Description
Following on the exhibition Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice across Asia at the National Museum of Asian Art, ten eminent scholars present their insights into Buddhism's fascinating relation with the five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch), which careens between delight and disgust, rarely finding a middle way. While much of Buddhist literature is devoted to overcoming the attachment that dooms us to rebirth in samsara, primarily by deprecating sense experience and showing that whatever brings us sensual pleasure leads only to physical and mental pain, in texts such as the Lotus Sutra, sensory powers do not offer sensory pleasure but rather knowledge, clear observation, and ability to teach the Dharma. Considering such religiously and historically contingent ambiguity, this volume presents each of the five senses in two instantiations, the good and the bad, opening up the discourse on the senses across Buddhist traditions.
Museum Story
The National Museum of Asian Art is a global resource for understanding Asian arts, cultures, and societies and their intersection with the United States. Opened in 1923 as the country's first national art museum, it now stewards one of the world's best collections of Asian art, which date from antiquity to the present, from China, Japan, Korea, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Ancient Near East, and the Islamic world (including Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa). The museum also holds an important array of 19th- and early 20th-century American art of the Aesthetic Movement.
Details
- Hardcover
- 264 pages
- 9.5" x 6.5"
- Edited by Robert DeCaroli and Donald S. Lopez Jr.
