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

One commonly held assumption among undergraduates and others (not all of them neophytes) is that Buddhism is “antimaterialistic”: deeply suspicious of and antagonistic to the world of things. While this characterization may in some respects contain a kernel of truth, it is fundamentally flawed and needs to be challenged. This new study does just that. Fabio Rambelli gives his book Buddhist Materiality the subtitle “a cultural history of objects in Japanese Buddhism,” thus promising a wide-ranging and comprehensive exploration of the place of the physical in Buddhist practice and doctrine. Indeed, one of the great strengths of this groundbreaking work is the boldness of its scope. It is an important book and should be read by any scholar of Japanese religions. A novel and provocative inquiry into the cultural and intellectual history of Japan, it also deserves attention from other students of Japanese society as well.

Some of the prominent themes in Rambelli’s book are: (1) the logic of the pervasive immanence of enlightenment in the phenomenal world, a product of Tendai doctrinal constructions insisting upon the “original enlightenment” (hongaku) of all beings and Shingon-based teachings on the perfected nature of physical reality as “Dharma-realm,” dharmadhâtu or hōkai; (2) Buddhist strategies of negotiation with other religious traditions and social systems, including the expansion of the combinatory honji-suijaku (“original ground–manifest trace”) model beyond the realm of one-to-one correspondences between Buddhist deities and the kami to the apotheosis of physical objects; (3) the construction of the myth of a unique Japanese love of nature attributable to “Shinto” and the unacknowledged role of Buddhism in shaping Japanese attitudes toward the natural world; (4) the place of objects sacred and mundane in the Buddhist transformation of Japan; that is, the integration of Buddhism into the everyday lives of the Japanese people and the eventual hegemony of Buddhist models over Japan’s ritual, doctrinal, and hermeneutical landscape. This deeply interdisciplinary inquiry challenges much of the conventional wisdom about the nature of Japanese religion.

Rambelli’s book offers us new lenses to see what had been hidden in plain sight. As the author tells us, “The history of Buddhist materiality and the related attitudes toward objects form a condensed cultural history of Japanese religion, beginning with the process of diffusion of Buddhism, its multiple interactions with local cults, and proceeding with the development of new forms of religiosity” (p. 273). Rambelli follows Jean Baudrillard in taking the cultural system of objects to be a “reflection of a total order” (p. 61). He asserts that Buddhist ideologies simultaneously shaped and mirrored Japanese cultural sensibilities. For those wishing to unlock the code of the Japanese imaginaire, it is essential to trace the key role of the physical, both products of human invention and naturally occurring raw materials, in the creation of religious meaning. In pursuit of this goal, Rambelli proceeds through a threefold investigation over seven chapters. The first three chapters focus on establishing an understanding of Japanese Buddhist (and, at times, more generally Buddhist) philosophical or doctrinal approaches to materiality. In these opening chapters, we begin to understand the complexity of the task Rambelli has set for himself.

Entitled “The Buddhist Philosophy of Objects,” the first chapter establishes, through reference to a broad range of doctrinal positions and their contestation in Japanese and East Asian clerical disputes (and modern scholarly circles), a discourse that will be essential to the entire narrative of the book. This is the trope of sōmoku jōbutsu, “the enlightenment of grass and trees,” a shorthand for the notion that even beings and objects usually held to be insentient, such as plants and minerals, in fact possess Buddha nature and are thus able to become Buddhas or reach salvation. In India, such ideas had not really even existed; in China, they acted as a sort of slogan or tag-line. In Japan, however, the notion of the enlightenment of objects became the subject...