Chapter 4 Devotion from Afar: Visualising India in Japan

In: Numinous Fields: Perceiving the Sacred in Nature, Landscape, and Art
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Russell Kelty
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Abstract

This Chapter describes the way in which believers in pre-modern Japan came to perceive painted representations of sacred landscapes in their own country as representations of sacred places in a completely different country. Japanese Buddhist believers were unable to make the dangerous and arduous pilgrimage to the Indian sites associated with the life of the historical Buddha. Isolated physically and temporally from such sites, and therefore isolated from whatever spiritual benefits might obtain from their physical presences there, these would-be pilgrims made what we might now describe as virtual pilgrimages to the sacred sites. In this paradigm, if one could not travel to India, then India could be manifest in Japan. Devotees utilized immersive hanging scrolls and handscrolls to envision vicarious pilgrimage to Tenjiku (India), which in painting was increasingly associated with the sacred landscape in the ancient Japanese capital of Nara, the location of Kasuga Taisha Shrine and Kōfukuji Temple. One of the most prominent figures and narratives to be envisioned, in devotional painting during the 13th and 14th centuries, was the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang Sanzang (Genjō-sanzō) (c.602–664). Xuanzang’s journey and subsequent written accounts of it provided the foundation for the flourishing of Buddhism in Japan during the Nara period (710–794).

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