Patronage
Patronage
While keeping in mind the complexities of high-level Buddhist notions of gender identity, as explored in Panel 1, this panel examines women as historical actors through the lens of patronage. There has been considerable scholarship on female practices and roles in commissioning Buddhist artifacts. Notable studies in Chinese history, for example, have approached this subject through the perspective of cakravartin legitimacy in the rulership of Empresses Dowager Ling and Wu Zetian, or through the popular patronage of Guanyin, most recently in the work of Yuhang Li. Moreover, scholars of Japanese studies and art history have undertaken significant research into the patronage of courtly elite and nunneries. In these contexts, the commissioning of artwork was conceived as a way of accruing merit while simultaneously circumventing, or overcoming obstructions to spiritual perfection. Were artifacts necessarily commissioned by women with this reconciliation in mind? What can we surmise from these artworks about attitudes regarding artmaking and soteriology that are not preserved in writing? How does this compare across Asia? What can we glean from donor images and dedications on these commissioned works? Finally, how do religious artifacts enrich our understanding of women’s roles in society, their social networks and lineal concerns, and help us problematize the notion of female “agency”?
Presenters and Paper Titles
Discussant: Lara C. W. Blanchard
“Women in Action: Gender dynamics in the art of medieval South Asia”
Jinah Kim: “Women in Action: Gender dynamics in the art of medieval South Asia”
Female patronage of Buddhist institutions in the form of religious donations to monastic communities and pilgrimage sites is well attested from epigraphic and other textual evidence in early centuries of Buddhism’s development in the Indian sub-continent. The conventional wisdom has it that women’s involvement in socio religious fabric shrinks considerably by the early medieval period in South Asia, to the extent a theory of vanishing women...
“Notes on the Tangut Nun in Mogao Cave 61”
Michelle McCoy: “Notes on the Tangut Nun in Mogao Cave 61”
This paper examines the near-life-size "portrait" of a Tangut Buddhist nun in the corridor of Cave 61, Mogao's "Mañjuśrī Hall," which was repainted during the Tangut period with large-scale processions of the astrological Buddha known as Tejaprabha. I address how this case interweaves the histories of Tangut women's participation in Buddhist art production and in divination.
”Buddhist Women, Patronage, and Agency in Early Medieval China”
Kate Lingley: ”Buddhist Women, Patronage, and Agency in Early Medieval China"
Practices of Buddhist merit-making in early medieval China were open to anyone who could muster the resources to support their act of patronage, however small, and many of the resultant projects (vegetarian feasts, sutra lectures, Buddhist monuments) were open to the community at large. As a result, Buddhism effectively opened a space for public action for early medieval women that had not previously been available to them. Many took the...
Talia Andrei: “The Elderly Nun, The Rain Treasure Child, and the Wish-Fulfilling Jewel: Tracing Patronage and Buddhist Networks at the Grand Shrine of Ise”
This talk will center on a recently discovered painting that portrays a nun invoking the deity Uhō Dōji in the form enshrined at Kongōshōji, a Buddhist temple situated at the top of Asama Mountain. Based on the iconographic elements of the painting, I will argue that the nun is from Keikōin, a powerful Buddhist nunnery famous in Japan’s late-...
