HOME Online Since 1995 BUDDHISM & SHINTISM IN JAPAN A-TO-Z PHOTO DICTIONARY OF JAPANESE RELIGIOUS SCULPTURE & ARTVIDEO of site author explaining Ni iconography (Oct. 2013) VIDEO of site author exploring Buddhist treasures (April 16, 2013) INTERVIEW with site author (Japan Times, August 7, 2010)

This photo library and dictionary is a labor of love. After moving to Kamakura in 1993, I became intrigued by the many deities and faces of Japanese Buddhism and Shintism. There are dozens of Buddhist temples and Shint shrines near my home, many dating from the 8th to 13th centuries, many open to the public. There are 400+ deities in this dictionary, and 4,000+ photos of statuary from Kamakura, Nara, Kyoto, and elsewhere in Japan. Use the search box to search in English, Japanese, Chinese, or Korean for deities not listed at left. Any mistakes or omissions at this site are my responsibility. Please contact me if you discover any. In July 2006, I launched the online store and gallery Buddhist-Artwork.com. It sells quality hand-carved wood Buddha statues and Bodhisattva statuary from Japan, China, and SE Asia. It is aimed at art lovers, Buddhist practitioners, and laity alike.

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Fourth, this project was prompted by a dissatisfaction with existing literature on Japanese Buddhist statuary. I still visit book stores and libraries hunting for the perfect English handbook on Japanese Buddhist sculpture. But I must admit, I have yet to find anything that satisfies me. Mountains of publications are out there. Many are aimed at the scholarly community, devoted to hyper-specialized topics, and extremely academic (thus "indecipherable" to the lay community). Another wellspring of information comes from museums, curators, art historians, and collectors. While lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogs and glossy art magazines are much appreciated and easier to read, these publications tend to ignore the religious underpinnings of Asian art. Instead of providing a broad historical view of the statue and its significance as a living icon, they tend to emphasize a piecemeal "bite-size" approach involving aesthetics, dating and provenance, technique, material, genre, and style. A third copious source of information comes from temples, practitioners, spiritualists, and independent web bloggers. Their publications are written for the general public but suffer from too much preaching, promoting, fabrication, self-interest, inconsistency, inaccuracy, and just plain "unreadability."

Dont get me wrong. There are excellent resources (see bibliography) out there by scholars and art historians, but yet I'm unsatisfied. The best of the lot, in my mind, are the books entitled Sculpture of the Kamakura Period (by Hisashi Mori, 1974), Portraits of Chgen: The Transformation of Buddhist Art in Early Medieval Japan (by John M. Rosenfield, 2010), and Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art from 1600 to 2005 (by Patricia Graham, 2007). As for online resources, the Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System (JAANUS) is by far the best digital dictionary devoted to Japanese art. It contains English definitions for over eight thousand Japanese terms related to religious sculpture, architecture and gardens, painting, ceramics, textiles, metalwork, and art-historical iconography. Another monumental work is the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism or DDB (log in with user name = guest). This online dictionary contains English definitions for over sixty thousand Chinese terms (as of May 2013), along with pronunciations in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. The DDB is also linked to the SAT Taish Shinsh Daizky (a digitized & searchable version of the Buddhist canon). Together they represent an invaluable reference work for Buddhist studies.

The study of Japanese religions and religious art has expanded greatly in the West over the past five decades. Until the 1960s, the field was populated mostly by college teachers and museum curators interested in collecting, but they had little or no training in Asian languages. Today the field is rooted firmly in Asian language sources and is highly specialized, with most universities emphasizing cult-specific, site-specific, ritual-specific, and deity-specific studies. These changes have deepened the discipline enormously, despite the tendency of hyper-specialization to narrow the outlook.

Thus I began in 1995 with my first digital camera, along with the help of my scanner. Ive been digging around ever since. This site is my tribute to Japanese Buddhist sculpture and, to a lesser degree, Shint art. It is written for scholars, art historians, practitioners, and laity alike, and attempts to remedy the dissatisfactions I mention above. Finally, let me express my gratitude and thanks to all the fine people, temples, shrines, museums, web sites, books, magazines, and other resources that have contributed to this ongoing project.

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