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 Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, opened to the public in 1923, a gift to the nation from Charles Lang Freer. The Gallery contains an extensive collection of oriental art, prints, sculpture and silk panels, as well as a major group of 19th and 20th century American works.
Details
- Hardcover
- 264 pages
- 9.5" x 6.5"
- Edited by Robert DeCaroli and Donald S. Lopez Jr.
