Customer Reviews

Ten Grotenhuis: Japans Mandalas Pa

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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.

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.

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.