Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures of a Zen Monastery (review)

Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures of a Zen Monastery, written by Gregory P. A. Levine, professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley, is a collection of four highly informative case studies and an epilogue investigating events in the temple's history. The book also explores the implication of those events in relation to the history of objects at the temple, as well as the way art history has regarded art at Daitokuji in the past. Levine states in his introduction that his book "is an effort to come to terms with art history's Daitokuji as much as Daitokuji's art history" (p. xxxvii). The volume successfully fulfills this mission for in each section he deftly moves back and forth between discussing objects and events and the ways these same objects and events have been presented in previous scholarship.

While the importance of Daitokuji to the history of Japanese art and religion is undeniable, surprisingly little has been written on the temple in English. Only two volumes immediately come to mind, Jon Carter Covell's Zen at Daitokuji, a highly idiosyncratic and personal view of the temple and its art which lacks a rigorous methodological focus; and Kenneth Craft's Eloquent Zen, a learned study of the temple's founder Daitō Kokushi.¹ Levine's book thus fills several gaps in Western scholarship on Japanese art. Moreover, Levine is ideally suited to undertake a study of the monastery: he is the author of an important doctoral dissertation on the Jukōin, one of Daitokuji's subtemples that houses works by the sixteenth-century painter Kano Eitoku, and he is intimately familiar with the entire monastic complex and its community.

Levine clearly sees his book as a corrective to the way Daitokuji and its art have been presented previously. He remarks, "An art history of Daitokuji should ask, therefore, not merely what and how (related to subject, iconography and expression) but where, when and why as well" (p. xlviii). He also wants to challenge what he considers to be the "rhetoric of solitary grandeur and unchanging repose common to many accounts of Daitokuji and other Buddhist temples, especially by Western scholars and visitors to Japan" (p. xlix). Indeed, Japan and Japanese Zen have long had a romantic hold over visitors from the West. Such attitudes were formulated first in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, as Levine acknowledges, then perpetuated by poets and artists (often associated with the Beat Generation) after the war, an admittedly extended period when Japanese art studies and religious studies were in their infancy. However, it is certainly not the view held by most art historians and historians of religion who study Buddhist institutions and their art today.² Thus, while much of Levine's discussion of the ways past scholarship has misrepresented the temple and its art is highly engaging, on occasion he seems to be critiquing views that are already discredited in the West.

The first section of the book investigates the status of chinsō, painted and sculpted portraits of abbots at the temple, and in particular a statue which until recently was understood to be of Shōkei Jōfu, the founder of the Kōrin'in subtemple. Levine was present when an inscription was discovered in the head of the statue indicating that it was originally sculpted to be a representation of the founding abbot of the Baigan'an, another of Daitokuji's subtemples and thus should really be considered to be of Ten'yū Jōkō. As Levine suggests, the identity of the chinsō seems to have shifted after the Baigan'an was abandoned in the nineteenth century.

Using this remarkable discovery as a catalyst, Levine reconsiders the category of Zen portraiture and its scholarship, focusing particular attention on why older images are more highly valued by the art historical community when later works, such as the statue at the...