Journey of the Three Jewels: Japanese Buddhist Paintings from Western Collections by John M. Rosenfield, Elizabeth ten GrotenhuisYasushi Egami

Excerpt

Śākyamuni, the historical Buddha, died in northern India centuries before the Christian era, but the faith which he initiated did not officially reach Japan from Korea until the middle of the sixth century. This thousand-year interval saw the development of a major doctrinal rift between the Theravada (‘Way of the Elders’) and Mahayana (‘Larger Vehicle’) schools. Mahayana in particular asserted the existence of an immense pantheon of compassionate deities to whom believers could pray for intercession and guidance on the path to enlightenment. The Mahayana school expanded across northern India to present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, whence monks and laymen of many different nationalities carried it to the kingdoms of Central Asia and eventually to China. Missionary zeal did not flag, and Paekche, one of the three Korean kingdoms and the country that sent statues and scriptures to Japan, formally embraced the faith in the late fourth century.

During this nearly ten-thousand-kilometer odyssey Mahayana Buddhism developed different sects as it absorbed gods from lesser faiths and clarified their individual status in the growing pantheon through cosmological philosophy. At the apex were the completely enlightened Buddhas, the tathagatas; below them came the bodhisattvas, or enlightened beings serving as agents of the supra-wordly tathagatas; on the next step down the hierarchy were the numerous guardians and other deities taken in from Hinduism and other faiths, who were so important to the esoteric Buddhist sects.

The spread of Buddhism to Japan brought about a dramatic change not only in Japanese religious life but also in the fields of art, architecture, writing, music, and systems of government. Only once since then has Japanese society undergone such a complete transformation involving a foreign set of ideals–the revolutionary Westernization in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the modernization that followed it. During this period of Westernization and modernization, unlike the time when continental Asian culture was being absorbed, a significant number of art works, many of them dealing with Buddhist themes, were taken out of Japan for collectors and museums abroad.