2023-24 Works-in-Progress Meetings

“The Making Practices of Women: Reusing and Recycling Handwritten Letters for Buddhist Death Rituals”

It was a woman who first made a letter sutra (shōsokukyō). Her name was Fujiwara no Tamiko (d.886), and she was a consort of Emperor Seiwa in the ninth century. From this innovative point of creation by a woman in grief who reused and possibly recycled her love’s handwritten missives, women have sustained and propagated this private practice, in part because women’s religious life was very often centred within the domestic realm and concentrated on personal devotions. Indeed, transcribing sacred text on personal letters was precisely the type of intimate ritual to have originated with a woman.

Two chapters of my current book manuscript, “Dead Letters,” work to uncover the evidence of women as makers and recipients of letter sutras in order to retrieve their stories and ritual activities and to reposition women in their proper place as the inventors of epistolary scriptures. However, the makers of very few extant memorial scrolls can safely be identified as women, and only two memoirs by women describe in detail their process of production. As a result, it can be tricky to recover their place in this history, and often we must rely on sources that inherently obscured them, such as brief entries within men’s diaries. This paper, therefore, workshops ideas around the methodological challenges of understanding the role of women in the practice of Buddhist palimpsests as well as ways of retelling their stories of creative mourning using the angles of haptics, materiality, and the history of emotions.

• Halle O'Neal is a Reader in Japanese Buddhist art in the History of Art department and Co-Director of Edinburgh Buddhist Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her recent edited volume, Reuse and Recycling in Japanese Visual and Material Cultures (Ars Orientalis 2023), brought together eleven articles to examine the reuse, recycling, and repurposing of a diverse range of objects across Japanese history, from ceramics, dolls, sculpture, and bronze bells to imperial calligraphy, scriptures, epistolary, and palimpsests.

"Gender and Expedients at the Fazang Monastery in Yixing, ca. 1100"

Since the mid-twentieth century, archaeological investigations of Buddhist monasteries in China have discovered dozens of printed and manuscript books, originally deposited inside or beneath buildings as offerings to relics. Remarkable among the offerings found in relic deposits from the Northern-Song (960–1127) period are the scale and diversity of books used by lay women. One such deposit discovered in 1995 at the Fazang Monastery in Yixing, Jiangsu is unusual in two respects: it was placed beneath a “revolving sutra library” rather than a pagoda, and it involved more women donors than men. Votive texts from this deposit reveal the various ways in which women donors related to Buddhist books. Some used books to mediate familial relations in their current and future lives. Others sold parts of their dowries to produce books, practiced “sutra copying” to recover from illness, or composed abridged sutras for the semi-literate. Often, donors related to these books, both as physical objects and as bearers of texts, through expedients—that is, the substituting of brief practices for lengthy ones. The very architecture of the revolving sutra library, which a devotee could revolve in lieu of reading, hinged on this concept. In this project, I look closely at the material forms of the Fazang Monastery deposit and its offerings. From this, I raise the question: How did the devotional practices of lay women structure the making and use of books during the Northern Song?

• Bryce Heatherly is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He writes broadly about the history and theory of art and architecture in China and Korea from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries.

"Hiding women’s agency in Buddha’s heart: feminine devotion and secrets deposits within Japanese Buddhist sculptures"

Attested as early as the Nara period (710-794), objects encapsulated within Buddhist sculptures (zōnai nōnyūhin 像内納入品) constitute valuable evidence to deepen our understanding of premodern religious practices and social life in Japan. Indeed, these polysemous items narrate the stories of the people who commissioned, produced, and worshipped them, simultaneously addressing political, ritual, and personal issues. One of these possible narratives portrayed by these invisible treasures is connected to the role and status of women within Japanese Buddhism during premodern periods. The last decades have seen an increase in studies and publications regarding this question, especially the richness of devotional art created by women’s communities. De facto, despite social and doctrinal hindrances, such as the impossibility for women to directly reach enlightenment or to visit several high-ranked temples, female devotees drew their original path to salvation, notably by developing their own patterns of devotion. A part of my research participates in this movement by showing how female devotees developed specific creative practices surrounding Buddhist statues and their sacred deposits. Indeed, many occurrences of statues and contents only commissioned by or for women, either lay devotees or nuns, have been uncovered and yet, their significance, along with the agency of women, have sometimes been disregarded by modern scholars. Therefore, my research will analyse several practices connected to women’s devotion such as the enshrinement of personal items, the offering of hair to Buddhist deities or the sewing of clothes to dress up icons carved in a naked appearance (ragyōzō).

• Elodie Pascal is a third-year PhD student in Art History at the University of Edinburgh, researching “Hidden Within: Merits, Materiality, and Memory in Japanese Buddhist sculptures”. Since the beginning of her PhD in 2020, she has been a recipient of the Khyentse Foundation scholarship and a member of Edinburgh Buddhist Studies.

"Blood-soaked Brush: Placing Yamanaka Tokiwa in Religious Context"

Iwasa Matabei’s (1570–1650) Yamanaka Tokiwa monogatari emaki illustrated handscroll set of the medieval ko-jōruri puppet play Yamanaka Tokiwa is known as one of the goriest paintings of early modern East Asia. Its expanse burgeons with stab wounds as it follows Lady Tokiwa (1138–c.1180), mother of Genpei War hero Minamoto no Yoshitsune (c. 1159–1189), as she meets her demise at the hands of bandits and Yoshitsune exacts his revenge. Scholarship has long pinned the bloodiness of these handscrolls on the personal history of their commissioner Echizen daimyo Matsudaira Tadanao (1595–1650) and his alleged penchant for sexual violence. Recent research, however, exonerates Tadanao of this reputation. Accordingly, this talk looks for other ways to understand the carnage of Tokiwa by reading the whole of each character’s pictorial arc against its accompanying text. In doing so, the talk suggests that the key to understanding Tokiwa’s bloodshed lies in its relationship to emergent Edo period (1615–1868) Neo-Confucian ethics, longstanding traditions of popular Buddhist imagery, and the gender dynamics within each.

• Trevor Menders is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. He studies Japanese painting from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries with special attention to the relationship between the visual and performing arts.

"Feminine Appropriation: Intersection of Buddhist Embroidery and Other Media in Seventeenth-Century China"

In Chinese history, the late Ming dynasty observed the proliferation of images, as the illustrated woodblock volumes garnered great popularity and the art and craft market flourished. In accordance with the proliferation of images in various media, the pictorial art of Buddhism prospered, often generating women’s responses in the format of Buddhist embroidery. In this talk, Soohyun Yoon examines seventeenth-century Chinese Buddhist embroideries to see how female embroiderers appropriated popular imagery of their time—sourced from paintings and woodblock print publications—for their visual expression of piety. By analyzing embroidered works including Arhats Worshipping Avalokiteśvara, Gu Embroidery (late Ming dynasty) and Avalokiteśvara Embroidered by Jun Shufang (dated 1619), Yoon examines the individual process of adaptation of the model images, which reveals the artistic agency wielded by Chinese women embroiderers as they engaged with the Buddhist visual culture of their time. The talk also discusses A Collection of Scattered Red Clouds (mid-seventeenth century) a rare catalog of Chinese embroidery designs, to contemplate the possibility of Buddhist embroideries being crafted based on contemporary huapu (“painting manuals”).

• Soohyun Yoon received her Ph.D. in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University in 2023. She specializes in the Buddhist visual culture of late Ming and early Qing China, with a focus on Buddhist women as producers, patrons, and consumers.

"The Gendered Mirror and Female Self-Portraiture in Late Ming China"

This paper analyses the changing notions of gender elicited by the mirror as three-dimensional object and bi-dimensional representation in the cultural, artistic and social context of late Ming China. It investigates how these notions were articulated in illustrated publications such as the encyclopaedias of daily use, and in illustrated editions of late Ming drama. ‘Gendered Reflections: Mirrors and Female Self-Portraiture in Late Ming China’ argues that the notion of zhen – a term translated as authenticity or genuineness in the context of late Ming Buddhist thinking – largely restructured notions of gender performed by the notions evoked by the mirror in art and visual culture of the late Ming. In earlier iconographies female bodies were passive and unable to detach themselves from the mirror’s outer and inner space. In the images of the late Ming, in contrast, the female body is disengaged from the mirror, enacting a different version of femininity, which allows women to follow their own desires. To finalise, this paper briefly considers to what extent these images might have reflected or engendered changes in the gender relations of living men and women during this period.

• Mariana Zegianini received her PhD in the Department of the History of Art at SOAS University of London where she is also a Senior Teaching Fellow. She specialises in portraiture and material culture from China from the late Ming to the early Qing, focusing on issues of gender and ethnicity.