Zen and Material Culture ed. by Pamela D. Winfield and Steven Heine (review)

Zen and Material Culture provides a variety of perspectives on how Zen traditions in Japan can be understood. Several essays would be appropriate for undergraduates, while others are clearly intended for specialists more familiar with the history of Chan/Zen in China/Japan. An analysis of artworks by two Buddhist nuns, a survey of the history and arts of the Obaku Zen temple of Manpukuji, interpretations of rags in the Soto Zen tradition, a critical examination of Rinzai Zen retail businesses in the United States, and an essay that challenges the reported relationships of Zen to the Japanese tea ceremony would all have appeal to college students studying the history, arts, and literatures of Zen. Of interest to Buddhist scholars would be the history and symbolism of a monk's walking stick or fly whisk, the changing uses and meanings of prayer beads, historical interpretations of the Buddhist robes, and Dogen's theoretical approaches to temple building. The authors include four art historians and five from Buddhist studies; all are interested in deciphering the material cultures associated with Japanese Zen and dispelling long-held stereotypes in the West that Zen transcends worldly "things." By using interdisciplinary methods, they bring valuable insights on how familiar objects of Zen practice "materialize abstract idea(l)s into concrete form," making this volume an important contribution to cultural studies and Buddhist studies (p. xvi).

Patricia Fister provides excellent biographical studies of two nuns who became abbesses of imperial convents, in "Visual Culture in Japan's Imperial Rinzai Zen Convents: The Making of Objects as Expressions of Religious Devotion and Practice." Daitsu Bunchi (1619–97), an imperial princess, was well educated but not trained as an artist. In 1656, she founded the convent Enshō-ji outside Nara and established a rigorous spiritual training program. There she created rather crude clay figurines in memory of her teachers and her father Emperor Go-Mizunoo (1596–1680), and arranged hair and nail clippings from her father into Chinese characters as an act of devotion. She also copied sutras using drops of her own blood mixed with the ink to demonstrate her spiritual sincerity. In contrast, Tokugan Rihō (1672–1745) studied Kano School painting and produced accomplished portraits of famous priests and nuns past and present, as well as images of Sakyamuni, Kannon, and Bodhidharma, for use in the imperial convent Hōkyō-ji, where she became abbess in 1689. For more than a decade, Fister has been carefully documenting the lives of Japanese Buddhist nuns, as artists, collectors, and spiritual leaders, and her writings have greatly advanced understanding of an important segment of Asian art history. In this article, she provides extensive endnotes that link to photographs of these various artworks, but only three illustrations are published with this essay. Other authors in this volume were similarly limited; for a book on material culture, more illustrations would be appropriate.

Patricia Graham's essay "The Importance of Imports: Ingen's Chinese Material Culture at Manpukuji" also only has three illustrations. She too provides endnotes to find images, but most of these refer to Japanese-language publications and limited circulation exhibition catalogues, so this rich field of research is still not well known in the West. Graham has written about Manpukuji in other books, but here she offers a capsule history of an important temple, its founder Yinyuan Longqi (aka Ingen Ryūki 1592–1684) who introduced Huangpo/Obaku sect Zen from China, the Chinese artists he brought with him, and the various objects he imported that have given Manpukuji a distinctive look and importance in later Japanese arts.

Because Manpukuji is located close to Kyoto, it has attracted Japanese who are interested in Ming Dynasty culture and has directly affected many generations of visitors who were inspired by the exotic architecture, realistic portrait paintings, and humanistic sculpted figures. At a time when much of Japan was closed to foreign influence, Manpukuji played a...