With a Single Glance: Buddhist Icon and Early Mikkyō Vision (review)

Some editorial decisions make you weep. Here I hold in my hands a beautiful, heavy book printed on glossy paper with no expense spared on superb illustrations, many of which are in color. The subject matter is highly specialized, the treatment technical, and the audience limited, certainly to graduate level and above. But where do I find the notes, all seventy-six interesting pages of them? At the end, for goodness' sake. What is wrong with these people? In this instance cost cannot possibly have been a factor. The result is that the effort of flicking heavy chunks back and forth from text to note quickly begins to pall, putting the breathless reviewer in a bad frame of mind from the very beginning. And this is emphatically not a good idea with something as difficult to read as this book. I had looked forward to reviewing it with great anticipation, but in the end it proved a much more demanding exercise than I had imagined.

Bogel's intention is to show that the new texts and practices introduced by Kūkai when he returned from China in 806 brought about a paradigmatic shift in the way the Japanese dealt with Buddhist icons and images, how they "saw" them. "Mikkyō icons and ritual halls offered a new sensory apprehension of the Buddha realm in the here and now and a new visionary model of the Buddha realm. The visual and visionary impact of Mikkyō material culture was transformatory, not only to the adherent but at a broad cultural level" (p. 4). The new images, which were drawn, painted, or sculpted, were to be treated as

direct experience of the dharma-not a reflection of it. Kūkai claimed the same potential for language. Doctrinally, "skillful means," the notion that the Buddha gave his teachings many forms to be comprehended according to the ability and grace of the individual, implies that language and image are imperfect but necessary representations of reality. In Mikkyō, "skillful means" is acknowledged at the same time it is erased: language and image are one and the same as reality. Theoretically, the absolute relationship between sign and signifier is dissolved.

(p. 5)

What distinguishes the Mikkyō system introduced by Kūkai is that the material and visual forms of the teachings instantiate (rather than represent) the absolute or the formless, transcendent Dharmakāya Buddha Dainichi.

(p. 6)

Now the idea that Kūkai was extremely influential is hardly new, and the fact that the kind of esoteric practice he brought back with him was fundamentally different from the norm in Nara Buddhism is not new either; but Bogel delves much further than most into the question of what this might have meant for the relationship between viewer and object. It is the "visual efficacy" of these images that attracts her attention. This leads her into lengthy discussions of exactly how we see what we see and what the term "visualization" might mean in various contexts, both in relation to mandala and icons. She is clearly very much at home with art history, and whenever she is describing an image or trying to date a series of images, the prose lights up; at times the detail is such that one can see nothing but the trees, but since With a Single Glance is unashamedly a specialist treatise, one can hardly fault the author for being too detailed. She is also well read in doctrine and brings the two together in exemplary fashion.

The book is in five parts. Part 1 is devoted to definitions of terms such as "esoteric" and "Mikkyō" and contains a general theoretical discussion of the role of image and icon, including how and why the use of images in Mikkyō might differ from their use as a "means to an end" (hōben) in mainstream Mahāyāna Buddhism. Part 2 is more historical, discussing Kūkai's experiences in China and the thorny...