Embodiment
Embodiment
What can visual material tell us about Buddhist conceptions of embodiment and one’s experience with the world? Traditionally, an embodied individual locates its subjectivity vis a vis a perceived internal, thinking self and its relationship to a given external other. This engagement is facilitated through both the sensori-motor functions of the body responding to external stimuli and the reciprocal imposition of social and cultural factors onto those interactions. Buddhism, however, rejects fundamentally the paradigm of a fixed, eternal self, positing instead that a sentient being exists as a continuum of material and mental processes. Given this notion of the no-self and the concomitant rejection of gender as a fixed category, how might studies of Buddhist artifacts directly engage theories of gender fluidity, queerness, and the performative and constructed aspects of gender?
With this question in mind, this panel addresses the ways in which visual material participated in historical discourses on the nature embodied experience and the status of body types in the Buddhist soteriological project. How is the perfected body visually represented? How do images, sculptural works, and other media engage with the body, or transform the body of both subject and viewer? Do visual materials complicate or contradict textually defined bodies?
Presenters and Paper Titles
Discussant: Kevin Carr
“Textile, Talismans, and Incantation: Tracing Female Agency in Chosŏn Buddhist Practice”
Youn-mi Kim: “Textile, Talismans, and Incantation: Tracing Female Agency in Chosŏn Buddhist Practice”
Through examination of clothing excavated from Chosŏn tombs and Buddhist statues, this paper examines female agency in the Korean practice of using jackets and skirts as a medium to enact the power of Buddhist incantations and talismans. Excavated clothing reveals that Buddhist practitioners of Chosŏn, especially laywomen, stamped their garments with written spells and talismans, which were then enshrined in a...
Yuhang Li: “Anthropomorphizing Icons through Gendered Bodies: Rethinking Chen Hongshou’s Dharma Likeness of Cundi Buddha Mother”
In the forty-eighth year of the Wanli reign (1620), Chen Hongshou (1599-1652) created an icon of Cundi Boddhisattva (or Cundi Buddha Mother) for Mr. Chen Zhimu, a follower of Cundi Boddhisattva from Shan-yin. Unlike most icons of Buddhist deities represented as a sturdy icon or as a transcendent being in human form, this painting portrays a person probably a woman impersonating a religious...
“Silk, Hair, and Gold: Materializing Women in Embroideries of Amida’s Welcoming Descent”
Carolyn Wargula: “Silk, Hair, and Gold: Materializing Women in Embroideries of Amida’s Welcoming Descent”
This paper considers visual and written evidence to argue that embroideries of Amida’s Welcoming Descent from Kamakura Japan offered viewers a new paradigm of bodily engagement that differed from paintings of the same genre. Devotees approached these corporeal embroideries not simply as sensuous surfaces for multisensorial contemplation but as sites of embodiment, where one’s body could be submerged with the Buddha, collapsing space and time, to become one with it—an appealing concept, particularly for women, who struggled with notions of bodily impurity.
“Ōtagaki Rengetsu’s Haptic Poetics and the Non-Self”
Melissa McCormick: Ōtagaki Rengetsu’s Haptic Poetics and the Non-Self
The early modern Japanese Buddhist nun-artist, Ōtagaki Rengetsu (1791-1875), left nearly one thousand waka poems, a number multiplied by their repeated inscription on all manner of surfaces, from pottery to poem sheets to hanging scrolls with accompanying paintings. Although Rengetsu left no poetic treatises or theoretical texts of her own, her vast oeuvre of verses and inscribed art works in their totality amount to a waka...
