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Mythological elephant predators6/30/2023 ![]() ![]() Embryological concerns also run right through both volumes, as both wrathful and benign deities were invoked to manage the fraught liminal stage for both mother and child.Īs a result, reading these volumes is more like consuming a bowl full of ramen than a bento box lunch: each deity has its own strand of developmental history, and Faure handles them in clusters to make a messy but satisfying meal that provides plenty of food for thought. The triad of Nyoirin Kannon, Aizen myōō, and Fudō myōō in volume 1, for example, finds its echo in the triad of Benzaiten, Dakiniten, and Shōten in volume 2, and many deities throughout both volumes are either iconographically, mythologically, numerologically, ritually, or astrologically associated with the cintamani wish fulfilling jewel or the sun kami Amaterasu, to name but a few common denominators. ![]() Moreover, when one looks closely at these networks in action, one observes how functionally fluid and even interchangeable these figures are. As a result, our understanding of the Buddhist pantheon is much expanded and enriched by his research. Because any one figure can be considered to be the arbitrary center or node in an extended complex of associated deities, as soon as one shifts the focus to a different deity, other related figures come into focus that were previously obscured. This labyrinthine latticework of deities and their elastic adaptations is Professor Faure’s key contribution to the field. It is incredibly complex and almost impossible to keep track of all the traces, but it is iconic neuroplasticity at its best. He demonstrates that deities can jump synaptic leaps of logic to analogically connect with other noumenal neurons, as tenuous and far-reaching as those dendrites may be. He employs the analogies of webs and meshes, the internet, genealogical family trees, rhizome root systems, and clusters of brain neurons. Faure’s agenda is to bring out the overlooked esoteric deities from the shadows, retrain our historic spotlight onto these less familiar luminaries, and reveal their iconographic interconnections, ritual interrelations, and functional flexibility relative to other deities, practical necessities, and historical contexts.Īs Faure crosses sectarian boundaries, invokes Indian and Chinese precedents, and traverses an immense body of visual and textual sources primarily dating from Japan’s Heian (794-1133) through Edo periods (1600-1868), he compels the reader to think about the gods as active agents within dynamic systems, not fixed figures within static structures. Bernard Faure’s The Gods of Medieval Japan is now challenging this kind of “explicit” pantheon of privileged Buddhist deities, proposing instead an “implicit” pantheon of understudied esoteric Buddhist figures who resist neat categories or static functions. The Musée Guimet in Paris, for example, created “Le Panthéon Bouddhique” from 1991-2015 to display the most prominent Buddhist deities drawn from the consolidated Guimet and Louvre collections of Asian art. Like the gods in the original domed Pantheon in Rome, Buddhas and bodhisattvas have traditionally been displayed and thought about strictly within their classical niches. ![]()
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