Paper Abstracts
Panel 5: Visual Practices

Discussant: Robert Sharf (University of California - Berkeley)
1) Raoul Birnbaum (University of California - Santa Cruz), “Blood Red Brushwriting of Hongyi Dashi”

During his monastic career, Hongyi Dashi (1880-1942, chujia 1918) made brushwriting an important element of his cultivation activities (xiuxing).  Production and distribution of calligraphic works also formed a significant and characteristic feature of his engagement within the world.  In these works, meaning is conveyed through script type and style, composition, and mood, as well as through direct lexical import.  While he ordinarily wrote with standard black ink, occasionally Hongyi produced red-colored works.  The red ink was derived variously from vermilion, cinnabar, or cinnabar mixed with his own blood.  This paper considers several examples of these works, with the aim of seeking to understand “why red?”  While no doubt in some works red may simply play a decorative role that is not the whole story.  Some explanatory context is drawn from Hongyi’s correspondence with his early mentor, the eminent Pure Land master Yinguang (1861-1940), in which the matter of writing with one’s own blood is discussed.

2) Dorothy Wong (University of Virginia), "Huayan Art in East Asia."

Huayan Buddhism was a major school of East Asian Buddhism based on the teachings of the Avatamsaka or Flower Garland Sūtra. Huayan Buddhism has inspired many art forms, from portrayals of cult deities (Vairocana, Mañjuśrī and Samantabhadra) to popular narratives of Sudhana’s pilgrimage to visit the fifty-three sages. While these subjects are better known and have been well researched, the present paper focuses on the less familiar pictorial representations (called jingbian [Ch], henso [J], or transformation tableaux) intended to symbolize the teachings of the sūtra. Of ninth- to twelfth-century dates, the extant examples in China are primarily found in the Dunhuang cave-chapels. In Japan, known examples are in the holdings of the Tōdai-ji (the center of Kegon Buddhism during the Nara period) and the Kōzan-ji (the locus of the renaissance of Kegon Buddhism under the leadership of Monk Myō-e in the Kamakura period). The Dunhuang murals of Huayan jingbian portray the theme of the Seven Audiences Places and Nine Assemblies in which the Avatamsaka Sūtra was preached, while the Japanese paintings feature saintly figures associated with the sūtra. These two groups of paintings are drastically different in content and composition, although the Japanese ones are said to follow contemporary Song and Yuan examples from China. The paper examines the religious and artistic contexts in which these Huayan paintings were created and used, proposing that their disparities may relate to differences in doctrinal emphases and local artistic conventions. Some late examples of Huayan paintings form Korea will also be examined.


3) Bruce Williams (University of California - Berkeley), "Image as Presence and Metaphor in Sixth Century Ten Stages Meditative Practice."

The use of the meditative visualization of the bodily form of the Buddhas and bodhisattvas as a mainstream meditative technique in Mahâyâna, especially in China and East Asia, has been little studied outside of Pure Land or Tantra.  Moreover, the use of the image and its visualization to characterize this process has often failed to recognize its role in a larger program of meditative and spiritual training.  This paper examines the meditative program of the Ten Stages lineages in sixth century northeastern China and the place of meditative visualization in this program.  We argue that meditative visualization served largely to facilitate entrance into the bodhisattva path, much as meditation on the Four Noble Truths in other Buddhist contexts served to anticipate and facilitate the direct perception of the path and the reality of these Noble Truths.  Once the bodhisattva path had been entered the Buddha image functioned largely as a flexible metaphor for the overall program of spiritual practice and its stages: one moved from seeing the Buddha to becoming the Buddha.