Word: buddhisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ancient sculptures--works that have been wrenched from diverse geographic and historical contexts to serve as an introduction to an unfamiliar artistic culture? Perhaps, but not because such a juxtaposition fails to address important issues for Chinese painting. In fact, the dramatic meeting of the two religious traditions, Buddhism and Daoism, and their dialogue with a third belief system, Confucianism, is the intellectual thread that Matsutaro Shoriki Curator of Asiatic Art Wu Tung attempts to draw across the three spacious galleries of the MFA's Gund Gallery. Nor should it bother us so much, at this stage in the game...
...walk out with some sort of understanding of the influence of religion on Chinese art, one instead wonders about the assorted pieces of a puzzle that have been scattered throughout the space of the exhibition. What of the relationship of calligraphy to painting, the differences within various appropriations of Buddhism or Daoism, the significance of dynastic upheaval on aesthetic production, the mysterious figure known as the scholar-artist? These are questions that leak through the seams of the exhibition, sometimes even appearing in the wall text, but which are never addressed in full...
...with Howl, a profane tirade that railed against a conformist society and dealt, rather graphically, with his homosexuality. In the '60s and '70s, he was active in both the hippie and antiwar movements. His poetry prefigured punk and New Age, encompassing protest and psychedelics, drawing inspiration from yoga, Buddhism, Native American mysticism, the Torah and fellow poets like William Carlos Williams...
Heaven has many cartographers, and through the centuries many different heavens have been charted. To the variety of celestial landscapes in the West, Islam and Buddhism have raised their own particular paradises: the Koran details a heaven filled with beautiful, large-eyed "companions" and youths of perpetual freshness; the sutras speak of a multiplicity of "Buddha fields," pleasant way stations on the journey to Nirvana. Adding to the plenitude, the New Age is now unrolling its own versions of eternity. The best-selling author, internationally renowned medium and healer Rosemary Altea, for example, speaks of her vision: "Heaven...
...Buddhism has as many paradises as there are Buddhas. Each enlightened being has his or her own heaven, a concept probably borrowed from Hinduism, in which gods and goddesses inhabit a series of heavens. The primal heaven, however, was probably the one called Sukhavati, which may itself have borrowed some elements from the florid paradises of Zoroastrian Persia (whence the word pairi-daeza, or enclosure, the origin of our word paradise). As Sakyamuni, the Buddha of our cosmos, teaches, if the denizens of Sukhavati "desire cloaks of different colors and many hundred thousand colors, then with these very best cloaks...