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Buddhism and the Senses
A Guide to the Good and Bad
Edited by Robert DeCaroli and Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Published by Wisdom Publications
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
Across Buddhist traditions, the five senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—are perceived both positively and negatively. Share our eminent scholars’ fascination and deep insight into what makes a sensuous experience good or bad.
Following on the exhibition Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice across Asia at the National Museum of Asian Art, ten eminent scholars present their insights into Buddhism’s fascinating relation with the five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch), which careens between delight and disgust, rarely finding a middle way. While much of Buddhist literature is devoted to overcoming the attachment that dooms us to rebirth in samsara, primarily by deprecating sense experience and showing that whatever brings us sensual pleasure leads only to physical and mental pain, in texts such as the Lotus Sutra, sensory powers do not offer sensory pleasure but rather knowledge, clear observation, and ability to teach the Dharma. Considering such religiously and historically contingent ambiguity, this volume presents each of the five senses in two instantiations, the good and the bad, opening up the discourse on the senses across Buddhist traditions.
Just as the museum departed from tradition to incorporate sensory experiences into the exhibition, this volume is a new direction in scholarship to humanize Buddhist studies by foregrounding sensory experience and practice, inviting the reader to think about the senses in a focused manner and shifting our understanding of Buddhism from the conceptual to the material or practical, from the idealized to the human, from the abstract to the grounded, from the mind to the body.
Following on the exhibition Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice across Asia at the National Museum of Asian Art, ten eminent scholars present their insights into Buddhism’s fascinating relation with the five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch), which careens between delight and disgust, rarely finding a middle way. While much of Buddhist literature is devoted to overcoming the attachment that dooms us to rebirth in samsara, primarily by deprecating sense experience and showing that whatever brings us sensual pleasure leads only to physical and mental pain, in texts such as the Lotus Sutra, sensory powers do not offer sensory pleasure but rather knowledge, clear observation, and ability to teach the Dharma. Considering such religiously and historically contingent ambiguity, this volume presents each of the five senses in two instantiations, the good and the bad, opening up the discourse on the senses across Buddhist traditions.
Just as the museum departed from tradition to incorporate sensory experiences into the exhibition, this volume is a new direction in scholarship to humanize Buddhist studies by foregrounding sensory experience and practice, inviting the reader to think about the senses in a focused manner and shifting our understanding of Buddhism from the conceptual to the material or practical, from the idealized to the human, from the abstract to the grounded, from the mind to the body.
Excerpt
Foreword
Exhibiting the Senses: Encountering the Buddha at the National Museum of Asian Art by Debra Diamond
The exhibition Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice across Asia (October 2017–January 2022) was the heart of a multiyear, multipartite project at the National Museum of Asian Art. The goals of the project, which in addition to the exhibition included print publications, digital features, and public programs, were to conceptualize, realize, and study effective strategies for museum presentations of Buddhist art and traditions.
After putting together the lineaments of the project, I was joined by the co-curators Robert DeCaroli and Rebecca Bloom in 2015–2016. Together we studied the museum’s collections of Buddhist art, made many short lists, and brainstormed innovative display strategies and conceptual frameworks. Our challenge was to illuminate Buddhist artworks and histories that spanned centuries and ranged geographically from Japan to Afghanistan. We were equally committed to creating an exhibition that was meaningful to both practicing Buddhists and visitors who had no knowledge of Buddhism.
Inspired by a turn within Buddhist studies toward finding commonalities among traditions, we explored and contextualized the exhibition objects through the lenses of art and practice. Our art-focused labels encouraged visitors to simultaneously discern transregional motifs and local traditions, and to marvel at the ways that artists inflected meaning and created beauty. Practice included considerations of how objects have agency, how devotees and communities engage with objects, how material culture embodies key Buddhist concepts, and how art museums collect and frame objects created within Buddhist contexts.
Art museums traditionally focus on the visual. Precious objects are displayed on pedestals or in vitrines, and paintings are hung at eye level for visual delectation and close study. Incorporating the material practice of Buddhism into the exhibition, however, immediately begged the question of how to incorporate other senses, sensory experiences, and contexts.
The images and captions on the following pages reveal the means through which we incorporated the awareness of the position and movement of one’s own body (proprioception) and hearing into the exhibition, as well as the ambient environments of a Tibetan shrine and a Sri Lankan stupa.
Exhibiting the Senses: Encountering the Buddha at the National Museum of Asian Art by Debra Diamond
The exhibition Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice across Asia (October 2017–January 2022) was the heart of a multiyear, multipartite project at the National Museum of Asian Art. The goals of the project, which in addition to the exhibition included print publications, digital features, and public programs, were to conceptualize, realize, and study effective strategies for museum presentations of Buddhist art and traditions.
After putting together the lineaments of the project, I was joined by the co-curators Robert DeCaroli and Rebecca Bloom in 2015–2016. Together we studied the museum’s collections of Buddhist art, made many short lists, and brainstormed innovative display strategies and conceptual frameworks. Our challenge was to illuminate Buddhist artworks and histories that spanned centuries and ranged geographically from Japan to Afghanistan. We were equally committed to creating an exhibition that was meaningful to both practicing Buddhists and visitors who had no knowledge of Buddhism.
Inspired by a turn within Buddhist studies toward finding commonalities among traditions, we explored and contextualized the exhibition objects through the lenses of art and practice. Our art-focused labels encouraged visitors to simultaneously discern transregional motifs and local traditions, and to marvel at the ways that artists inflected meaning and created beauty. Practice included considerations of how objects have agency, how devotees and communities engage with objects, how material culture embodies key Buddhist concepts, and how art museums collect and frame objects created within Buddhist contexts.
Art museums traditionally focus on the visual. Precious objects are displayed on pedestals or in vitrines, and paintings are hung at eye level for visual delectation and close study. Incorporating the material practice of Buddhism into the exhibition, however, immediately begged the question of how to incorporate other senses, sensory experiences, and contexts.
The images and captions on the following pages reveal the means through which we incorporated the awareness of the position and movement of one’s own body (proprioception) and hearing into the exhibition, as well as the ambient environments of a Tibetan shrine and a Sri Lankan stupa.
Product Details
- Publisher: Wisdom Publications (September 24, 2024)
- Length: 264 pages
- ISBN13: 9781614298908
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Raves and Reviews
"This volume brings together the work of specialists in a range of Buddhist traditions and advances research on embodied or “lived” Buddhism in innovative ways. Categorized by sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, the individual essays probe ambivalences in Buddhist attitudes toward the physical senses, which Buddhist teachings have characterized both as snares for the ignorant and as vehicles of cultivation and insight. The difference between delusion and awakening, the authors find, involves not only the mind but also sensory experience. Nuanced and engrossing, this collection will delight scholars and students of Buddhism as well as anyone interested in religion and the body.”
– Jacqueline I. Stone, Professor of Religion (emerita), Princeton University, and author of Right Thoughts at the Last Moment: Buddhism and Deathbed Practices in Early Medieval Japan
“This ingenious collection of essays by a great group of scholars takes a mainstay category in Buddhist theory of knowledge, the role of the senses, and expands the implications in astounding ways. The multidisciplinary studies included here look at Buddhist literature, philosophy, and practice, both ancient and modern. They reveal the extraordinary importance in Buddhism of the senses for the insights and wisdoms they can convey to us—that is, if only we knew how to notice, and appreciate, them.”
– Janet Gyatso, Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies, Harvard Divinity School
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