Images in Asian Religions: Texts and Contexts (review)

This publication exemplifies the edited volume of conference proceedings in the degree to which it hews to its thesis – debates about the representation of deities and the use of visual artifacts in Hinduism and Buddhism in South, Southeast, and East Asia – and presents the reader with the life of scholarly inquiry. The editors achieve clarity and uniformity, but not staid homogeneity. We have authors in contention and in agreement, and a sense throughout of a unifying agenda of research. The book is ideal for scholars who conduct research into the visual cultures of Asia and its historical debates. However, it is rare among collections of essays in that the editors have managed to make these essays, and the work as a whole, equally appealing to students, particularly undergraduates, in classes that deal with visual culture and religious history in general.

The introduction clearly, and enticingly, outlines the scope of the book. Of the ten essays, five involve India (Granoff, Gilles Tarabout, Daniela Berti, Hans Bakker, and Gérard Colas), two investigate China (Shinohara and Robert M. Gimello), two are devoted to Japan (Chari Pradel and Elizabeth Harton Sharf), and one studies the Angkor Wat complex in Cambodia (Robert L. Brown). Essays juxtapose time and method and are centred on important questions. For example, the first essay by Granoff inquires about the possibility that image worship was inchoate, but contentious, within some circles of Brahminical practice in ancient India, and thus denied ritual power, or rather had its power dispersed into multiple, non-iconic forms as well. She draws upon historiography and Sanskritic textual analysis in this pursuit. Tarabout follows with an ethnographic challenge to Granoff, finding in contemporary Kerala a caste division whereby Brahminical castes tend to undertake anthropomorphic worship with greater regularity than lower castes, and thus a caution is registered about reading classical texts as historically true of practice. The third essay weaves between the first two by taking up a secondary, but vital, issue raised by Granoff and Tarabout regarding ways non-anthropomorphic objects can become signs and embodiments of anthropomorphic divinity. Berti, in this essay, investigates Nepali practices of representation in public venues from an ethnographic viewpoint.

This pattern of interlocking thematic and theoretical issues defines the volume's key strength as a collective work. In Bakker's essay, we return to text and the historical reconstruction of practice in the worship of Shiva in India: the author returns to questions of caste-differential in modes of worship, reviving the issue of whether or not classical Brahminical practice comfortably contained image worship. Colas shifts from practice to philosophical reasoning about image worship among three of the six tradition schools of philosophy in classical India, giving us a fine intellectual history of this central problem. With Shinohara's essay on monastic texts within Chinese Buddhism, we enter into a discussion of this heterogeneous religion where the worship of the images of the Buddha(s) has always been both contentious and ubiquitous. Gimello's essay on Tantric Buddhism and goddess worship in China taps into the non-monastic practices of popular religion. Chari Pradel offers an engaging study of the genealogy and interpretation of a pair of curtains that entered into Japanese scholarly and public culture as emblematic of the origins of Buddhism in that region. Pradel weaves a fascinating story that involves text, practice, and visual reconstruction. Sharf looks at portrait-painting in Japan by Buddhist monks whose religious genealogy is Chinese and Japanese. This essay is a wonderful example of visual historiography, as Sharf 'reads' visual cues for the past of an artistic-monastic tradition. Brown finishes this collection of essays with a visual reading of Angkor Wat that studies interactive practices with the structure, and would be a delightful companion to any visual investigation of the temple complex in a class setting.

What this volume lacks are modular theoretical contributions that might find wider applicability, and the authors do not engage with significant theoretical...