Zenkoji and Its Icon: A Study in Medieval Japanese Religious Art. - book reviews

This type of detailed monograph is exactly what Western scholarship on Japanese art needs. Much of the literature in European languages consists of broad surveys, exhibition and collection catalogues, or summary "life-and-work" profiles of individual artists. Here is an exploration of fundamental issues in Buddhist art - image cults, the replication of sacred image types - that is both exhaustive and authoritative. Donald McCallum, professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, has produced a remarkable book; it is, alas, impaired by a difficult, overly didactic writing style.

The focus of this study is a once-remote temple, Zenko-ji, in the central highlands of the main Japanese island of Honshu. The sanctuary houses a triad of small bronze statues that constitute a Japanese counterpart of the "true images" of medieval Christendom, such as the Veronica Cloth depictions of Christ's face, or the Saint Luke portraits of the Virgin. Zenko-ji, moreover, is a center for mass pilgrimage, like Santiago de Compostela or Lourdes, and still vitally active.

In his introduction McCallum declares his desire to incorporate "the East Asian experience (of religion and art) into a broader synthesis of human experience throughout the world." To do so he makes considerable use of studies in reception theory by art historian David Freedberg and in ritual procedures by anthropologist Victor Turner.(1) Even closer in content to McCallum's book is Hans Belting's Likeness and Presence, which appeared in English after McCallum finished his manuscript.(2) Belting's evocative subtitle, A History of the Image before the Era of Art, could have served McCallum equally as well.

Students of religious art who scan McCallum's book will find much of universal interest, but they will quickly discover that he writes primarily for Japan specialists. He explains at great length the political and economic history of Shinano Province (present-day Nagano Prefecture), where Zenko-ji is located. He gives an overview of developments in Japanese Buddhism and explores in detail the role of hijiri, shamanlike wandering priests who spread the Zenko-ji cult through the countryside. His study is rooted in publications by Gorai Shigeru, preeminent scholar of Japanese popular Buddhism, and of Kobayashi Keiichiro, an indefatigable local Nagano historian.

At the heart of McCallum's topic is a medieval fable, Zenko-ji engi, which tells of the origins of the temple and its wonder-working images. The story - in barest summary - describes the making of three golden statues in India in the 5th century B.C., fabricated by Buddhist gods in response to the pleas of a rich man to cure his daughter of a near-fatal illness. The central statue, thought to be a "Living Buddha," represents Amitabha, lord of the Western Paradise; the two flanking statues depict Amitabha's attendant bodhisattvas.

In the legend the Indian man dies and is reborn as an evil king in Korea; the three statues follow and transform him into a virtuous king. After other incarnations, the man is reborn in the 6th century A.D. in a remote mountain village on Honshu. The statues arrive there and are enshrined in a small temple. The central statue signals its satisfaction by sending forth a ray of light from a spot on its forehead. From this comes the name Zenko-ji, literally, "beneficent light temple." The legend then tells of people, from commoners to an empress, saved by the Living Buddha from the torments of hell.

By the 13th century, pilgrims were beginning to trek along the winding mountain roads to worship at the shrine. Some were prominent religious and political leaders; most were ordinary villagers. Women were especially attracted to the cult, and over the centuries the trickle of visitors grew into a flood. The Zenko-ji Main Hall was often burned and rebuilt; the Living Buddha always miraculously escaped. Originally the temple was far from major population centers; gradually the town of Nagano, with a present-day population of over three hundred thousand, grew up around it.

Large confraternities of villagers and townspeople would spend weeks on the road trudging to the sanctuary, lured by the promise of rewards which popular religions everywhere bestow on the faithful: mystic communion with a divine force, fulfillment of worldly needs (especially miraculous cures), and deliverance from suffering in the afterlife. Pilgrims crowded into the temple's assembly halls; priests expounded the Zenko-ji legend. Entering the Main Hall votaries spent entire nights praying before the shrine that housed the Living Buddha. They also underwent symbolic death and rebirth by descending into a dark room under the main altar and emerging back into the light. The ritual ended with priests touching the foreheads of each devotee with an iron seal to convey the blessings of the Living Buddha and his attendants.

Throughout Japan, returning pilgrims founded branch temples, usually called Shin (or "new") Zenko-ji, to house bronze or wooden replicas of the triad; they also placed copies in small shrines within their own homes. According to McCallum, scholars have identified over 230 surviving temples associated with the Zenko-ji cult and at least 400 bronze replicas of what he calls the Zenko-ji icon.

From this tangled skein of fable and folk belief McCallum has extracted a core of substantial historical data. He believes that the cult must have been in existence by the mid-Heian period, about A.D 1000; that the first recorded replica of the triad can be dated to 1195; and that the Zenko-ji engi itself was codified and written down early in the 15th century. He finds it impossible, however, to verify events earlier than these.

Of transcendent interest for art historians is the fact that the original Zenko-ji triad, McCallum's "prime object," has always been treated as a secret image. What pilgrims may occasionally see in the Main Hall (when they peer into the darkness through clouds of incense smoke) is merely a substitute, the maedachi honzon ("the votive image that stands in front"). In principle, the prime object has never been seen by mortal eyes, but devotees believe so fervently in its powers that they do not have to see it; its very invisibility enhances the aura of its sublime power. McCallum repeatedly states "No icon, no cult"; but the corporeal presence of the icon is irrelevant. It "exists" in the imagination of the faithful.

To be sure, secret images are a familiar feature in Japanese religious custom. Lay-men are never allowed to enter the inner sanctuaries of Shinto shrines or to gaze upon the shintai ("divine bodies") enshrined within. Many Buddhist temples have kept certain statues and paintings sealed away for decades and even centuries, opening them to view on the rarest of occasions.

Here is a case, however, of a prime object known through replicas. The oldest surviving examples date from the early 12th century, and McCallum emphasizes that these are notably inconsistent in style. If, indeed, there had once been a prime object, it had disappeared without a trace long before the 12th century. Replicas datable from the mid-13th century onward, however, are more consistent in style and contain features which suggest that the artists attempted to create a sculptural icon consonant with the account in the Zenko-ji engi.

Perhaps the best-known bronze Zenko-ji triad is one datable to 1271 in Engaku-ji, Kamakura city. Its attendant bodhisattva figures reflect the so-called Tori style of the early 7th century in their stocky proportions, hands clasped at their chests, and low crowns. The boat-shaped mandorla seems to reflect Chinese and Korean prototypes. In other words, the standard Zenko-ji image type is one that pretends to be archaic and invents its own stylistic ancestry. It thereby manifests the propensity to create standardized "true images" that is an archetypal principle in votive sculpture and painting throughout the Buddhist world.

The origins of this practice can be traced to India and a legend of King Udayana of Kausambi (present-day Allahabad district), who sends a sculptor to paradise to carve a sandalwood image of Sakyamuni, the historical Buddha.(3) The notion of a "true image" of Sakyamuni spread to China;(4) from there it was brought to Japan.(5) There are many "true image" traditions in Buddhist art, but none has been documented as thoroughly as the Zenko-ji icon in McCallum's study.(6)

An important feature of McCallum's study is the author's account of bizarre events in the later history of the Zenko-ji triad. During the civil wars of the 16th century the icon was abducted from Zenko-ji and passed like a trophy from one victorious warlord to another. When misfortunes befell the captors, however, they attributed them to the Living Buddha's unhappiness in his exile; so in 1598 the triad was returned to Nagano.

Reflecting the general decline of Buddhist institutions in the Edo period, the Zenko-ji Main Hall fell into a parlous state. To pay for construction, an enterprising abbot took the surrogate statues on a fund-raising tour - carried in a special palanquin and accompanied by a grand retinue of priests and officials. In 1692 the triad was displayed in Edo in the castle residence of the shogun and in homes of high officials. It was later shown in temples in Kyoto and Osaka and in provinces from Kanazawa in the north to Shikoku and Kyushu to the south and west. By 1707 enough money had been collected to build the present-day Main Hall, one of the largest wooden structures in Asia.

The Zenko-ji story is truly engrossing, but ironically enough McCallum obscures it with an obsessive desire for clarity. He continually recapitulates his theses and ideas, explaining again and again what he is doing, and expending far too much effort defining well-established terms such as "icon." Moreover, he writes from a needlessly defensive posture, as though he expects to be criticized because he does not deal with high art or elite religion.

It is entirely appropriate that McCallum focuses on a folk cult and on sculptures of routine artistic attainment, but he absurdly tries to make a virtue of the fact that, in doing so, he ignores factors of artistic creativity and quality - factors unquestionably germane to works produced by master sculptors (busshi) of the establishment ateliers of Nara and Kyoto. Such overcompensation is unnecessary; the theme he has chosen is of central importance for the history of Buddhist art. McCallum's long excursions outside art history into social, political, and economic subjects help account for the environment in which the Zenko-ji cult grew. This illuminating book needs none of the self-conscious apologia that blemish its high achievement.

1. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago, 1989; and Victor Turner, "Death and the Dead in the Pilgrimage Process," in Frank E. Reynolds and Earle H. Waugh, eds., Religious Encounters with Death: Insights from the History and Anthropology of Religion, University Park, Pa. 1973.

2. H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Chicago, 1994.

3. Daniel Ingholt, Gandharan Art in Pakistan, New York, 1957, no. 125.

4. Samuel Beale, Buddhist Records of the Western World, London 1906, I, 235-36; Marsha Weidner, Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism 850-1850, Lawrence, Kans., 1994, 221-25.

5. Gregory Henderson and Leon Hurwitz, "The Buddha of Seiryoji: New Finds and New Theory," Artibus Asiae, XIX, 1956, 5-55. McCallum is preparing a study of the Japanese replicas of the Udayana-type Buddha statue at Seiryo-ji, Kyoto.

6. See also Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis, "Rebirth of an icon: The Taima Mandala in Medieval Japan," Archives of Asian Art, XXXVI, 1983, 59-87.

JOHN ROSENFIELD Department of Fine Arts Harvard University Cambridge, Mass. 02138

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