Fabricating the Tenjukoku Shūchō Mandara and Prince Shōtoku's After-lives by Chari Pradel (review)

The Tenjukoku Shūchō Mandara (hereafter TSM) is one of the iconic artifacts that looms large in the discussion of Prince Shōtoku (ca. 574–ca. 622), a cultural hero in Japan who championed the adoption of Buddhism and continental culture against the backdrop of Japan's frequent contacts with the Korean kingdoms and China at the time. The TSM is an embroidered work made some time in the seventh century, but only a few fragments remain. The discovery of it by Shinnyo (b. 1211), a nun at Chūguji, in the thirteenth century, a time when the cult of Prince Shōtoku reached another crescendo, led to the restoration and renaming of the embroidery to its present nomenclature. The discovery itself was seen as another miraculous event associated with Shōtoku, for the nun learned from the inscription that the embroidery was dedicated to the prince, known as Prince Toyotomimi in the inscription. The characters tenjukoku 天寿国, translated as Land of Heavenly Lifespan (in the book) or as Heavenly Realm of Longevity, became part of the title of the work in the surviving inscription, while mandara, which usually refers to a magical, cosmic diagram showing the congregation of Buddhist deities in esoteric Buddhist art, is an anachronistic term to designate the work.

The TSM in its present form includes fragments from the seventh century and the thirteenth-century repair and reconstruction, assembled together in a panel in the eighteenth century and then mounted. Because of the work's significance to Japan's early cultural history, there have been numerous studies and hypotheses advanced about the construction of the original embroidery, often spanning widely conflicting viewpoints. Chari Pradel's work is the first major study in English that presents a thorough review of both visual evidence and historiography of largely Japanese scholarship. The discussion of Japanese scholarship alone is of great service to readers who do not have the time to sift through the massive amount of materials and to sort out the various viewpoints.

The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1, "Material and Visual Evidence," explains the material and technical aspects of the embroidery, provides insights into dating the fragments, and gives a thorough analysis of the designs. Chapter 2, "The Embroidered Inscription and the Imperial Biography," analyzes the epigraphical evidence of the embroidery and related documents, enhanced by a discussion of early writing in Japan and the role of immigrant kinship groups. In chapter 3, "Tenjukoku Shūchō in Seventh-Century Japan," Pradel offers an interpretation of the TSM in the religious and cultural context of its time of production, arguing that the TSM was intended as curtains used in a memorial service for Shōtoku and his mother, Anahobe. Chapter 4, "From Shūchō to Tenjukoku Mandara," discusses Shinnyo's discovery of the embroidery and the subsequent repair and dedication. The last chapter, "The Restorations, Fragmentations, and Secularization of the Tenjukoku Mandara," studies the reception of the TSM from the fourteenth through the early nineteenth century and explores the change in meaning of the embroidery through time.

In this volume, one learns about many things other than the embroidery itself, from funerary art and practices to genealogy of Japanese rulers, the various roles played by immigrant kinship groups, man'yōnaga (classical Chinese graphs as phonograms) as an early form of Japanese writing, calendrical systems, and measurements used. Pradel's book thus offers valuable background and insights into the religious and cultural milieu of Japan in the seventh century, a time when the formulation of its culture was at an embryonic state amidst the influx of new elements of continental culture reaching the Japanese archipelago and through a variety of channels and intermediaries.

In examining funerary art, Pradel's approach is to introduce extensive comparative materials. It seems, however, that some examples are anachronistic and overused while other possible materials have not been utilized. For example, in...