The Buddha's Shadow and God's Flesh: Image and Anti-Image in Huiyuan and Julian of Norwich

Abstract

This essay compares the ideology of visualization of the late fourth-century Chinese Buddhist monk Huiyuan 慧遠 (334–417) and the late fourteenth-century English Christian mystic Julian of Norwich (1342–1430). Specifically, it compares how the two authors deal with the limits and possibilities of visualization in understanding the relationship between the transcendent and the immanent. Although Huiyuan and Julian lived a thousand years apart, their articulations of the imagistic representation of the transcendent reveal synchronic connections between Buddhist and Christian ideas about the absolute presence and necessary absence of the divine. Both religious thinkers use details related to the skin and to textiles when they address the representation of the "ineffable." The ways they treat the boundaries between skin and textiles expose fundamental differences between the Trinity of the Christian God and the Buddha's three bodies (the Trikāya), but the two religious writers reflect on a similar oscillation between the active generation and passive reception of mental images.