental elaborations can lead one to realize that “this very mind is Buddha” (sokushin zebutsu), but then he also privileges select Zen icons as worthy of veneration. In considering the nuanced views of these two premodern Japanese Buddhist masters, this study updates previous comparisons of Kūkai’s and Dōgen’s oeuvres and engages both their texts and images together for the first time. It thereby liberates them from their respective sectarian scholarship that has pigeonholed them into iconographic/ritual vs. philological/philosophical categories, and it restores the historical symbiosis between religious thought and artistic expression well before the nineteenth-century invention of the academic disciplines of religious studies vs. art history. Theoretically speaking as well, this study breaks new methodological ground by proposing space and time as organizing principles for analyzing both meditative experience, as well as visual/material culture, and it presents a broader vision of how Japanese Buddhists themselves understood the role of imagery before, during, and after awakening.