Buddhism and the Senses: A Guide to the Good and Bad - Couverture rigide

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1614298904 ISBN 13 : 9781614298908

Editeur : Wisdom Publications, 2024

Synopsis

Across Buddhist traditions, the five senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—are perceived both positively and negatively. Share our eminent scholars’ fascination and deep insight into what makes a sensuous experience good or bad.

Following on the exhibition Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice across Asia at the National Museum of Asian Art, ten eminent scholars present their insights into Buddhism’s fascinating relation with the five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch), which careens between delight and disgust, rarely finding a middle way. While much of Buddhist literature is devoted to overcoming the attachment that dooms us to rebirth in samsara, primarily by deprecating sense experience and showing that whatever brings us sensual pleasure leads only to physical and mental pain, in texts such as the Lotus Sutra, sensory powers do not offer sensory pleasure but rather knowledge, clear observation, and ability to teach the Dharma. Considering such religiously and historically contingent ambiguity, this volume presents each of the five senses in two instantiations, the good and the bad, opening up the discourse on the senses across Buddhist traditions.

Just as the museum departed from tradition to incorporate sensory experiences into the exhibition, this volume is a new direction in scholarship to humanize Buddhist studies by foregrounding sensory experience and practice, inviting the reader to think about the senses in a focused manner and shifting our understanding of Buddhism from the conceptual to the material or practical, from the idealized to the human, from the abstract to the grounded, from the mind to the body.

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

Robert DeCaroli is a professor of South and Southeast Asian Art History at George Mason University. He is the author of Haunting the Buddha: Indian Popular Religions and the Formation of Buddhism, Image Problems: The Origin and Development of the Buddha’s Image in Early South Asia, as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Recently, he co-curated Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice across Asia at the National Museum of Asian Art. He has been awarded a Getty Research Institute Fellowship and the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Research Fellowship.

Donald Lopez is an Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. He is the author of numerous monographs, translations, and edited volumes on South Asian Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, and the European encounter with Buddhism. In 2014 his Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (with Robert Buswell) was awarded the Dartmouth Medal of the American Library Association for best reference work of the year. In 2000 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Foreword
Exhibiting the Senses: Encountering the Buddha at the National Museum of Asian Art by Debra Diamond

The exhibition Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice across Asia (October 2017–January 2022) was the heart of a multiyear, multipartite project at the National Museum of Asian Art. The goals of the project, which in addition to the exhibition included print publications, digital features, and public programs, were to conceptualize, realize, and study effective strategies for museum presentations of Buddhist art and traditions.

After putting together the lineaments of the project, I was joined by the co-curators Robert DeCaroli and Rebecca Bloom in 2015–2016. Together we studied the museum’s collections of Buddhist art, made many short lists, and brainstormed innovative display strategies and conceptual frameworks. Our challenge was to illuminate Buddhist artworks and histories that spanned centuries and ranged geographically from Japan to Afghanistan. We were equally committed to creating an exhibition that was meaningful to both practicing Buddhists and visitors who had no knowledge of Buddhism.

Inspired by a turn within Buddhist studies toward finding commonalities among traditions, we explored and contextualized the exhibition objects through the lenses of art and practice. Our art-focused labels encouraged visitors to simultaneously discern transregional motifs and local traditions, and to marvel at the ways that artists inflected meaning and created beauty. Practice included considerations of how objects have agency, how devotees and communities engage with objects, how material culture embodies key Buddhist concepts, and how art museums collect and frame objects created within Buddhist contexts.

Art museums traditionally focus on the visual. Precious objects are displayed on pedestals or in vitrines, and paintings are hung at eye level for visual delectation and close study. Incorporating the material practice of Buddhism into the exhibition, however, immediately begged the question of how to incorporate other senses, sensory experiences, and contexts.

The images and captions on the following pages reveal the means through which we incorporated the awareness of the position and movement of one’s own body (proprioception) and hearing into the exhibition, as well as the ambient environments of a Tibetan shrine and a Sri Lankan stupa.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Wisdom Publications
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1614298904
• ISBN 13: 9781614298908
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 264
• Éditeur: DeCaroli Robert, Lopez Jr. Donald S.
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible