Origin and Originality in Buddhist Art

Buddhism provides an ideal thematic thread for an introductory lecture or a survey course on the Art of Asia. The religion’s crucial role in pan-Asian intellectual and material exchanges illuminates the interconnections between different polities and regions throughout Asia; the history of iconic images in circulation, pilgrimage networks, scriptural translations, and the dissemination of relics and teachings all serve to challenge familiar notions of state, cultural, or linguistic boundaries. Yet the predominant narrative of Buddhist art across Asia is often trapped between two rather fixed paradigms of power relations: the story of influence or transmission on the one hand, and that of indigenous or local appropriation on the other.

When providing students with a guiding narrative of Buddhist art across Asia, how can we opt out of negotiating this binary? What are alternative models? In this paper, I propose that a way to bypass the issue is by focusing on the question of how Buddhist art, and by extension—their makers and users—tell the story of their place in history. That is, how do art objects narrate their own existence in the historiography of Buddhism and Buddhist art? I will give one example from eighteenth-century China. My approach is based on the observation that the most innovative of Buddhist imageries and practices are also the ones with the deepest (albeit also creative) investment in long-winded histories and genealogies. This paradoxical performance of origin-tracing and originality reveals that the binary is of our own making.