Author: Beate Fricke

Today, Japanese Buddhists mostly aspire to be reborn in the Pure Land – a Buddhist heaven – rather than attaining Nirvana which is considered too difficult a task for a lifetime. At Uji, a small town next to Kyoto, the Pure Land touches earth. In the middle of the 11th century, at about the time when Pure Land Buddhism came to the fore in Japan, the nobleman Fujiwara no Yorimichi built here a temple called Byōdōin which is a precise imitation of the Pure Land, in the way it is described in the Visualization Sutra (Amitāyurdhyāna Sūtra). The sutra tells us how the Buddha helps aspirants to the Pure Land to reach the heaven by means of a a meditation practice. This practice is based on the visualization of the Pure Land. Also, the recitation of the name of the Buddha Amitabha (Amida in Japanese), the Buddha who resides over the Pure Land, is crucial.

For most of our group, today’s highlight probably were the wooden sculptures of boddhisattvas, carved by the workshop of the famous Heian sculptor Jōchō, which formed the retinue of the Buddha Amitabha in the central hall of Byōdōin. One thing to note is that the Pure Land was definitely imagined as a place full of music! The boddhisattvas play flutes, drums, cymbals, lutes and a host of other instruments which make us aware that hardly any of us has a clear idea of what classical Japanese music actually sounds like.

The idea that heaven must culminate in heavenly music strikes us as pretty familiar. Less obvious we find the central role chanting plays on the worshippers’ path towards the Pure Land, and more generally in many Japanese Buddhist schools. Everyone can attain rebirth in the Pure Land, the Visualization Sutra says, as long as one is mindful of Amitabha and chants his name. We have done it ourselves a few days ago when we stayed overnight on Mount Koya at a temple partaining to the Shingon school and started the morning with chanting: “Na-Mu-A-Mi-Da-Butsu” (“Adoration for Amitabha Buddha”).

A forefather of this practice is the monk Kūya, a famous sculpture of whom we visit in the museum of the small temple of Rokuharamitsuji. The sculpture, created by Kōshō (died 1237), shows how Kūya travelled in the 10th century around Japan and spread the practice of nenbutsu (recollection of the Buddha) by reciting his name. From his mouth exit six images of the Buddha, mounted on a thin wire. Each figure of the Buddha stands for one of the six mōra Na-Mu-A-Mi-Da-Butsu. In Japanese, words are not broken up in syllables, but in signs. All of these mōra are chanted at the same length which makes for a very rhythmic chanting practice. In the sculpture of Kūya, a sound becomes an icon. Incantation and visualization are one.

When a member of the staff of the museum of the Rokuharamitsuji temple tells us the history of the temple, the importance of nenbutsu for many different schools of Japanese Buddhism becomes clear: Kūya founded the temple in 951 and left it unaffiliated. Only later the temple became associated with the “esoteric” Buddhist school Tendai. Today, however, the temple pertains to another esoteric sect, Shingon, the same that we came across on Mount Koya. Throughout the temple’s history, the memory of Kūya as well as his sculpture were preserved. Kūya, best known as an identification figure of Pure Land Buddhism, left in fact a mark on many Buddhist practices.

A memorable, mind-changing, and particularly enjoyable first day started at the Gallery of the Horyuji Treasures. The spectacular building is housing objects that were given reluctantly by the temples to the national museum, previously stored in the temples’ treasure storage. Relocating 150 sacred objects into the museum – and keeping the larger and prominently visible cult objects on the temple grounds – was not a purely voluntary move by the temples facing financial difficulties.

The display of small gilded bronzes, boxed each in a glass cube, solitary, at a safe distance, and illuminated directly from below and indirectly from above, these little boddhisattvas seem to be lost in time. As if each would silently claim to be the prime object, but all being prime objects in a Kublerian sense, bearing distinctively foreign but yet ambiguous ethnic traces of a distant origin on the mainlands. These smaller bronzes are now gazing all towards the entrance, facing their detached mandorlas neatly lined up at the opposing wall.

The beholder today is standing in the gap between formerly joined parts of venerated statues made in the 7^th century, like in a virtual orchestra pit, a position raising the question what does ornament mean, what ornamentation? Their mute choral seemed to chant that nothing should be displayed without being contextualized.

Their context today forms an upbeat in the dark cube with a clear choreography leading to the upper room. There we have had the very rare occasion of seeing the Illuminated Biography of Prince Shotoku.

The five panels on display had previously been housed in a hall dedicated to the pictorial biography of Shōtoku. Painted on silk, they tell a richly illustrated story of a princely life, yet the order is neither chronologically nor topologically at first sight. Starting at the right, we enter the picture, moving towards the left. But we are encountering obstacles, the lines revealing the perspectival construction of each architectural element drawn with flying-off roofs, drawn in the Heian-period, illuminating a rather distant past. Later on, this will be a prominent feature of illuminations of the Genji tales in manuscripts or on screens. These lines pointing all towards the upper right reject our eyes’ movement towards the left, and push back our initial current of reading. But do we want to be read pictorially into a picture? Why this opposite movement, if the primary sources of these times in East and West describe looking at a picture as “entering” it, as walking mentally through the depicted space and time?

We count five different systems of representation, coexisting and overlapping here – 1. perspectival representation for the architectural forms, 2. movement of the people, 3. nature, 4. the overarching horizon building the stage for this Simultanbild, and 5. the little cartouches describing the scenes in writing.

After queuing in the burning sun in front of the Heiseikan building, we entered the special Shōsōin exhibition, the treasures preserved through the imperial family. Because of the incoronation of the new emperor the show has two parts, and stunning objects, a once-in-a-lifetime encounter with objects usually stored in 206 chests in Nara. The open lock greeted us at the entrance, followed by breath-taking objects, such as a five-string lute, the dragon-headed ewer, red and blue painted ivory pieces, folding screens with calligraphy formed by pheasant feathers sewn to the panels, incense burners and incense with pieces only taken off every now or then as an extraordinary imperial honor.

But the true highlight was a series of eye-opening revelations by Kris Kersey, illuminating Japan’s history in the Honkan building on the Tokyo National Museum Campus with a focus on the Nara-period to the collapsing of the Heian regime. Listening to him, one wants to be able to understand immediately each layer he unfolds mentally in front of our inner eyes, gliding over paper with embedded vines and phoenixes made with mica-powder pattern, and be able to read every word of those poems, using the paper format like a stage with the golden cut, arranging thoughts and letters, with their bodies and gestures dancing over the sheet’s surfaces, drawn by the quill gliding over the structured paper made in the 7^th century. Gold and silver sprinkles, script systems, existing parallel next to each other until the 19^th century.

Afterwards we strolled along more profane objects, the shell-matching game with a box decorated with the Genji-tales, admiring the shadows in perspective in the golden era of multiple color-plate printing from the late Edo-period, and concluding with thoughts how one could re-write the history of netsuke, from a hobby-horsian view (Gombrich), or like Camille, as reminiscence of an other-wise unrecorded yet relevant past of the profane everyday world.