This is probably my failed art historian art critic kink. Years ago, even before studying art history at the University in Bucharest in the late 90s, I was interested in Buddhist images and representations, in just being able to approach a non-Christian iconography. In part, I suppose, because most of Romania’s post-1989 cultural life (and block apartments and buses) was infused with myrrh and spreading gilded neo-Orthodoxy, with the establishment or attempt to establish an Icon Museum at Kalinderu, as well as the Anastasia Foundation, celebrated painter and neo-orthodox guru Sorin Dumitrescu’s initiative. Not trying to say that Osho was far away, since there was an infusion of Tibetan medicine, Chinese pressupuncture and lots of books about Zen, Esoteric Buddhism, even Milinda Panha (or fragments thereof) got translated (in 1993 titled MILINDA – PANHA sau Intrebarile Regelui Milinda – Institutul European Iasi).
We are engulfed in images, in thousands and billions of similar memes and almost self-replicanting signs, symbols, emoticons – so in a way we are swimming in an ocean of icons that hover on all sides. Anyway, Buddhist teachings, sayings, abstractions, and koans were also becoming more accessible and even a way to counter a bit the heavy-handed and hegemonic presence of iconostases, interpreting Judgement Day frescos and vibrantly painted (on the outside!) Moldavian monasteries.
Today I am mostly fascinated by two related things – the multiplication process and infinities (practically some form of proto Benjaminian The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – of the Buddhas, the technical way that print culture evolved, and was in part the result of a symbiosis with Indian Buddhism in its Chinese Buddhist syncretic form. The fact that the oldest dated printed book is the Diamond Sutra (Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra) is a Mahāyāna Buddhist sutra from the genre of Prajñāpāramitā (‘perfection of wisdom’) from the Tang dynasty was found among the incredible Dunhuang manuscript trove sold by Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu for peanuts to Aurel Stein. I completly missed the exhibition dedicated to the restored Tang dynasty book exhibited at the National British Library – A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang in London, and will probably regret it all my life.
Second aspect is the fact that is the first document (dated May 11, 868 CE) or book dedicated to public usage (first explicit use of public domain) in its colophon: “for universal free distribution“.
Maybe this is a historical quirk, but I do not consider it accidental that the first dated copyleft text was a Buddhist text, and a woodblock print with the Diamond Sutra to exemplify how printing culture travelled along the Silk Road. As Dr. Shih-shan Susan Huang mentions in the Q&A it is a highly contentious discussion of how print culture actually travelled to the West. But what is clear is that she has been able to follow several such trajectories and establish with great accuracy the various printing centers and bookshops around China and their communication with distant Korea, Japan, and even with Afghanistan. Some of them with the exact addresses. Maybe it is not everyone’s cup of tea to follow such minutiae findings and speculations, but for me it is immensely interesting. I also like that the motive, if I can call it so of the sutra with the four workers is also special, it does not seem to be attached to any Jataka (legends or stories based on Buddha’s previous lives) but is a lively scene of the daily life of bricklayers. Which made me think of Harun Farocki’s brilliant documentary In Comparison installation about labour production in various places from Burkina Faso, through semi-industrialized moldings in India to Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland.
Some of the texts and prints she analyzes are not even made for human eyes, and are purely votive, hidden inside statues and found much later by the museum staff. Some had magic function and were talismans, copies of sacred text reproduced against bad omens and there is a lot of information of who the patrons were, in some cases, women who used it to protect against childbirth complications. This is also why a lot of recent research highlighted how Buddhism depended on a network of traders and was, like the Renaissance later on, flourishing because of the laity (for this, check my review of the Golden Road by William Dalrymple, which again is pure wonder for the failed art critic in me). Making Buddhist sculptures after the early aniconic phase became a source of merit for the patrons starting with the Kushan period. Altough where and when the first Buddhist images took form is a matter of fierce debate. Anyway, lucky those who can check the amply illustrated 2025 Brill volume by Dr. Shih-shan Susan Huang.
TimeSpace Warps 