Buddhism and Iconoclasm in East Asia: A History

256 Pages·2012·1.517 MB·English

by  Fabio Rambelli, Eric Reinders

Th e earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and fi nally
a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein)

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Preface
Th is book began in a rather casual and unpredictable way some 15 years ago. One
evening at dinner, aft er a long day spent listening to paper presentations at an
annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, we were musing on the fact
that many paper titles included words that implied a constructivistic approach,
such as “constructing,” “creating,” and “producing.” Even “de-constructing”
(an expression much present in conference papers back then) is predicated
on a previous “construction”; other common terms, such as “engendering”
and “embodying,” also presuppose more or less intentional acts of making.
Suddenly, all this struck us as slightly incongruous, because we were well aware
that a large portion of religious practice deals not with construction but rather
with d estruction . It occurred to us that destruction within the religious fi eld is
mostly the topic of news (as in acts of religious fundamentalism or terrorism),
and is usually reduced to actions of fanatics. Th ere exists a more specialized
academic literature on iconoclasm, but almost always limited to particular
Western cases. By inverting many of the conference paper titles—from creating
to destroying, doing to undoing, embodying to disembodying—we imagined
a whole catalogue of destruction. Destruction now showed us two faces: one
aimed at attacking religious institutions and representations, the other aimed at
creating and preserving them.
W e gradually developed a joint manuscript. We also decided to add “solo”
chapters, written by each of us according to our respective areas of expertise and
topics of interest. It became clear that our project could never be in any sense
exhaustive, as the fi eld of religious destruction in East Asia is vast and still largely
unexplored. Rather, since the beginning we set for ourselves the following aims.
First, we wanted to draw attention to phenomena of religious destruction
in East Asia that can be characterized as “iconoclastic” despite the received,
narrowly Eurocentric understanding of the term. In order to do so, we had to
expand the meaning of “iconoclasm” to include, literally, all forms of destruction
of religious objects; this was our second goal. Th ird, we wanted to show that
iconoclasm targets not just objects but also people—oft en according to the same
logic and by following the same rules. Fourth, we proposed (rather ambitiously),
a general catalogue of religious destruction, which, we hoped, may be useful also
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Preface ix
to study cases outside of the East Asian context. Finally, we envision the birth of
a new discipline, “Destruction Studies,” that would address any and all instances
of destruction within cultures.
A comment about our terminology is in order here. Some readers will be
puzzled, if not even annoyed, by our attempt to extend the term “iconoclasm”
to East Asia; aft er all, Paul Demiéville seems to have closed the issue several
decades ago when he wrote that destruction of sacred images in China was caused
mostly by economic reasons and not by intellectual concerns (Demiéville, 1974).
However, recent studies have emphasized the existence of a larger, pervasive
dimension of Western iconoclastic movements, as not simply the result of
doctrinal diatribes, but as complex phenomena related to economic, political,
and social issues as well; furthermore, all these issues also involved discourses
about the representation of the sacred. It is according to this new understanding
that we apply the term iconoclasm to East Asian religious history.
Th e word “iconoclasm” is rich with meaning and history, and it has come to
mean many diff erent things, in diff erent time periods and in diff erent disciplines.
We need to broaden the use of the term beyond certain historical associations
and disciplinary conventions, in an attempt to defi ne a trans-disciplinary
object of analysis. We employ the term also in consideration that, so far, there
is no better term. Aft er all, if we bracket for a moment the thick Byzantine and
Protestant connotations of the word, “iconoclasm” simply means “destruction
of sacred images” (and related sacred objects). We do introduce, however, the
term “hieroclasm” toward the end of the book, to point to a well-delimited
phenomenon, namely, the elimination of sacred value from formerly religious
artifacts once they are re-signifi ed as cultural relics or art.
In our usage, iconoclasm is a subset of the larger category d estruction .
Th ough some acts of destruction (of things and people) are so sad or horrifi c as
to demand not only the strongest criticism but also concerted eff orts (including
violent intervention) to prevent them, yet we do not in principle consider the
category “destruction” as negative, morbid, or evil. Th e destruction of objects
produces new meanings and practices, damaged things may become more
precious, and the dead continue to infl uence us. In many ways, destruction is
not the end of culture but one of the conditions of its possibility. Destruction i s
cultural activity. Let us not forget that production (of a wooden icon, say) always
involves some degree of destruction (of a tree).
Th e destruction of religious objects is a cultural practice that changes the
materiality or the meaning of the object involved, or both. Destruction and
damage of religious objects cause transformations of the semiotic status of those
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x Preface
objects. Operating on the materiality—on the body—of a sacred object aff ects
and modifi es its symbolic status—its meanings and functions in its cultural
contexts. In certain cases, communities are willing to dispose of objects they
consider no longer “sacred” or, at least, indispensable, to replace them either
with new objects of identical use or with totally diff erent objects carrying
identical “value” (see Barbier, 1994). Destruction or damage of objects may also
transform the status of the agents involved. In this respect, a promising new
avenue of research has been opened by a number of scholars who have addressed
acts of destruction (especially, the destruction of sacred objects) as ritual forms
and, more generally, as signifying practices. Natalie Zemon Davis, for example,
in her fascinating study of religious riots in premodern France, treated acts of
destruction of religious objects as “texts” with an internal logic that can “be ‘read’
as fruitfully as a diary, a political tract, a sermon, or a body of laws” (Davis, 1975,
pp. xvi–xvii). She showed that the violence of crowds against religious targets
is not simply something so profoundly irrational as to be beyond the scope of
research and interpretation. On the contrary, “violence, however cruel, [was]
not . . . random and limitless but [was] aimed [instead] at defi ned targets and
selected from a repertory of traditional punishments and forms of destruction”
(ibid., p. 154).
Th e destruction of sacred objects in China and Japan gives a diff erent picture
of East Asian history and Buddhism. For instance, thinking about religious
phenomena such as Christian missions as (among other things) traditions of
destruction changes the historical narratives. In the case of Japan, to see the ways
in which religious institutions presented visions of incessant cosmic struggle
underlying concrete historical events off ers a rather diff erent picture of Japanese
Buddhism. We are not aiming for an exhaustive account, something that would
be impossible anyways. Our aim is both more modest and more ambitious than
that. It is more modest in the sense that we simply hope to start a discussion on
the relations between Buddhist, its materiality, and instances of religious violence
and destruction. It is also more ambitious, however, because we are gesturing
toward some kind of generalized theory of meaningful destruction. In the book,
we focus on particular instances because the specifi city and concreteness of acts
of iconoclasm require a case-by-case approach. However, we shall also step back
from the particulars and seek a cross-fertilization of theoretical approaches to
destruction in culture. Th is book seeks to chart out variations in the fi eld of
iconoclasm in East Asia. It also deliberately addresses the boundaries or gray
areas around the central concepts of iconoclasm. An interdisciplinary and cross-
cultural examination of these and other issues will enable us to formulate some
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Preface xi
hypotheses on the mechanisms of symbolic destruction in religious and cultural
phenomena. As we address a larger audience than Buddhist studies and East
Asian religions specialists, we have tried to reduce the use of primary sources
to the minimum indispensable, and we quote from translations whenever
possible.
Let us now look at the structure of the book. It is divided into three parts, in
an ideal itinerary from the more concrete (material objects) to the more abstract
(theories about cultural value and destruction), from Buddhology (the material
dimension of Buddhism), to East Asian historical and cultural contexts (Japan,
China, and museums) and to cultural analysis in general. Th e fi rst part, “Stuff :
Materiality and Fragility of Dharma,” lays out the main conceptual framework of
the book. Chapter 1, “Buddhist Objects, Buddhist Bodies—An Outline,” presents
an overview of the fi eld of Buddhist materiality and the keen awareness, within it,
of its fragility and the ever-present possibility of destruction. We draw attention
to the enormous importance of material objects for not just Buddhist practice,
but also for the conceptualization of Buddhist doctrines; this importance is well
indicated by the sheer number of objects directly involved in the discourses and
practices of Buddhists throughout the ages. Th e chapter explores the entangled
connections between the need for objects (in order to think and act in Buddhist
terms) and the uneasiness toward such a need. We also discuss the pervasive
rhetoric of animation, according to which Buddhist sacred images are real
presences of Buddhas; this rhetoric contributed to blurring the lines separating
objects and human bodies, something that aff ected also the ways in which
iconoclastic attacks were carried out. However, Buddhists were also very aware
that objects are perishable: subject to wear-and-tear, unintentional damage, and
intentional acts of destruction. Indeed, Buddhists also believed that Buddhism
itself was going to disappear one day, at the end of the Final Age of Dharma (Ch.
mofa, Jp. mappō) , and that the end would be accelerated by excessive attention to
materiality. In the fi nal section of the chapter we discuss the concept of iconoclasm
and scholarly developments in the fi eld that address not only theological issues
but also social background, historical context, politics, and economics.
We look at these new developments, with their wider perspectives, to ground
our own perspective on instances of destruction of sacred objects in East Asia.
In particular, we criticize the received idea that there was not iconoclasm in East
Asia because the intellectual traditions there did not formulate specifi c religious
injunctions against image worship; we argue instead that destruction of sacred
images is a meaningful act per se that questions anyway the status of the objects
(especially, their sacredness) it targets.
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