Reimagining Modernity through Ancient Indian Art: Japanese Buddhists and the Ajanta Caves

The reimagination of the Indian origins of Buddhism has played an important role in the development of modernist narratives within Japanese Buddhism in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. This new connection with Indic sources allowed Japanese Buddhist intellectuals to enter into conversation and competition with the Indology-centered European Orientalism, while claiming through Buddhism a spiritual connection with Asia beyond the Chinese cultural sphere. These ideas found echo in material and visual culture and this played a crucial role in making Buddhist modernist discourses on India reach the public sphere in Japan, especially as in the case of the Japanese interest in the art of the Ajanta caves. Completed in the fifth century and famous for their wall paintings, the Ajanta caves were an important travel destination for the transnational network of Buddhist modernism in the early twentieth century. While historians have investigated the modern Indo-Japanese connections in the fields of art and literature, focusing on towering figures such as Tagore and Okakura, little work exists on the religious-artistic network and on the Japanese Buddhist involvement in the rediscovery of Ajanta. This presentation focuses on two events in particular: the visit to Ajanta of the first expedition (1902–1904) organized by the Ōtani Buddhist sect, and an exhibition in Kyoto (1924) of copies of the Ajanta wall paintings, made by artist Inoue Toshimasa and organized in collaboration with his travelling companion to India, the Buddhist priest and Indologist Izumi Hōkei.