Spring 1998
Volume 24, Number 3

This essay is an attempt to reconsider what vision of--that is, what discourse of--Buddhist icons is possible for a Westerner (or Westernized Asian). Buddhist icons have been essentially the domain, or rather the preserve, of art historians. But Buddhist art, if there is such a thing, is perhaps too important to be left to art historians alone. Is there a Buddhist "art," a subcategory of Asian art, itself a rubric within world art, one among the many rooms in André Malraux's famous "musée imaginaire"? Or are we not dealing primarily with Buddhist images, whose artistic value is at best derivitive? Even though art history is beginning to take a broader, even anthropological, perspective with regard to Western images and visual culture, it is still necessary in the Asian context to shift the focus from tradtional concerns about the history and aesthetics of art to the history, affect, and function of ritual images or icons. Even if we want to retain the notion of aesthetic value, to the extent that a narrow aestheticism precludes our understanding of the anthropological and phenomenological dimensions of Buddhist icons, we must question this emphasis on the aesthetic object. I want to focus precisely on the vision of icons, on the asymmetrical exchange of glances that characterizes icon worship. I have elsewhere examined the various techniques of animation of the Buddhist icon. 1 Because they are, in a manner, alive, and not simply dead representations, these icons are images of power. However, this obvious point--perhaps because it is obvious in the etymological sense ("lying in the way"; hence preventing making an obstacle)--has until recently been largely ignored by art historians, especially in studying Buddhist images. The notion of animated Buddhist icons has been repressed as a result of the modern and Western values of aestheticization, desacralization, and secularization. This situation, however, is beginning to change.2 I will take some of my cues from the recent work done by certain historians and from critiques of Western art in the wake of Walter Benjamin. 3

I also want to question the scholar's instinctive reluctance to blur genres. What is at stake in this maintenance of the disciplinary border by the scholars who set themselves up as keepers of the pass, or of the passage? This question motivates my inquiry into the need and possiblity for rethinking--or rather revising, reenvisioning--our understanding of the Buddhist icon, and by the same token perhaps modifying our gaze. The term icon, here, will designate mostly images such as statues and portraits (icons in the strict sense), but it could be extended to include aniconic, that is, nonanthropomorphic, symbols or diagrams (such as the Indian/Buddhist swastika or the wheel of the dharma). Icons, as we will see, are ritually animated and in this sense are not different form masks, puppets, or automatons, in which one finds the same "conflation of sign and signified" (PI, p.32). At times, Buddhist icons are literally animated by the presence within them of a (supposedly) live entity. Paradoxically, then, the icon becomes a kind of tomb. A significant case is that of a Japanese stone statue of the Buddha Amida, in which was placed the mummy of a Buddhist monk.4 The icon becomes a container, a recipient, a funerary urn or stupa.

The labyrinthine structure of my argument might be partly justified when we recall that Daedalus, the first maker of animated images, was also the inventor of the labyrinth. Deadalus was the first to open the eyes of statues, and to set their feet apart (see PI, pp. 36-37). Notice here the symbolic equivalance between eyes and legs: it is as if the opening of the eyes, which gives life, were equivalant to the separation of the legs, which permits movement. Buddhist icons, although their eyes have been opened, are usually represented sitting cross-legged or standing still with legs joined. Only a small number of Buddhist icons, representations of minor deities (what the Japannese call besson, "distinct worthies," as opposed to the major Buddhas, the honzon of "main worthies"), are depicted as dancing or gesturing wildly. On the whole, Buddhist iconology has valorized stillness. Buddhist icons are, strictly speaking, "still life" or "suspended animation." When they seem to be on the move, their movement often goes hand in hand with a certain sexualization. Whereas the honzon's immobility, its self-contained appearance, symbolizes its absence of passions (or outflows) and its genderness, the besson are more dynamic and clearly gendered (sometimes even quite explicity, like images of the goddess Benzaiten, whose unclothed body is distinctly feminine).

1. See Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism (Princeton, N.J., 1991), pp. 148-78 and Visions of Power: Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism, trans. Phyllis Brooks (Princeton, N.J., 1996), pp. 237-63. See also Michel Strickmanm, Mantras et mandarins: Le Bouddhisme tantrique en Chine (Paris, 1996).

2. On Buddhist art, see the groundbreaking work of Paul Mus, Barabudur: Esquisse d'une histoire du bouddhisme fondée sur la critique archéologique des textes (1935; New York, 1978). See also G. Coedés, Pour mieux comprendre Angkor: Cultes personnels et culte royal; monuments funéraires; symbolisme architectural; les grands souverains d'Angkor (Paris, 1947); trans. and ed. Emily Floyd Gardiner, under the title Angkor: An Introduction (New York, 1963). See also Stanley K. Abe, "Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art and the West," in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (CHicago, 1995), pp. 63-106; hereafter abbreviated "IW." On East Asian art and ritual artifacts, see Doris Croissant, "Der unsterbliche Leib: Ahneneffigies und Reliquienporträt in der Porträtplastik Ostasien," in Das Bildnis in der Kunst des Orients, ed. Martin Kraatz, Jürg Meyer zur Capellan, and Dietrich Seckel (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 235-68; T. Griffith Foulk and Robert H. Scharf, "On the Ritual Use of Ch'an Portraiture in Medeieval China," Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie (1993-94): 149-219; and Mimi Yiengpruksawan, "In My Image: The Ichiji Kinrin Statue at Chu-sonji," Monumenta Nipponica 46 (Autumn 1991): 329-47.

3. See, in particular, Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), pp. 217-51, hereafter abbreviated "WA," and "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Illuminations, pp. 155-200; David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989), hereafter abbreviated PI; W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986); Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover, N. H., 1994); Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l'image: Question posée aux fins d'une histoire de l'art (Paris, 1990) and Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris, 1992).

4. On Buddhist mummies, see Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy, pp. 148-78, and Scharf, "The Idolization of Enlightenment: On the Mummification of Ch'an Masters in Medieval China," History of Religions 32 (Aug. 1992): 1-31.

Bernard Faure is professor of religious studies at Stanford University. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism (1991), Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistomological Critique of the Chan Traditions (1993), Visions of Power: Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism (1996), and The Will to Orthodoxy: A Critical Geneology of Northern Chan Buddhism (1997).