Sacred Treasures of Mount Koya: The Art of Japanese Shingon Buddhism [Paperback]

Koyasan Reihokan Museum (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Hawaii Pr (May 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082482802X
• ISBN-13: 978-0824828028
• Product Dimensions: 11.7 x 8.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,747,975 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.", May 10, 2008

By 

Crazy Fox (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Sacred Treasures of Mount Koya: The Art of Japanese Shingon Buddhism (Paperback)

Exhibition catalogs are of course primarily meant as mementos of a pleasant museum visit, often perhaps of some certain interesting exhibit that especially captured one's imagination that day. And if you were lucky enough to see the "Sacred Treasures of Mount Koya" exhibit at the Honolulu Academy of Arts back in 2002, then this fine, beautifully printed book would serve that function wonderfully. Like many such exhibition catalogs, though, it transcends its original purpose and makes for a visually stunning and intellectually fascinating art book in its own right, one featuring many religious art works of Shingon Buddhism both famous and obscure, common and unusual. Ninety-one items were loaned to Hawaii straight from Mount Koya (one of the chief headquarters of Shingon Buddhism), a generous and historic first; twenty more items came from the Honolulu Academy of Art's own holdings in conjunction with this event, and are themselves more or less rarely seen.

In terms of illustrations, this book gets it right. All are in gloriously vibrant full color, and all are printed reasonably large (full page, usually). The explanatory text is a bit weaker. Introductory essays by Jane Tanabe and Shinryu Izutsu do a fine job overall of kicking things off, especially for those who are new and unfamiliar to this form of sacred art and iconography. Little blurbs explaining each item are more uneven in quality sometimes and are all the way in the back of the book, making a constant flip back-and-forth necessary for anyone who wants to know what they're looking at (I ended up using two bookmarks as I navigated along). On the good side, all text is thoroughly bilingual, in English and Japanese--nobody gets skimped, as sometimes occurs. Anyway, a picture's worth a thousand words, and it's the pictures that count here.

So, illustrations of what? iconographic renderings of Buddhist deities both in sculpture and painting, both singly and arranged in complex mandalas--some serene, some full of righteous fury, some of a cosmic scale, some local guardians of Koyasan's grounds. And much more: portraits of Shingon saints, historically valuable maps of Koyasan's temple complex through the ages, actual ritual implements, portable personal shrines, calligraphic scrolls of scriptures, and in general a fabulous variety befitting such a wondrously intricate religious system. And all dating from its origins in the Heian period up until the twentieth century.

In fact, I was surprised. I've been deeply interested in Shingon Buddhism for almost two decades now; I've been to its temples in Japan and collected any number of works on Shingon art and iconography. I thought I'd more or less seen it all. I was wrong. This book does include some old familiar standards that are nonetheless nice to see again, but it also features a very large number of pieces I've never set eyes on before in all my years of enthusiasm. Partly that seems to be due to the practical limitations of the exhibit itself, so that fewer registered national treasures from the Heian and Kamakura periods show up, yielding the floor to more commonly ignored but actually very fine works of lesser (art historical) distinction from the Muromachi, Edo, and even Meiji periods (even one from 1935 by Buzan Kimura, a student of Okakura Tenshin). The religious significance of these works, though, more than makes up for any art historical and aesthetic deficiencies--and for that matter, most of them seemed deficient only in lacking the patina of age, the accumulation of centuries for pigments to fade or flake off and so accord the work a misleadingly austere appearance. Anyway, even if you have dozens of books on this subject, I bet you'll find something new and intriguing herein. Check it out!

P.S. for more on the sacred mountain temple complex from which these works come, check out the very readable and informative Sacred Koyasan: A Pilgrimage to the Mountain Temple of Saint Kobo Daishi and the Great Sun Buddha.