Booktalk and Slide Presentation: Japanese Mandalas: Representations of Sacred Geography
October 26, 2000
Booktalk and Slide Presentation: Japanese Mandalas: Representations of Sacred Geography
Professor Elizabeth Ten Grotenhuis (Associate Professor of Asian and Japanese Art History, Boston University)Discussion with Professor Ryuichi Abe (Kao Associate Professor of Japanese Religion, Columbia University)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. & Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 PM
| The first broad study of Japanese mandalas to appear in a Western language, this volume interprets mandalas as sanctified realms where identification between the human and sacred occurs. The author investigates eighth- to seventeenth-century paintings from three traditions: Esoteric Buddhism, Pure Land Buddhism, and the kami-worshipping (Shinto) tradition. Explaining why certain fundamental Japanese mandalas look the way they do and how certain visual forms came to embody the sacred, ten Grotenhuis presents works that show a complex mixture of Indian Buddhist elements, pre-Buddhist Chinese elements, Chinese Buddhist elements, and indigenous Japanese elements.
Professor Ten Grotenhuis is the author of many articles and books. Her most recent publication is the work featured in this lecture, Japanese Mandalas: Representations of Sacred Geography (University of Hawaii Press, 1999). She translated and adapted from the Japanese Narrative Picture Scrolls by Hideo Okudaira (1973) and Pure Land Buddhist Painting by Joji Okazaki (1977). She is the co-author, with John M. Rosenfield, of Journey of the Three Jewels (1979), and the author of The Revival of the Taima Mandala in Medieval Japan (1985). She is currently at work on a book entitled Arts of the Silk Road. In addition to having authored scholarly books and articles, she wrote the script and narrated a short film called the The Life of the Buddha, produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1987), and she wrote the program notes for a concert featuring Yo-Yo Ma based on the Japanese aesthetic concept mono no aware (1992). |  |
Co-sponsored by the University Seminar on Buddhist Studies
