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.
| |||||||||||||||
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
Review
...Ten Grotenhuis's original and expansive study makes an important contribution to scholarship on Japanese religion and related visual imagery. She provides readers with copious references to religious and art-historical studies in both Asian and Western languages. She also offers thoughtful hypotheses about sources for this Japanese religious imagery and observations on correlations between divergent Buddhist and kami-worshiping traditions. These comments suggest new approaches to consideration of premodern forms of religious worship and their visual expressions in Japan. Consequently, I believe ten Grotenhuis's book will become an indispensable reference to all those interested in deepening their understanding of the uniqueness of the Japanese religious tradition and its related imagery. Patricia J. Graham, University of Kansas -- CAA.reviews September 21, 1999
From most studies on this subject we get the view that mandalas originated in the Indian context and spread to China and Japan. What sets this study apart is the exploration of a Chinese, pre-Buddhist origin for the East Asian concept of mandala. Ten Grotenhuis (Harvard and Boston Univ.) examines the mandalas of Pure Land Buddhism, Esoteric Buddhism, and Shintoism from the eighth to 17th centuries, focusing mainly on paintings. Her pioneering assertion that Japanese mandalas follow Chinese texts on sacred geography will change the way most scholars look at the use of this ritual and sacred art...The book is readable and beautifully presented to the nonspecialist. For the specialist in the fields of religion and art, Buddhism, Asian religions, and comparative religions, ten Grotenhuis presents many avenues for further research. General readers and all academic levels. - L.L. Lam-Easton, California State University, Northridge -- Choice, October 1999, vol. 37, no. 2
From most studies on this subject we get the view that mandalas originated in the Indian context and spread to China and Japan. What sets this study apart is the exploration of a Chinese, pre-Buddhist origin for the East Asian concept of mandala. Ten Grotenhuis (Harvard and Boston Univ.) examines the mandalas of Pure Land Buddhism, Esoteric Buddhism, and Shintoism from the eighth to 17th centuries, focusing mainly on paintings. Her pioneering assertion that Japanese mandalas follow Chinese texts on sacred geography will change the way most scholars look at the use of this ritual and sacred art...The book is readable and beautifully presented to the nonspecialist. For the specialist in the fields of religion and art, Buddhism, Asian religions, and comparative religions, ten Grotenhuis presents many avenues for further research. General readers and all academic levels. - L.L. Lam-Easton, California State University, Northridge -- Choice, October 1999, vol. 37, no. 2
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is a fascinating and accessible book.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Ten Grotenhuis: Japans Mandalas Pa (Paperback)
Professor ten Grotenhuis' book deserves a wide audience. Anyone interested in religious art will be delighted to find images of exceptional beauty illustrating a readable yet authoritative introduction to the worlds of the Japanese mandala. Specialists will be equally delighted to find that ten Grotenhuis offers engaging, fruitful new ways of thinking about these pictures, for instance by placing Buddhist images in the context of pre-Buddhist Chinese texts.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Circular Reasoning,
By Crazy Fox (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Ten Grotenhuis: Japans Mandalas Pa (Paperback)
Art History or Religious Studies? General audience or specialists? "Japanese Mandalas" has its cake and eats it too, for it is wonderfully written to appeal to both the curious beginner and the enthusiastic initiate. And as a book it is both a detailed and well thought-out discussion of Japan's amazingly complex diagrams of sacred geometry and geography as art objects--categories and types, materials and media, aesthetic value and cultural importance--AND a carefully-researched and thought-provoking exploration of their religious symbolism, ritual significance, and spiritual depth. The overall tone is also appropriately scholarly and objective without being reductive or dry and pedantic, and a precarious balance is deftly maintained between generality and specificity--and believe me, when it comes to mandalas it's easy to lose the forest for the trees and vice versa.
The author aptly divides mandalas in Japan into three categories: Esoteric, Pure Land, and the Kami-Worshiping tradition (avoiding the anachronistic term "Shinto"). This includes the Taizokai and Kongokai Mandalas of Shingon and Tendai Buddhism as well as variants focusing on specific deities or sets of deities, works depicting Amida's Pure Land like the Taima Mandala, and sprawling landscapes depicting the Kasuga and Kumano Shrines and their complex weave of what might seem to us like disparate religious traditions. This in itself is impressive, but Grotenhuis also convincingly and counter-intuitively demonstrates how these three varieties are interrelated and even inter-referential. Highly innovative and insightful considerations of the Indian and Chinese antecedents for the mandalas are also given and elaborated with properly nuanced caution and reserve, and the author's freshly original look at concepts of sacred geography, social ranking, and city-planning in pre-Buddhist China as these inform the design and imagery of all three mandala types is eye-opening and very much as believable as it is unorthodox. The book is also profusely illustrated, as is of course warranted by the subject matter. The twenty-two color plates, besides being intrinsically beautiful, are clarity itself. The 104 black & white illustrations also get the job done for the most part. Yes, for the most part. That said, it must be remembered that many of these mandala are large, expansive works filled to the brim with a profusion of delicately fine details; most of them are also centuries-old and more or less worn down and abraded here and there if not everywhere. Reducing these in size is bad enough but a necessary evil, but then reproducing them in shades of gray sometimes makes it really hard to see what the heck's going on in the picture even if you have reasonably good eyesight and kind of already know what you're looking for (two assumptions the publishers shouldn't be taking for granted, at that). Then again, printing every illustration in color would shoot the price of this book through the roof, so it's hard to say what the solution is exactly. One way Grotenhuis gets around this problem is the inclusion of detailed close-ups, but she tends to make less and less use of these as we get to the shrine mandalas--and this is about where you'd want them the most, maddeningly enough. In a few cases one gets a guided tour of millimeter-sized dark gray blurs against a slightly darker gray background. Whew. Still, I don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill. In the final analysis this is an excellent book both textually and visually and it should greatly appeal and be of use to anyone interested in Japanese Religions, Asian Art History, and/or Iconography, Geometry and Geography in Sacred Art as a whole.
5.0 out of 5 stars
a Treasure,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Ten Grotenhuis: Japans Mandalas Pa (Paperback)
A beautiful and very well written and illustrated book. The most helpful I have found on the subject. Definitely a must have item, if I had to choose only 10 books of my collection to keep this would easily make the cut. A treasure to own and a pleasure to read.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
