Buddhist Materiality: A Cultural History of Objects in Japanese Buddhism (review)

Japanese Buddhism is replete with sacred objects. Amulets (omamori), talismans (ofuda), funerary tablets (ihai), relics and reliquaries, images, prayer beads (juzu), ceremonial robes, sutra copies, ritual implements, temples, and pagodas just begin to tell the story. These objects serve as symbols of authority, mediate the sacred, and contribute to an economy of sizable proportions. Recent scholarship has examined different elements of this sacred material realm.¹ And in a text on “Buddhist materiality,” one might expect a broad survey and analysis of this range of sacred Buddhist objects. Such a study is warranted and would no doubt make important contributions to the field.

Fabio Rambelli takes a surprising turn and, in so doing, breaks new ground in the study of Japanese religion and culture. This is, quite simply, a “must read” for any scholar of Japanese history and culture, much less religion. Rather than focus on the obvious dimensions of “Buddhist” materiality, Rambelli shifts his lens to more mundane and profane elements of the material realm—trees, professional tools, and used-up commodities—to illustrate the sacralizing influence of Buddhist discourse from early to modern times. Even when he turns his attention to more obvious religious objects such as sacred texts, Rambelli challenges the conventional contemporary emphasis on hermeneutic meaning. The scope of this study in terms of history, documentary sources, doctrine, and methodological theory is impressive. The boldness of the approach will no doubt inspire critical responses— some warranted, some not. But the debates to follow will be nothing but beneficial to the broad field of Japanese studies that has been comparatively tardy in adopting methodological approaches of recent decades.

There are three basic sections to the text. The first, including chapters 1 and 2, provides an overview of the status and meaning of Buddhist objects and their role in shaping the Buddhist worldview. The second includes four chapters that explore the extensive reach of Buddhist views of materiality including sacred texts, trees and the natural world, professional tools and the professions that employ them, and memorial services (kuyō) for exhausted objects. The concluding chapter draws on a number of theoretical approaches, from cultural studies and semiotics, to analyze the relationship between the role and function of religious objects and a general economy of the sacred that includes, in its most basic form, the buying, selling, and trading of sacred objects and ritual practices. At least two themes weave throughout the text. The first is the extraordinary degree to which esoteric ritual protocol and its underlying ideology of nonduality permeated all spheres of discourse and practice, sacred and secular, from the medieval period forward. A second is Rambelli’s penetrating analysis of the process by which Buddhist institutions utilized this ideology to claim power and control over all manner of phenomena, people, and processes of production. What follows is a brief summary of the chapter contents.

Chapter 1, “The Buddhist Philosophy of Objects and the Status of Inanimate Entities,” explores early Buddhist efforts to distinguish between sentient beings and inanimate/nonsentient entities such as plants. Rambelli focuses in particular on the tantric turn in Buddhist discourse with its emphasis on nonduality and the philosophical deliberations surrounding the issue of whether nonsentients possess Buddha-nature (p. 14). He follows the ensuing debate through China to Japan where Tendai and Shingon traditions agreed, though for somewhat different reasons, that nonsentients are universally endowed with Buddha-nature. Rambelli contends that the special attention given in Japan by Kūkai and others to the ontological and soteriological status of nature, nonsentients, and material objects—embodied particularly in the trope of sōmoku jōbutsu, the enlightenment of grass and trees—was unusual within the Buddhist tradition (p. 57).

Chapter 2 surveys Buddhist objects such as esoteric icons and liturgical implements, often expressions of a “nostalgia of origins” and an “obsession with authenticity,” that function as symbolic representations of Buddhist doctrines, values, and worldviews (p. 62). After noting the...