仏像に心を奪われるときWhen a Buddhist Statue Captures the Heart

I have seen a great many Buddhist statues across Japan, but the ones that truly captivate the heart are remarkably few. No one knows exactly how many Buddhist statues exist in Japan, but the estimate exceeds 300,000. That a country with no original history of Buddhism should have adopted the faith and expanded it to this degree in roughly 1,500 years is deeply moving. But my interest lies in why only a small number among those 300,000 seize my heart and will not let go. You may have felt this yourself. Why do certain statues possess an attraction that cannot be put into words? Perhaps this is what the Japanese felt the first time they laid eyes on a Buddhist statue.

Historians commonly say that when Buddhism first arrived on the Japanese archipelago, the indigenous people who had never before seen idol worship, the statues, the monks, the temples, were either captivated by the splendor or seized by awe. But we need to question whether this account is sound.

The circumstances under which Buddhism reached the Japanese archipelago were far from simple. Official and unofficial transmissions of Buddhism were entirely different affairs, and the unofficial side has vanished into historical darkness because it left no written record. But it strains common sense to believe that Buddhism was transmitted directly to ancient Yamato, situated deep in the interior of the archipelago. What is important is that the transmission came neither from India nor from China directly. It came by way of the Korean Peninsula. In the official sense it was Seimei, king of the ancient Korean kingdom of Baekje, who dispatched Buddhist statues, sutras, and monks to the Yamato court.

Seen from another angle, Buddhism had already advanced as far as the Korean Peninsula. If so, I believe the likelihood is high that Buddhism had been brought to the Japanese archipelago through the complex ancient sea routes, still not fully understood, that connected the Korean Peninsula and the Chinese coast to the Japanese side. These routes were not one-directional. People from the Japanese archipelago may have crossed and brought Buddhism back. Unless we turn our attention to ancient maritime traffic, this dimension will remain invisible.

The conventional dates proposed for Buddhism's official transmission have long been either 538 or 552, and 538 is now considered the more probable. Behind this lay not the religious prestige of Buddhism but the political situation on the Korean Peninsula. At the time the peninsula was divided among Baekje, Goguryeo, and Silla, three kingdoms frequently at war. King Seimei of Baekje, which had maintained close ties with the Japanese side since antiquity, sent Buddhist statues, sutras, and monks in an effort to forge a stronger alliance with Japan. But this "Japan" refers only to Yamato, not the entire archipelago. The transmission of Buddhism was not a pure religious exchange. It was a diplomatic act born of peninsular power dynamics.

The gift from Baekje was not welcomed from the start. Emperor Kinmei showed interest in the arrival of the statues but exercised caution over their acceptance. He entrusted them to his senior minister Soga no Iname with instructions amounting to little more than "try worshipping them and see what happens." This anecdote reveals that the emperor's personal embrace of the new faith was heavily constrained by the political dynamics of Yamato. Both the Baekje side and the Yamato side understood the transmission of Buddhism as an intensely political matter, specifically one of domestic politics. This continues to be ignored, but in the dynamics of ancient East Asia the movements of China, Korea, and Japan were linked. When China wavered, Korea and Japan wavered. When Japan wavered, Korea and China wavered. This triplet relationship is important for reading the current East Asian situation, yet this perspective is routinely dismissed.

When a massive epidemic struck Yamato during Emperor Kinmei's reign, the anti-Buddhist faction led by the Mononobe clan petitioned the throne. The Buddhist statues were cast into the canal at Naniwa and the temple buildings were burned to the ground. At the root of this violent resistance lay the internal conflict between the pro-Buddhist Soga clan and the anti-Buddhist Mononobe. In 587, during the reign of Emperor Yomei, the Mononobe were destroyed. Buddhism was formally accepted. Riding the current of the new era, Prince Shotoku rose to prominence and laid the foundations for Buddhism's flourishing by constructing Horyu-ji and Shitenno-ji. A persistent view holds that Prince Shotoku never existed as a historical individual. The portrait attributed to him is shrouded in doubt, and the court rank associated with him did not exist at the time. The current prevailing view is that the prince did exist but that everything attached to his image was fabricated by later generations.

Seen from yet another angle, the acknowledgment of Prince Shotoku's existence may be inconvenient for certain parties. The reason remains unclear, but my own view is that something problematic lay in his bloodline and that later generations altered the record to conceal it. The flourishing of Buddhism was in fact constructed as a triangle among the Soga, a rising clan that had consolidated power by uniting naturalized immigrant groups, the Emperor Yomei whom they installed, and Prince Shotoku, said to be Yomei's son. My personal view is that Prince Shotoku was the child of immigrants. The movement of this new immigrant-backed faction to seize control of the imperial court provoked a fierce backlash from the old-guard clans, the Mononobe, the Nakatomi, and the Otomo. The Otomo, however, were the first to defect to the immigrant side, betraying the old guard in exchange for interests on the Korean Peninsula, and were eventually destroyed by the Mononobe for their treachery. In this era, if we limit our view to Yamato, the forces led by indigenous clans and the forces led by immigrant clans were locked in fierce conflict over domestic governance. A new dynamic was being born. Without grasping this dynamic the true significance of Buddhism's arrival cannot be perceived. To say merely that people were captivated by splendor is to say nothing at all.

With this background in view, the historians' interpretation of Buddhist reception as "captivation by splendor" is revealed as hopelessly superficial and meaningless. People died in great numbers over these statues. Temples were burned. A political and spiritual shock of that magnitude ran through the people of this archipelago. The foundation of the problem was not Buddhist faith itself. It was the process by which, confronted with the choice of acceptance or rejection from the standpoint of maintaining domestic hegemony, they ultimately took Buddhism in. It is in that process that the prototype of the complex emotion the Japanese have held toward Buddhist statues can be found. At that moment a transmission of Buddhism occurred that transcended political calculation.

How do you look at a Buddhist statue when you stand before one?

The stains and darkening that appear on a statue are not merely evidence of material deterioration in wood or gilt bronze over the passage of years. I believe they are proof that the statue has received the individual prayers of people living across the ages over an immense span of time. Countless prayers transcending time and space manifest on the statue as stains and patina. For me a Buddhist statue is not an object of worship. It is the power of prayer that nullifies time. Its true worth will appear in the future on a plane beyond linear time. It was most likely this power of prayer that captivated people in the early period, drawing them not to Buddhism as a doctrine but to the statues themselves, and that was the fundamental reason the specialized profession known as busshi (仏師), the Buddhist sculptor, was born on the Japanese side.

Japanese Buddhist statues are predominantly carved from wood, using primarily hinoki cypress, kaya, camphor, and boxwood, with the choice of material shifting across eras. What is interesting is that the statue transmitted to the court at the time of Buddhism's arrival was a gilt-bronze image of Shakyamuni, yet over time the balance shifted decisively toward wood. The conventional explanation cites material cost and weight, but to accept this alone as the reason is to miss what makes the statues compelling. What I want to address is not the academic study of material transitions but the heart of the busshi. Why did sculptors captivated by Buddhist statues change their materials and develop distinctive methods of their own? Lacquer, stone, and clay all played a role, and a current of indigenization took hold as statues were adapted to the natural environment of the Japanese archipelago, which differed from that of the continent and the Korean Peninsula. The statues became Japanese, or more precisely, they became Yamato.

After the transmission of the gilt-bronze Shakyamuni, the Shaka Triad at Horyu-ji (623), attributed to Prince Shotoku's involvement, and the Yakushi Triad at Yakushi-ji were also executed in gilt bronze. The famous Great Buddha of Nara is a monumental gilt-bronze statue, but because it was a symbol of a project mobilizing the full resources of the state it does not serve as a reference in this context. In terms of technique, dry-lacquer construction involved building a core from wood or clay, layering hemp cloth soaked in lacquer over it, and forming the shape. The Ashura at Kofuku-ji is a representative example, and the method enabled lightweight and highly detailed expression. Clay modeling built forms by packing clay over an armature and was widely used in the Nara period. The Four Heavenly Kings at the Todai-ji Kaidan-in are famous examples. But because the results were heavy and fragile the method fell out of use in later eras. Stone Buddhas were sometimes carved as freestanding sculptures, but in Japan roadside and cliff-carved examples are far more common, and stone statues rarely served as principal icons of temples compared to the practice on the continent. In broad strokes, the material transition of Japanese Buddhist statues moved from gilt bronze in the Asuka and Nara periods to wood with lacquer and polychrome finishes in the Heian period. One reason wood became dominant is said to be Japan's abundant timber resources and advanced woodworking skills. But is this account truly adequate? By adequate I mean whether it captures what the people of the time were feeling. Viewed from this angle I feel that the conventional perspective on Buddhist statues has never once touched the essence. Let me reframe the question.

Why were the busshi captivated by wood rather than gilt bronze?

You have probably never posed the question in this way, but it is essential. Let me state my view first. It is because wood allows prayer to permeate directly, whereas gilt bronze resists it.

In the turbulent world that unfolded on the stage of Yamato, the source of power in the statues, distinct from Buddhism as a doctrine, lay in the fact that they became a gateway to a pluralistic world rather than a monolithic or binary one. Buddhist statues were objects to which many people directed their prayers, whether for survival or for power. But they also functioned as the finest tool for prompting self-discipline and self-reflection. In my view what the Japanese of the time were captivated by was not Buddhism but Buddhist statues. To push the point further, this has not changed even today. If this perspective is sound, then what matters when looking at Japan is not Buddhism but the history of captivation by the statues. Without this axis the interpretation of Japanese Buddhist history will remain the same tedious commentary it has always been.

A Buddhist statue as a physical object is unchanging. But what a person does in the act of looking at one varies as infinitely as the number of people who look. It is this plurality within an unchanging presence that I believe constitutes the greatest attraction of the statues. Put differently, it may have been the evolution of Buddhism itself. The eleven-faced Kannon of esoteric Buddhism, for example, with eleven faces atop its head offering salvation in every direction, is the embodiment of this movement of the heart given form. Fortunately an Eleven-Faced Kannon from the Nara period survives at Shorin-ji in Asuka. Looking at it, you can plainly see that the indigenous people of the Nara period had already become unable to sustain the early perspective toward Buddhist statues. To give it form was proof that the plurality of people's faith was beginning to be lost. By that point the sensitivity of captivation by the statues had already declined, and centralized Buddhicization had begun to advance. By "centralized Buddhicization" I mean Buddhicization led by the court.

Regrettably this way of seeing has been banished to oblivion. The plurality that allowed prayer to permeate the statues has been lost. Busshi still exist in Japan today. Projects to reproduce ancient statues are under way in various quarters. But what these sculptors are completely unaware of is that scientific reproduction carries no meaning whatsoever. No matter how precisely an ancient statue is reproduced, a statue that does not allow human prayer to permeate it has no value. And yet the plurality of prayer from that era has not entirely vanished. To know this, one must travel to a specific place. That place is the Pacific coast of Tohoku.

Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011. The earthquake and tsunami inflicted catastrophic damage. Including those still missing, more than 20,000 people died, concentrated along this coastal zone. People continue to die from earthquake-related causes to this day. When you enter this region you encounter a grief that cannot be put into words. Walk into a supermarket and virtually every person you pass has lost a close relative or someone they loved. Roki Sasaki (now with the Los Angeles Dodgers) was born in the city of Rikuzentakata in Iwate Prefecture, one of the areas hardest hit by the tsunami. He lost his father and his paternal grandparents in the wave. His family home was swept away. And yet they have kept living, one step at a time. How painful that accumulation of steps has been is something we cannot know. This is why Sasaki has become a source of hope for the people who have had to continue living every day since the earthquake. He is not merely a baseball player. For the people of that land he is a symbol of someone who carries the same grief inside and still keeps walking, one step at a time. But what must not be misunderstood is that this applies not only to the famous. Every person in that land has been living these days.

In that land sit many Buddhist statues that have received the prayers of those who lost their families and those they loved. The statues stand as vessels that absorb in silence the fierce grief and the lost hopes held within those hearts. You can sometimes feel a vast, desolate sadness and a concentrated fragility of having been forsaken. What I learned there is that Buddhist statues may have been taking upon themselves the grief of human beings. And I believe this is because a custom called yorishiro (依り代), a vessel in which the sacred resides, had taken indigenous root in Japan across the vast ages before Buddhism arrived. This is the essential reason Buddhism spread in Japan. For a people who had long directed their prayers toward nature as a vague yorishiro, the psychological impact of the arrival of the Buddhist statue as an object on which prayer could be concentrated was of a magnitude that we in the modern world can never reach.

I sense that within this context a movement arose among the sculptors as well, one that re-envisioned the statues in response to the prayers of the people. This transition cannot be systematized as a mere history of styles and forms. The statues were taking upon themselves the delicate and bold movements of prayer among the indigenous people of each place. To know this unspoken history of prayer through the heart, the most instructive place in Japan is Nara. I have spent a great deal of time moving through Nara and confronting countless statues, and the unverbalized history of Nara's Buddhist statues poses an essential question to us. For instance, the transition from statues that served as passive receptacles absorbing every kind of prayer including desire, to statues that were inverted to press actively upon the one who prays, demanding self-discipline, self-reflection, and confession. This is the trace of the busshi's struggle in a non-verbal world. The person who achieved it more fully than anyone was the sculptor called the greatest busshi in Japanese history. That sculptor was Unkei.

Several hundred years after the Nara period of Heijo-kyo, when Buddhism began spreading across Japan, in the transition from the late Heian to the early Kamakura period, Unkei appeared on the stage of Nara, a land that had already lost its former prestige. He radiated an overwhelming presence. His birth date is unknown but is estimated at around the middle of the twelfth century. He was born the son of Kokei, a Nara-based busshi who worked out of Kofuku-ji. He trained under his father in the traditional techniques of the Nara school and completed the Dainichi Nyorai seated statue at Enjo-ji in Nara in 1176. This is considered the oldest surviving work by Unkei.

The early Kamakura period in which Unkei was active was, as I have discussed in the On Dogen series, an era in which political power had fully shifted from the aristocracy to the warrior class and the prestige of Heian-kyo had been lost. It was an era that propelled new movements not only in politics and religion but in the arts as well. I do not, however, evaluate Unkei in artistic terms. I see his true significance in the fact that he restored the plurality of prayer and achieved its most intense expression for the era. Before the Kamakura period the sculptural world had stagnated under the Kyoto-based busshi who carried on the Heian aesthetic lineage of Jocho. Meanwhile the Nara-based busshi had been moving toward a more concrete mode of expression by adopting the new technique of gyokugan, inserting crystal into the eyes of the statues. But Unkei went further still. He gave each individual statue a unique personality and a palpable sense of physical mass, and he pursued forms that pressed actively upon the viewer. This is Unkei's defining characteristic. The prewar interpretation that describes this as "realism" must be thoroughly discarded. If something so banal sufficed, there would have been no need for Unkei to appear.

Unkei's culminating achievement was the Kongo Rikishi pair at the Great South Gate of Todai-ji. The temple's main compound had been destroyed in the Burning of the Southern Capital by Taira no Kiyomori in 1180. The statues were completed as the crowning work of the Todai-ji reconstruction project led by the monk Chogen with the support of the court and Minamoto no Yoritomo. Unkei led a team of busshi including Kaikei, Jokaku, and Tankei. Work began on July 24, 1203. The Agyo figure was standing in the Great South Gate by August 7. That the two figures were sculpted simultaneously was confirmed by colophons on sutra scrolls discovered inside the statues during later dismantling and repair. The completion of two colossal figures each exceeding eight meters in height in the astonishing span of just sixty-nine days demonstrated the organizational and technical mastery of Unkei's atelier. It was also the crystallization of the fierce will of the people who had staked everything on the reconstruction. The issue lies in the busshi's own heart. Within Unkei's heart burned an intense funnu (憤怒) that did not surface. It seethed like magma. It was this heart that took up residence in the statues and became the wellspring of their power as yorishiro.

The proportions of the figures, with their large heads and short legs, close to five heads tall, appear unnatural at first glance. In fact the dimensions were calculated with meticulous precision for the line of sight of worshippers looking upward from the base of the tall gate. Rather than installing the statues as passive objects of prayer, Unkei engineered them so that the statues themselves exert pressure upon the bodies and eyes of those walking the approach. This was Unkei's revolution. And the revolutionary element resides in "the gaze of the statue." Readers who have spent time contemplating a Buddhist statue will understand. The gazes of statues are endlessly varied. And the true worth of a statue is determined not by the beauty or grandeur of its form but by its gaze. That is how far I take this conviction.

The gaze of a Buddhist statue possesses the power to activate within the heart of the one who prays the reality that person does not wish to see. The manner of this activation changes with each statue, so it exists in as many forms as there are statues. What matters above all is that when the gaze of the statue activates the heart of the one who prays, that prayer nullifies time and space. Taken to its extreme, I believe that Buddhism in truth needs neither sutras nor monks. Because the full content of what Buddhism is resides within the power of the statue itself. But since it is a statue, the question becomes whether the busshi who made it has reached that power. The great majority of busshi have no way of knowing such things. But Unkei was the first in Japan to be most fully conscious of it. There are, however, busshi whose names have not survived in history who also possessed this awareness. To understand this there is no method other than seeing statues across Japan.

Once, while staring intently at a statue made by Unkei, I experienced a shock in which the statue's gaze stared back and my own gaze was nullified. What that shock felt like was the nullification of subject, subjectivity, the grammatical first person, the ego, and consciousness. In that instant I felt that I had grasped in my own way why Buddhism spread in Japan. Simply visiting a temple and gazing vaguely at a statue is an entirely different thing from experiencing the power of a statue's gaze to nullify. I regard human history as "the long history of the arrival at subjecthood." That Buddhist statues were transmitted to Japan in this era therefore carried considerable significance. And what the statues are actually doing in response to the delicate and bold movements of the heart as subjecthood emerges in human beings is not encouraging that subjectification but rather attempting to nullify it and return the person to the original state.

What is that original state?

When each of us asks this question individually, the traces of Buddhism's fierce struggle with the fact of being human are revived. I hope readers will keep asking. Sleeping within it is the primordial memory of why human beings created religion in the first place.