Explaining Pictures

Beginning with the claim that the popularization of Buddhism in the medieval period was a phenomenon of visual culture, this book reexamines the history of medieval Japanese Buddhism. It is an important groundbreaking work, and it treats Buddhist art as religious propaganda and pictorial storytelling as a form of popular culture in medieval Japan.

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Early Japanese Buddhism patronized the literate classes and remained a prerogative of the elite until the end of the twelfth century. With the fiscal and political decline of its aristocratic patrons, the Buddhist establishment turned to lay commoners and women - two groups previously excluded from the benefits of the Dharma - for financial support, using paintings to accommodate its new, and often subliterate, audiences. This type of preaching, known as etoki (pictorial decipherment), helped bridge the worlds of esoteric Buddhism and lay practice and reveals much about the role of art in the context of didactic storytelling and proselytization. Beginning with the provocative claim that the popularization of Buddhism in the medieval period was a phenomenon of visual culture, "Preaching with Pictures" reexamines the history (and historiography) of medieval Japanese Buddhism.
With theoretical sophistication and a full appreciation of the power of imagery to convey and control religious meaning, it investigates a range of aspects of etoki, including the particularly active role of itinerant nuns, whose performances were especially edifying to female audiences, as well as the visual hagiography of the reputed founder of Japanese Buddhism, the pictorial projections of Buddhist paradise and hell, and the explanation, through visual imagery, of sacred mountains. "Preaching with Pictures" is an important groundbreaking work, the first to treat Buddhist art as religious propaganda and pictorial storytelling as a form of popular culture in medieval Japan. A truly interdisciplinary study, it suggests fruitful avenues of discussion between art historians and historians of Japanese Buddhism.