Hōryūji Reconsidered (review)

In his excellent introduction to Hōryūji Reconsidered, John Rosenfield surveys the history of the temple complex, noting that it is not only "the oldest continually active Buddhist monastery in Japan, it is the oldest in all of Asia" (p. xi). He also comments on the difficulties the temple, its history, and its contents present to art historians and religious historians alike because of "contradictions and complexities in the evidence—cryptic temple records, fragmentary state chronicles, puzzling inscriptions, incomplete excavations and pious legends" (p. xi). Hōryūji Reconsidered, edited by Dorothy Wong, makes important contributions toward resolving many of those contradictions and complexities. The book is the product of a symposium held at the University of Virginia in 2005—five of the essays were papers presented at that time, and three others and the epilogue were commissioned specifically for the book. The volume looks at the temple from a variety of methodological perspectives, broadly locating it in the context of East Asian art and religious practice. Five chapters examine the archaeological, architectural, and art historical record of the temple, and three focus on issues of religious history. The epilogue, by David Summers, an eminent specialist in the art of the Italian Renaissance and author of Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (Phaidon, 2004), places the temple in its historical and geographic space.

The publication of Hōryūji Reconsidered coincides with a renewed interest in the art and religion of seventh-century Japan as well as in the career of Prince Shōtoku. Despite the importance of the temple for the art of East Asia and voluminous scholarship about it in Japanese, until recently surprisingly little had been written about it in English. The English-language works previously available by Mizuno Seiichi and the seminal Japan Society exhibition and catalogue are of a general nature and do not provide the close scholarly focus of Hōryūji Reconsidered.¹ Nor do they examine the temple in the context of East Asia.

The first essay in Hōryūji Reconsidered, by J. Edward Kidder, the pioneering Western archaeologist of Japan, reexamines one of the most persistent controversies in Hōryūji's early history: the relationship between the temple and its predecessor, Ikarugadera. Kidder addresses the conflicting evidence surrounding the fire that destroyed the temple in 670 and its subsequent reconstruction. Central to his argument that the architects of the rebuilt Hōryūji reused certain structural elements of the first temple for the new sanctuary, as a way to explain the archaic style of the main hall and pagoda, is dedrochronographic evidence that dates the central pillar of the pagoda to 594. This explanation is ingenious and perhaps more convincing than the theories presented by his Japanese counterparts, but it is still only circumstantial. Kidder addresses another vexing problem in the fourth chapter: how best to assess the information provided by the sanctuary's 747 inventory and the relationship between the Shākyamuni Triad that is the main image of Hōryūji today and the statue of Yakushi that was cast after the 670 fire to replace the main image of Ikarugadera.

The second chapter on the structure of the pagoda was authored by Eric Field, a design technologist at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. Repairs to the pagoda in the 1920s revealed that the base of the central pillar, which Japanese architectural historians assume had originally rested on a foundation stone buried some three feet below the surface of the raised platform on which the pagoda was constructed, had rotted off at some point in the structure's history, possibly as early as the eighth century. Thus, for centuries the pillar was suspended in space, held in place by four battens and locking brackets. Through detailed computer-aided technical analysis, Field concludes that the central pillar never needed to function as a load-bearing support. Rather, he argues that its primary, if not sole function...