Images in Asian Religions

Text and Contexts

Edited by Phyllis Granoff & Koichi Shinohara
Categories: Regional & Cultural Studies, Asian Studies, Religious Studies, Social Sciences, Anthropology, Art & Performance Studies, Art, Art History
Series: Asian Religions and Society
Publisher: UBC Press
Paperback : 9780774809498, 396 pages, July 2005
Ebook (PDF) : 9780774851107, 396 pages, October 2007
Ebook (EPUB) : 9780774859806, 396 pages, October 2010

Table of contents

Contributors

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1: Defining Images: The Sacred Objects of Indian
Religions

1. Images and Their Ritual Use in Medieval India: Hesitations and
Contradictions

2. Theology as History: Divine Images, Imagination, and Rituals in
India

3. Of Metal and Clothes: The Location of Distinctive Features in
Divine Iconography

Part 2: Images and the Elite Intellectual Culture:
Accommodations and Ambiguities

4. At the Right Side of the Teacher: Imagination, Imagery, and Image
in Vedic and Saiva Initiation

5. The Competing Hermeneutics of Image Worship in Hinduism (Fifth to
Eleventh Century AD

6. Stories of Miraculous Images and Paying Respect to the Three
Jewels: A Discourse on Image Worship in Seventh-Century China

Part 3: Recreating the Context of Image Worship: Case
Studies

7. Icon and Incantation: The Goddess Zhunti and the Role of Images
in the Occult Buddhism of China

8. The Tenjukoku Shucho Mandara: Reconstruction of the Iconography
and Ritual Context

9. Obaku Zen Portrait Painting and Its Sino-Japanese Heritage

10. Ritual and Image at Angkor Wat

Index

A comprehensive and balanced look at the role of images in Asian religions, which examines aspects of the reception of image worship that have only begun to be studied.

Description

This collection offers a challenge to any simple understanding of
the role of images by looking at aspects of the reception of image
worship that have only begun to be studied, including the many
hesitations that Asian religious traditions expressed about image
worship. Written by eminent scholars of anthropology, art history, and
religion with interests in different regions (India, China, Japan, and
Southeast Asia), this volume takes a fresh look at the many ways in
which images were defined and received in Asian religions.

Buddha Dharma Kyokai Foundation Book on Buddhism and Comparative
Religion

Reviews

The essays are uniformly informative and well written. All of the essays in this collection are well-written and insightful. They certainly fulfill their mandate of dealing with images in Asian religions.

- Alexander Soucy, St. Mary’s University