Word Embodied: The Jeweled Pagoda Mandalas in Japanese Buddhist Art (Harvard East Asian Monographs) - Hardcover

O’Neal, Halle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674983866 ISBN 13: 9780674983861

Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018

Synopsis

In this study of the Japanese jeweled pagoda mandalas, Halle O’Neal reveals the entangled realms of sacred body, beauty, and salvation. Much of the previous scholarship on these paintings concentrates on formal analysis and iconographic study of their narrative vignettes. This has marginalized the intriguing interplay of text and image at their heart, precluding a holistic understanding of the mandalas and diluting their full import in Buddhist visual culture. Word Embodied offers an alternative methodology, developing interdisciplinary insights into the social, religious, and artistic implications of this provocative entwining of word and image.

O’Neal unpacks the paintings’ revolutionary use of text as picture to show how this visual conflation mirrors important conceptual indivisibilities in medieval Japan. The textual pagoda projects the complex constellation of relics, reliquaries, scripture, and body in religious doctrine, practice, and art. Word Embodied also expands our thinking about the demands of viewing, recasting the audience as active producers of meaning and offering a novel perspective on disciplinary discussions of word and image that often presuppose an ontological divide between them. This examination of the jeweled pagoda mandalas, therefore, recovers crucial dynamics underlying Japanese Buddhist art, including invisibility, performative viewing, and the spectacular visualizations of embodiment.

About this title

About the Author

Halle O’Neal is Chancellor’s Fellow and Lecturer at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0674983866
• ISBN 13: 9780674983861
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 310