Hell-Bent for Heaven in Tateyama Mandara: Painting and Religious Practice at a Japanese Mountain

Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-90-04-20335-8
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 6, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 195 mm x 256 mm, Gewicht: 1078 g

Reihe: Japanese Visual Culture

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries priests from the Tateyama mountain area (Toyama Prefecture) brought paintings of the mountain, called Tateyama mandara, on campaigns throughout Japan that extolled its merits, drummed up warm-weather pilgrimage, and established venues for selling products and services. The images depict pilgrims, monks, animals, and supernatural beings occupying the mountain’s landscape, thought to contain both hell and paradise. The local landscape was thus cast as a universalized portal to the other world and Tateyama preachers positioned themselves at its gateway as indispensable intermediaries to “salvation,” a notion that encompassed a wide range of meanings, from enlightenment to temporary escape from hell. Tateyama preachers increasingly promoted the mountain as particularly beneficial to women, updating older practices to address new concerns about female salvation that spread during the late medieval and Edo eras. Without professional assistance women were perceived as doomed to hells directly related to their reproductive responsibilities. Moreover, where women were forbidden from climbing the mountain or directly partaking in its benefits due to perceptions that they were polluted, the images enabled their direct engagement with its salvific spaces. Drawing on methodologies from historical, art historical, and religious studies, this book untangles the complex premises and mechanisms operating in these pictorialisations of the mountain’s mysteries and furthers our understanding of the rich complexity of pre-modern Japanese religion.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hirasawa, Caroline

Weitere Mitwirkende

Carpenter, John T.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstformen, Kunsthandwerk Malerei: Gemälde
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Künstlerische Stoffe, Motive, Themen Künstlerische Stoffe, Motive, Themen: Religiöse Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunststile Asiatische Kunst
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Sonstige Religionen Östliche Religionen

Über Autor(innen)

Caroline Hirasawa, Ph.D. (2005), Stanford University, is Associate Professor of Art History at Sophia University. She has published articles on Japanese paintings of hell, most recently,“Cracking Cauldrons and Babies on Blossoms,” in Artibus Asiae.