Buddhism-Image As Icon, Image As Art by Charles Lachman

Buddhism—Image as Icon, Image as Art
Oxford Handbooks Online

Charles Lachman
The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts
Edited by Frank Burch Brown
Print Publication Date: Feb 2014 Subject: Religion, Art, Buddhism, Architecture
Online Publication Date: Feb 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195176674.013.026
Abstract and Keywords
Buddhism is characterized by considerable geographical and doctrinal diversity, but one

feature shared by its many disparate strands is an emphasis on the ritual importance of
images. These images constitute the core of the category of “Buddhist art” as it is
commonly understood, but there is a significant difference between how such objects are
viewed by Buddhist practitioners and how they are viewed by art historians and scholars
of religion. This chapter investigates the role and status of images in Buddhism
(beginning with the so-called “aniconic controversy”), the various critical approaches that
have been used to interpret them, and the inherent tension between these two
perspectives: the tension, that is, between images as “icons” and images as “art.” It also
considers some of the ways in which such contemporary artists as Atta Kim and Montien
Boonma have engaged Buddhist ideas and themes in their practice.
Keywords: art, Buddhism, Buddhist art, image, icon, aniconic
27.1 Introduction
THE Buddhist religion, based on the insight and teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (the
“Buddha” or Enlightened One, ca. 560-480 BCE) originated in northern India some
twenty-five hundred years ago. Although Buddhism grew only slowly in the first several
centuries following the Buddha’s death, it eventually flourished and spread throughout
the Indian sub-continent and beyond, becoming—and remaining—a major religious
tradition in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand, China, Tibet, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and
elsewhere. By the twelfth century, however, it had virtually disappeared in the land of its
birth.
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Buddhism today is characterized by considerable geographical and doctrinal diversity, but

one feature shared by its many disparate strands is an emphasis on the ritual importance
of images. Indeed, regardless of the country or the sectarian “school,” the most
commonly performed activities at virtually all Buddhist temples center on burning
incense, making prostrations, and worshipping before painted and sculpted
representations of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. These images constitute the core of the
category of “Buddhist art” as it is commonly understood, but a fundamental issue that
will be taken up below concerns some of the significant differences between how such
objects are viewed by Buddhist practitioners and how they are viewed by art historians.
Thus, what follows focuses on the role and status of images in Buddhism, on the various
art-historical approaches that have been used to interpret them, and on the inherent
tension between these two perspectives. It also considers some of the ways in which
contemporary artists have engaged Buddhist ideas and themes in their practice.
27.2 Images in Early Buddhism and the

(p. 368)
“Aniconic” Controversy
The first several hundred years after the death of the historical Buddha Sakyamuni in the
early fifth century BCE remain something of a mystery, since no Buddhist texts, ritual
objects, or other material remains from this period have survived.1 Dating to the first
century BCE, gateways and railings made of stone and decorated with relief carvings and
sculptures comprise the earliest extant examples of Buddhist art or architecture. These
structures were built to enclose the large funerary mounds (known as stupas) that were
the primary monuments of Buddhist monasteries. According to tradition, such mounds
were originally constructed to hold the physical remains of the Buddha, which had been
divided up following his cremation.2
These early stupa gateways and railings have several distinctive characteristics. For one,
the stone is often deployed in a way that clearly mimics construction in wood or other
perishable materials, such as thatch or brick, and thus suggesting why earlier structures
failed to survive. Secondly, although many of the carved reliefs depict themes from the
life (and previous lives) of the Buddha, no representations of the Buddha in human form
appear among them; instead, the Buddha is indicated by a wide range of symbols or
signs. For example, a scene might show followers of the Buddha clustered around a large
wheel, or an empty seat under a tree. In the former case, this could represent the Buddha
delivering a sermon, with the wheel serving as a symbol of the Buddha’s teachings
(commonly referred to as the Wheel of the Law); in the latter instance, the seat and tree
refer to the Buddha’s enlightenment experience as he sat in meditation under the bodhi
tree.
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The practice of avoiding the representation of the Buddha in anthropomorphic form and
relying instead on the use of such symbols as the empty seat or wheel (among others),
has been referred to for more than a century as “aniconism.” The question of why there
was this artistic avoidance in the first place has been answered in various ways. Several
scholars have seen this as the natural outcome of a religious tradition that emphasizes
emptiness and the ultimate impermanence of all phenomena. More recently, the very idea
of aniconism has been challenged, most vociferously by Susan L. Huntington.3
Huntington argues that many so-called aniconic narratives are actually depictions of
practitioners worshipping at sacred places associated with the life of Sakyamuni Buddha,
rather than depictions of actual events that transpired during his lifetime. Vidya Dehejia,
meanwhile, has challenged many of Huntington’s conclusions, while proposing her own
theory of “multivalance” or multiple meanings, positing that the seat or wheel, for
example, are not simply “symbols” of the Buddha but simultaneous emblems of the
Buddha’s presence, of a sacred site, and of Buddhist ideals or attributes.4
The debate about the nature of early Buddhist narrative art is ongoing, but regardless of
how one assesses aniconism, the surviving physical record makes clear that the absence
of anthropomorphic images of the Buddha represents but a brief moment in (p. 369) the
broad sweep of Buddhist art history. Indeed, by the first century CE, the practice of
making Buddha images had become common in India, and would also become the norm in
every region to which Buddhism later traveled.
27.3 The Image of the Buddha

The question of why was it not until roughly five hundred years after the death of
Shakyamuni Buddha that his image became widespread remains unanswered. Just as the
motivations that underlie the lack of anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha in
early reliefs are seemingly impossible to recover, the impulses that led to the eventual
emergence of such representations are equally murky. The most influential theories
concerning the origins of the Buddha image were articulated by Alfred Foucher (1865–
1952), a French archaeologist who was also central to the formulation of the theory of
aniconism. In a seminal article first published in 1905, Foucher proposed that the
sculptural depiction of the Buddha originated in the region of Gandhara (an area covered
today by parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan), under the influence of Bactria and other
nearby Greek colonies. As he wrote about a famous standing Buddha from Gandhara:
Without doubt you will appreciate its dreamy, and even somewhat effeminate,
beauty; but at the same time you cannot fail to be struck by its Hellenic
character….Your European eyes have in this case no need of the help of any
Indianist, in order to appreciate with full knowledge the orb of the nimbus, the
waves of the hair, the straightness of the profile, the classical shape of the eyes,
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the sinuous bow of the mouth, the supple and hollow folds of the draperies. All
these technical details, and still more perhaps the harmony of the whole, indicate
in a material, palpable and striking manner the hand of an artist from some Greek
studio.5
Foucher (and others) used the term Greco-Buddhist to denote this hybrid style, though it
is clear even from the short passage above that the “Greco” influence is seen by him as
the driving force behind its origins.
Quite apart from Foucher’s condescension towards Indian artists and undisguised air of
cultural superiority, several scholars challenged his account of how (and where) the
image of the Buddha originated. Chief among these opponents was A.K. Coomaraswamy
(1877–1947), a prolific writer who was born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), then raised and
educated in England, and who served for 40 years as the first Keeper of Indian Art at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In a brief but important article on “The Indian Origin of the
Buddha Image,” Coomaraswamy states at the outset that he has found it necessary “to
abandon the commonly accepted theory of the Greek origin of the Buddha image.”
Having studied the so-called Mathuran type of Buddha and Bodhisattva figure, executed
in a style both distinct from that of Gandhara and also clearly related to earlier Indian art,
Coomaraswamy concludes that “the Buddha image is of Indian origin” [original
emphasis]. He goes on to claim that “the Gandhara and (p. 370) Mathura types were
created locally about the same time, in response to a necessity created by the internal
development of the Buddhism common to both areas” and, moreover, that “the Mathura
type is the main source” of later developments in India.6
A version of Coomaraswamy’s main argument—namely, that the Gandharan and

Mathuran images of the Buddha evolved essentially independently and simultaneously—
can be found in most contemporary scholarship that treats the question of origins.
However, his supporting argument that the image of the Buddha emerged in response to
“internal” necessity is less widely held. As suggested above, there is still no clear
scholarly consensus either about why the earliest known phase of Buddhist art eschewed
anthropomorphic images or why in the next phase they became ubiquitous. Also, for all of
the stylistic differences between the Gandharan and Mathuran representations of the
Buddha, the two types share a core of important iconographic features: the presence of a
halo-like mandorla; elongated earlobes (a sign of the Buddha’s renunciation of the
material world); a pronounced cranial protuberance (or ushnisha); a tuft between the
eyes (urna); the wearing of simple monastic robes; and so on. Moreover, the two types
share a certain conceptual similarity, in the sense that both representations are more
concerned with evoking a spiritual ideal than with capturing anatomical reality.
Ultimately, it was the iconographic features first developed in India, rather than the
stylistic features of any one region, that proved to be most constant as the image of the
Buddha was transmitted to other lands. In general, as these foreign sculptural
conceptions interacted with native traditions, there was a tendency for local aesthetic
preferences to gradually assert themselves, resulting in the creation of distinct national
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styles. This is readily apparent in China, as an example, where early Buddha images (such
as the well-known seated figure in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, or the
colossal Buddha of Cave XX at Yungang) clearly hew quite closely to Indian prototypes.
Slowly, however, images of the Buddha become much more Sinicized, taking on Chinese
facial features and wearing the robes of a Confucian scholar rather than those of an
Indian monk, while still retaining the iconographic features first witnessed at Gandhara
and Mathura.
This process essentially repeated itself each time Buddhist images began arriving
someplace new and in many respects parallels the situation of Buddhism more generally.
That is, just as Buddhist practice in Thailand, for example, is very different from Buddhist
practice in Korea, despite important and fundamental commonalities, so, too, are a Thai
Buddha image and a Korean Buddha image each utterly distinctive and recognizable. But
while differing significantly in terms of style, they nonetheless exhibit a shared
iconography that harkens back to the earliest Indian paradigms.
27.4 Living Icons

As Robert H. Sharf, the prominent scholar of Buddhism, has noted, in East Asia (as
elsewhere) “depictions of Buddhist deities are everywhere: in homes, on street corners, in
shops, restaurants, and offices, in cars and taxis, on billboards and student backpacks.
(p. 371) And, of course, Buddhist images abound in temples and monasteries, where a
single complex might house hundreds or even thousands of images of all shapes and
sizes.”7 In order to better understand why images came to figure this prominently in
Buddhism as it developed and expanded, it will be useful to consider some of the specific
functions and roles that images played in Buddhist traditions.
Although the sutras (or sacred texts) of early Buddhism are surprisingly silent about the
use of images, one telling anecdote about the “original” image of the Buddha is preserved
in several sources. According to this well-known legend, a sculpture of the Buddha,
carved from sandalwood, was commissioned by King Udayana so that he could gaze upon
the sacred form of the Buddha while the latter was off preaching to his mother in the
heaven of Indra. This popular account also reports that the Buddha’s disciple
Maudgalyayana transported thirty-two craftsmen up to the heavenly realm so that they
could observe the special marks of the Buddha firsthand, thereby insuring the
representational accuracy of the image they created. When the Buddha eventually
returned to the earth, King Udayana’s statue rose into the air to greet him of its own
accord, and the Buddha proclaimed that it would one day help to transmit his teachings.8
This idea of a sculptural image being endowed with supernatural abilities is widely
attested in Buddhist history. In Japan, such feats often figure prominently in the founding
tales of temples and shrines, such as the Kokawa-dera, which is said to have been built on
the spot where a statue of a thousand-armed Kannon miraculously materialized in a
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hunter’s rustic hut. Buddhist literature is also filled with accounts that ascribe protective
and apotropaic powers to images of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. A Chinese collection of
miscellaneous anecdotes compiled in the seventh century, for instance, tells of a gang of
thieves who pilfered miniature bronze Buddhas from local temples. After melting them
down to make currency, the thieves died howling, “and their bodies were found to be
scorched and split as if they had been burned to death.”9 The diary of the famous monk-
pilgrim Xuanzang (600–664) also describes magical images that he encountered on his
journey to India, such as the white marble Buddha that confronted a band of robbers and
so frightened them that they repented on the spot and became champions of the faith.10
In addition to providing the paradigm of the miraculous image, the story of King
Udayana’s statue exemplifies another highly important concept in Buddhism, namely that
of the “living” image. This notion is one that is also widely attested, and Buddhist
literature is filled with accounts of practitioners behaving towards images as they would
toward living beings. The “living image” can also be associated with the important ritual
known commonly as the eye-opening ceremony. As the name implies, this rite of
consecration entails painting in the eyes (or carving the pupils) of an image in order to
bring it to life: up until this act is performed, in fact, the image has no particular sacred
value and is not treated with any great reverence, and only after the eye-opening does it
become an object of worship. Historically, one of the most famous consecrations was that
of the Great Buddha of Todaiji, conducted in Nara in 752. Reportedly, some ten thousand
monks participated in the ceremony, and the emperor (p. 372) himself stood atop a ladder
and wielded the large brush that was used to complete the eyes and thus “activate” the
Buddha.11 Not merely a popular practice of the distant past, eye-opening consecrations
continue to play an important role in Buddhist communities around the world.12
27.5 Art and Icon

In light of the central role that miraculous, “living” images play in Buddhism, it is
somewhat puzzling to notice that this aspect was almost completely unaccounted for by
scholars until recent times. Several factors might be adduced in searching to explain this
curious silence. One would be what the renowned Buddhologist Gregory Schopen has
characterized as “Protestant presuppositions” in the study of Buddhism; that is, a
tendency on the part of many Western scholars to privilege textual sources over
archaeological materials and over the actual practice of Buddhism as it can be observed
in the world.13 A corollary to such attitudes, and also quite evident among earlier
scholarship, in particular, is the notion that image worship in Buddhism bordered on
idolatry and reflected an unsophisticated and “primitive” worldview that was at odds with
the philosophical sophistication of Buddhist literature. Thus, a kind of scholarly dualism
evolved, opposing “real” or “pure” Buddhism (as found primarily in certain canonical
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texts) and “popular” Buddhism (as practiced by actual Buddhists, who were largely
viewed as credulous and naive).
A similar kind of dualism characterizes most of the early art-historical investigations of

Buddhism, which tend to implicitly oppose “real” art (comprising a small number of
sculptures and paintings that correspond to accepted Western categories of aesthetic
value) and “popular” art (the vast majority of Buddhist images which, to the extent that
they are even noticed, are deemed deficient in aesthetic and historical value). These
assumptions were so pervasive and influential that even an “enlightened” scholar of the
stature of Ernest Fenellosa (1846–1908) could not escape their effects. Fenellosa was
extremely knowledgeable about Asian art, having served as the director of the Japanese
Imperial Museum in Tokyo, and as curator of Oriental art at the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. (He was also a Buddhist convert, and his ashes are buried at a temple in Kyoto).
Despite this background, his discussion of Buddhist art in Epochs of Chinese and
Japanese Art, a magisterial two-volume survey published in 1912 and the first of its kind,
draws comparisons to Western art at every turn: Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo; the
Greeks, Egyptians, Aztecs, and Persians; all of these artists and traditions—and more—
are invoked in order to confirm that Buddhist painting and sculpture can, at times, rise to
the level of Art.14 While later art historians would increasingly approach the topic of
Buddhist art with greater recognition of its inherent characteristics and values and
without searching for the validating echoes of Europe or classical antiquity, the focus
until relatively recently remained squarely centered on style and iconography.
From an art-historical point of view, such analysis is important, of course, but it

(p. 373)
rarely allows the function and ritual status of Buddhist images to enter into the equation.
Some scholars, however, have questioned whether it is even possible for art history to
account for the notion of “living” icons. As Donald McCallum writes in Zenkoji and its
Icon:
Throughout this study I refer to art, art history, and art historians, but I must
confess great unease with regard to the applicability of the term “art” to the types
of icons with which we are concerned. Of course, this is a broader issue within the
study of religious imagery, since obviously aesthetic motivations were not primary
in the production of religious paintings and sculptures….In the case of monuments
that are universally recognized as “great art,” there is an all-but-irresistible
tendency to shift the focus from religious to aesthetic factors, to offer explications
in terms of “art.” The Zenkoji-related icons lack such dramatic aesthetic qualities,
and thus more easily accommodate a different approach. However, I would like to
generalize this methodology to the degree that we can begin to look at all icons
outside of the context of “art” as an aesthetic category.15
Some of the implications of such a methodological approach—of dispensing with art as an

aesthetic category in the discussion of Buddhist images—will be returned to below.
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27.6 Art and Expression

As witnessed above, most critical examinations of images in Buddhism focus on the
nature and status of the object, and rarely devote much attention to the makers of those
objects or to the motivation for their production beyond the obvious circumstance of
patronage and commissioning. In part, this can be attributed to the fact that far and away
the vast majority of Buddhist images have been made by unknown or unrecorded
sculptors and painters (as is also true for much of the world’s religious art). When
anything is known about the creation of an image—and this is so in only a very small
minority of instances—the information is typically derived from an inscription of some
sort, many of which are brief or only partly decipherable. Accordingly, and with a few
notable exceptions, relatively little is known about many individual Buddhist artists or
their motivation for producing artwork.
Historically, perhaps the greatest exception to this tendency towards anonymity is

provided by the example of Chan (Zen) painting, which in Western scholarship is one of
the most noticed and celebrated forms of Buddhist art, and one of the only categories
that can be associated with a substantial number of named artists.16 Even if detailed
biographical information is still difficult to come by in most instances, the fact that
specific paintings can be linked with specific painters seems to have made Chan/Zen
painting more approachable to Western art historians. That is, for scholars whose
disciplinary methods are rooted in the concept of the individual creative genius, the
Chan/Zen narrative proved familiar.
But as various scholars have pointed out in recent years, the general Western
(p. 374)
understanding of Zen was based largely on misperceptions and misapprehensions. As

Robert Sharf sums it up.
[T]‌hose aspects of Zen most attractive to the Occident—the emphasis on spiritual

experience and the devaluation of institutional forms—were derived in large part
from Occidental sources. Like Narcissus, Western enthusiasts failed to recognize
their own reflection in the mirror being held out to them.17
In many ways, these comments are also relevant to the way in which Zen painting has
been understood in the West, in that the art-historical emphasis on the supposed self-
expressivity of Chan/Zen painting and on the function of painting as a vehicle for spiritual
creativity are ideas that similarly derive primarily from Occidental sources: when critics
and art historians first peered into the mirror of Chan/Zen painting, they saw (with
approval) analogues of Modernism and Abstract Expressionism reflected back at them.
While the qualities so admired in Chan/Zen ink painting (directness, spontaneity) have
been aptly linked to doctrinal values, there is no evidence to support the contention that
these characteristics were linked with the act of painting at the time of their execution. In
short, the notion of employing art as a vehicle for religious self-expression is
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anachronistic when attributed to Chan/Zen painting, just as it is with regard to virtually

all other forms of Buddhist art.
If, historically, images in Buddhism were primarily made to serve specific ritual functions
and purposes, in recent decades a significant number of artists have in varying ways
engaged Buddhist philosophical ideas and/or imagery in creating works that fall outside
the parameters of traditional Buddhist worship. The ongoing “On-Air” series by the
Korean photographer Atta Kim (b. 1956), the lost-wax “Melting Void” installations of the
Thai artist Montien Boonma (1953–2000), or the multi-media “Nirvana” by the Japanese
video artist Mariko Mori (b. 1967), to cite but a few prominent examples, engage such
fundamental Buddhist concepts as impermanence and personal transformation in diverse
and often surprising ways.18 One thing these works have in common is that they were
expressly created to be viewed in a gallery or museum, rather than, say, a Buddhist
temple. In other words, unlike the vast bulk of traditional Buddhist images, they were
conceived from the start as “art” objects rather than as “icons”; ironically, however, to
date few histories of Buddhist art seem willing or able to accommodate such
unconventional expressions within their boundaries.
27.7 The End of Buddhist Art History?

Broadly speaking, art historians have typically treated “Buddhist art” as a
straightforward and self-evident category (primarily comprising paintings and sculptures
of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and related figures). As the discussion above has suggested,
(p. 375) however, this position has increasingly come under attack from practitioners of
Buddhism and historians of religion (among others) who have challenged the
appropriateness of invoking the concept of “art” to refer to the animated Buddhist icon.
The conflict between (secular) art object and (sacred) icon, is certainly not unique to
Buddhism, and has arisen in connection with numerous forms of religious art. Indeed,
this is precisely the issue that prompted the Archbishop of Westminster to ask the
National Gallery in London in 2008 to transfer Piero della Francesca’s “Baptism of
Christ” to his cathedral. “It is a mistake to treat it as a work of art,” said the Archbishop,
“it is a work of faith and piety.”19
In some sense, it could be argued that the issue here is one of semantics, though it also
points to the importance of context and framing in determining an object’s meaning: a
sculpture of a Buddha (or a Renaissance “Baptism” for that matter) addresses a very
different audience and also functions very differently when it is removed from a site of
worship and placed in a museum. From this perspective, in fact, it might be fair to say
that the sculpture on a temple altar and the sculpture in a museum vitrine are not the
“same” object in different locales, but rather different objects all together. To borrow
Wittgenstein’s famous dictum which, though not originally meant to apply to visual
artifacts, is apposite here: the meaning is the use.
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Ultimately, what is at stake in this debate? Why and to whom does it matter if an image is
called an icon or a work of art? For Buddhist believers, certainly, this is essentially a
difference without a distinction: “art” and “icon” are conventional designations, born of
discursive consciousness and a failure to recognize that both are ultimately illusory,
“empty” categories. For art historians and historians of religion, however, these
distinctions have a direct and significant impact both on what constitutes the object of
study, and on how such study will be carried out. By its very nature, a method that
focuses almost exclusively on style, iconography, and aesthetics will tend to understand
Buddhist images in terms of Western categories of value, while also overlooking whole
categories of objects that lie beyond the pale of art. Such an approach, which also tends
to privilege historical value, will also overlook centuries of production: Robert E. Fisher’s
popular survey text, Buddhist Art and Architecture, for instance, does not include a single
object more recent than the eighteenth century, while Denise Patry Leidy’s more recent
The Art Of Buddhism ends in the nineteenth.20
If traditional Buddhist art history has essentially been rooted in exclusion—ignoring

objects that are too new, too naive, too crude, too derivative, and so on—an increasing
number of scholars have been taking a somewhat different approach by adapting the
paradigm of “visual culture” as a useful way to proceed without simply perpetuating the
presumptions of earlier generations. The visual culture model, which originally evolved
from concerns about incorporating new media and modes of representation into the
framework of art history, approaches visuality in a neutral way, one that attempts to erase
distinctions between supposedly high and low forms of expression. In the context of
Buddhism, this method makes it possible to look at objects in multiple ways, and also to
incorporate into the field of study the numberless images that have been historically
invisible. In Ordinary Images, for example, Stanley K. Abe very clearly demonstrates the
(p. 376) valuable insights that can be derived from the close analysis of Buddhist objects
that were long ignored precisely because they were deemed to be ordinary, and thus
unworthy of attention.21 While it is too soon, perhaps, to declare the end of Buddhist art
history, all indications are that it will be strongly challenged if not eclipsed in the future
by the narrative of Buddhist visual culture that is slowly being written.
References
Abe, Stanley K. Ordinary Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Baas, Jacquelynn. Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet
to Today. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Brinker, Helmut. Zen in the Art of Painting. New York: Arkana Books, 1987.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda. “The Indian Origin of the Buddha Image.” Journal of the
American Oriental Society 56 (1926): 165–170.
Davis, Richard H. Lives of Indian Images. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Page 10 of 14

Davis, Whitney. A General Theory of Visual Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2011.
Dehejia, Vidya. Discourse in Early Buddhist Art: Visual Narratives of India. New Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal, 1997.
Fenollosa, Ernest F. Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An Outline History of East
Asiatic Design, rev. ed., 2 vols. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912.
Fisher, Robert E. Buddhist Art and Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.
Foucher, Alfred. The Beginnings of Buddhist Art. Translated by L. A. Thomas and F. W.

Thomas. Paris: P. Geuthner, 1917.
Gombrich, Richard. “The Consecration of Buddhist Images.” The Journal of Asian Studies
26.1 (1966): 23–36.
Horton, Sarah J. Living Buddhist Statues in Early Medieval and Modern Japan. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Huntington, Susan L. “Early Buddhist Art and the Theory of Aniconism.” Art Journal 49.4
(1990): 401–8.
Itzkoff, Dave. “Archbishop Says Picture Belongs in a Church.” New York Times (Arts,
Briefly), November 29, 2008.
Jacob, Mary-Jane. Grain of Emptiness: Buddhism-Inspired Contemporary Art. New York:

Rubin Museum of Art, 2010.
Kim, Atta. On-Air Eighthours. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009.
Leidy, Denise Patry. The Art of Buddhism: An Introduction to its History and
(p. 378)
Meaning. Boston: Shambhala, 2008.
Lopez, Donald S., Jr., ed. Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under
Colonialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Mariko Mori. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998.
McCallum, Donald F. Zenkoji and its Icon: A Study in Medieval Japanese Religious Art.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Okudaira, Hideo. Narrative Picture Scrolls. New York: Weatherhill, 1973.
Poshyananda, Apinan. Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind. New York: Asia Society,
2003.
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Schopen, Gregory. Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the
Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India. Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 1997.
Sharf, Robert H., and Elizabeth Horton Sharf, eds. Living Images: Japanese Buddhist
Icons in Context. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Soper, Alexander C. Literary Evidence for Early Buddhist Art in China. Ascona,
Switzerland: Artibus Asiae, 1959.
Weidner, Marsha, ed. Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism 850–1850.
Lawrence, KS: Spencer Museum of Art, 1994.
Notes:
(1) . The paucity of Buddhist remains for this early period is not so startling when
considered in a broader context. As Frederick Asher has noted, not “a single material
remain survives from the entire 1,600-year period” in India between the end of Harappan
culture and the reign of King Ashoka in the third century BCE. Frederick Asher, “On
Mauryan Art,” in A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture, ed. Rebecca M. Brown and
Deborah S. Hutton (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 421.
(2) . Illustrations of many of the works referred to in this chapter can be found in Denise
Patry Leidy, The Art of Buddhism: An Introduction to Its History and Meaning (Boston:
Shambhala, 2008).
(3) . Susan L. Huntington, “Early Buddhist Art and the Theory of Aniconism,” Art Journal
49, no. 4 (1990): 401–408
(4) . Vidya Dehejia, Discourse in Early Buddhist Art: Visual Narratives of India (New
Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1997).
(5) . Alfred Foucher, The Beginnings of Buddhist Art, trans. L.A. Thomas and F.W. Thomas
(Paris: P. Geuthner, 1917), 151.
(6) . Ananda Coomaraswamy, “The Indian Origins of the Buddha Image,” Journal of the
American Oriental Society 56 (1926): 165–166.
(7) . Robert H. Sharf, “Prolegomenon to the Study of Japanese Icons,” in Living Images:
Japanese Buddhist Icons in Context, ed. Robert H. Sharf and Elizabeth Horton Sharf
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1.
(8) . For more on the King Udayana image, see Marsha Weidner, ed., Latter Days of the
Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism 850–1850 (Lawrence, KS: Spencer Museum of Art,
1994), 221–225.
Page 12 of 14

(9) . Alexander C. Soper, Literary Evidence for Early Buddhist Art in China (Ascona,
Switzerland: Artibus Asiae, 1959), 58.
(10) . Si-yu-ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, trans. Samuel Beal (1884; repr.,
New York: Paragon Books, 1968), 1:103.
(11) . Sarah J. Horton, Living Buddhist Statues in Early Medieval and Modern Japan (New
York: Macmillan Palgrave, 2007), 12.
(12) . See Richard Gombrich, “The Consecration of Buddhist Images,” The Journal of
Asian Studies 26, no. 1 (1966): 23–36.
(13) . Gregory Schopen, “Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of

Indian Buddhism,” in Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press, 1997), 1–22.
(14) . Ernest F. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An Outline History of East
Asiatic Design, rev. ed., 2 vols. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912), see esp. vol. 1, 28–
168.
(15) . Donald F. McCallum, Zenkoji and Its Icon: A Study in Medieval Japanese Religious
Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5–6.
(16) . See Helmut Brinker, Zen in the Art of Painting (New York: Arkana, 1987), for a
convenient introduction.
(17) . Robert H. Sharf, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism,” in Curators of the Buddha: The
Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 140.
(18) . See Atta Kim, On-Air Eighthours (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009); Apinan
Poshyananda, Montien Boonma: Temple of the Mind (New York: Asia Society, 2003); and
Mariko Mori (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998).
(19) . David Itzkoff, “Archbishop Says Picture Belongs in a Church,” The New York Times
November 29, 2008.
(20) . Robert E. Fisher, Buddhist Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson,
1993); Leidy, The Art of Buddhism.
(21) . Stanley K. Abe, Ordinary Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Page 13 of 14

Charles Lachman
Charles Lachman holds an M.A. in Buddhist Studies (McMaster) and a Ph.D. in East
Asian Studies (Toronto), and taught at York University and Dartmouth College prior
to joining the faculty at the University of Oregon, where he is chair of the History of
Art and Architecture department. In addition to teaching, he has curated numerous
exhibitions, among them “In the Eclipse of Angkor” (2009), “Buddhist
Visions” (2008), and “Elizabeth Keith in Korea” (2006). He is the author of
Evaluations of Sung Dynasty Painters of Renown (1990), The Ten Symbols of
Longevity (2006), A Way With Words: The Calligraphic Art of Jung Do-jun (2006), and
articles and essays in a variety of publications.
Page 14 of 14

Buddhism-Image As Icon, Image As Art by Charles Lachman

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Buddhism—Image as Icon, Image as Art

Oxford Handbooks Online

Abstract and Keywords

Buddhism is characterized by considerable geographical and doctrinal diversity, but one

Keywords: art, Buddhism, Buddhist art, image, icon, aniconic

Subscriber: University of North Carolina - Greensboro; date: 04 October 2018

Buddhism today is characterized by considerable geographical and doctrinal diversity, but

27.2 Images in Early Buddhism and the

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27.3 The Image of the Buddha

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A version of Coomaraswamy’s main argument—namely, that the Gandharan and

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27.4 Living Icons

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27.5 Art and Icon

Subscriber: University of North Carolina - Greensboro; date: 04 October 2018

A similar kind of dualism characterizes most of the early art-historical investigations of

From an art-historical point of view, such analysis is important, of course, but it

Some of the implications of such a methodological approach—of dispensing with art as an

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27.6 Art and Expression

Historically, perhaps the greatest exception to this tendency towards anonymity is

understanding of Zen was based largely on misperceptions and misapprehensions. As

[T]‌hose aspects of Zen most attractive to the Occident—the emphasis on spiritual

Subscriber: University of North Carolina - Greensboro; date: 04 October 2018

anachronistic when attributed to Chan/Zen painting, just as it is with regard to virtually

27.7 The End of Buddhist Art History?

Subscriber: University of North Carolina - Greensboro; date: 04 October 2018

If traditional Buddhist art history has essentially been rooted in exclusion—ignoring

Subscriber: University of North Carolina - Greensboro; date: 04 October 2018

Foucher, Alfred. The Beginnings of Buddhist Art. Translated by L. A. Thomas and F. W.

Jacob, Mary-Jane. Grain of Emptiness: Buddhism-Inspired Contemporary Art. New York:

Kim, Atta. On-Air Eighthours. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009.

Meaning. Boston: Shambhala, 2008.

Mariko Mori. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998.

Okudaira, Hideo. Narrative Picture Scrolls. New York: Weatherhill, 1973.

Subscriber: University of North Carolina - Greensboro; date: 04 October 2018

Subscriber: University of North Carolina - Greensboro; date: 04 October 2018

(13) . Gregory Schopen, “Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of

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Subscriber: University of North Carolina - Greensboro; date: 04 October 2018

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