An Introduction to Buddhism

To do no evil;

To cultivate good;

To purify one's mind:

This is the teaching of the Buddhas.

--The Dhammapada

The Buddha was born Siddhartha Gautama, a prince of the Sakya tribe of Nepal, in approximately 566 BC. When he was twentynine years old, he left the comforts of his home to seek the meaning of the suffering he saw around him. After six years of arduous yogic training, he abandoned the way of self-mortification and instead sat in mindful meditation beneath a bodhi tree.

On the full moon of May, with the rising of the morning star, Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha, the enlightened one.

The Buddha wandered the plains of northeastern India for 45 years more, teaching the path or Dharma he had realized in that moment. Around him developed a community or Sangha of monks and, later, nuns, drawn from every tribe and caste, devoted to practicing this path. In approximately 486 BC, at the age of 80, the Buddha died. His last words are said to be...

Impermanent are all created things;

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An Introduction to Buddhism - My Webspace files

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.

WHATS NEW (Sept. 2014) Mt. Tiantai Art (110 pix) Zodiac & 28 Moon Lodges Hina Dolls & Scapegoats Medicine Buddha (50 pix) Videos on Buddhism Seven Luckies Revisited Star Worship in Japan Korean Buddhism (280 pix) Modern Artists (35 pix) Benzaiten (260 pix) Medieval Art in Japan Tanuki (175 pix) Becoming a Shrine Priest Bishamonten (80 pix) Daruma & Zen (80+ pix) Kappa Revisited (31 pix) Baku - Nightmare Eater Shki - Demon Queller Kannon Guide (130+ pix) Jiz Handbook (90+ pix) CHINA RELATED Longmen | Ni | Shitenn

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.

TIMELINE

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JAPANESE BUDDHISM - Onmark Productions Web Designs ...

What's in this FAQ? Zen is short for Zen Buddhism. It is sometimes called a religion and sometimes called a philosophy. Choose whichever term you prefer; it simply doesn't matter.

Historically, Zen Buddhism originates in the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama. Around 500 B.C. he was a prince in what is now India. At the age of 29, deeply troubled by the suffering he saw around him, he renounced his privileged life to seek understanding. After 6 years of struggling as an ascetic he finally achieved Enlightenment at age 35. After this he was known as the Buddha (meaning roughly "one who is awake"). In a nutshell, he realized that everything is subject to change and that suffering and discontentment are the result of attachment to circumstances and things which, by their nature, are impermanent. By ridding oneself of these attachments, including attachment to the false notion of self or "I", one can be free of suffering.

The teachings of the Buddha have, to this day, been passed down from teacher to student. Around 475 A.D. one of these teachers, Bodhidharma, traveled from India to China and introduced the teachings of the Buddha there. In China Buddhism mingled with Taoism. The result of this mingling was the Ch'an School of Buddhism. Around 1200 A.D. Ch'an Buddhism spread from China to Japan where it is called (at least in translation) Zen Buddhism.

Shashu is performed by placing the thumbtip of the left hand as close to the left palm as comfortable and making a fist around it. Place the fist in the center of the chest and cover it with the right hand. Keep the elbows away from the body with the forearms parallel to the floor.

Isshu is the same as shashu but with the left fist turned thumb side toward the chest. Left fist and thumb are parallel to the floor and not vertical as in shashu.

Hokkaijoin (Cosmic Mudra) is performed in the following manner. Place your right hand palm upward in your lap against the lower abdomen. Place the left hand palm upward on top of the right. The second joints of the middle fingers should be touching, and your fingers parallel. Raise the thumbs up opposite the fingers and touch the thumb tips lightly together; forming an oval between the thumbs and fingers. The thumb tips should join at the approximate level of the navel. In some Tibetan teaching lines the right hand is placed on top of the left.

Place a thick mat (zaniku or zabuton) in front of the wall and place a small round cushion (zafu) on it. Sit on it facing the wall. There are several positions for the legs. If not too cold sit with bare feet. Leave your wristwatch off.

The cross legged positions provide greatest stability. To sit in full lotus, place the right foot on the left thigh and then the left foot on the right thigh. To sit in half lotus place your left foot on your right thigh. Try to cross the legs firmly so that a stable tripod of support is provided by the knees and the base of the spine. The order of the crossing of the legs may be reversed. It is also possible to simply sit on the floor with one foreleg in front of the other or kneeling using a bench or a cushion. To sit in a chair, place the feet flat on the floor and use a cushion to elevate the seat so that the upper thighs fall away from the body and follow the rest of the applicable instructions.

Rest the knees firmly on the zaniku, straighten the lower back, push the buttocks outward and the hips forward, and straighten your spine. Pull in your chin and extend the neck as though to support the ceiling. The ears and shoulders should be in the same plane with the nose directly above the navel. Straighten the back and relax shoulders, back, and abdomen without changing posture.

Keep the mouth closed placing the tongue with the tip just behind the front teeth and the rest of the tongue as close to the roof of the mouth as comfortable. Keep the eyes at least slightly open cast downward at a 45 degree angle without focusing on anything. If closed you may slip into drowsiness or daydreaming.

More:
Frequently Asked Questions from alt.zen - ibiblio