ESTABLISHED PATTERNS

People who specialise in Buddhist Art tend to start as Art Historians, then specialise in a particular region (e.g. South or East Asia) and finally become expert in certain categories of that regional art, e.g. the Buddhist. Given this background, they may wish to view their objects of study more or less exclusively in relation to the power structures, status conventions and patterns of thought and behaviour common across the specific society in which they were created.

It may be felt inappropriate to see this art in the context of a population for whom enlightenment has been a primary category, and which has accordingly identified itself with others remote from it in time and place.

This approach is not without merit. It is true of course that those who see themselves as Buddhist must be understood in their own social world, in relation to contemporaries who do not identify themselves that way. Their visual culture reflects the assumptions and behaviours common across their society.

NEW DIRECTIONS

Still, who are we to gainsay their ‘Buddhist’ identification? After all, their behaviour, attitudes and relationships with non-Buddhist peers do often bear comparison with what we find at other times and places; and their art and Archaeology exhibit notable continuities with other societies’ and periods’.

There are aesthetic and iconographic continuities across widely separated centuries and territories (as the image at the end of this booklet shows). A common sensibility may be discerned in the sometimes quite disparate forms of visual culture associated with the Buddhist tradition. We can at least see family resemblances. For instance, social forms – monasteries, patronage – exhibit continuities that are manifest in buildings and their adornments.

Accordingly, students of Buddhist visual culture naturally tend to understand it in relation to the specifically Buddhist features of the environment from which it emerged. Textual and institutional references are critical. An object can often be well understood as expressing in an alternate form what has already been embodied in a text. Thus, scholars like Lothar and Leddrose span textual and artistic phenomena.