Preserving the Dharma: Hōzan Tankai and Japanese Buddhist Art of the Early Modern Era by John M. Rosenfield (review)

This book is the final, posthumous publication of the distinguished Harvard University art historian John M. Rosenfield (1924–2013), whose scholarship throughout the course of his career set a high standard for writing about Japanese art in Western languages. Although he wrote elsewhere on secular and Zen paintings and calligraphy of the early modern period, this book represents his first foray into the world of early modern Buddhist art. Its genesis was a series of lectures he presented at Princeton University in 2008, collectively titled "Icons, Rituals, and Paths to Salvation: Three Lectures on the History of Buddhist Sculpture." As Jerome Silbergeld states in his foreword to this book, Rosenfield intended these lectures to "raise questions about the ritual function of works of art in times of extreme social upheaval and the effects of social change on artistic patronage and practice" (p. 9). This book expands the third lecture in the series, "The Very End of the Law," on the Shingon monk Hōzan Tankai (1629–1716), the temple he founded, and his relationship with professional Buddhist image makers. Silbergeld points out that "even this end was not the end, for with the spiritual leadership of the Buddhist priest Tankai, who served as head priest of the temple Hōzanji in Nara for almost four decades in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Buddhism in Japan enjoyed yet another restoration" (p. 10). Supplementing this statement, the short description of the book's significance on its back cover states that it "shows the richness of early modern Buddhist art, which has often been neglected and undervalued." These comments strike this reviewer as attempts by the publisher, written during the book's production process after the author passed away, to make the book appear broader in scope than the author intended. As Rosenfield himself states in the first paragraph of his Author's Acknowledgements (p. 13), it was this reviewer's book on later Japanese Buddhist art that inspired him to re appraise Buddhist art of the early modern era and "make a preliminary study of works of art credited to Tankai" (p. 13).¹

Although Rosenfield says little about Tankai's place within the complicated hierarchical structure and competitive world of institutional Buddhism of his day, the methodical approach he takes, grounded in close reading of primary sources assembled in a 1964 publication by eminent scholar Kobayashi Takeshi (1903–69), and his comparison of these with surviving sculptures, paintings, and ritual objects associated with Tankai, raises thoughtful questions for the future study of the ways in which patrons, priests, and professional Buddhist sculptors and painters interacted in the early modern period. Rosenfield deployed a similar biographical approach to great effect in a prior book about the Buddhist art and architecture of the Kamakura period, through the lens of the monk Shunjōbō Chōgen (1121–1206),² especially that monk's transformation of Tōdaiji into a national symbol of Buddhism, though it had a different aim, to broadly situate Chōgen within a socio-historical-artistic context. Befitting his intention here, Rosenfield largely eschews wide-ranging discussions. He does not cite recent studies by religious studies and art history specialists writing in English on significant Buddhist sites of worship in the early modern period,³ exhibition catalogues in English on other important early modern monk/artists,⁴ or recent publications on Buddhist art of the early modern period in Japanese.⁵ As a scholar whose focus has been on Japanese Buddhist arts of earlier periods throughout his career, Rosenfield deftly shows the ways Buddhist art of the early modern era represents an inheritance and reinterpretation of earlier styles and religious doctrines. Throughout, he incorporates early Japanese religious and historical background into his discussion, for example when explaining the meaning of and reasons for the appearance of seed characters in...