Good morning, everyone. For new folks, I'm Taigen Leighton, the guiding Dharma teacher at Ancient Dragons Zen Gate. You're all welcome. Today, I'm going to speak about Unkei, and also some of his sons. And has anybody here heard of Unkei? I don't see any hands up. How many people have heard of Michelangelo? Yeah, a lot of hands. OK. Well, he is known and rightfully known as the Japanese Michelangelo. He was a sculptor of Buddhist images, died in 1223, the same year that Dogen left to go to China as a young monk. So he was contemporary but older, overlapping with Dogen.

[01:06]

He was a carver of Buddhist statues and images and from a guild of Buddhist sculptors in Japan. And his best known statue was, or his first known statue, not best, but first known statue, which I don't have a picture of today, is from 1175. And that's a Vairochana or Dharmakaya Buddha, which was important in the Flower Ornament Sutra, the main Buddha there, and also in Esoteric or Vajrayana Buddhism, which was important in Japan. In 1180, starting from 1180 to 1185, there was a huge civil war in Japan. The war between the Minamoto family and the Taira family went from 1180 to 1185.

[02:16]

In 1180, two major, so, Unkei was associated with the Nara group of sculptors. So Nara was the ancient capital up to 800, and Kyoto was the capital from 800. And there will not be a test, so don't worry about remembering all this. But just to give you context, so During this, in 1180, during the civil war, the huge temples of Kofukuji and Todaiji in Nara were burned down. And this was not a civil war over, you know, being Buddhist or Buddhist doctrine, but between noble families and actually between samurai families and

[03:16]

but connected with the nobility. But a lot of the major temples had associations with these families. So that was why Kofuku and Todai-ji, both of which I'm going to talk about more, were burned down. But when this happened, the sculptors in Nara and in Kyoto, and there were temples burned down in Kyoto too during the Civil War, had an opportunity when these temples were being rebuilt to produce new Buddha images, new Buddha sculptures, as well as craftsmen who built new temples. And so, These images are important. So Unkei was from the Nara sculpture lineage. His father, Kokei, had been an important sculptor before him. But Unkei, particularly, I want to talk about. And for most of the population in Japan then, and for many countries still at that time,

[04:27]

there were the nobles and some of the samurai were literate and could read buddhist texts and scriptures but for most people for the general populace their understanding of buddhist buddhism and dharma came from seeing these images of buddhas and bodhisattvas and protectors as well as the wonderful temples there so um Young Unkei visited and sculpted in Kamakura. The new capital was moved to Kamakura by the winning side in this war. This war is the Heike Monogatari is a narrative, very famous in Japan, tale of Heike about this important civil war. It's compared as the Japanese Iliad. It's a very moving, long, long story. were anyway, the capital was set up in Kamakura in 1185.

[05:34]

And from 1185 to, oh, I don't know, the 1330s, that's called the Kamakura period because of that. And it was an important time in Japan. There was a lot of change and upheaval. So we're familiar with that here. And the major current Buddhist schools in Japan came about then. So the Zen school, Rinzai and Soto, the Tendai school based on the Chinese Shintai, the Nichiren school based on the Lotus Sutra all came about during this volatile period. Unkei was at the beginning of it, and sculptors were important. Many of them have not survived, but I want to show you just a few that have. So, David, you could put up the first image, we're going to have some images of these. So, can you all see this?

[06:37]

Yeah, this is another first one. Yeah, thank you. That's Jizo Bodhisattva. So I talked about him and some of the others in my book Faces of Compassion about the Bodhisattva archetypal figures. Jizo is the bodhisattva, his name means earth womb or earth matrix. So he was very much the bodhisattva of common people and particularly in all the realms, including in the hell realms. So he is particularly the bodhisattva who goes into the hell realms to help beings there. He's also considered a guardian of children and of women and of people who've passed away and are waiting to be reborn. So he's very important. Bodhisattva is very, very popular in China and Japan. Kshitigarbha in Sanskrit, Zazang in Chinese.

[07:42]

Again, there won't be a test. But this was a sculpture by Unkei. And it's at a temple called Rakuhara Mitsuji in Kyoto. Rokuhara Mitsuji in Sino-Japanese means the Sixth Paramita Temple. So it's the temple of the six transcendent practices that I've talked about. So this is a sculpture, one of my favorite Japanese Buddhist sculptures by Unkei. And I have a particular relationship to it. Well, it's just to say Rokuhara Mitsuji, that temple where this statue now is, is a little bit south of Keninji, walking distance from Keninji, which is where Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen, practiced just before and just after he went to China to study and brought back Soto Zen.

[08:44]

So this statue, I feel, Somehow I feel a sense of breath from the statue, a sense of presence. The robes are particularly vivid, but just his calm presence. When I was living at Tassajara one time, I spent maybe about a week looking at this image, which I had in my cabin, and then in the zendo during Zazen, visualizing it. So I feel like I learned to breathe from this statue by Oike. I should mention that Rokuhara Matsuji was near where Dogen practiced at Keninji, just before and after he went to China. Rokuhara Matsuji, Sixparamita Temple, where this Jizo is, is also where Dogen gave his talk, Zenki, Total Dynamic Activity.

[09:50]

I think maybe one of his other talks he gave there. So it's a fairly small temple now. It was much larger back then. So anyway, I really continue to appreciate this statue. By the way, Jizo is holding in his left hand a wish-fulfilling gem just to grant the wishes of whomever he meets. And in his right hand, there used to be a staff. So most Jizos have a teaching staff or a monk staff. So anyway, this is one of the statues by Unkei. Can you go to the next image, David, please? This is a self-portrait of Unkei. Very unusual to have a statue of a Buddhist sculptor. There were portrait statues before this in the earlier period, but usually of very prominent monks.

[10:55]

As you can see, Oneke is holding some beads. He has a shaved head and is dressed like a monk. So this is also at the Rakuhara Matsuji and his hands are particularly you know, I get the sense of his strength and his large hands. He was not a monk in the official sense, but as I was saying, there were guilds of crafts people, craftsmen, associated with all these temples or associated with whole cities and making statues or gardens or temple buildings for many different temples. But this is Unkei. This statue probably was finished by one of his disciples after his death. But it gives a sense of this man, Unkei, this great, great sculptor of Buddhist and Buddha images.

[12:03]

David, could you go to the next image, please? This is not in Rokuhara Matsuji, but in the temple called Kofukuji in Nara, which was the southern capital. It's a short train ride south of Kyoto now. I did many day trips to Nara to look at these statues and old temples when I was living in Kyoto. This is, Sessu is his name in Japanese, Sesshin, excuse me, but this is Vasubandhu. Some of you know him as a teacher of Abidharma early on, but he became converted to the Yogacara school, in Japanese it's called the Hoso school, by his brother. Could you go to the next image, please? So this is Mujaku is the name in Japanese, but this is Asanga. So Asanga and Vasubandhu were two great Indian scholars and monks.

[13:11]

And they are particularly associated with the Hosowa Yogachara School, which is one of the two main branches of Mahayana Buddhism coming from India, along with the Madhyamaka. So these two statues are both by Unkei. And one gets quite a sense of these great Indian masters as people from these statues. So could you go back a second, David, to Vasubandhu? Yeah, so they're both the same height. You can't tell from these images, but they're, oh, 12 or 15 feet high. They're large. They're in one of the buildings at Kofukuji. And the Tara school is associated with a study of consciousness. So it developed a whole study of different aspects of consciousness and how consciousness works.

[14:17]

And it's an important background for Zen and many other schools. So you can go back to Asanga. David, thank you so much. So these two brothers, they were brothers, were both, were both famous as founders, as patriarchs of this Yogachara school, which came into Japan and Kofukuji, this temple where they're at, is the center of that. And the Yogachara school was also very much connected to Maitreya Buddha. If you could go to the next slide, David, next image, David. This is also carved by one K also at Kofukuji. This is an image of Maitreya when he becomes the Buddha. So Maitreya, Miroku in Japanese is the bodhisattva who is predicted to become the next Buddha.

[15:21]

And he was important in the Yogacara school. There's a story, maybe I can tell it later, about Asanga's practice with Maitreya. Very colorful story, but people in those times venerated Maitreya, were devoted to Maitreya. And this is the image of him. when he becomes a Buddha in the future. And there are various devas, goddesses, who are on the halo behind him. You can only see a couple of them. But again, this is an amazing statue by Unke. Just as a contrast, Maitreya sometimes is shown as a Buddha like this, sometimes as a Bodhisattva. So David, could you show the next image, please? This is a much earlier statue from the Koryu-ji Temple in Kyoto. This is probably the most famous Buddhist statue in Japan.

[16:23]

And this is Maitreya, Miroku in Japanese, before he became the Buddha, as he is now, sitting in one of the meditation heavens. And he's kind of pensively thinking, contemplating how to save all beings. And as part of this, he studied the consciousness, different aspects of consciousness of suffering beings. And this is why he's connected to the Hosowa Yogachara school. This is not, this is a much earlier statue, probably from the 600s, one of the earlier Buddha statues in Kyoto, Inara, and probably carved by a Korean craftsman. Korean crafts people came over to Japan early on and for a while. But this gives you the other side of Maitreya, sometimes with images as a Buddha, sometimes as a bodhisattva like this, contemplating the suffering of sentient beings, considering how to become a Buddha and how to save all sentient beings.

[17:28]

And there's a statue nearby, this statue in Koryu-ji, a wonderful old temple in Kyoto. I think it's Shingon school. Anyway, there's a statue nearby called Weeping Maitreya. I don't have a picture of it, but he's in the same pose, but he's kind of leaning over and it looks like he's weeping for the suffering of beings. So, Kofukuji, where, if you could go back, David, to the Maitreya, Kofukuji, the temple in Nara, the old capital, which was capital like in the 700s, a little earlier, of Japan, has wonderful, wonderful temples. But I wanted to say a little bit about Kofukuji particularly, this Yogacara temple. When I had the opportunity to spend a few months going around to temples in Kyoto and Nara when I was 20, looking, I hadn't intended, that wasn't the reason for my being there.

[18:39]

I just went down to Kyoto and ended up spending three months going around to temples. to Buddhist temples after the first time I dropped out of school, but was just blown away by these statues. And a story about Kofukuji. the first time I went to Kofukuji, it's an amazing place. There's all these statues and many, many more statues than I've shown here. But you get a little taste of them, not just from the Kamakura period, but from the earlier period, there's a statue of Amalakirti. There are statues of protectors and demons. I'll show you one of those in a little bit. There's also a deer herd wandering around and there's a wonderful pagoda, very tall pagoda. So some of you may have, I know some people from our Sangha have gone to Kyoto and Nara and looked at some of these things.

[19:39]

Anyway, the story is that when I first went to Kofukuji and was just blown away by these statues. I mean, I just like, I had never, didn't know about them and never seen anything like them. And there's many, many more that are there. And then I wandered over to another building where there was a, it's called Fukukenjaku Kanon. And I don't have an image, the image of it, but this is a statue, an octagonal building with only one image, with only one statue in it, and that's Kanon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, who we'll see more later. And I looked at it and it was very, very, you know, another fine statue. And I turned away. And when I looked back, there was an old woman standing in front of this building and looking up at this Kannon. And she bowed and gassho, like Hogetsu talked about last week.

[20:42]

And suddenly I, realized that this was not just a museum of sculpture or statues. And I feel like that's, when I saw that old woman bowing to the Kannon at Kofukuji was when I first became a Buddhist. Some people have asked me that question. I don't know if Eve is on the, is here with us today, but she asked me. So I have various, I could give various answers to that, but, of how I became a Buddhist was just seeing this old woman bowing to this statue of Kannon at Kofukuji. So Kofukuji, there are other amazing temples in Nara. There's one that's very close to Kofukuji called Todai-ji. Could you go to the next image, actually the image after next, David, please?

[21:47]

Here, this is from Todai-ji. Todai-ji is the largest wooden building in the world. And inside it is the largest bronze statue in the world, which is a statue of the Dharmakaya Buddha, Vairakshana. That building and statue were also destroyed in the civil wars. They rebuilt them later. So they're still not the largest wooden building and the largest bronze statue. The ear of that Buddha is eight feet long, to give you an idea. It's huge, but a beautiful statue, but they've been rebuilt and they're still the largest, but the original ones were larger. So anyway, this is a statue of Atof Kuci. There are two statues on either side of the gate of this guardian figure and this is common at temples in Japan that there are guardians at the gate. One of them has the mouth open like this, the other one has their mouth closed in a very fierce posture.

[22:52]

So these statues were made by Unkei and Kaikei who was a fellow apprentice with Unkei of Unkei's father. So he was also a famous sculptor in this period. And we don't know which of these statues was made by Unkei and which by Kaikei, but they're quite imposing and impressive as an entryway to Todai-ji, which is Todai-ji is a Kegon school temple devoted to the Waiyan or to the Avatamsaka Sutra that some of us are reading every month. This statue is about 25 feet tall. So it's huge. It's very imposing. And you can see it's very realistic and muscular and very vivid. And so this or the one next to it on the other side of the gate was carved by Unkei. And you can see the influence of the samurai culture that was becoming dominant then. So these statues, particularly in this Kamakura period, because of the capital being in Kamakura and the shogun or samurai rulers' influence, we have statues like this.

[24:02]

So I next want to talk about and show some statues by Unkei's sons. So as I was saying, there were guilds of these craftspeople, sculptors, later gardens, Zen rock garden makers, of course, temple architects and designers and carpenters who Paul Disko studied with, a modern version of. So, 1K had six sons, all of whom were sculptors, only three of them, works from only three of them survived. David, could you go to the next image, please? This is another one of my favorite Japanese Buddhist sculptures. I don't know if you can make it any larger, David. If not, that's OK. But this was carved by Koban, who was Unkei's third son. No, not. Yeah, just that's OK.

[25:04]

Just stay with that. He has a dragon. whirling around him. And this is a common demon figure. So often these kind of demons with these kind of faces are shown under the feet of protector guardians, protector kings. But this one has been converted. And there's another one that Copen made that's a pair with this, that they're holding up lanterns to protect, to illuminate the Dharma. So this is a protector demon holding up a dragon lantern. And he's, you know, it's hard to tell in this image, but this is the dragon's head. And so he's just there, this dragon around him, holding up this lantern to illuminate the Dharma, a very powerful sculpture. And you can see his kind of partly hoof-like feet. These demons are called oni in Japan.

[26:05]

And there's, at many of the temples, when you step in, there's a kind of wooden plank upright, so you have to step over to enter into the temple. And that's to keep the onis out, to keep out the demons, because they're small and they can't get over that. But some of them have been converted, like this one. The next image, David. Yeah, this is by another one of Unkei's sons, Kosho was his name. And he's the fourth son of Unkei, of the six. And this is back in Rokuhara Mitsuji, where we saw the image of Jizo and the image of the self-portrait statue of Unkei. And this is an interesting story.

[27:07]

This is a portrait of a monk from the Heian period, from, I think, the 1000s. and his name was Kuya. And this monk, it may be hard to see here, but he has a gong here and a striker here and a deer antler staff. And he would walk around the streets of Kyoto chanting Namo Amida Butsu. So that's the Buddha of the Pure Land Schools. So even before the Pure Land School was founded in the Kamakura period, won by Honen and then by Shinran, the Jodo Shinshu School, There was a lot of devotion to Amida Buddha. And I should have mentioned Maitreya earlier on was maybe more of it. an object of devotion for Buddhists in Asia before Amida became more popular, but going back into, well, the time when the early Maitreya I showed, the Korean Maitreya, Bodhisattva, that was one of the main Buddhas that was, that people were devoted to.

[28:16]

But many Buddhists and Bodhisattvas were part of the devotion of, Buddhism. So this Kuya, again, was an historical monk. Oh, Kuya lived 903 to 972. So there was no pure land school as such back then. Before the Kamakura period, the two main schools were the Tendai school, which was up on the Mount Hiei, the northeast of Kyoto, and Dogen and all his disciples. And actually all the Kamakura founders were disciples of Tendai Buddhism. Honen and Shinran for Pure Land, and Nichiren for the Nichiren Lotus Sutra School. But there were people like Kuya who were devoted to Amida Buddha. So this again, this is a statue at the Rokuhara Matsuji Temple by Honke-san Kobe.

[29:18]

Could you go to the next image, please, David? Yeah, so coming out of his mouth, he's chanting Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu. These are Buddhas that appear because he is chanting them. So this is a very interesting statue, a cool way of showing his chanting and actually depicting these Amida Buddhas that Kuya was chanting. So he wasn't part of the Pure Land School. He was probably a Tendai monk, but he just, he liked Amida Buddha. And so he popularized Amida Buddha before the Pure Land Schools in the 900s. And he was the founder of Rokuhara Mitsuji. temple I've talked about where that Onke statue is and the self-portrait statue of Onke is. But this was a statue carved by Onke's son.

[30:18]

There's only a few other pieces by this sculptor, Kosho, that survive, including a very peaceful Amida Buddha. So There's a kind of way in which these statues are very vivid and moving. Can you go back one to see, David, to see Kuya, the full body image, yeah? So again, this is, he's barefoot, or maybe he's got his tricentals on, that's probably it. And this was an image of him walking around. Kyoto chanting Amida Buddha and hitting his gong and dancing with that. So a few more pictures by other sons of Unke. If you could go to the image after this. So Unke's eldest son is named Tonke.

[31:25]

And I think some people in our sangha have gone to the Sanjusangendo, which literally means 33 bays or 33 spaces. So there's 33 of these kind of spaces between the pillars. But this is an amazing temple. There are literally a thousand of these Kannon statues. And you can see them with the thousand arms and with the 11 heads that are characteristic, including a head of Amida. So Kanon is very, very popular, maybe the most popular Bodhisattva in Asia. And this temple, Sanjusangendo, is a little bit south of Rakuhara Matsuji. Maybe Rakuhara Matsuji is halfway between Keninji, where Dogen practiced, and which is still a functioning Rinzai temple, and Sanjusangendo. It's not just on Gendo, it just has this awesome impact when you go in. And maybe you can't tell it by looking at this picture, but each one of these Kannon statues is really a beautiful image.

[32:35]

Each one was made individual, they were not made on a conveyor, you know, by modern technology stamped out. Each one is individual and has a slightly individual expression. There's a Nara museum between Kofukuji and Todaiji where you can see it's one of the places, actually there's a museum just across the street from Sanjusen Gento 2 in Kyoto, and just if you see just one of these images sometimes they loan out individuals of these Kannon images. They're beautiful and all of them were super made by or supervised by Tom K. Tom K supervised them and you can't really see them here but there are in front of these there are a whole bunch of very peculiar images of different Buddhist images from these descriptions of the assemblies in Buddhist Some of these are old hermits.

[33:41]

Some of these are fierce guardians. They're all particular interesting characters. So if you ever get to Kyoto, Sanjusangendo is one of the popular tourist places that's really worth going to. Next image, David, please. So here you get a sense of the Sanju Sangendo. There are a thousand of these Kannon statues. You can't see all of them in this picture, but it's immense, and it's just mind-blowing when you walk in there and see all these Kannon statues. And then the other figures are just in front of this railing. You can't see them in this image. But these were all supervised by Tonke, and he built some of them himself. Tonke, who was the eldest son of Unke, he lived from 1173 to 1256, three years after Dogen.

[34:41]

So I'm not sure exactly when, well, Sanjusangendo was built in 1251. The statues were made between 1251 and 1254. So I don't know whether Dogen, who died in 1253, would have seen them when he went back to Kyoto to die. But anyway, this was an immense place. And on the other side of the Sanjusangendo, which is this very long, long hall, is a a walkway where they used to have archery competitions. And archery was one of the samurai practices. So there was a long hole where archers could shoot from one end to the target at the other end. So Tanke, as I said, supervised this. There's not so many other statues that survived, but one of them, if you could go to the next image, David, please. This is at the center of those thousand.

[35:47]

Kanons you saw. So there's 500 on one side and 500 on the other side. And in the middle is this amazing statue of Kanon Bodhisattva. And this was built by Tonke, Monke's eldest son. And you can see this is so this is the Bodhisattva of Compassion. He has typically 11 heads, including Amida on top. There's various stories about that. One of them is that Kannon saved all the beings in the hell realms. And then he looked back and saw the hell realm being filled up again and his head split open with grief. And this happened 11 times. But then the last time he had this Amida head and was able to continue. And you can see on the halo behind, there's a Buddha, there's other Buddhas behind the hands. He's said to have a thousand hands. And sometimes they're depicted only with 25 hands or 500 hands.

[36:50]

I think this one actually has, well, I can't tell, maybe it only has 50 hands. Each of the hands is supposed to have an eye in it, And each of the hands, the hands have various images. Here's a hatchet. Here's a whisk. Here's a lotus. I don't know if you can see the cursor, but I'm moving on it. There's a lotus here. And there's the sun and the moon and bells and a staff. And of course, Kanon is in Gassho, which Hokusai talked about last Sunday. So this is a very large statue. I think it's about 35 feet high. And it's, again, sits up on a lotus pedestal in between the 500 canons on one side and 500 on the other. So this is Tanke, whose images are more peaceful than some of Onke's, but you can feel the vividness of this branch of sculptors.

[37:53]

So that's the pictures that we have for you. just to say that there are other pieces that Tankei sculpted. Many of the pieces by Unkei sons and by Unkei have not survived, but I've shown you some that did. And for practitioners, just to go to Kyoto and Nara to see these images is powerful. It's why I wrote my book on Faces of Compassion about the different Bodhisattva figures, because I was going around for three months when I was 20, and then 20 years later, I lived in Japan for two years plus, and I was doing other things. I was translating Dogen and teaching English in school, but I also went around to these temples many times to look at the temple architecture, which Paul knows a lot about, and also with these amazing images.

[38:58]

And also the Zen gardens, which were built, the rock gardens were built later. Most of those are from the 1300s and later. So that's later than these images. So this is a little bit of Kamakura Buddhist sculpture. David, could you, if you could go back to the very first image of Jizo, just because I like it a lot. And, yeah. Maybe we could open this up for questions or comments, if anyone has it. Maybe let's go back to the gallery view, David, so I can see whose hand, and you can help me see whose hand is up. So any questions or comments about these amazing images and about the Japanese Michelangelo Unkei? I would love to respond or hear your comments. Yes, Paul.

[40:22]

I think it's hard in the photographs to get the impression of just how powerful this statuary is. I mean, it's you can feel there's something alive, there's a presence, there's an actual aura, they have a presence that even it's being a thousand years old, or 800 years old, you can still feel something vivid and alive is maybe not the right word, but definitely consciousness, it still has consciousness. And it's beyond explanation or beyond words. When I first went to Rokuhara Mitsujita, seeing the statue of the Buddhas coming out of his mouth, which is very famous, showed him all the travel brochures, and it's quite popularized. And I was standing there looking at it, and I felt somebody staring at me from behind.

[41:25]

And I turned around and there was the statue that we showed earlier of the carver himself. And you could still feel, he still had power to, actually I think it was a different one that I felt. It was a monk, a abbot's death sculpture. And you could still feel the energy coming off of it. Even like you can, you can feel somebody staring at you. Maybe you've all had that experience and you look around, there is somebody staring at you. I looked around and there was this. 800-year-old block of wood staring at me. It was quite, it's a memorable experience. And there's many others throughout Japan from that period, and even earlier. There was one in a temple near where I lived that was a, from the 8th century, that was also just mine, just still alive, just still had a vibrant consciousness. But it takes one to carve one, so you have to be, you have to practice, you have to know what you're carving, you have to be what you're carving.

[42:36]

It's an amazing testimonial to the practice of early Buddhism. Thank you very much, Paul. Yes. And these, you know, I've, I've wanted to talk about Nge for a long time, but, and I, you know, I'm sorry that Western Buddhists, American Buddhists never heard of Nge, because he's so powerful, his images. And yes, as Paul said, it's not that they're just dead statues. They're very vivid and they have this presence. It's very powerful. And, you know, I described that with the old woman who bowed to the Kanon statue at Kofukuji. Yeah, so they're more powerful than the pictures can convey. But this is a part of Buddhist practice that Buddhism is not just about reading texts and studying sutras and all that, studying great teachers like Dogen.

[43:43]

Again, for illiterate common people back then, these statues were how they learned about Buddhism. So this isn't about Japanese culture particularly. I mean, it is in a way. These were all Japanese Buddha carvers who practiced, as Paul said, to be able to create such images, one has to show their calmness or their energy, as in some of the protector figures, like the guardians of the gate. One has to be very, very settled and to know something from inside. So again, these images are of figures that go back to China and India. And there are today in America, American Buddhist artists who carve Buddha images or who paint Buddhist bodhisattvas and buddhas or other images or paint images of nature that express something of the dharma.

[44:58]

So here we talk about Buddhism and about the dharma because that's what we can do. And we said, in front of the Zoom screen. We are still missing being present together in the same room, and that'll happen again eventually. But anyway, this is about Buddhist art and the power of it. So other comments or questions or responses? I think Aisin has something in the chat window. She doesn't have a microphone, but was really struck by the stylistic differences between Unke's portrayal of bodhisattvas and his portrayal of individual people, especially in the face. So yeah, there's a vividness to the, I mean, these are master sculptors.

[45:59]

I mean, Unke is called the Japanese Michelangelo for a reason. I've never been to Italy to see original Michelangelos. I've only seen pictures of them, but these images by Unkei are very powerful and very expressive. And again, it's not just an image. So again, the pictures don't really capture it in a lot of ways, but there's a tremendous presence. Other comments, questions, responses, anyone? David, help me. I think Xinyu's hand is up. Who's that? Who's that? Xinyu. Oh, Xinyu, hi. Xinyu? Thank you for sharing this topic. And I'm quite curious about how How do these sculptors practice during their time? Do they practice by doing sculptures or do they also do some form of Buddhist practice?

[47:08]

I don't know so much, you know, in terms of the literature about them, but I'm I'm certain that Unkei practiced meditation. You can see that. And he was practicing at this Hoso Yogachara school temple, but he also built statues in many, many temples in Kyoto and Nara. And then he went to Kamakura for a little while and built statues there at some of the temples that were being built by the samurai shogun. And that influenced him in terms of the vividness more. you know, protector fierce figures. So there's a whole, I only showed a couple of these, but there are a whole branches, a bunches of Buddhist sculpture in Japan that are wrathful figures. You got a sense of it from the guardian at the gate, but there are many, many, many other, the four protector kings who are stamping on these little, and so the statuary is very vivid.

[48:14]

And as Paul said, they could not have, Oh. created these statues with their strong presence if they hadn't practiced, if they hadn't known from inside and practiced themselves. And they were associated with many different temples and not any particular school. So I don't know in detail about it, but it was hereditary. So one case, father was a master sculptor and then his sons became master sculptors. So they were, they were practicing in some way as well as practicing by creating this Buddhist art. And there are now in the West, artists who are creating all kinds of, you know, Dharma art in various ways. So, Paul. From somebody that studied craft in Japan and studied the history of these temples and the objects in them, A lot of this came from the mainland.

[49:19]

A lot of it came from China and Korea. They originated, somebody or a group of people would come from China or Korea, and then they would set up sort of an ongoing business. I actually worked underneath a company. One of the temples I built was a subcontract to a group called the Congo Gumi. who was a Korean construction company that came to Japan in 12-something. And I just heard in the news about three years ago that they finally would have a business after 800 years of being in business. But these things don't occur all of a sudden by themselves. It's generation after generation. It takes at least three generations, four generations to reach this peak of of ability. So it's handed down generation to generation, and they study and are immersed in it from childhood on.

[50:19]

And it's not something you can do from a standing start. Just sit there and do it. It takes several lifetimes to be able to do this kind of work. And they say it takes seven generations. By seven generations, you've peaked and gone downhill again. So it's one of those things where it's cyclical. You have to build up to it, and then you reach the top and become complacent or humorous, humorous sets in and then it starts to decline. So you see how some of these, many of these statues have occurred by the children of, or the father of, it runs in families and in heritage from one generation to the next. Thank you, Paul.

[51:22]

Yes. So these images go back to Korea, to China, some even to India. But then these Japanese sculptors made them vivid and gave their own Japanese kind of context. And that's how American Buddhist art today, or Western Buddhist art, develops based on artists seeing some of these these images and paintings, as well as sculpture and the architecture. And the temple buildings are also amazing and brilliant and were very inspiring to me, as well as the sculpture. But also when you go to large temples, still, there are laborers to put it that way, who are associated with the temple and live on the temple grounds and have families that have been living on the temple grounds.

[52:22]

So these guilds of sculptors and temple builders were part of that worker force. And so anyway, it will take a while. There's some amazing Western Buddhist art already, but it'll take longer for it to really develop. But there's a woman in Sacramento who creates images of bodhisattvas. And there's a statue, she has a statue, a porcelain statue of a Kannon sitting on a lounge chair in one of the poses, for example. So Anyway, it's a living thing. David, can you, for people who don't have, who I can't see, some of you who don't have images, you can go to the participants window and hold your hand up. And now I see there are a number of hands, David and Ron and Dylan. So David first. Thank you, Taigen, for that talk.

[53:24]

It makes me realize that seeing Buddhist art has been formative in my life, too, both when I was in China at the Lama Temple in Beijing, but also in museums. And I have a question about the about the images that you showed in about Unke in particular, and maybe this is a totally predictable question, but especially the Jizo image reminds me of the art, of the Buddhist art from India. that is said to manifest some of the influence of Hellenistic Greek sculpture, and in the way that folds of cloth are depicted, for example, in the Jizo sculpture, and then also in the face. And so I'm wondering if art historians think that there's a direct line. I mean, if traditional sculptures came from India and then to China, and then from there to Japan, I guess it could make sense that there would be some of that.

[54:31]

some of that flavor preserved. Yeah, so in terms of Indian Buddhist imagery, there's some Indian Buddhist imagery that's particularly from the Gandhara region. The first Buddhists that originally in Buddhism, they didn't have images of the Buddha or statues of the Buddha. They just had the Buddha's footprint. This is in India. But then they started actually influenced by Hellenic influences from Alexander's invasion of India and the inter-Buddhist mingling from that, some of the early Indian Buddha images definitely are Hellenic, but I wouldn't say that that's, so those images and other Indian Buddhist images did influence Buddhist images in China and Japan, but they're not, I wouldn't say that they're directly related to whatever,

[55:32]

Hellenic or Greek influence there was in Indian Buddhist statuary. Just in terms of the robes, one of the things that happened with Unkei and in the Kamakura period, where you can see the folds of the robes are very vivid, in the earlier Japanese Buddhist statues. And you got a sense of that from that Maitreya I showed, which was by a Korean sculptor. So yeah, they were influenced by Korean and Chinese images. But then it became something Japanese in the Kamakura period. But the earlier Japanese Buddhist statue is much more delicate, less vivid. So calmer in some sense, less dramatic maybe. So I wouldn't say that there's a direct influence from the Hellenic statuary in Japan. But that said, in the Nara period, which was like in the 700s and maybe the late 600s, there were in Nara people from all over Asia.

[56:47]

There were even, I think, Nestorian Christians maybe who came to Nara. So Nara was a very cosmopolitan city. Later on in Japan kind of walled itself off and there wasn't much interchange with the mainland and Dogen was one of the first who went to China. So it's a complex history. I have hands up from Ron next and then Dylan, then Ian. Paul also, I think, had a comment. Did you have a comment directly on this, Paul? You're silenced. We have to remember that China went through a great upheaval in the 12th century with the Mongol invasion. We've lost almost everything from before that period. So there's very little art and statuary and architecture and anything that can burn is gone or rot.

[57:55]

And there's very, very little of it. So we don't realize how much of this came from the mainland. But Japan was this isolated island off the coast that was not invaded and kept all of this treasure from the mainland there in its temples and in its palaces. And so it's a wonderful mirror or image, a window onto the pre pre-Mongol invasion China and Korea. So a lot of this stuff is actually very much part of the mainland, but there's no remaining examples of it on the mainland because of the people and the war and the destruction. But that just like with the automobile or the TV set or whatever, Japan's been very good at copying and very good at making subtle changes and making it better, but they didn't come up with the idea in the first place.

[59:04]

It's true that the temples have been going on that way for a long time. Thank you, Paul. I want to call on Ron, who I knew back in New York, before I dropped out and went to Japan the first time. Thank you, Taigen, for the delightful and informative talk. It almost made me feel like I was back in art humanities class in Hamilton Hall. There's questions about how the patronage system for sculptors and painters worked during Nkei's time. Were, for instance, temple works financed by civil authorities or by the temples? Did Nkei negotiate directly with whoever it was that was letting the contract out, or was the negotiation done by the guild? In terms of working artists, was it kind of a flat hierarchy where all of them were paid relatively the same, or did star sculptors like Unkei earn significantly more than the ordinary artists?

[60:11]

Well, first I should say I don't know completely the answer to that question. There's not very much about Unkei in English, unfortunately. But what I can say is that there were competing guilds in Kyoto and Nara. at the beginning of the Hamakura period. And they were competing for the, to rebuild these temples that had been burned in the civil war and to rebuild the statues for those temples. So I think they were paid by the temples, but the temples were all connected with, you know, this was part of why some of them were burned down. The temples were all connected to, you know, the families of, you know, the samurai and the families of the noble people. So some of the noble people and aristocrats and samurais, you know, helped sponsor a particular temple.

[61:16]

So it was complicated. I don't know. But part of what happened with Unkei is he went to Kamakura when he was young. And so he had patronage from the shoguns. and from the samurai families and influence from them, from Kamakura, which is a town a little south of Tokyo, what's now Tokyo. And so that backing had some influence, I'm sure, in terms of him gaining stature in Nara and Kyoto. And at some point, the heads of the Kyoto sculptor guilds had died and so One-K and his group and the Nara sculptors had more influence in Kyoto too, so that's how they built things at Rakuhara Masuji and at Sanjusen Gandel and many other Kyoto temples. So it's complicated but they were, but I think for some of the

[62:18]

regular craftspeople, they probably were associated with particular temples and supported by those temples. But somebody like Unkei had a wider stature. And so, yeah, I mean, the temples where he worked would pay him. But I don't know much about that. I think there probably is information in Japanese that I can't access. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for the question. So other people, Dylan, comments, questions, responses? Yeah, can you hear me okay? Yes. Okay. Yeah, I really, really appreciate the, you know, Buddhist art, visionary art, Buddhist visionary art, and these statues. I think, especially in, at least in my experience in American Zen so far, when people are new to Zen, that there's this, one of the first questions is like, what book should I read?

[63:27]

You know, what is the, like, what are the top five books that I should go and study to start my practice? And I think it would be great if, like, you know, what if we, you know, what if when people ask that, we just, like, gave them a picture of Kanon or something or one of these statues, and that was it. you know, just to see what, like, because there's so much of it that you can't, it's about the experience of it rather than reading it in the books, you know? The other thought I had is that it reminds me of my, one of my favorite directors, Lucio Fulci, who's a horror director from the 70s and 80s in Italy. And in one of his films called The City of the Living Dead, when characters in the movie would have like a direct confrontation with death, a ghost, they would just start bleeding from the eyeballs. And, and that always had like elicited a similar sort of like spiritual sort of quality for me. So yeah, and there are

[64:31]

I haven't kept up with Japanese cinemas as much as I wish I had, but there are, you know, some of the great classic Japanese films that are definitely a Buddhist subject. So that's a modern artistic expression. But having said all that, you know, you're talking about looking at these images as opposed to, you know, reading books and and you know there are so many books on Buddhism in the West now and I've added to the to the plethora but in our temple that Ancient Dragon Zen Gate on Irving Park. There's numbers of you who've joined us since the pandemic started. Actually a year ago this week was the last time we occupied that space. But on the altar and around the temple, there were images of the Buddha, of Kannon. There was a big picture of Jizo in the kitchen. There were images of Kannon in my Doksan room.

[65:36]

Anyway, so Buddhist temples have these images on altars and around temples. There was a Tara, a form of Kannon right by the door to the zendo. So, you know, that's a way in which these kind of images also can be informative. So, Ian and then Jason. Hi, Terry. Hey, I wanted to ask you about the Bodhisattva images. They're always kind of, I guess the word is like, I'm thinking of Jizo who went through hell and Avalokitesvara with a thousand arms. It always seems kind of like super heroes or superhuman. And I was wondering, what their connection with humanity is and why they want to save all sentient beings. And then in our practice, we're also encouraged to see ourselves as Bodhisattvas or embody that ideal.

[66:41]

And it seems a very lofty goal. So I was wondering how those differences are reconciled. Well, yeah, at the end of all of our events, we do the four bodhisattva vows, and we'll do that today. And everybody here in all of these little Zoom squares that I can see and not see are bodhisattva practitioners. That's what we're doing here. Zen is part of the Mahayana great vehicle bodhisattva path. So we're, you know, in that sense, we are bodhisattva practitioners inspired by the desire to ease suffering in the world and help liberate all beings. That's our job. But these great Bodhisattva figures like Jizo or Kannon or Maitreya are, you know, very ancient, they go back to India, very ancient images of what I call archetypal Bodhisattvas, great Bodhisattva figures, inspirational figures, and they are dedicated to helping

[67:52]

Not just human beings, some of them are, you know, help also non-human. You know, there are many non-human or other kinds of beings that are at the assemblies of the Buddha. And there are many, many, many, many, many of them. In my book, Faces of Compassion, I focus on the seven who are the major archetypal bodhisattvas in East Asia, Maitreya and Kannon and Jizo included. But can you hear me okay? Yeah, so that's who they are. They're dedicated to universal liberation as these great bodhisattvas. And some of them are particularly, you know, Jizo particularly is really down to earth. Jizo is the bodhisattva who helps farmers and common people. Some of the bodhisattvas, Maitreya is now up in the meditative heavens trying to figure out consciousness and how to help beings that way.

[68:59]

So, but each of these Bodhisattva major figures have a whole range of practices and folklore and associations with different Buddhist schools. So they're, you know, they're complicated figures. But yeah, they're connected to us. Jason was next and then Paul. Jason. Thank you very much for the talk and all the pictures. It was lovely to see them this morning. I've been reading your book, Just This Is It, and you talk a little bit about synesthesia and the experience of especially Dongsheng and the text and the sound and bring up Rimbo and other individuals. Sculpture for me has always been a really acoustic medium. So when I see it, I certainly hear sounds, and it certainly instills movement.

[70:02]

Because I haven't seen a lot of those sculptures in person, any of the ones that you have shown, I can't hear them. I'm wondering if you could share the sounds, if you can. Yeah, so that's interesting. Thank you for that question very much. Yeah, this is about, so the sutras we in the West think of as intellectual texts that we have to understand. And actually that's not how they're understood in Asia for the most part. They're read aloud as we're reading all the Flower Ornament Sutra aloud. once a month, first Friday evening of the month that Jason helped inspire. So we connect with that which goes beyond the senses through the senses. We connect with the ultimate, with the universal in terms of our practice experience through these various vehicles, visual, auditory,

[71:07]

Fragrance, in the sutras, there are Buddhas who teach by fragrance. So incense is a relic of that or an aspect of that, as well as sounds. Now, all these Bodhisattva figures, this is in my book, Faces of Compassion, Archetypal Bodhisattvas and Their Modern Expression. get from wisdom publications. I have chapters on the different major Bodhisattva figures. Each one of them has at least one if not more dharanis or mantras that you can say and those are invoking these Bodhisattva figures. So that's an aspect of the sound and they can be sung too. So I talked, I think, last month about music in Soto Zen, and we think of there not being music, but of course, the sounds of the bells and the sounds of our chanting are auditory. But one response to your question is that the bodhisattvas each have a particular dharani or mantra to speak, and that invokes them through sound.

[72:16]

But I appreciate that, and Jason is one of our artists here in our sangha, and I don't know if you've done intentionally Buddhist-influenced pieces, but I'm sure that your practice influences all of your art. So anyway, thank you very much for the question. I did, I have one extra thing, I did, I did do, so art and practice are very much intertwined, but one specific sculpture that was very important is that Kuya sculpture. I did one piece in response or relationship to that, that was the only direct thing, but it was a nice, so I thought I'd share that too. Yeah, and that image, that physical image in that sculpture of Amida Buddha, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu. Each one of those is creating this little standing Amida Buddha in that sculpture.

[73:17]

It's a kind of amazing, very modern, what we might call postmodern or something, way of imaging something that was auditory. and that Nkuye was particular, who founded the Rakuhara Mitsuji, was particularly connected with. So, you know, there are these complex ways in which the senses are called on. So, thank you for that. Paul, did you have something else? Well, I just wanted to respond to Ian's question, basically, that, you know, We call ourselves the Soto Zen School, which is a particular way of approaching Buddhism and a particular way of understanding the nature of the Dharmakaya. But there's many other schools of Buddhism that have other approaches, and some of them get quite caught up in skillful means and offer people a lot of candy to help them along the road, and let them sort of

[74:26]

fall into a Buddhist understanding without them knowing it. Anyway, as Dylan was saying, for us, the viewing of these statues is to perceive it directly, which is what our practice is about, is perceiving things directly. And we don't really, We don't really get caught up in Zen in general. There's very little talk about the other Ujizo, for example, is never mentioned, and even Kuan Yin is hardly mentioned. It's not part of the Zen approach, but it's part of general Buddhism, it's part of popular Buddhism, and it's part of the overall picture of what Buddhism is. But our particular school of Buddhism is more interested in perceiving things correctly, without intermediaries in between.

[75:30]

So the two are not exclusive from each other, but they are different approaches. Yeah, thank you very much, Paul, but I want to comment on that. So for me personally, Well, before I first went to Japan, I guess I read Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, and there was hardly any real books on Buddhism back then. Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki, maybe. But anyway, I went there and without particularly intending to go around to Buddhist temples, but just was blown away by these statues as well as the temple architecture. But for me, four years after I came back from Japan, I met my first teacher, who was a Japanese Soto Zen priest and been doing Zazen every day since. But for me, this background of having seen these Bodhisattva images, and all these different Buddhist images, and the wrathful guardian figures very much so, and on these, you know, the background, the culture of Japanese Buddhism, the ground

[76:41]

You know, when I went back and lived there for a couple years or so, I was living between two temples, places that people had been practicing for 1000 years or more. So there's something in the culture. So our American Zen is not about Japanese culture, but there's something in this ground of Buddhist images and so forth that is part of the background. So that's why I wrote that book on the Faces of Compassion on the Bodhisattva figures because to me that was foundational even to Soto Zen. And if you go to Soto Zen temples in Japan, A lot of them have many, many images and very colorful, you know, even images of the arhats around the Buddha hall. So this is part of Japanese Buddhism. And I think it's something that's helpful for the American and other Buddhist practitioners just to be aware of.

[77:42]

So a few of you have gone to Japan and seen that or gone to other countries in Asia and seen the buildings and the statuary there and the paintings and so forth. So Jason mentioning synesthesia. Zazen is a practice where we sit and feel. in various ways, we hear sounds, we see the wall in front of us, we feel the sensations of the, you know, pain in our shoulders or knees or whatever. It's all and it's all connected. And we, we again, connect with something deeper that goes beyond through all these senses. So anyway, this is about the cultural ground, not of Japan, but of Buddhism as a whole, as Paul was saying, this is Japanese sculptures, you know, were based on sculptures in China and Korea and so forth.

[78:47]

So I kind of wanted people to have a sense of these bodhisattvas And they're spoken about in some in Japanese soto-sen. Dogen wrote about kanon, but they're not the predominant thing, but they're also in the background. So anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about today. If there's any last comment, we have time maybe for one last comment or response or question, if anybody else has something to ask or say, some response. Okay, well, thank you all. And oh, I'll mention that when this talk is posted to our website, Angie will be also providing a document which has all the images that were shown on it.

[79:48]

So you'll be able to look at them again. And yeah, we'll close out with chanting and...

[79:57]

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