Danxia Burns a Buddha
Danxia Burns a Buddha
Zen and the Art of Iconoclasm
Chapter 3 focuses on a medieval painting in the Zen art canon—Yintuoluo’s painting of Danxia Tianran (738/39-824), a Chinese monk said to have burned a wood statue of the Buddha—and situates it within its modern surround, particularly in relation to Zen iconoclasm, a prominent trope in postwar Zen cultural production including Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and other countercultural works. The chapter suggests how premodern representations of the Danxia tale circulated in the modern world through art collecting, photographic reproduction, translations of hagiography into modern Japanese and English for lay and non-practicing readers, and “reverse orientalist” critique of Western views of Buddhism. It notes too the tale’s representation by modern artists in Japan, including Yamamoto Shunkyo and Okamoto Ippei. Whatever the representation of Danxia burning the Buddha meant in preceding centuries, in the early twentieth century, it responded to new prospects, ambitions, and conflicts, as much geo-political as personal.
Keywords: Danxia Tianran, Dharma Bums, iconoclasm, Jack Kerouac, Okamoto Ippei, Yamamoto Shunkyo, Yintuoluo
Hawaii Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.