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Replicating the Past in Hopes of Legitimizing the Present: Kokūzō Bosatsu Images

Sun, June 26, 8:30 to 10:20am, Shikokan (SK), Floor: 1F, 114

Abstract

Throughout the history of Buddhism, iconographic drawings (zuzō) of deities have served as invaluable conduits of visual information vital to the production of icons. As something meant to be copied, their value lay not only in their ability to convey data, but also in the geographic and temporal proximity to the originals on which they were based. An inscription found on a thirteenth-century iconographic drawing of Kokūzō Bosatsu (the Space Repository bodhisattva) housed in the Shingon temple of Daigoji in Kyoto states that it is a copy of an eighth-century image which the Japanese priest Dōji (d. 744) used in a memory-retention ritual called gumonjihō. Dōji learned of this ritual during his eighteen years of Buddhist study in China. This drawing, however, rather than having stylistic features of eighth-century images, is more resonant of thirteenth-century styles, and is strikingly similar to a thirteenth-century painting of the deity housed in the Tokyo National Museum. This paper examines these specific images as representative of a wider tradition in Japan of replicating icons that had close ties to the origin of the Buddhist teaching in hopes of increased efficacy and authority in the newer images. At the very least, the inscription is valuable in what it reveals about the thirteenth century Shingon institution’s hope to be linked to and legitimized by older traditions.

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