Event

This talk analyzes the role of Buddhist maps in the construction and contestation of worldviews in medieval and early modern Japan. By attending to the ideological implications of objects of visual and material culture and their centrality to debates over the form of the world and Japan’s place in it, I argue for an alternative historiography of Japanese Buddhism and the importance of visual representation in religious discourse. Japan’s earliest world map, painted by a Buddhist monk in the 14th c., which depicts the Indian pilgrimage of a 7th c. Chinese Buddhist monk, was preserved for centuries in temples as a devotional object and transcribed by monks as an aid for meditative journeys to the distant lands of Buddhist origins. Yet the map continued to be copied, printed, and sold well into the late 19th c. with the world of early cosmological treatises augmented with geographical data from the latest European sources. It was not completely supplanted by the European world maps introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries and held its own against alternative visions of the world within the marketplace of Japanese print capitalism. The popularity of such a purposefully ahistorical religious geography long after European-style world maps were in common use reveals the unexamined but crucial role of the Buddhist imaginary in early modern debates over geography, cosmology, and cultural identity. This talk will show how, and by whom, such maps were deployed to defend a traditional Buddhist worldview in the face of European, Confucian, and Nativist critiques and to provide a starting point for religious and astronomical arguments -- articulated in texts, prints, models, and machines -- that appropriated rather than rejected new forms of knowledge.
* CEAS Humanities Colloquium