Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600-2005 (review)

As Patricia Graham points out in the introduction of her excellent book, Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600–2005, the standard narrative of Japanese art history does not fully acknowledge the religious art of the Edo or Meiji periods, nor of the twentieth century. Indeed, Buddhist art is only briefly mentioned in some of the best-known and most widely read books covering artistic developments of early modern and modern times. For example, Penelope Mason's regularly used survey text, A History of Japanese Art, discusses Edo Buddhist architecture and sculpture along with a section on the always-popular zenga paintings of unconventional religious subjects by amateur monk-artists (generally practitioners of Zen); nevertheless, it includes only three works made after 1868 with explicitly Buddhist subjects.¹

A posting on the Web site "Ukiyo-e: The Pictures of the Floating World," in response to a question on the religious content of prints, does a good job of summing up the general lack of awareness of the importance that Buddhism played in image-making in the Edo period:

Offhand I recall very few (if any) connections. Shrines are pictured as incidentals in a few prints (Hiroshige, etc.), but few deities are the subjects of wood-block prints and I know of no depictions of religious ceremonies—except perhaps the odd marriage, and the occasional procession that may or may not be religious in intent.²

Indeed, many accounts of the four-hundred-year period covered in Faith and Power project the view that the most meaningful engagement with the Buddhist religion ceased in Japan before the start of the early modern period, at which time artists, patrons, and devotees suddenly abandoned their spiritual lives. Such discussions give the impression that the production of Buddhist architecture, sculpture, and paintings stopped abruptly at the end of the sixteenth century, replaced almost completely by the creation of thoroughly secular works. Further, the religious art from these periods that is discussed is celebrated primarily for its formal qualities rather than its manifestation of spiritual and devotional practices. As any visitor to Japan knows, however, Buddhist festivals, pilgrimages, and funerary rites remain an important part of the fabric of daily life. While the Buddhism of the early modern and modern periods has been the focus of a number of studies by historians of religion, the Buddhist art of these periods, with the exception of zenga, has escaped sustained attention by art historians. With the publication of Graham's wide-ranging survey, this vibrant world of artistic activity, which has remained essentially inaccessible to all but the specialist, is now discussed in English for the first time.

In her introduction, Graham presents the aims of her study:

[T]his book has three main goals: (1) to reassess the canon of Japanese art history to allow for the inclusion of later Buddhist imagery and architecture; (2) to define the social history of recent Japanese Buddhist art and architecture; and (3) to identify Buddhism as an important source of inspiration for artists and architects whose work is generally not associated with institutional Buddhism and its canonical visual requirements. I intentionally do not organize the book along traditional lines, distinguishing among arts and architecture for the various Buddhist sects or following the separate stylistic or hereditary lineages or workshop ateliers of artists.

(p. 3)

Graham succeeds admirably in achieving her goals, and her decision to organize her text around issues of patronage, religious practice, and media allows her to bring order to a diverse body of material. What she chooses not to do is to discuss at any length the artworks produced in response to the needs of other competing religious traditions during the years covered by her text. Clearly, she prefers to focus exclusively on Buddhism. Given, however, the long history of Shinto-Buddhist syncretism, the importance of Confucian ideas throughout the Edo period (which she does mention), and the dominance of dramatic architectural monuments in the...