The Buddhist icon and the modern gaze

by Bernard Faure

            
            
     
            This essay is an attempt to reconsider what vision of -- that is, 
            what discourse on -- Buddhist icons is possible for a Westerner (or 
            Westernized Asian). Buddhist icons have been essentially the domain, 
            or rather the preserve, of art historians. But Buddhist art, if 
            there is such a thing, is perhaps too important to be left to art 
            historians alone. Is there a Buddhist "art," a subcategory of Asian 
            art, itself a rubric within world art, one among the many rooms in 
            Andre Malraux's famous "musee imaginaire"? Or are we not dealing 
            primarily with Buddhist images, whose artistic value is at best 
            derivative? Even though art history is beginning to take a broader, 
            even anthropological, perspective with regard to Western images and 
            visual culture, it is still necessary in the Asian context to shift 
            the focus from traditional concerns about the history and aesthetics 
            of art to the history, affect, and function of ritual images or 
            icons. Even if we want to retain the notion of aesthetic value, to 
            the extent that a narrow aestheticism precludes our understanding of 
            the anthropological and phenomenological dimensions of Buddhist 
            icons, we must question this emphasis on the aesthetic object. I 
            want to focus precisely on the vision of icons, on the asymmetrical 
            exchange of glances that characterizes icon worship. I have 
            elsewhere examined the various techniques of animation of the 
            Buddhist icon.(1) Because they are, in a manner, alive, and not 
            simply dead representations, these icons are images of power. 
            However, this obvious point -- perhaps because it is obvious in the 
            etymological sense ("lying in the way"; hence preventing, making an 
            obstacle) -- has until recently been largely ignored by art 
            historians, especially in studying Buddhist images. The notion of 
            animated Buddhist icons has been repressed as a result of the modern 
            and Western values of aestheticization, desacralization, and 
            secularization. This situation, however, is beginning to change.(2) 
            In order to counteract this repression, I will take some of my cues 
            from the recent work done by certain historians and from critiques 
            of Western art in the wake of Walter Benjamin.(3) 
            I also want to question the scholar's instinctive reluctance to blur 
            genres. What is at stake in this maintenance of the disciplinary 
            border by the scholars who set themselves up as keepers of the pass, 
            or of the passage? This question motivates my inquiry into the need 
            and possibility for rethinking -- or rather revising, reenvisioning 
            -- our understanding of the Buddhist icon, and by the same token 
            perhaps modifying our gaze. The term icon, here, will designate 
            mostly images such as statues and portraits (icons in the strict 
            sense), but it could be extended to include aniconic, that is, 
            nonanthropomorphic, symbols or diagrams (such as the Indian/Buddhist 
            swastika or the wheel of the dharma). Icons, as we will see, are 
            ritually animated and in this sense are not different from masks, 
            puppets, or automatons, in which one finds the same "conflation of 
            sign and signified" (PI, p. 32). At times, Buddhist icons are 
            literally animated by the presence within them of a (supposedly) 
            live entity. Paradoxically, then, the icon becomes a kind of tomb. A 
            significant case is that of a Japanese stone statue of the Buddha 
            Amida, in which was placed the mummy of a Buddhist monk.(4) The icon 
            becomes a container, a recipient, a funerary urn or stupa. 
            The labyrinthine structure of my argument might be partly justified 
            when we recall that Daedalus, the first maker of animated images, 
            was also the inventor of the labyrinth. Daedalus was the first to 
            open the eyes of the statues, and to set their feet apart (see PI, 
            pp. 36-37). Notice here the symbolic equivalence between eyes and 
            legs: it is as if the opening of the eyes, which gives life, were 
            equivalent to the separation of the legs, which permits movement. 
            Buddhist icons, although their eyes have been opened, are usually 
            represented sitting cross-legged or standing still with legs joined. 
            Only a small number of Buddhist icons, representations of minor 
            deities (what the Japanese call besson, "distinct worthies," as 
            opposed to the major Buddhas, the honzon or "main worthies"), are 
            depicted as dancing or gesturing wildly. On the whole, Buddhist 
            iconology has valorized stillness. Buddhist icons are, strictly 
            speaking, "still life" or "suspended animation." When they seem to 
            be on the move, their movement often goes hand in hand with a 
            certain sexualization. Whereas the honzon's immobility, its 
            self-contained appearance, symbolizes its absence of passions (or 
            outflows) and its genderlessness, the besson are more dynamic and 
            clearly gendered (sometimes even quite explicitly, like images of 
            the goddess Benzaiten, whose unclothed body is distinctly feminine). 
            
            The Rise of Orientalist Aesthetics 
            In what follows, I first examine the aesthetics of several early 
            twentieth-century art historians, some of whom became at one point 
            purveyors of Asian art to European and American audiences. I realize 
            that modern art historians no longer find this aesthetic discourse 
            valid, or worth discussing (if they ever did). No self-respecting 
            specialist in Indian or Japanese art today finds his or her 
            references in Ananda Coomaraswamy or Ernest Fenollosa. I still think 
            it necessary, however, to emphasize what we might call the 
            genealogical flaw of the Euro-American discourse on Asian art and 
            its replication in the "secondary Orientalism" of native Asians, 
            precisely because its Orientalist origins have receded into a dark 
            corner and seem to have evaded scrutiny.(5) A number of 
            presuppositions that governed the discourse and vision of these 
            predecessors are still influencing ours today. I would like to 
            adumbrate some of these presuppositions by setting up a few straw 
            men as (not so) ideal types. 
            The aesthetic tendency (and secondary Orientalism) in early Japanese 
            art history is well represented by a historian like Watsuji Tetsuro, 
            who in his book Restoring the Idols compared the Buddhist revival of 
            the Taisho era (1912-25) to the Western Renaissance. The title of 
            his book is, however, rather misleading, since the idols thus 
            restored "did not revert to being gods to be worshipped but were now 
            appreciated as works of art."(6) This return to antiquity was in 
            fact, as in the French controversy between the Ancients and the 
            Moderns, a departure from everything that had prevailed in the past; 
            therefore, despite its title, the book advocated a radical 
            modernism. The rediscovery of Buddhist doctrine and Buddhist art 
            from the Taisho era onward followed in the wake of this modernist 
            demythologization. 
            Another influential writer who was among those credited with 
            (re)-defining the fields of Japanese (or of Buddhist) art is Ernest 
            Fenollosa. Hoping to serve as a bridge between the West and Japan, 
            Fenollosa defined the parameters by which Chinese, Korean, and 
            Japanese arts should be judged. In 1887 he received from the 
            Japanese government the task of registering Japanese art treasures 
            and through his lectures almost singlehandedly changed the Japanese 
            people's perception of its cultural and artistic patrimony. 
            Fenollosa was not only a fine lecturer at Tokyo Imperial University, 
            he also became in 1890 the first curator of the Oriental collection 
            (named after him) at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He went back to 
            Japan in 1896 and, after his death in London in 1908, his ashes were 
            buried at Miidera, the Buddhist monastery on the southern bank of 
            Lake Biwa. 
            While in the United States, Fenollosa exerted a powerful influence 
            on American art education, namely with his emphasis on the notion of 
            "spacing" and his assertion that "style" was a "shibboleth," 
            reflected in statements like the following: "We find that all art is 
            harmonious spacing, under special technical conditions that 
            vary."(7) By attempting to give "a history of Oriental Art written 
            from a universal point of view," he contributed more than any other 
            Westerner to the enshrinement of Buddhist imagery into so-called 
            universal art (EC, 1:xxv). In the introduction to his Epochs of 
            Chinese and Japanese Art, he wrote, for instance: "We are 
            approaching the time when the art work of all the world of man may 
            be looked upon as one, as infinite variations in a single kind of 
            mental and social effort" (EC, 1:xxiv). 
            The crucial role played by Fenollosa in rescuing Japanese Buddhist 
            art and, as his wife, Mary, claims in her preface to his work, 
            restoring Japanese "national pride and interest" cannot be denied 
            (EC, 1:xvi). However, this achievement was not without cost, in 
            artistic as well as ideological terms. In light of our knowledge of 
            what this restored national pride led to, the preface's claim that 
            Fenollosa was "deeply stirred by the splendid struggle of Japan in 
            her war with Russia" is disturbing (EC, 1:xxi). Conflating religion 
            and ideology, he was led to believe that the passionate idealism" of 
            "this remarkable race" had "displayed itself in the sacrifices of 
            the recent Russian war" (EC, 1:155). From an art historical point of 
            view, the cost has to do with the aestheticization of Buddhist 
            images -- the purely stylistic approach to the "epochs of art" -- 
            with hardly a word as to the functions of and responses to this art. 
            Fenollosa's idealization of Asian images as sublime works of art, 
            comparable and even superior in some respects to Greek art, goes 
            hand in hand with a lack of interest in their cultic functions. A 
            significant example is his account of the discovery in 1884 of the 
            Yumedono Kannon of Horyuji, an icon which had been kept hidden in 
            its "Pavilion of Dreams" (yumedono) for centuries. But, says 
            Fenollosa, "it was the aesthetic wonders of this work that attracted 
            us most," a work that "seemed to rise to the height of archaic Greek 
            art," with "its rather large -- almost negroid -- lips, on which a 
            quiet mysterious smile played, not unlike Da Vinci's Mona Lisa's" 
            and a slimness "like a Gothic statue from Amiens" (EC, 1:51).(8) 
            Here is Malraux's "musee imaginaire" in a nutshell: "As one stands 
            upon the altar of Kondo, he gets to-day a strange, weird feeling of 
            Greekish frescoes, Norman hangings, Gothic statues, and Egyptian 
            bronzes, so varied is the jumble of forms of a hundred sizes" (EC, 
            1:59). 
            In all fairness, Fenollosa does at times, though rarely, depart from 
            his purely aesthetic mode and reflect on the response that these 
            icons could provoke from the (Christian) beholder. Thus, speaking of 
            the Maitreya of Horyuji, he writes: "The impression of this figure, 
            as one views it for the first time, is of intense holiness. No 
            serious broad-minded Christian could quite free himself from the 
            impulse to bow down before its sweet powerful smile. With all its 
            primitive coarseness of detail, ... it dominates the whole room like 
            an actual presence" (EC, 1:64). But on the whole, he remains mainly 
            interested in the line, color, and grace of Buddhist art, this 
            "aesthetic flowering of the Japanese race" (EC, 1:99). When one of 
            these standards is not met, he is quick to denounce the ugliness of 
            what he observes, as in the case of Nara's Great Buddha, with its 
            "ugly big head," reflecting "the taste of the day ... for fat and 
            neckless types" (EC, 1:109). The same is true for the Eighteen 
            Arhats of Kodaiji, which, with their "evidently intentional" Semitic 
            features, lacking any grace, he argues must have been found in 
            Chinese synagogues, for "the Arabs hated Buddhism so heartily that 
            they would hardly have become mistaken for [arhats]" (EC, 1:142). 
            Fenollosa does not even mention the obvious ideological and cultic 
            aspects of these icons, in particular the Vairocana Buddha of 
            Todaiji, whose ritual "eye-opening" ceremony in 753 crowned a 
            massive effort to gather the metal for the statue that strained the 
            state's resources. 
            Fenollosa's interest in line (perhaps showing the distant influence 
            of Vasari) and color leads him to assert the superiority of painting 
            over sculpture: "The very rhythms of line may suggest motion and 
            transitory phases which are forbidden to sculpture. The latter 
            normally register's the permanent; the former the process" (EC, 
            1:122). Sculpture seems to be the first stage in artistic evolution, 
            correlated with public religious worship; but with the growth of 
            individual religiosity, painting he foreground, as for instance is 
            the case with the "mystical," antiritualistic art of Chan/Zen. We 
            are now "to follow Chinese and Japanese art into the greater 
            subtleties of painting, the ripe stage of infinite modulations in 
            line and colour" (EC, 1:123). Because painting constitutes the 
            ultimate reference, Buddhist sculpture is judged on the basis of its 
            lines, the grace of its forms. When the line fails, it may be partly 
            redeemed by the richness of the color, but in most cases ugliness 
            ensues. 
            For Fenollosa, therefore, as for historians of Western art like 
            Heinrich Wolfflin, the history of art is one of the development of 
            forms.(9) This emphasis on the stylistic form prevented him, and 
            many after him, from reflecting on the ritual context of the icons 
            he discovered. Aesthetic considerations have steered us away, for 
            instance, from exploring all the implications of the well-known (and 
            often mentioned) fact that the Guze Kannon icon and the Sakyamuni 
            icon at Horyuji were made the size of the ruler Shotoku Taishi 
            (572-621). The size of an icon was one of the essential elements in 
            the success of a ritual. As Sylvain Levi pointed out in his analysis 
            of Vedic sacrifice, "the sacrifice is the man. The sacrifice is the 
            man because it is man who offers it; and every time it is offered, 
            the sacrifice has the size of the man."(10) The Guze Kannon is even 
            believed to be an image of Shotoku Taishi, made while he was alive. 
            In other words, whereas these icons were substitute bodies, tokens 
            of immortality, many of us, a century after Fenollosa, still see 
            them as items in the catalogue of the "musee imaginaire," next to 
            the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, and Rodin's The Thinker. To give 
            just one example, quoted with approbation by a contemporary art 
            historian, Karl Jaspers saw the famous Maitreya icon of Koryuji as a 
            "symbol of the purest, the most harmonious and the most eternal 
            [sic] of the human `being,' freed from the hindrances of the 
            temporal that rules over this earth."(11) No doubt Jaspers would 
            have been surprised to hear that -- unlike in the case of the Venus 
            de Milo, whose beauty is enhanced by her incompleteness -- when a 
            finger of this Maitreya was broken by a high-school student in 1960, 
            the whole country followed the media's hour-by-hour account of the 
            recovery of the wounded icon. All this does not detract from 
            Fenollosa's achievements -- or does it? At the very least, one could 
            say of him what he says of one of his predecessors: "Marco Polo is 
            surely worth something" (EC, 1:xxix).(12) 
            The Sacralization of Art and the Profanation of Icons 
            In the case of the Yumedono Kannon as in many others, Fenollosa, 
            acting on behalf of the Meiji government, was able to requisition 
            the opening of the pavilion, despite the protestations of the 
            resident monks: "They resisted long, alleging that in punishment for 
            the sacrilege an earthquake might well destroy the temple. Finally 
            we prevailed, and I shall never forget our feelings as the long 
            disused key rattled in the rusty lock. Within the shrine appeared a 
            tall mass closely wrapped about in swathing bands of cotton cloth, 
            upon which the dust of ages had gathered." The atmosphere of 
            profanation that prevails here recalls the Western discovery of 
            Egyptian mummies, but this violence in the name of art is well worth 
            it in Fenollosa's text, since "at last the final folds of the 
            covering fell away, and this marvellous statue, unique in the world, 
            came forth to human sight for the first time in centuries" (EC, 
            1:50). 
            The earlier mention of Malraux in relation to the notion of 
            universal art, of the "muse imaginaire" (an expression that E. H. 
            Gombrich translates as "Museum of the mind"), is significant in 
            other respects as well."(13) One of the lesser claims to fame of 
            this colorful figure, who became the first minister of culture of 
            the Fifth Republic, is the story of his arrest in his youth for 
            stealing the head of a Buddhist statue from Angkor. Art and violence 
            form an old couple, and Buddhist temples, from India to Japan, were 
            plundered long before Malraux. When Indiana Jones tries to retrieve 
            a precious cross from the hands of avid collectors, angrily 
            protesting, "It belongs in a museum!" he is more akin to the thieves 
            than he might think.(14) However, this plundering was usually 
            committed for venal reasons, rarely in the name of aesthetics (and 
            even when it was, as in Malraux's case, aesthetics seems more like 
            an alibi or an afterthought -- or perhaps a mark of remorse). This 
            enshrining of aesthetic pieces (and fragments) in the temple of art 
            by profaning the icons of the temple (literally, bringing them from 
            inside the temple to outside, in broad daylight, in front of the 
            temple [pro fanum]) brings to mind an even more dramatic case, that 
            of Victor Segalen, a noted French poet and novelist, who also became 
            well known in the sinological field for his research on Chinese 
            archeology. In his epigraph to Segalen's book, The Great Statuary, 
            of China, Malraux writes: "The great poet who wrote Steles here 
            reveals to us, as no one had ever done before and as no one since 
            has done, the spirit of the art he studied. In its field, this book 
            is irreplaceable."(15) One wonders whether Malraux knew about the 
            following incident, narrated by Segalen's companion, Gilbert de 
            Voisins. If he had, would it have changed his appreciation of 
            Segalen as a great poet uniquely able to reveal to us the spirit of 
            Chinese art? Or would the revelation of this dirty secret have, on 
            the contrary, illuminated in his eyes the essence of 
            connoisseurship? 
            On 29 August 1909, upon stopping to visit a dilapidated pagoda on 
            the roadside, Segalen and de Voisins discover a splendid statue of 
            Buddha: 
            Despite its missing two arms and a torso that seemed to be in poor 
            shape, this life-size statue is still alive: its profile has 
            retained its 
            nobility, its eyes their gaze, the smile of its mouth its generous 
            sweetness 
            and a kind of irony. -- This statue, we must have it! We won't leave 
            it 
            as if it were a mere bronze vase! We will not leave without it! With 
            
            chosen words that bind us, we make a pledge. -- This is all very 
            well, 
            but how should we proceed? Take it? Steal it? -- It would be 
            impossible for us even to lift that piece of wood! Very well then! 
            We will 
            its head! Immediately, fetching an axe from our luggage, we 
            undertake the sacrilegious work. With all my strength, I strike the 
            first 
            blow on the golden neck, but I hardly make a mark on this age-old 
            wood. We struggle in vain. Segalen strikes with all his strength, 
            without any more success. This lasts for about half an hour, when 
            just as 
            we are about to give up ... two peasants who were passing on the 
            road, attracted by the noise, enter suddenly. We feel quite 
            embarrassed, our cynicism has its limits.... To pollute a temple by 
            debasing the statue of its god is an act for which there is hardly 
            any 
            excuse. But the newcomers, far from showing any anger or 
            indignation, 
            behave, on the contrary, in a way that stupefies us: they offer to 
            help 
            us! -- first, they make us understand that it is pointless to try to 
            
            behead this Buddha, which is too heavy, while standing. They lay it 
            down on its face, with its head on a block, put wedges under its 
            sides, 
            fix it with straw plugs, and finally, laughing at our clumsiness, 
            take 
            the axe from our hands. With a few well-directed strokes, crackles, 
            an atrocious tear, it is done; the beheading is perpetrated. In the 
            chest we find some cash, which we leave to our accomplices, and 
            papers, which I keep. Our horses are now stamping in the mud. We 
            jump into the saddle without further delay and ride away... On the 
            way back, Segalen imagines the plot of a nice story, based on our 
            action today. He is so ashamed of this sacrilege that he wants to 
            justify himself to posterity. In particular, he is so ashamed of our 
            
            impunity that he heaps a thousand calamities, each more atrocious 
            than 
            the other, on the main character of his story. In this way, he 
            believes 
            that he can to some extent avoid them himself. Only when he laid 
            out the conclusion of his story, which I may add is perfectly 
            horrible, 
            did he perhaps feel relieved and find his peace of mind again.(16) 
            Interestingly, Segalen exorcizes or placates one double (the icon) 
            by punishing another (the character in his story). 
            Would Segalen have committed the same profanation if the icon had 
            not been a Buddhist one? Sometimes the idealization of one type of 
            art is achieved at the cost of another. Segalen calls Buddhist 
            sculptures "outgrowths of apostolic Hinduism" and refuses to 
            consider them as examples of "China's true statues" (GS, p. 15). 
            These sculptures, being the "repetition of one monotonous type," are 
            "of the same stiff ecstasy" and are "neither beautiful nor Chinese" 
            (GS, p. 121). Segalen deplores the tragedy that famous sites such as 
            Yungang and Longmen are "no longer anything but an empty sponge, a 
            once-living core putrefied by the hand of man" (GS, p. 122). He does 
            not try to hide his prejudice against Buddhism, "what we must call 
            and consider China's major heresy, her fault, her slavery" (GS, p. 
            79). If he feels obliged to talk about Buddhist art at all, it is 
            "in order to challenge and reject the lyrical admiration with which 
            that `art' had been treated" -- an art "so remote, so exotic, so 
            waning" compared to the "pure, intrinsic, inherently Chinese nature 
            of the genius of ancient China expressed in three-dimensional stone" 
            (GS, pp. 128, 119).(17) Yet the Buddhist statue was beautiful 
            enough, with the "generous sweetness" and the "kind of irony" of its 
            smile, for Segalen to desire its possession at any cost. 
            The point is not to lay blame on some individuals in order to 
            exonerate ourselves more easily but rather to register the intrinsic 
            violence of the modern gaze and discourse, the predatory nature of 
            our relation with non-Western cultures -- a violence so deeply 
            embedded that it infected even the best minds, but a desecration 
            that is also perhaps incited by the sacred icon itself.(18) The 
            commodity fetishism that characterizes much of the discourse about 
            art today may be simply another expression of the intrinsic violence 
            done to the image, although it can also be analyzed as part of the 
            lingering fascination exerted by it, and as a way of recharging 
            things with alienated "powers." Or again, as Freedberg argues, the 
            violence might be done not only to the object but to oneself. The 
            aesthetic mode of thought might be the active repression of an 
            animistic belief in the power of images, the very kind of repression 
            of outdated feelings that Freud sees as the source of the uncanny. 
            As the above example suggests, there is sometimes a fine line 
            between iconophilia and iconoclasm.(19) 
            The Desire for Vision 
            If unlike the devotional or ritualistic approach -- and more than 
            the traditional Buddhist emphasis on beauty -- the modern aesthetic 
            approach is essentially a strategy for containing the "impure" 
            (sexual or magical) elements of cultural artifacts, we need to move 
            beyond aesthetic discourse to consider the abundant, yet neglected, 
            anthropological data regarding (and regarded by) the icon. Among 
            these we might want to include Indian and Chinese notions about the 
            gaze (in Sanskrit, darsan), the stupa (a reliquary mound housing the 
            relics of the Buddha or of a saint), the tessera (in Chinese, fu), 
            and power (in Chinese, ling).(20) A case for the importance of 
            context has been made by Edmund Leach, who argues that icons are 
            part of a "space syntax" of sacred buildings (and, we could add, of 
            domestic worship) and that one cannot remove them from this context 
            without entirely changing their nature.(21) For Leach, "works of art 
            are not just things in themselves, they are objects carrying moral 
            implications. What the moral implication is depends upon where they 
            are" ("GH," p. 256). What we call the loss of aura results in this 
            case from the displacement of the icon from its religious context 
            and not merely, as Walter Benjamin argued, from mechanical 
            reproduction. Although some icons are displaced a great deal in 
            traditional cultures and actually derive much of their power from 
            this, their displacement does not entail a dislocation of their 
            meaning. One could perhaps distinguish between the syntactic level, 
            on which an icon appears as part of an iconological structure or 
            network (a triad, and so forth), and the semantic level, which 
            abstracts that icon from its synchronic or metonymic associations 
            not in order to re-create another sequence, a diachronic one, but 
            rather to focus on its individual aura, its unique presence. Leach 
            focusses on group representations, in which "the jumble is the 
            message" ("GH:" p. 250). A case in point, which both he and Rolf 
            Stein study, is the representation of the Gatekeepers -- who usually 
            form a "dual" of persons, a pair of twins that should not be 
            separated.(22) In the twin pagodas of Zayton (Quanzhou), studied by 
            Gustav Ecke and Paul Demieville, icons are structurally paired.(23) 
            These pagodas, whose photographic study necessitated the 
            construction of a complex scaffolding, reveal another interesting 
            fact: in many cases icons are not there to be seen, either because 
            they are placed too high or because they are buried (literally 
            encrypted) or kept hidden (the so-called hibutsu, or "hidden 
            Buddhas").(24) A dominant metaphor in art nowadays, which explains 
            the art critic's interest in a hermeneutic or semiotic approach and 
            Leach's structuralism, is that of the text to be deciphered 
            (de-crypte). However, images are not simply there to be seen or 
            read. Even in the case of icons carved on a stupa, "circumambulation 
            does not lend itself to aesthetic contemplation."(25) 
            Despite its highly abstract metaphysics, Buddhism, through its 
            iconic and ritualistic tendency, remains an eminently concrete 
            religion. As noted above, the cult of icons is characterized by 
            strategies of presence. The notion of presence might seem too 
            reminiscent of Christianity, but in this respect Christian iconology 
            itself, unlike Jewish iconoclasm, savored of paganism. Christianity 
            (or Western philosophy, according to Derrida) does not have the 
            privilege of a "metaphysics of presence."(26) Such a metaphysics is 
            one of the most commonly used strategies and one of the most common 
            features of religious ideologies across cultures. 
            The figurative practice in China has its antecedents in magical 
            conceptions related to witchcraft, funerary, and ritual practices, 
            in contrast to the figurative practice of the West, where a clear 
            break seems to have occurred.(27) The Western image is, in the words 
            of Jean-Pierre Vernant, "only resemblance," and "this pure 
            similitude that defines its nature of image marks it with the seal 
            of a total irreality."(28) However, the contrast is perhaps not as 
            clear-cut as Hubert Delahaye, for one, thinks. Delahaye nevertheless 
            makes the interesting point that statues in China do not reflect a 
            divine reality; they are not mere illusions or repositories of a 
            higher power, but refer only to themselves -- a signifier without 
            signified, as it were. As we will see, this is not always the case 
            for Chinese sculpture, or at least for Buddhist icons. 
            In some cases, Buddhist icons were so true to life as to be endowed 
            with viscera, the most famous example being that of Seiryoji in 
            Kyoto, a wooden Buddha dated 985, in which five cloth entrails were 
            found along with a variety of votive objects and relics. Likewise 
            the statue of the Buddhist master Zendo (Shandao) at Chion-in 
            contains a number of objects a mirror, coins, written prayers, and 
            so forth). Some of these "stuffed" Buddhas are verisimilar to the 
            point of having inlaid glass eyes. The blood, sweat, and tears of 
            sculptures were usually seen as bad omens. Sometimes icons grow hair 
            or eyebrows, another ominous sign, or cry for help when robbers come 
            to steal them. Sometimes the icon can be a stupa, as in the 
            following story: Having noticed an old woman climbing a mountain 
            every day to worship a stupa, some youths ask her why she takes such 
            pains. She answers that it is because of a prophecy that the 
            apparition of blood on this stupa would mean an imminent disaster. 
            The youths decide to smear the stupa with blood to laugh at the old 
            woman's expense. The next day, when she sees the blood on the stupa, 
            she runs down the mountain and leaves the village. Soon after, a 
            sudden flood devastates the valley, fulfilling the prophecy.(29) I 
            will return to the equivalence between stupa and icon below. 
            There are many cases like the following, in which Asian icons, 
            because of their verisimilitude, their mimetic quality, are able to 
            arouse people. Here are a couple of Chinese examples: 
            During the Xianning era of the Song, three young men went to a 
            sanctuary on Mount Jiang. There were several statues of very 
            beautiful and worthy women. The young men got drunk, and everyone 
            chose a statue as a spouse and began to flirt with her. They 
            [played] 
            thus until the evening; during the night, they all had the same 
            dream, in which the lord of Mount Jiang sent a messenger who 
            transmitted this message: "My daughters are all old and ugly, and 
            yet we 
            have received the favor of your homages and solicitude. We must 
            therefore fix the day and month when you will all meet again for 
            the wedding."(30) 
            Soon after, all the young men died. Another story is found in Hong 
            Mai's Yijian zhi (Record of the Listener), from the second half of 
            the twelfth century: 
            There was in Chaojue monastery ... a hall of the Mother with Nine 
            Children. It was on the top of the mountain. A lay practitioner 
            named Huang went to offer incense and lamps, and, among the 
            statues, he took [particular] care of a statue of a wet nurse. Her 
            breasts 
            hung outside her robe, offering a pleasant sight. Every time he 
            came, 
            he caressed her breasts with sighs of pleasure. One morning, the 
            statue moved her eyes and got up. She took him by the land, led 
            him behind a screen, and they had intercourse. From that day 
            onward, they maintained the habit. After several months, the man 
            fell 
            ill and had to stay in bed. However, he continued to climb the 
            mountain. The abbot of the monastery spied on him, and saw a woman 
            welcoming him with laughter halfway to the top. The next day the 
            abbot followed him: the woman was there again. The abbot hit her 
            with a staff, and she collapsed on the ground. In the terracotta 
            fragments [of the statue] he found a fetus which seemed to have been 
            
            gestating for several months. He ordered Huang to take it home; 
            then suddenly the fetus broke in a thousand pieces. [Huang] mixed 
            [bits of] the fetus into a drug which he then swallowed, and 
            subsequently recovered.(31) 
            We find here a very concrete description of fetishism as the 
            animation of an object through the projection of one's own life. If 
            unchecked, such alienation leads to the death of the fetishist, 
            through the birth of his double.(32) 
            In Japan, the best-known story is that of Kichijoten (in Sanskrit, 
            Laksmi) in the Nihon ryoiki (Record of Miraculous Stories from 
            Japan): In a mountain temple of Chinu there was a clay image of the 
            goddess Kichijo. A lay brother who lived in the temple was attracted 
            to the female image, felt desire, and fell in love with it. This 
            Buddhist Pygmalion prayed to the goddess six times a day, asking her 
            to give him a beautiful woman like herself Subsequently he dreamed 
            that he had sexual intercourse with the goddess; the next morning he 
            discovered a stain on the skirt of her image. Seeing this, he 
            repented, saying. "`I prayed to you to give me a woman like 
            yourself, but what a sacrifice you made to give yourself to me.'" He 
            was too ashamed to tell others, but the whole affair was eventually 
            discovered, and villagers found the stain on the statue. The text 
            concludes by saying that "deep faith never falls to gain 
            response."(33) 
            Delahaye contrasts the world of Chinese painters, who were usually 
            literati and therefore opposed to magical aspects of their art, to 
            that of sculptors and craftsmen, who remained closer to the cultic 
            context of popular culture. In both cases, however, image makers 
            were seen as demiurges, able, like Pygmalion, to breathe life into 
            their creations. Even the most abstract concepts of Chinese 
            aesthetics betray their magic origins. As noted above, the lifelike 
            nature of the icon manifests itself in its movement: icons can 
            speak, walk, fly. Sometimes the icon walks around its own pedestal, 
            from which it has climbed down. The first Buddhist image was also 
            the first icon that moved. Here is how the Gaoseng zhuan 
            (Biographies of Eminent Monks) tells the story of the origin of this 
            icon: 
            The Buddha had gone ninety days earlier to the Trayastrimsa 
            Heaven to preach the Law to his mother. King Prasenajit [or, in a 
            variant, King Udayana], regretting not being able to see him, had a 
            statue carved in sandalwood ... and had it placed at the spot where 
            the Buddha used to sit. Later, when the Buddha returned to his 
            vihara, the statue came out to welcome him. The Buddha said: 
            "Return to your seat. After my nirvana, you will serve as model to 
            the 
            four categories of followers." The statue sat down. This statue is 
            the 
            first of a multitude.(34) 
            A replica of this icon (or, in some versions, the original -- which 
            was, of course, already in a sense a replica) was allegedly brought 
            to Japan by the priest Chonen at the end of the eleventh century and 
            enshrined at Seiryoji (Shakado) in Kyoto. This icon is the one in 
            which cloth viscera were found, a fact that in part explains its 
            vitality. However, in China, the notion of live icons predates 
            Buddhism, and animated effigies were already found in the tombs of 
            the Han. Of course, this widespread cultural notion ran against the 
            intellectualist approach of doctrinal Buddhism. In the early 
            canonical scriptures, one often reads that the Buddha is not in his 
            image. In the Daoxing jing, for instance, the Bodhisattva 
            Dharmodgata asks his disciple, Sadaprarudita, "O Noble One, would 
            you say that the Buddha's spirit is in the image?" Sadaprarudita 
            replies, "It is not there. The image of the Buddha is made (only) 
            because one desires to have men acquire merit."(35) 
            Similarly, the well-known story in which Upagupta asks the Tempter 
            Mara to impersonate the Buddha Sakyamuni is an early attempt to 
            distinguish Buddhist icon worship from "pagan" fetishism: When the 
            patriarch Upagupta wants to see the Buddha, the demon Mara 
            impersonates him, to Upagupta's delight. However, Upagupta makes it 
            clear that his devotion goes to the Buddha, not to Mara.(36) We are 
            reminded of the Byzantine iconodules' statement that the devotion 
            goes to the prototype and that the image and the prototype are not 
            to be confused.(37) 
            These stories suggest that in most cases the icon finds its origin 
            in a desire for vision and/or presence. The same desire is found at 
            the source of Christian icons. Like King Prasenajit (or Udayana) 
            requesting the right to make an image of the Buddha Sakyamuni, Saint 
            Veronica, in one version legend, asks for an image of the Christ as 
            a substitute when she is about to be deprived of his presence. In 
            response, Christ presses his face on a cloth and leaves an 
            impression of his features: a true image (see PI, p. 207). This 
            legend eventually merged with another legend, that of the holy 
            shroud, perceived as a vera eikon (whence derives the name 
            Veronica). Yet, whereas a subjective vision might easily lead to 
            aesthetic contemplation, the Buddhist desire for vision is not 
            purely assertive: the beholder wants also to be beheld, to dwell in 
            the benefic, transformative gaze of the icon. The icon is also at 
            the center of meditation (dhyana, "visualization"): here too we have 
            a form of image making, one that results in a mental icon.(38) 
            The intimate relationship between the icon, the god, and the 
            believer can also be observed in China and Japan in the cases of 
            people who, in times of drought, attempt to coerce the deity by 
            making its icon suffer from exposure to the sun, or by throwing the 
            icon into the water because the god has failed to protect them from 
            a disease.(39) In some of these stories, the god appears 
            subsequently in the dreams of other monks to complain about this 
            harsh treatment.(40) At any rate, the icon seems to offer a direct 
            access to the god and to allow for all kinds of spiritual blackmail 
            or hostage taking. 
            The "true images" (zhenxiang or chinzo), portraits of Chan/Zen 
            masters that have long aroused the interest of art historians 
            because of their so-called realism, must be understood against their 
            funerary backdrop.(41) This is not true, of course, of all Buddhist 
            icons, strictly speaking. In Chinese, the term used to qualify 
            powerful icons, ling (usually translated as "power" or "efficacy"), 
            generally connotes death.(42) Even in the case of icons such as 
            those deriving from the image made by King Udayana, one could 
            perhaps argue that Sakyamuni's departure to the Trayastrimsa Heaven 
            was a kind of anticipation of his great departure into nirvana. In 
            this sense, the image is not so different from a chinzo; each is a 
            vera eikon, a true image. 
            There appear to be some exceptions. For instance, a distinction may 
            be drawn between images used as aids for meditation and images that 
            serve as channels of power in a cultic context. At first glance, a 
            visual aid for meditation seems to have little to do with death. But 
            perhaps the cultic logic at work in these, too, has something 
            uncanny about it, and as this is the case, the funerary chinzo can 
            be taken as paradigmatic for this sort of image, as well. The 
            funeral of the Chan master is reminiscent of what the Romans called 
            a funus imaginarium, an "imaginary" funeral, or, more precisely, a 
            "funeral for an imago," in which the portrait of the deceased takes 
            the corpse's place.(43) Florence Dupont points out that the imago 
            "is the trace, not the figuration, of the deceased.... This presence 
            is real, and has nothing to do with the presence/absence of images 
            that merely resemble him.(44) 
            The theme of the animation of the icon is found across times and 
            cultures, from Pygmalion to Chinese painters like Gu Kaizhi, who 
            lived in the fourth century.(45) It accounts for the liveliness, or 
            potential for liveliness, of images. The effects of this animation 
            can sometimes remain invisible, but can sometimes also be quite 
            dramatic, as in the following account from the biography of the 
            Tantric priest Vajrabodhi: 
            The Emperor ordered Vajrabodhi to set up an altar in order to pray 
            for rain. Vajrabodhi thereupon called on Amoghankusa, according 
            to the bodhisattva ritual, and erected an altar... He himself 
            painted 
            an image of the Bodhisattva of Seven Kotis [that is, Guanyin], and 
            set 
            the date to "open its eyes," so that at dawn of that day it would 
            rain.... On the seventh day, the air was hot and dry; there were no 
            clouds in the sky. But in the afternoon when the eyes [of the 
            statue] 
            were opened, a northwest wind immediately began to blow. Tiles flew 
            off roofs and trees were uprooted. Thundering clouds burst forth 
            with rain, startling those near and far. And in the place of the 
            altar, 
            a hole broke through the room so that the ritual arena was deluged. 
            The next morning, gentlemen and commoners of the capital all said, 
            "Vajrabodhi captured a dragon which broke out of the room and 
            flew away." Hundreds of thousands of people daily came to look at 
            the place. Such is the divine efficacy of the "altar ritual."(46) 
            Likewise, we are told that the dragon paintings of Fuxing were used 
            to make the rain fall, while the lion paintings of Puyangcheng 
            healed people afflicted with malaria. 
            The animation process of Buddhist icons corresponds to what the 
            Greeks called stoicheiosis, in which talismanic powers are brought 
            to an icon through the introduction of mineral or vegetal 
            substances, or even sometimes of small animals (lizards), but also 
            through inscribed seals or incense.(47) It is at times difficult to 
            distinguish between relics and ex-votos inside Buddhist icons. But 
            the placing of relics inside an icon is not everything. More 
            fundamentally, icons are alive because they have been consecrated. 
            This also explains why they can, and in some cases must, be 
            desecrated. The iconoclast's attempt to destroy the icons is still 
            an acknowledgement of their power, an affirmation qua negation. This 
            kind of desecration seems fundamentally different (or is it?) from 
            the Western profanation described above. And if, in some cases, it 
            can be seen not only as a response to but also as part of the icon's 
            power, should we speak of the icon's masochism? 
            Many characteristic features of the Buddhist icon -- consecration 
            and insertion of relics, for example -- are found traditionally in 
            the Western tradition, too. This does not mean that we can project 
            into Buddhism a Western, Christian metaphysics of presence but 
            rather that there are some phenomenological constants in the human 
            response to images. Sometimes Buddhist mummies, too, were used just 
            like icons, as when the "flesh-body" of the Chan patriarch Huineng 
            (d. 713) was paraded through town on a palanquin in times of 
            drought, as a substitute for the icon of the Bodhisattva Guanyin. 
            The description of this "celebrated monster" given by Jesuit 
            missionaries suggests that, like popular icons, this mummy had been 
            blackened by the smoke of incense.(48) This raises the question of 
            whether this flesh-body is the same as the lacquered, golden-colored 
            mummy that was until recently visible at the Nanhua Monastery near 
            Canton. It seems that one may discern in Buddhism two notions of 
            presence, which perhaps entail two different conceptions of the 
            sacred: the presence of the here/now (the immediacy advocated by 
            "sudden" Chan/Zen), and the presence/absence of the sacred divinity 
            (implying some form of mediation).(49) At any rate, it is clear that 
            the notion of presence is not merely a Christian one, inspired by 
            the eucharist and Byzantine icons; it is pre-Christian, or pagan -- 
            and nowadays eminently poetical. 
            In his stimulating work, Freedberg asks, "Why do we ignore the 
            evidence for the effectiveness and provocativeness of images?" (PI, 
            p. 26). There is perhaps no need to dwell here on what is apparently 
            the blind spot of traditional Buddhist art history as well. T. 
            Griffith Foulk and Robert H. Sharf have pointed out some of the 
            inadequacies of the aesthetic approach in the case of Chan/Zen 
            portraiture, and, as already noted, recent Euro-American art history 
            has become interested in the ritual "effectiveness" of images. 
            Instead, I would like to explore what kind of possibilities arise 
            when we consider icons as images of power -- an expression that 
            translates quite appropriately the Chinese term lingxiang (if 
            perhaps less clearly its Japanese counterpart, reizo) -- and to 
            discuss, as Freedberg and others have done for Western art, the 
            possibility of a theory of response. This means attempting to free 
            ourselves from the obsession with meaning (symbolism, iconology in 
            the Panofskian sense) and form (style) in order to retrieve the 
            affect, effectivity, and function of the icon.(50) We need to go 
            beyond the traditional concerns about the genesis of particular 
            works of art; influences; attempts to retrieve historical or 
            aesthetic categories (the sublime, and so forth); and, more 
            generally, the privileging of "high" art. 
            Because he deals with Western materials, Freedberg is concerned 
            mainly with the extreme eroticism of images, a dimension that one 
            might claim is less conspicuous in Buddhist or Asian images. Indeed, 
            it seems more difficult to derive a "phenomenology of coprophilia 
            and arousal" from the vast bulk of Buddhist sculpture -- with the 
            exception of some Tantric figures (PI, p. 20). Many scholars would 
            probably argue that even in these cases the image should be seen as 
            merely a symbolic expression of the philosophical "conjunction of 
            opposites" and not as a realistic representation of carnal lust. 
            Even if the point were granted, it is obviously clear that such 
            dialectical images lend themselves to a multitude of 
            interpretations. Likewise, even if repressed in terms of pictorial 
            depiction, the development of a motif such as that of Guanyin as 
            prostitute, an illustration of this bodhisattva's vow to appear in 
            the world to save beings overcome by desire, must have had a power 
            of arousal that we no longer suspect. The same can be said of 
            figures of goddesses like Benzaiten or Kichijoten, or of the 
            representations of Manjusri, Shotoku Taishi, and Kobo Daishi as 
            young boys (chigo).(51) A similar example, in the Christian context, 
            would be the popular image of the Virgin offering her breast to a 
            sick monk. If this male fantasy was triggered by the monastic 
            contemplation of an icon, one might expect the same fantasies to 
            have arisen from Buddhist monks' relations to Guanyin and other 
            similar (male or female) figures. 
            "Seeing comes before words," John Berger argues.(52) Yet our gaze is 
            always already informed by words, discourse -- discursive thought, a 
            thinking whose course is dual, bifurcated. There is no need to 
            further emphasize the importance of the gaze, not only in the 
            Indo-Buddhist tradition, but also in the Western tradition. As the 
            conscious gaze, presupposing spacing and differentiation, is always 
            already mediated by discourse, apparently no primacy of perception 
            exists. Although words can never replace seeing, seeing is already 
            informed through knowledge, discourse, and words, and our discourse 
            on Buddhist "art" is itself informed by several venerable 
            traditions. 
            Even when we attempt to break away from the traditional aesthetic 
            approach to take into account the anthropological or cultic 
            dimensions of the Buddhist icon, our predominant influence remains 
            Western. Whatever its inadequacies, the study of the anthropological 
            or cultic dimensions of Buddhist art appears as a prerequisite, an 
            antidote to the dominant Orientalist and/or aesthetic approaches. As 
            Heidegger puts it, "the works [of art] themselves stand and hang in 
            collections and exhibitions. But are they here in themselves as the 
            works they themselves are, or are they not rather here as objects of 
            the art industry?(53)... The whole art industry, even if carried to 
            the extreme and exercised in every way for the sake of works 
            themselves, extends only to the object-being of the works. But this 
            does not constitute their work-being."(54) Of course, there are also 
            ambivalent cases, for instance in modern Japan, where icons are at 
            the same time-although not for the same people -- objects of 
            collection and of devotion, of aesthetic appreciation and of 
            religious respect. 
            If icons, in their ritual context, are essentially traps, devices 
            for capturing power (ling), it is no wonder that the art historians, 
            but also the artist-monks, like the gods of their iconology (or 
            iconography), would be in turn trapped by their lure (what the 
            French call a miroir aux alouettes).(55) Our discussion of the 
            nature of the icon should blur the opposition between presentation 
            and representation: both are always present, and interpretation is 
            always to double business bound. And yet the icon is neither simply 
            presence nor representation. 
            We stand at the intersection of several strands (aesthetic, 
            philosophical, and cultic) of the Western and Asian traditions, 
            which are themselves dual, insofar as they present iconic (or 
            cultic) tendencies and iconoclastic rhetorics -- a duality found 
            most notably in Chan/Zen Buddhism. Insofar as it acknowledges its 
            debt to Asian and Western, Buddhist and Christian traditions, while 
            attempting to intertwine them, my own discourse here is 
            self-consciously and painfully hybrid. However, before weaving these 
            various strands into a new pattern, I should try to disentangle the 
            red thread that runs through each of them. 
            In Christianity, the belief in the incarnation, while an attempt to 
            make "the invisible visible," amounted to a destabilization of the 
            visible, its opening into -- or rather, its escaping, vanishing unto 
            -- another, still invisible, reality. The vanishing point in 
            question, however, is not that of perspective. Although the 
            manifestation of the Buddhas and bodhisattvas in this world is not 
            the same thing as the incarnation of Christ, there is something to 
            be learned from the history of Western images. I say "Western 
            images," not "Western art," because the latter could be seen, at the 
            risk of oversimplifying, as a forgetting of the incarnation of the 
            invisible in the visible, just as Western philosophy, according to 
            Heidegger, is a forgetting of the Greek notion of Being as 
            "appearing" (Erscheinen).(56) In the Buddhist context, an example of 
            that paradoxical attempt to reveal the invisible is the wooden image 
            of the Chinese thaumaturge Baozhi (418-514), in the Kyoto National 
            Museum. The face of this icon splits open, like a dehiscing fruit, 
            and another face, that of Dizang, the bodhisattva who was Baozhi's 
            true nature, appears within (behind the mask). The story behind that 
            image is also revealing: we are told that the artist who tried to 
            represent Baozhi found it impossible to fix his features because 
            they changed constantly. 
            Another symbolic expression of the excess that constitutes the 
            unrepresentable is the invisible usnisa or fleshy protuberance on 
            the top of the Buddha's head. We are told that this usnisa remains 
            invisible because no one can look down on the Buddha. On the one 
            hand, it is but one of the thirty-two signs that configure the 
            Buddha's body, obfuscating it while revealing it. On the other hand, 
            it is a paradoxical, formless sign that implies its own 
            negation.(57) According to Stella Kramrisch, it constitutes "an 
            extension of the body-like appearance of the Buddha beyond its 
            anthropomorphic limits" (EI, p. 131).(58) The usnisa is the unseen 
            top of the Buddha icon, symbolizing its nirguna, or unqualified 
            aspect, the paradoxical quality of the supramundane or transcendent 
            Buddha. It is, as it were, the invisible top of a truncated column 
            -- like the one in Giorgione's Tempesta, a comparison to which we 
            will return. 
            The point is this: something appears in the icon that is beyond 
            representation, and this something projects the whole icon beyond 
            representation. It interrupts or doubles the convenient demarcations 
            of aesthetic, artistic, symbolic, or art-market economies. The icon 
            is at the same time here and there, bridging the gap between two 
            realms and partaking of both. To begin to understand this 
            paradoxical presence or visuality, we need to expand our visual 
            field to include in it other realities, such as dreams, visions, 
            relics, and rituals. In this sense, images (unlike art) belong to 
            the field of anthropological history and no longer to art history 
            alone. Here Georges Didi-Huberman's notion of the visual (as opposed 
            to the merely visible) proves heuristically useful. According to 
            Didi-Huberman, 
            there is no image that can be thought radically except beyond the 
            principle of visibility, that is, beyond the canonical 
            opposition -- spontaneous, unthought -- between the visible and the 
            invisible. This beyond will still have to be called visual, as that 
            which 
            will always come to create a flaw in the disposition of seeing 
            subjects to 
            reestablish the continuity of their descriptive recognition or of 
            their 
            certitude with respect to what they see.(59) 
            The visual is what, in the visible, modifies it and gives it its 
            character of sacred event, what connects metonymic figures of the 
            double like icons, relics, and dreams. 
            In their attempt to move away from discussions about the sublimity 
            of art, art historians have tended to focus on works of art as 
            "deposit[s] of a social relationship" or "fossils of economic 
            life."(60) Alternatively, they have focussed on symbolism 
            (Panofsky's iconology) or on techniques of production. Recent 
            scholarship has explored, for instance, the technical aspects of the 
            manufactured object -- what Heidegger described as the artisanal 
            element of the work of art. Heidegger warns us that "the 
            much-vaunted aesthetic experience cannot get around the thingly 
            aspect of the art work," but at the same time he wants to retrieve 
            what, apart from materiality, defines the work of art ("OW," p. 19). 
            However, when the focus is on the object (as "thing" or as "work"), 
            there is a danger of missing or minimizing the response of the 
            subject (the beholder). Even when the emphasis is on the response to 
            art, this approach does not always sufficiently address the 
            nonaesthetic effects that images may have on the beholder, and, in 
            particular, the performative function they have in a ritual context. 
            If, following Kramrisch's discussion of the Buddha's bodily marks, 
            we admit that the usnisa stands for the sublime or for 
            transcendence, whereas the web symbolism on the Buddha's body stands 
            for immanence, the inscription of the icon in multiple symbolic 
            networks, then one could argue that the gaze of the icon, but also 
            its touch, usually forgotten in these discussions, establish another 
            type of communication -- of relationship-between the icon and its 
            beholder (its would-be holder, but also its beheld and beholden 
            believer). Some of these icons, like those of Binzuru (that is, 
            Pindola, an arhat famous for his magical powers) are called in Japan 
            nade-botoke ("Buddha to stroke"). Others are kept, on the contrary, 
            off-limits, because they are too powerful; they tend to get out of 
            hand, or cannot be touched without harm. It is often one of their 
            lesser manifestations that is offered to the touch or gaze of 
            worshippers. 
            We need therefore to look again at traditional themes of Buddhist 
            art, such as the vexed question of iconism and aniconism, the 
            iconoclastic rhetoric of Chan, the double and the symbol, and ritual 
            efficacy. The icon (and, more broadly, the symbol) permits an 
            articulation between different symbolic orders (the stupa, the human 
            body, the social body, the cosmos). Such an articulation is not, 
            however, a pure equivalence because these various orders remain 
            clearly distinct; the family resemblance between various symbolic 
            artifacts should not be construed as an identity. There is a 
            constant danger of hermeneutic overkill: an icon is not a mummy, 
            which is not a living being. Yet something circulates from one to 
            the other, a circulation permitted by a certain isomorphism, 
            isotopy, mimesis, and functional equivalence between these figures 
            of the double. There is no identification, at least as long as a 
            clear sense of boundaries, what Nietszche would have called an 
            Apollinian sense, prevails -- but this sense is at times erased, 
            during crepuscular moments of Dionysian high tide, the time of 
            ritual when all sacred cows and all cats turn grey. 
            When we try to retrieve this dialectical dimension, how can we avoid 
            the double pitfall of formalism and historicism? Iconological 
            interpretation, despite (or because of) its sophistication, tends to 
            hermeneutic overkill. At any rate, trying to understand the symbolic 
            motivation of the artist is not sufficient, because, as Dan Sperber 
            has pointed out, this motivation is itself symbolical.(61) We need 
            to go beyond a purely semiological reading, or beyond reading as 
            such, that is, beyond interpreting the image as a message, a symbol 
            (in the traditional sense). Only then can we understand the symbol 
            (in the etymological sense of "throwing together"). This long detour 
            from one type of symbol to another only has the appearance of a 
            tautology, of a vicious, or, if you prefer, hermeneutic, circle. 
            Actually, it is not so much a circle as a recycling of old ideas, 
            putting them to new use. This whole discussion may seem rather 
            obvious to postmodern historians, but Buddhist art history still has 
            a long way to go before earning the dividends (and enjoying the 
            divisiveness) of postmodernity. 
            For this bricolage, we find in the toolbox of Western art criticism, 
            beyond a traditional aesthetic criticism of a rather descriptive 
            vein, various recent theoretical attempts at "thinking through" the 
            icon with concepts such as the fetish (Marx); the aura (Benjamin); 
            the visual (Didi-Huberman); the parergon (Derrida); the effigy 
            (Louis Marin, Jean-Pierre Vernant); or the symbol, perceived, in the 
            words of Jean-Joseph Goux, as a concrete union between the finite 
            and the infinite.(62) Paradoxically, we might also try to retrieve 
            some submerged or peripheral intuitions of Kantian or Hegelian 
            aesthetics (most notably the Kantian discussion of the sublime and 
            the colossal) or take our cues from Baudelaire, who wrote: "Praise 
            the cult of images (my great, my unique, my primitive passion)."(63) 
            But this means that we attempt to divert these concepts from their 
            classic use, to subvert them by dislocating and relocating them, not 
            that we simply yield to the grandiloquence of sublime aesthetics. To 
            us, sublime resonates with sublimation and with subliminal. 
            In his analysis of Eisenstein's film images, next to (or rather 
            beyond) their semiotic and symbolic meanings Roland Barthes 
            distinguishes a "third meaning" (playing on the polysemy of the 
            French word sens: "meaning," "signification," but also "sense," and 
            "direction").(64) He returns to this theme, in regard to music, with 
            his notion of the grain of the voice: "Through music, we understand 
            better the Text as significance [as opposed to mere 
            `signification']."(65) If so, through what medium can we understand 
            better the "image as significance"? Significantly, this "third 
            meaning" is qualified as obtuse (as opposed to obvious). What I am 
            trying to retrieve in Buddhist icons seems akin to what Barthes 
            calls the obtuse meaning, only it is no longer a meaning, strictly 
            speaking, but rather an elusive reality, perhaps akin to the 
            perlocutionary aspect of language according to Austin, or to what in 
            Indian aesthetics is called the indirect (paroksa) and in Buddhism 
            "twilight language."(66) 
            Fenollosa saw the introduction of Buddhism to China as a "stupendous 
            revolution" in Asian art (EC, 1:28). Let me indulge in an 
            etymological fantasy and derive stupendous from stupa (as colossal 
            derives from kolossos, an erected stone). One could argue that 
            Buddhist art begins with a stupa, a funerary monument usually seen 
            as a symbol of death but that is also a symbol of life and 
            fertility. As is well known, the stupa gave birth to the Chinese 
            pagoda (a term said to derive from dagoba, a contraction of dhatu 
            garbha, "womb of the relic"). According to Hegel, the origin of the 
            Indian icon is to be found in the linga, a column that resembles the 
            ovoid or seamless stupa (an egg-shaped monument, distinct from the 
            five-degree stupa) of Japanese Buddhism.(67) This phallic column is 
            soon ornamented with images' emptied and hollowed out by these 
            supplements. Asian art thus evolves from the column; the linga is 
            emptied to produce icons. Speaking of the culture of Angkor, Georges 
            Coedes writes: "The essence of kingship was supposed to reside in a 
            linga ensconced in a pyramid in the center of the royal city, itself 
            supposed to be at the ideal center of the world. The cult of the 
            god-king was first introduced in the ninth century. Later, with the 
            introduction of Buddhism, the god-king became an image of the king 
            as Buddha."(68) The truncated column, like Mount Sumeru, the cosmic 
            pillar whose upper part vanishes into the thin air of higher realms, 
            is therefore the image or symbol of the symbol itself. Likewise, the 
            portrait (chinzo) of a Chan/Zen master, a variant of the Buddha 
            icon, is a truncated column, whose top (usnisa, the skull 
            protuberance, translated as chinzo) is invisible. Needless to say, I 
            do not have in mind here an evolutionary conception of art like that 
            of Hegel. I merely want to suggest that there may be more than meets 
            the eye in this Hegelian column. This emphasis on phallic imagery 
            should not be read too quickly as standard phallocentrism, since the 
            column is also a crypt. Its hollowness and the womb symbolism that 
            accompanies it deflate its apparent turgescence, or at least belie 
            its gender symbolism.(69) Segalen, too, saw the origin of Chinese 
            statuary in the column and the stele. Stupas and steles are perhaps 
            the Asian counterparts of the Greek kolossos. 
            The Hegelian conception of the column/linga and its relation to 
            images recalls, mutatis mutandis, Kramrisch's description of the 
            Hindu temple or Paul Mus's discussion of the Buddhist stupa. One can 
            say of the Buddhist stupa and its relics what Kramrisch says of the 
            Indian temple and its image -- "the symbol or image occupies the 
            center of the sanctuary and is known as the jiva, the `life' of the 
            temple in which it dwells.... The walls are its body" (EI, p. 253). 
            While the center is unchanging, undifferentiated, like the immutable 
            essence (purusa), the periphery is differentiated in its images, and 
            changing, like matter (prakrti). We must, at least, distinguish 
            between the static image at the center and its mobile counterparts 
            at the periphery as they are seen in the ritual process, the 
            hermeneutical circle of circumambulation. Thus, the stupa is, in 
            more than one sense, an animated monument, not only because of the 
            presence of relics that give it life but because of the procession 
            of pilgrims that turns it into what Mus called a `cinetic' 
            monument.(70) The center/periphery, or inside/outside pattern 
            overlaps with the nirguna/ sarguna, or formless/with form paradigm. 
            This paradigm is played out in a variety of ways in Hinduism and 
            East Asian Buddhism: it informs, for instance, the distinction 
            between the seamless or ovoid stupa and the five-degree stupa in 
            Japanese Buddhism. 
            In China, the mummies of Buddhist priests, first encrypted under the 
            funerary stupa, eventually were placed in chambers at the entrance 
            of the stupa, where they could reveal themselves on occasion to the 
            bemused gaze of the worshippers -- like the Buddha Prabhutaratna in 
            the Lotus Sutra, appearing in midair within his stupa. One case in 
            point is that of the mummy of the fourth Chan patriarch, Daoxin: the 
            gates of his stupa opened by themselves, revealing his intact body 
            in its eerie splendor, and no one afterwards dared to close them. I 
            have examined elsewhere the process of iconization that brought 
            these mummies out of their crypts into the "Image Halls" of Chan 
            monasteries.(71) 
            We might pursue these philosophical musings on the column/stupa by 
            turning to Kant's conception of the sublime as a truncated column, 
            and to Derrida's analysis of the Kantian sublime in terms of the 
            colossal and the parergon. The question of taille, size, is also 
            that of taille, cutting, engraving. The French word taille derives 
            from tailler ("to cut," "to engrave," "to carve"), hence the height 
            of the human body (used by image carvers). Unfortunately, the 
            English language does not allow us to follow Derrida in his wordplay 
            on the limit that simultaneously delimits and "illimits." A "detail" 
            (detail, or detaille) -- like the visible/invisible usnisa -- means 
            "the movement from cise [taille], which is always small or measured, 
            to the disproportion of the without-cise [sans-taille], the immense. 
            The dimension of the effigy, the effigy itself would have the 
            fictional effect of demeasuring. It would de-cize [elle 
            detaillerait], would liberate the excess of cise" (TP, p. 121).(72) 
            As Kramrisch points out, the Buddha image is always a cut above the 
            human beings it seems to reproduce, and this excess (demesure) is in 
            a sense the effect of its usnisa (see EI, pp. 130-40). Recall, too, 
            that this term came to designate the portraits of Chan/Zen masters. 
            The logic of representation permitted by the icon is supplemented 
            (in the Derridean sense, that is, also subverted) by the logic of 
            impregnation that comes with the olfactive perception of 
            incense.(73) Do mummies and icons have a smell?(74) They probably 
            do, and this may explain why they are usually sealed with lacquer or 
            gold. It may be worth mentioning here the case of the Central Asian 
            thaumaturge Sengqie (d. 710), whose posthumous refusal to be 
            enshrined in the capital -- far from his community in Sizhou -- was 
            manifested in his corpse's stench.(75) The mummy of the Chan master 
            Wuliao (787-869) is another similar example, in which the stinking 
            icon, the mummy, resists representation, resists commodity fetishism 
            -- even on the part of an Emperor.(76) The icon fights back. The 
            smell of the icon, whether stink or fragrance, is another excess, a 
            sign of transcendence that can easily go unrecognized. 
            In this context, we may recall that the first Buddhist icons in 
            Japan were made out of aromatic camphorwood (kusu), a particularly 
            sacred wood, although especially difficult to carve. A good example 
            is the Miroku image of Chuguji, the first known instance of the 
            assembled woodblock technique (yosegi zukuri). It has been argued 
            that camphorwood was the Japanese equivalent for sandalwood, out of 
            which was carved the first icon of the Buddha. But, unlike 
            sandalwood icons, camphorwood icons were usually painted, which 
            tends to cover the fragrance. The Yumedono Kannon, for instance, is 
            carved out of camphorwood. The fragrance of these icons may be seen 
            as a reflection of the natural fragrance of the Buddha's body, but 
            it may also be a way to cover the fingering stink of death in icons 
            that were perceived as mummies or as anthropomorphic tombs 
            containing relics. 
            The Logic of the Tessera 
            As Derrida has shown in his discussion of the parergon, the icon 
            lends itself to deconstruction. It is both disjunctive and 
            conjunctive, or, better, it itself operates the disjunction between 
            disjunction and conjunction: the disjunction between, precisely, 
            iconophilia and iconoclasm. Because of the appearance of the icon, 
            two strategies become possible, or, rather, two poles are produced, 
            with a number of intermediary strategies. The icon is also 
            conjunctive, like the ritual centered on it, joining and separating 
            the two spheres of the profane and the sacred, providing the 
            ontological cut (la taille, "cise") and the scar. Derrida again: 
            Thus all this goes on around an infinite but truncated column, at 
            the 
            limit of the trunk, at the place of the truncation or the cutting 
            edge, 
            on the borderline, fine as a blade, which defines the cise. The 
            question opens around knowing whether one must think a sublimity of 
            the soul from one edge or the other, of the infinite or the finite, 
            it 
            being understood that the two are not opposed to each other but 
            that each transgresses itself toward the other, the one in the 
            other. 
            [TP, p. 134](77) 
            I argued above for the need to go beyond traditional iconology, that 
            is, beyond an approach that reads images as symbols. In apparent 
            self-contradiction, I want now to argue for considering the icon as 
            a symbol, but a symbol in a different, etymological sense. Referring 
            to John Skorupski's notion of the symbol as something that "in some 
            sense is or participates in the reality it represents" Freedberg 
            asks rhetorically, "If we speak thus of identity, what need for the 
            notion of the image or object as symbol?" (PI, p. 277). None, of 
            course, unless we use the word symbol in its etymological sense of 
            the identity and complementarity of tallies (doubles) -- what I call 
            the logic of the tessera.(78) This logic of the symbol, or of the 
            tessera, lends itself to duplication, that is, to the production or 
            even the profusion of doubles. The duplication process is not simply 
            the result of new techniques of production (icons constructed from 
            many prefab pieces, versus one-piece icons, carved from a single 
            block of wood or stone), although technical factors clearly played 
            an important part in it.(79) 
            The Chinese tessera (fu) was a bamboo tab or tablet divided 
            longitudinally into two parts to serve as testimony in a contract. 
            The term means, variously, a seal divided in two parts; to concord, 
            to adjust, to respond mutually, to fit, or to conform; or a good 
            omen, a charm (writing or drawing), an amulet, or a talisman. The 
            compound fuhao denotes a symbol, a mark, a sign. Robert Des Rotours 
            notes that these insignias or double contracts were of universal 
            use. In France, they were called tailles because of the incision 
            made on the two juxtaposed sticks; this is the origin of the English 
            word tally.(80) 
            According to the Shuowen dictionary, "the fu is what gives proof [ce 
            qui fait foi]. In the Han regulations, one divides a six-inch-long 
            piece of bamboo in order to join its two parts." The Cihai also 
            defines fuxin as follows: "What is in the genre of insignia or 
            tablets in two parts (fuqi) is also called fuxin, which means 
            insignia used as proof [wei]." The word xin, which means "faith," or 
            "worthy of faith," also means "seal" or "tessera."(81) The Ciyuan 
            has the following about fu: "A bamboo [tablet] on which characters 
            were written; one divided this tablet into two parts, each person 
            kept one half. One reunited these two parts when one wanted to prove 
            one's sincerity. Sometimes these were made of wood, jade or 
            metal."(82) According to the Cihai dictionary, fu also has the 
            meanings "good omen" and "amulet." It can in some cases play the 
            role of a talisman. These insignia were used in a lot of 
            administrative and judicial functions from the Han dynasty 
            onward.(83) A synonym is qi, a tablet used for a contract, generally 
            written on and divided into two parts. According to the Shuowen, a 
            qi is a large contract. The Cihai defines it as a contract or a 
            diploma in two parts. The word derives from the Chinese for incise, 
            engrave, hence it signifies also an incision (taille).(84) These 
            etymologies call to mind the old Chinese saying, "To incise the boat 
            at the place where the sword fell in the water" -- which is perhaps 
            a nice metaphor for what we are trying to do when we judge Buddhist 
            icons by modern standards, whether those of art history or of 
            anthropology. 
            On the Western side, we use the term symbol, derived from sumbolos 
            (and sumballein, "to throw together") (see, for instance, "OW," p. 
            20). An equivalent term is token, a piece of stamped metal used as 
            substitute for currency -- therefore halfway between false and real 
            money. What affects the prototype of the image during the ritual 
            also affects the beholder -- by the same token, because they have 
            the same token, the same "counter." The response (ying) of the deity 
            is the counterpart of the response of the follower. Ultimately, the 
            Chinese symbol is not simply a juxtaposition of two tallies; it is a 
            union, a hierogamy -- which implies an exchange of substance, a 
            twofold movement, upward and downward. The logic of this kind of 
            symbol is not simply metaphoric but also metonymic. 
            Icons can be used as material objects of worship or as mental aids 
            for meditation through visualization. However, the distinction is by 
            no means clear-cut: visual icons, just like material ones, are 
            essentially "traps for power," and they function as substitute 
            bodies. This power can at times be nefarious, as with the straw dogs 
            of Chinese antiquity, ritual scapegoats that were ritually 
            destroyed; or the Japanese dolls that are given to the custody of 
            temples (like the Ningyo-dera, "Doll Temple," in Kyoto). The same is 
            true of mental images of demonic powers, which are summoned by the 
            practitioner to be eliminated through incantations or imaginary 
            battles. 
            In traditional Buddhist practice, the meditator must visualize the 
            physical attributes of a Buddha to obtain the "samadhi [mental 
            absorption] of the one who stands (avasthita) face-to-face with or 
            in the presence of (sammukha), the present ... Buddhas."(85) One of 
            the sixteen ways to obtain this samadhi is by having an icon of the 
            Buddha made, or "just having a picture painted."(86) One of the 
            raisons d'etre of the first image of the Buddha was to aid 
            contemplation during the time when the Buddha would no longer be on 
            earth, and looking at it is said to be "no different from looking at 
            the Buddha's [actual] body." Significantly, among such visual aids, 
            Chinese Buddhists included paintings of landscapes. Stein has shown 
            that the miniature landscape, perceived as a microcosm, constitutes 
            a kind of tally. This world in miniature is said to call the powers 
            of the macrocosm, which flow into it, fusing with it. Like the icon, 
            the bonsai is a trap for power; it was used in particular by the 
            Daoist ascetics to increase their longevity.(87) Originally, as 
            Delahaye has shown, landscape painting had a talismanic value not so 
            different from that of the Daoist "sacred maps." This explains why 
            these paintings, despite secularization, have remained "compelling 
            images" in the hands (and eyes) of the literati, a facet of 
            aestheticism that would probably surprise many connoisseurs of 
            Chinese art.(88) 
            The Aura of the Icon 
            An analysis of Buddhist icons would not be complete without a 
            discussion of Benjamin's seminal notion of the aura of the work of 
            art.(89) Such a reference is not merely a nod in the direction of 
            modern art criticism; indeed, this notion turns out to be quite 
            useful in defining the obtuse presence of the icon. In "The Work of 
            Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), which appeared 
            the year after Mus published Barabudur, Benjamin defines the aura of 
            natural objects as "the unique phenomenon of a distance, however 
            close it may be" ("WA," p. 222). This notion is then extended to 
            cultural (and cultic) productions. In a footnote, Benjamin adds: 
            The definition of the aura as a "unique phenomenon of a distance 
            however close it may be" represents nothing but the formulation of 
            the cult value of the work of art in categories of space and time 
            perception. Distance is the opposite of closeness. The essentially 
            distant 
            object is the unapproachable one. Unapproachability is indeed a 
            major 
            quality of the cult image. True to its nature, it remains "distant, 
            however close it may be." ["WA," p. 243 n. 5] 
            The distance is equated, paradoxically, with presence through 
            another definition, albeit a negative one: "Even the most perfect 
            reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its 
            presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where 
            it happens to be.... One might subsume the eliminated element in the 
            term `aura' and go on to say: that which withers in the age of 
            mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art" ("WA," pp. 
            220-21). Benjamin comments on the intrinsic violence of modern 
            perception, arguing that "to pry an object from its shell, to 
            destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose `sense of the 
            universal equality of things' has increased to such a degree that it 
            extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction" 
            ("WA," p. 223).(90) 
            The aura of Buddhist icons has to do with the deposit of relics 
            within them and their ritual consecration: the term aura means 
            "breath," and the consecration is an "installation of the breaths" 
            (pranapratistha). In some cases, this aura also has to do with the 
            beliefs in the divine power of the material element, stone or wood, 
            as in the ichiboku (one-piece) sculpture in Japan: "The god in the 
            unworked stone or stock continues to reside in the worked stone or 
            stock."(91) This is also true, for instance, of the "miraculous" 
            logs, found in many legends. In other cases, the wood is empowered 
            during consecration ceremonies that take place once carving is 
            initiated.(92) Finally, the aura is often explained as resulting 
            from an unbroken line of mimesis and contact between the first icon 
            and its later reproductions -- the power of this first icon, the 
            Udayana image, itself owing to its resemblance to and contact with 
            the Buddha himself. The importance of the initial view of the Buddha 
            can also be explained in terms of verisimilitude. This is also true 
            for the Chinese representations of the eighteen arhats, whose 
            prototype was initially seen by the poetmonk Guanxiu in a dream. In 
            all cases, the existence of a direct link, historical or 
            metaphysical, with the ultramundane prototype is essential in order 
            for it to become present in the icon -- hence the critical role of 
            textual iconographies as a source of models. Just as the vera eikon 
            was imbued with the power of Christ through the impression of his 
            face, the efficacy of Buddhist icons derives from their initial 
            contact with the Buddha. This contact, however, does not have to be 
            with the Buddha in the flesh, since his body was already, in a 
            sense, merely an icon or a trace, an embodiment of the truth or 
            dharma. Other traces or substitute bodies may have a similar effect. 
            The Buddhist tradition seems to have hesitated between two models, 
            one that insists on the superior value of the original or historical 
            Buddha, and another that, in an almost Derridean fashion, undermines 
            that foundation with its emphasis on the notion of traces. After the 
            death of the Buddha, the sacred places where his paradigmatic life 
            had unfolded and where his stupas remained came to play a similar 
            role in the production of presence. 
            To what extent, then, does the reproduction affect the effectiveness 
            of the image? Is not the materialization of a halo or aureole around 
            the head or body of Buddhist statues already a sign of their loss of 
            the true aura (in the Benjaminian sense)? More to the point, the 
            Benjaminian notion of a loss of aura through photographic 
            reproduction may have serious implications for the historian of 
            Asian religions. As any fieldworker knows, there is a clear sense of 
            profanation when taking photos in a cultic context; often the native 
            objection against photos is that they will diminish the "efficacy" 
            (ling), or what we may as well call the aura, of the icon. I recall 
            a Japanese Buddhist monk who, when I asked him if I could take a 
            picture of a particularly powerful icon, argued that the image would 
            not imprint on my film. We are clearly the descendants of our 
            Orientalist fathers in this and other respects: although we no 
            longer steal and behead statues (at least most of us), who does not 
            have in his or her possession Buddhist icons (in one form or 
            another) whose provenance will remain conveniently vague? 
            In modern society, Berger comments, "works of art are discussed and 
            presented as though they were holy relics" (WS, p. 21). He 
            disapproves of such fetishism. But one might want to see works of 
            art truly treated as relics, precisely because relics were not the 
            object of the kind of "bogus religiosity" that "has become the 
            substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them 
            reproducible" (WS, pp. 21, 23). If this "bogus religiosity" is 
            nostalgic, so is its critique. Berger, in fact, shows that 
            photographic reproduction is responsible for a recrudescence of the 
            nostalgia for the aura. What exactly distinguishes this "bogus 
            religiosity" from Benjamin's authentic religiosity is not always 
            clear, even if the new kind of impressive, mysterious aura no longer 
            pervades the artwork "because of what it shows -- ... because of the 
            meaning of its image," but "because of its market value" (WS, p. 
            23). 
            The standardized production of icons in japan after the eleventh 
            century already resulted in a kind of commodity fetishism. As 
            Christine Guth writes of the earlier period: "In preserving the 
            cylindrical mass of the log from which an image is carved, Japanese 
            sculpture of this period has an inner life and immediacy -- 
            qualities lost in later images of the joined-wood type."(93) Clearly 
            the shift from one-piece to prefab icons marks a watershed in icon 
            production (and perhaps in icon reception). It does not mean that 
            the cultic value has disappeared, although it might indeed have 
            weakened, but the dissemination of power or sacrality (ling) is what 
            justifies the multiplication of icons in the first place. Depending 
            on circumstances, this dissemination can reflect (or produce) both 
            an increase and a decrease in belief. The weakening of the icon's 
            power, or rather the alternation between belief and disbelief that 
            characterizes the icon as a dialectical image, is well illustrated 
            by the story of the future shogun Yoritomo carrying a figurine of 
            Kannon on his headdress, yet simultaneously dot wanting it to be 
            found by his enemies for fear of ridicule. In medieval Japanese 
            Buddhism, as in the contemporary Thai case described by Stanley 
            Tambiah, We find a massive production of amulets, but these amulets 
            are charged by the monks, imbued with power.(94) Similarly in 
            seventeenth-century France, the dissemination of the king's portrait 
            sometimes weakens but most often reinforces the belief that the 
            portrait of the king is the king -- a king who no longer has merely 
            "two bodies," but a multitude. 
            Double, Double, Toil and Trouble 
            In China, the first effigies, sometimes automata, are found in 
            graves and seem to have been substitutes for real people, meant to 
            accompany the deceased to the other world.(95) As Delahaye points 
            out, "the doubles, ou, are beings, living or not, with whom one 
            forms a couple. In numerology, ou refers to even numbers; it is 
            opposed to qi, meaning odd number, but also unique, extraordinary, 
            which has no match" ("AM," p. 52 n. 7).(96) 
            The icons are therefore quite literally "figures or images of the 
            double" (in Chinese, ouxiang; in Japanese, guzo, meaning "statue" or 
            "idol"). The original may be the god, or the worshipper. The 
            correspondence between the icon and its human counterpart is such 
            that the sympathetic magic works even on iconoclasts. We are told, 
            for instance, of a despot who urinated on a statue that he had put 
            in the privy and later suffered from a terrible pain in the scrotum 
            that ceased only when he repented;(97) and of the case of an 
            iconoclastic Tang emperor, who, upon finding out that an icon of 
            Guanyin had not been destroyed according to his orders, hit it in 
            the chest and subsequently died of chest cancer. The notion of 
            physical correspondence between the icon and its human counterpart 
            is a basic feature of black magic.(98) It also explains why people 
            in Japan often stick an ex-voto or a golden leaf on the icon or 
            caress its body at the point corresponding to the part of their body 
            which hurts. An interesting case is that of the bodhisattva Kuginuki 
            ("Nail-pulling") Jizo, whose emblem is a pair of pliers. In a small 
            temple in Kyoto, dedicated to that particular Jizo, the presence at 
            the gate of a giant pair of pliers, the size of a person and wearing 
            a child's bib, shows the complex nature of some icons. One could, 
            paraphrasing Magritte, say, "this is not a pair of pliers" (although 
            clearly Magritte's point was different). It represents at the same 
            time an obvious symbolism (the nail as physical pain, nail-pulling 
            as removing the pain) and a substitute body, not only of Jizo (as 
            indicated by the bib, a traditional attribute of this protector of 
            children), but also of the worshipper, who touches this paradoxical, 
            nonanthropomorphic "Buddha to stroke" at various places before 
            rubbing the corresponding painful parts of his or her own body. 
            The icons of the Buddha are sometimes compared to the "original" 
            shadow that he is said to have left in a cave at Nagarahara, in 
            Central Asia. This shadow, which became the source of another 
            iconographic tradition, was described by the Chinese pilgrim 
            Xuanzang (600-664), who was able to see it only after prostrating 
            himself several hundred times. The shadow, invisible at first, 
            eventually appeared in its full glory, with a cohort of bodhisattvas 
            and celestial musicians, "as when the clouds open to reveal the 
            golden Mountain."(99) Likewise, the first Chan patriarch Bodhidharma 
            left his shadow on a rock on Mount Song, near the cave where he had 
            practiced his legendary "war contemplation." As a focus of worship 
            in the Chan/Zen tradition, this shadow plays a role equivalent to 
            that of another famous relic, the flesh-body or mummy of the sixth 
            patriarch Huineng. 
            The notion of the double leads us to examine the relation between 
            the aura and the Freudian notion of the uncanny. Taking some of his 
            cues from Hoffmann's story of the Sandman, Freud sees a paradigmatic 
            example of uncanniness in the motif of the double, that is, in the 
            relation between "persons who are considered identical by reason of 
            looking alike." This relation, in Hoffmann, is accentuated "by 
            transferring mental processes from the one person to the other -- 
            what we should call telepathy -- so that the one possesses 
            knowledge, feeling and experience in common with the other, 
            identifies himself with another person, so that his self becomes 
            confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own -- in 
            other words, by doubling, dividing and interchanging the self."(100) 
            Freud considers that the double was originally a protection against 
            the disappearance of the self, or, in Otto Rank's words, "an 
            energetic denial of the power of death." He suggests that the 
            "immortal" soul was the first double of the body (quoted in "U," p. 
            387). Originally a product of "primary narcissism," an assurance of 
            immortality, the double tends to become, when the narcissistic phase 
            is left behind, precisely the opposite: a ghastly harbinger of death 
            ("U," p. 387). The conscience is another kind of double, a 
            psychological double, but one that does not produce a feeling of the 
            uncanny. Thus, for Freud, the double, as a figure of the uncanny, is 
            the return of something once "familiar" but eventually repressed 
            ("U," p. 394). It is in particular the return, or apparent 
            confirmation, of animistic beliefs that we thought we had surmounted 
            (see "U," p. 402). 
            One of the best expressions of the uncanniness of the double is 
            given by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Here, a reversal 
            takes place between the "real" (Dorian Gray) and his double (his 
            portrait), his "truth in painting." The portrait undergoes all kinds 
            of changes while Dorian remains eternally young, until he tries to 
            get rid of his shadow, the silent witness to his depravation, 
            without realizing that it is himself. By trying to destroy it, he 
            ends up killing himself, effecting one last reversal.(101) This 
            illustration of the expression "le mort saisit le vif " recalls the 
            traditional Chinese belief that the subject of a painting sometimes 
            dies when the painting is finished: all his or her life flows into 
            the double. It explains in part the custom of painting only the 
            portraits of the dead. 
            The multiplication of icons in medieval Japan -- which could be 
            seen, with some qualifications, as their commodification -- suggests 
            the relevance of the problematic of fetishism and projection. A 
            notion of projection that prefigures the Marxist concept can be 
            found at the basis of the idealist tendency in Mahayana Buddhism 
            (Yogacara, Chan), but it was counterbalanced, in other parts of this 
            tradition ("gradual" Chan, Pure Land, Vajrayana), by a belief that 
            subjects do not necessarily alienate themselves or become dependent 
            on objects (icons) when they project themselves into them. The 
            priest who projects his Buddhahood into a material support, a wooden 
            icon, does not fall into the trap of fetishism -- let alone of 
            primary narcissism. He can eventually bridge the gap, the cleavage 
            of the self, when he reintegrates in his self-consciousness the 
            power temporarily projected into the icon. Here again we encounter 
            the metaphor of the symbol, the split image, and the reunion of the 
            tallies: divided in order to be reunited. Another paradigmatic 
            expression of the folded structure of reality and its resolution is 
            found in Hegel's statement, "As a spirit, man does not have an 
            immediate existence but is essentially returned-home-to-self (in 
            sich Zuruckgekehrtes). This movement of mediation (Vermittelung) is 
            an essential moment of the spirit. Its activity consists in 
            transcending and negating its immediacy so as to return upon itself 
            (Ruckkehr in sich)."(102) 
            Whereas Freud saw in the objectivation of doubles a return of the 
            repressed, Clement Rosset analyzes it in metaphysical terms as an 
            instinctive denial of immediacy, the constant search for a deeper, 
            hidden reality that replicates, subverts, or legitimizes that of the 
            everyday world. Here the duplicated original is no longer an object 
            or event of the outside world but the subject itself.(103) It is the 
            very self that loses some of its ontological reality that becomes 
            the double, the shadow of a greater reality Speculations about the 
            shadow, or the double, lead to a feeling well expressed by Rimbaud: 
            "Je est un autre."(104) Rosset denounces this feeling as an illusion 
            that will ultimately receive a reality check with the advent of 
            death. As in the case of the French and English kings, the Chan/Zen 
            master's two bodies turn out to be a mere single body, and a very 
            mortal one.(105) "The different aspects of [this illusion]," writes 
            Rosset, "refer to a same function, a same structure, a same failure. 
            The function: to protect one from the real. The structure: not to 
            refuse to perceive the real, but to double it. The failure: to 
            recognize too late in the protecting double the very same real 
            against which one believed to have guarded oneself."(106) 
            The Buddhist theory of the Two Truths, or two levels of reality, 
            introduces into the real a duplicity of which the iconic doubles are 
            merely particular cases. In a poem on an icon, for instance, the Lu 
            Shan master Huiyuan reflects on the Buddha's simultaneous existence 
            on both levels: "In the tasteless void he has sketched his 
            countenance. / Touching the surface of emptiness he transmitted his 
            image."(107) The much-vaunted iconoclasm of Chan/Zen, based on the 
            notion of immediacy, is belied by the adherence of this school to 
            the Two Truths theory, which implies a bifurcation of the real, two 
            levels of reality rather than a single, and therefore the use of 
            symbols to mediate between them, to bridge the gap. This two-tiered 
            structure should be seen as the symbolic structure, the structure of 
            the symbol itself. Thus, the opposite (and counterpart) of immediacy 
            is mediation, duplication, the double, the icon. The Chan/Zen 
            rhetoric of immediacy is also a rhetoric of iconoclasm.(108) 
            Conversely, there is a rhetoric of mediacy -- that of iconophilia. 
            Consider the Japanese contrast between the butsuzo (Buddhist icon) 
            and the shinzo (icon of the kami, or god): whereas the latter were 
            made of a single block, the former were, from the eleventh century 
            onward, usually made of joined woodblocks. Like the shintai (divine 
            body) -- a sacred mirror in the case of the sun-goddess Amaterasu -- 
            the shinzo clearly functions as a double; there is only one in each 
            shrine, and it is hidden. Guth contrasts this unicity with the 
            multiplication in Buddhism of images that function primarily as aids 
            to visualization.(109) However, one should distinguish between those 
            Buddhist icons that are multiplied and offered to the gaze of 
            worshippers and those -- like the master's portrait (chinzo), the 
            mummy, or the "hidden Buddhas" (hibutsu) -- that remain sequestered 
            in the temple's inner sanctum. The former serve as aids to 
            visualization (but also as ex-votos), whereas the latter remain the 
            invisible bodies (or doubles) of the gods. 
            The Buddhist Ideology of Aniconism 
            Aniconism is not a lack of images, a default, but rather an excess, 
            crossing through and beyond images. Recently, Susan Huntington has 
            reopened the old "debate on Buddhist aniconism" by arguing that 
            "representations of Buddhas were being produced at the same time as 
            the so-called aniconic reliefs."(110) Huntington correctly points 
            out the presuppositions regarding the superiority of iconism (and of 
            Western/Greek art) of Alfred Foucher and others. However, her claim 
            that the aniconic symbols are not surrogates for Buddha images or 
            descriptions of events in the life of the Buddha but "portraits" of 
            the sites of Buddhist devotion merely displaces the problem. As she 
            herself points out, these sites were themselves surrogates for the 
            Buddha, "traces" or "relics" ("EB," p. 406). Her belief in the 
            "intrinsic meaning of the art" hardly represents progress, and Vidya 
            Dehejia is right to emphasize in her response to Huntington the 
            multivalence of emblems ("EB," p. 406).(111) Regrettably, both 
            Huntington and Dehejia seem to ignore the work of Mus, although he 
            provided a much more comprehensive solution to their problem by 
            placing Buddhist imagery in the context of Brahmanic aniconism.(112) 
            
            The traditional view that there were no images of the Buddha in 
            early Buddhism led to the Orientalist belief that this religion was 
            artistically, therefore spiritually, inferior. Yet, as Freedberg 
            notes, aniconism (or nonfigurative art) is always on the side of 
            "spirituality" (PI, p. 54).(113)"' In the Indian context, however, 
            Buddhist aniconism should have been read as a claim for spiritual 
            superiority. In China as well, there is a strong connection between 
            xenophobia and the Confucian criticism of the cult of images as a 
            form of degeneration, as expressed by Confucians such as Yaochong or 
            Han Yu. Similarly, Chan/Zen iconoclasm is often seen as the 
            expression of a Buddhist theory of the sublime or the 
            unrepresentable. Consequently, Chan/Zen paintings, with their 
            rarefied atmosphere and their tendency toward abstraction, are 
            perceived as a concrete illustration of the passage beyond the 
            representation of objective reality, a freedom from what Kazimir 
            Malevitch has called the useless weight of the object. However, the 
            claim for aniconism or immediacy, wherever it is found, must be read 
            as ideological. Aniconism is usually part of a general discursive 
            strategy. For instance, with a similar aniconic gesture Plato 
            denigrates materiality, mimesis, and the Cratylian conception of 
            language, as well as the work of poets (ut pictura poesis). Standing 
            at the other end of this philosophical tradition, Heidegger wants to 
            present the work of art as a self-revelation of truth; however, in 
            the process he reduces the image to the poem (ut poesis pictura). 
            With their rationalist bent, orthodox Buddhists probably had an axe 
            to grind against Indian polytheism and its cult of images. However, 
            archeological evidence seems to run contrary to their claims. 
            Inasmuch as Buddhism is a product of Indian culture, there is reason 
            to believe that the use of symbols in early Buddhism was never 
            strictly the result of a purely aniconic teaching, a fortiori, of 
            some figurative incapacity. Could we argue that the nonfigurative 
            was perceived as ritually more efficient than the figurative? 
            Freedberg would disagree. For him, there are only different kinds of 
            likeness, some obvious to us, others not (see PI, p. 203). But this 
            seems to beg the question. 
            According to Mus, however, the nonfigurative nature of the Vedic 
            fire altar, with its schemas, diagrams, and symbols, is precisely 
            what makes it more strongly expressive of man and, more 
            specifically, of his immortality. The altar is an architectural 
            double, a substitute body made the size (taille) of the sacrificer. 
            It is an image, a "symbol" in the etymological sense, that is, a 
            temporary double of the sacrificer, whose final image will be his 
            funerary tumulus, itself measured in the same way. This 
            nonfigurative yet ultrasymbolic monument is more sacred, more 
            ritually efficacious, more "powerful," than any anthropomorphic 
            figure. It is an eminent representation or "making-present." not an 
            imperfect one. Anthropomorphic figures or figurations appear only 
            downstream; they are logically (not chronologically) derivative. A 
            nonfigurative representation like the abstract linga of Siva remains 
            more potent than any ithyphallic image. We also find hybrid cases, 
            in which nonanthropomorphic icons are worshipped in anthropomorphic 
            fashion: for instance, posts or erected stones are clothed like the 
            more anthropomorphic representations of the deity and/or dotted with 
            eyes. In this context, Mus argues, the aniconism of ancient Buddhist 
            art no longer seems problematic: it can be seen as a partial, 
            reserved, or eminent aniconism.(114) Similarly, in the Hindu temple, 
            icons are projections of the central god, which is often a 
            nonfigurative linga. The notions of aniconic center and iconic 
            periphery explain the importance of the circumambulation 
            (pradaksina) that leads the practitioner from periphery to center, 
            from bottom to top, from the senses to the spirit, from multiplicity 
            to oneness. 
            From the question of aniconism, we move now, in circumambulatory 
            fashion, to those of figuration, anthropomorphism, and realism, 
            which are at the center of Freedberg's work on the "power of 
            images." Verisimilitude is indeed important, not only in the case of 
            the funerary portraits (chinzo), but for all Buddhist images 
            modelled after the Udayana icon. Yet the conventional view is that 
            Indian art is after the type, not the individual; and one may argue 
            that the Sakyamuni of Seiryoji in Kyoto, supposedly a replica of the 
            Udayana icon itself, is quite "typical." There is a tension between 
            the symbol (for instance the usnisa), which connotes divine 
            transcendence, and a verisimilitude that denotes humanity -- 
            although the distinction is not always clear-cut (the usnisa may at 
            times simply represent a concrete fleshy protuberance on the top of 
            the head). If resemblance is the goal, how do we explain the 
            coexistence of resembling and nonresembling icons? Freedberg claims 
            that we may not see what other cultures see as resemblance. But, 
            precisely, what is the line between what we see as resembling and 
            what we do not see as such? If this line is not the same for all, 
            how can one claim that we all look for the same verisimilitude? How 
            do we avoid the teleological schema (denounced by Freedberg) and say 
            that the verisimilitude aimed at by "primitives" -- in their 
            fetishes for instance -- is not as verisimilar as ours? How do we 
            include under that rubric objects that are clearly not very true to 
            life, yet that are obviously quite powerful and animated; Why would 
            a priest be glad to "dot the eyes" of a funerary tablet when he 
            could instead dot the eyes of a wax effigy? Should we not keep an 
            eye on that distinction? Can we simply reduce everything to 
            figuration? A conception of verisimilitude that relies on figuration 
            implies a notion of mimesis, which is understood quite differently 
            in the Chinese or Japanese contexts. How does it play out in the 
            case of Buddhist "realism" (for example, the Kamakura statuary)? Is 
            the addition of real hair aimed at making the icon more "realistic" 
            (that is, at verisimilitude) or more "real" (that is, at animation)? 
            Why, if we admit Freedberg's point, would the eucharist have 
            remained noniconic, yet so powerful? Why not some homunculus, a kind 
            of ginger-bread man, then? Surely not simply because the 
            cannibalistic nature of the ritual would have become too obvious and 
            unpalatable? 
            The resemblance between the icon and its worshipper is not so much a 
            question of verisimilitude as one of size (as noted earlier, the 
            Vedic altar and Buddhist icons are made according to the size of the 
            worshipper) and of the presence of certain symbolic markers. Even 
            when likeness is deemed essential, it is not sufficient. A case in 
            point is that of a decorative painting by Huang Quan, a 
            tenth-century Chinese painter who specialized in flower and bird 
            paintings, on the walls of the palace of the King of Shu, that was 
            so realistic that a falcon offered to the king mistook the painted 
            pheasants in it for real ones.(115) The text commemorating the 
            incident states that "among the six principles" of higher art, only 
            the "resemblance to form" and the "harmony of breath" are essential. 
            If the "harmony of breath" is found without formal resemblance, 
            substance dominates over ornament. To have only "formal 
            resemblance," however, is like having the flower without the fruit. 
            While likeness and spirit are harmoniously balanced here, in many 
            other texts the emphasis is on the spirit. A case in point is that 
            of Gu Kaizhi, who would paint a portrait and sometimes not dot the 
            eyes for several years. When someone asked his reason for this, Gu 
            replied, "`The beauty or ugliness of the four limbs basically bears 
            no relation to the most subtle part of a painting. What conveys the 
            spirit and portrays the likeness lies precisely in these 
            dots.'"(116) In the case of sculptures, too, one can distinguish 
            between animation in principle ("installation of breath") and in 
            fact (for example, articulate limbs). In Western art as well, a 
            prejudice against verisimilitude is evident, but it appeared quite 
            late and did not constitute a dominant feature of the iconic 
            tradition. This explains Freedberg's emphasis on the power of 
            likeness, but it does not justify his attempt to generalize it to 
            non-Western cultures. Man of his conclusions derive from the fact 
            that his narrative moves, as it were, teleologically, from the 
            figurative to the non-figurative icon (and not the other way 
            around). Asian "realism" arises not only from increasing skill in 
            naturalistic representation but from a conscious will to render the 
            invisible visible, or the dead present. In Buddhist hagiography, the 
            mummy of a dead master, when it happens to be discovered, always 
            looks "as if alive" -- precisely the same topos found in the case of 
            a "realistic" icon. 
            Where Freedberg sees sexuality arousing the beholder because of the 
            likeness of the image, Heidegger would see the unfolding (Ereignis) 
            of Being: "This nature of truth which is familiar to us -- 
            correctness in representation -- stands and falls with truth as 
            unconcealedness of beings" ("OW," p. 52). What Freedberg considers 
            to be the ne plus ultra of verisimilitude, the real costume of 
            certain icons, can play quite a different role in the Buddhist 
            context. There are some well-known cases in Japanese Buddhism of 
            icons whose body is represented with "soft" realism (for instance, 
            the so-called naked Jizo or Benzaiten). These icons were originally 
            clothed like noble human beings. The same is true of the mummies of 
            Buddhist priests. However, one may wonder what role this parure 
            (Kant's parergon) plays in the general economy of Buddhist ritual. 
            In a seminal essay entitled "Le Buddha pare" (The Adorned Buddha) 
            Mus has shown in the case of Sakyamuni that the nature of an icon 
            can change along with its parure, its finery: instead of descending 
            further into the world of appearances, as we might assume at first 
            glance, it now transcends it; it no longer manifests its (relative) 
            "metamorphic body" (nirmanakaya), but its (absolute) "dharma body" 
            (dharmakaya).(117) But things are not always so paradoxically 
            simple, and one may argue that, in most cases, the uncarved 
            woodblock (or at least the single woodblock icon) is closer to the 
            transcendental Buddha. We seem to have here two different ways of 
            conceiving the excess of representation (the sublime): as an 
            additional layer of symbolism (cloth, parergon), or as a total 
            stripping (like the nudity of the "heavenly-clad" ascetic in 
            Jainism). 
            And So? 
            It is clearly impossible to return to a premodern conception of the 
            icon, or to retrieve non-western conceptions of it, to abandon the 
            vantage point (or disadvantage point) of our self-centered 
            perspective. I suggested above that an intrinsic quality of the 
            modern (and, by the way, predominantly male) gaze is the violence it 
            does to images. Perhaps one cannot avoid the most subtle forms of 
            that violence. At any rate, there is little to be gained by adopting 
            a nostalgic approach that idealizes the past (an idealization that 
            is just the other side of the coin, as the case of Segalen shows) 
            and clings to tradition. 
            Our use (or abuse) of these icons may be not only the unavoidable 
            outcome of modern commodity fetishism but also part of a Western 
            pragmatic which consists in installing cultural fragments in another 
            context (Malraux's musee imaginaire), reinscribing them in another 
            structure, and thus establishing another circulation of power. These 
            icons remind me of Nancy Jay's example of the churinga (an 
            Australian Aboriginal ritual instrument, a sort of bull-roarer) in a 
            museum, which she compared to Confederate money, about which one 
            thing is certain: it is no longer money, although we do not know 
            what kind of object it is.(118) One could also argue that, despite 
            the apparent novelty, there is nothing radically new here: the icon 
            was always already reinscribed or disseminated. If we still believe 
            that this disenchantment is radical and irreversible, should we then 
            mourn it? Benjamin was the first to theorize this disenchantment of 
            the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. The example 
            he focusses on, the photograph, is interesting since, as he rightly 
            points out, it retains some of the individual aura (and we know that 
            photos can be used as substitute bodies in black magic). But above 
            all, if some photos do lose their aura through reproduction, others 
            regain another type of aura, or, rather, present an aura that was 
            not apparent in the original subject. Clearly, the reproduction of 
            votive images does not result in the loss of their aura; Benjamin's 
            earlier insight that the aura was in part the product of the 
            photographical technique would seem more to the point here.(119) At 
            any rate, the notion of aura might be useful even in the case of 
            noncultic images. One could also argue that the multiplication of 
            images, rather than depleting their aura, renders presence 
            "immediate and indubitable" (PI, p. 177). This is true with the 
            portrait of the ruler, in the absolute monarchy that emerged in 
            seventeenth-century France, as well as today in all regimes based on 
            a cult of personality. Although Benjamin at one point considered the 
            loss of the aura as a necessary counterpart to the democratization 
            of art, in his argument about the unity of the work of art in its 
            aura we can also perhaps hear a distant echo of the discourse of 
            censorship, according to which prints, like photographs, are vulgar 
            "because they can get into the hands of the vulgus, the crowd" and 
            "are therefore not like art" (PI, p. 361). 
            There is therefore no need to wax nostalgic or nihilistic about the 
            loss of the aura in the age of mechanical reproduction or the 
            inauthenticity of the technical epoch. As Jean-Francois Lyotard 
            remarks, Being "didn't choose Ceizanne to express itself."(120) 
            After all, the grandiloquent disclosure of truth that Heidegger 
            attributed to the work of art can occur in the photos of, say, Man 
            Ray or Henri Cartier-Bresson -- and, with some luck, in my own 
            amateurish photos as well. Similarly, the erotic aura is not limited 
            to the "artistic" photos of Mapplethorpe. One could argue, as 
            Freedberg does, that any erotic or pornographic picture has the 
            potential to arouse a strong response from the beholder, to turn him 
            into a voyeur. How this differs, then, from the voyeurism implicit 
            in paintings like Giorgione's Tempesta -- a voyeurism that is the 
            main source of the fascination exerted by "classic" paintings such 
            as this one -- is not always clear. We may recall that fascination 
            is derived from fascinus, the Latin word for phallus. Thus, my 
            position here is by no means a nostalgic one. However, I want to 
            emphasize again that the aura -- which is perhaps not irreversibly 
            lost, but often ignored or eclipsed -- is an important aspect of 
            these artworks and that one way to retrieve it -- as it were, 
            dialectically, through a kind of Buddhist "skillful means" (upaya) 
            that could later be conveniently abandoned -- is to place it, as 
            Benjamin argued, in its cultic context. This anthropological 
            reinscription will help us to move beyond the cultural level to the 
            phenomenological level. 
            Passing through customary readings of the icon (the aesthetic, 
            symbolic, economic, anthropological), we have shifted from its 
            readable/visible (or obvious) to its visual (or obtuse) dimension. 
            The icon overflows from the aesthetic and symbolic spheres into the 
            anthropological. The focus on the anthropological dimension referred 
            to the belief in a presence, a transcendent immanence of the icon. 
            However, one must be able to go beyond that dimension toward the 
            phenomenological dimension, where the experience of the aura, now 
            desacralized, secularized, reveals a more originary aspect of sense 
            perception.(121) Thus, going through the anthropological moment (by 
            placing the icon in its cultural/cultic context), one ends up 
            discovering a broader anthropological (in the philosophical sense) 
            dimension of the aura, for which the cultic aspect is no longer 
            essential, or, rather, from which it merely derives. 
            The Buddhist icon, like any true icon, is a meteque ("wog"), as 
            Segalen would have described it, but for reasons that have less to 
            do with designating cultural or artistic superiority or inferiority 
            and more to do with the etymological root of the word (meta-oikos, 
            literally, "one who moves to a different house"). This derivation is 
            apt not only because the icon tends to move from temple to museum 
            (or the antiquarian's shop) but because it is both within and above 
            the oikos, the economy (oikonomia, the law of the house and of 
            partition, distribution, and exchange): it simultaneously institutes 
            the economic/iconomic circle and goes beyond it.(122) In this hybrid 
            and highly unstable figure, all human meteques and metis 
            (half-breed, half-cast, or half-caste -- a related word, although of 
            different etymology) will recognize their prototype. (1.) See 
            Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of 
            Chan/Zen Buddhism (Princeton, N.J., 1991), pp. 148-78 and Visions of 
            Power: Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism, trans. Phyllis Brooks 
            (Princeton, N.J., 1996), pp. 237-63. See also Michel Strickmann, 
            Mantras et mandarins: Le Bouddhisme tantrique en Chine (Paris, 
            1996). 
            (2.) On Buddhist art, see the groundbreaking work of Paul Mus, 
            Barabudur: Esquisse d'une histoire du bouddhisme fondee sur la 
            critique archeologique des textes (1935; New York, 1978). See also 
            G. Coedes, Pour mieux comprendre Angkor: Cultes personnels et culte 
            royal; monuments funeraires; symbolisme architectural; les grands 
            souverains d'Angkor (Paris, 1947); trans. and ed. Emily Floyd 
            Gardiner, under the title Angkor: An Introduction (New York, 1963). 
            See also Stanley K. Abe, "Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art and 
            the West," in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under 
            Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Chicago, 1995), pp. 63-106; 
            hereafter abbreviated "IW." On East Asian art and ritual artifacts, 
            see Doris Croissant, "Der unsterbliche Leib: Ahneneffigies und 
            Reliquienportrat in der Portratplastik Ostasiens," in Das Bildnis in 
            der Kunst des Orients, ed. Martin Kraatz, Jurg Meyer zur Capellen, 
            and Dietrich Seckel (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 235-68; T Griffith Foulk 
            and Robert H. Sharf, "On the Ritual Use of Ch'an Portraiture in 
            Medieval China," Cahiers d'Extreme-Asie 7 (1993-94): 149-219; and 
            Mimi Yiengpruksawan, "In My Image: The Ichiji Kinrin Statue at 
            Chusonji," Monumenta Nipponica 46 (Autumn 1991): 329-47. 
            (3.) See, in particular, Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the 
            Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, 
            ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), pp. 217-51, hereafter 
            abbreviated "WA," and "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Illuminations, 
            pp. 155-200; David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the 
            History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989), hereafter 
            abbreviated PI; W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology 
            (Chicago, 1986); Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. 
            Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover, N.H., 
            1994); Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l'image: Question posee aux 
            fins d'une histoire de l'art (Paris, 1990) and Ce que nous voyons, 
            ce qui nous regarde (Paris, 1992). 
            (4.) On Buddhist mummies, see Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy pp. 
            148-78, and Sharf, "The Idolization of Enlightenment: On the 
            Mummification of Ch'an Masters in Medieval China," History of 
            Religions 32 (Aug. 1992): 1-31. 
            (5.) For a recent scrutiny of some of the Orientalist 
            presuppositions of Buddhist art, see "IW." For a discussion of 
            "secondary Orientalism," see Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights: An 
            Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 
            1993), pp. 52-88. 
            (6.) William R. LaFleur, "A Turning in Taisho: Asia and Europe in 
            the Early Writings of Watsuji Tetsuro," in Culture and Identity: 
            Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years, ed. J. Thomas 
            Rimer (Princeton, N.J., 1990), p. 239. 
            (7.) Ernest F. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An 
            Outline History of East Asiatic Design, 2 vols. (New York, 1913), 
            1:xxiv; hereafter abbreviated EC. 
            (8.) Not surprisingly, the classical reference is omnipresent in 
            Western judgments about Asian art. When Aurel Stein begins to 
            explore Buddhist sites in the Swat district of Northern India with 
            Alfred Foucher in 1896, he writes: "I feel I am on classical soil 
            and enjoyed every minute" (quoted in "IW," p. 85). As Abe points 
            out, "`Greekness' ... serves to designate the aesthetic superiority 
            of the European colonial" ("IW," p. 71). This bias toward antiquity 
            is still visible in the titles of major journals in the field: 
            Artibus Asiae, Ars Orientalis -- to name just a few. But in the case 
            of Gandhara art, unlike in the present case, the thickness of the 
            lips of some statues was judged as a proof of non-Greek origin; see 
            ibid., p. 71. (9.) See Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles of Art History: 
            The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. 
            Hottinger (New York, 1950). 
            (10.) "Le sacrifice, c'est l'homme. Le sacrifice est l'homme car 
            c'est l'homme qui l'offre; et chaque fois qu'il est offert, le 
            sacrifice a la taille de l'homme" (Catapatha-Brahmana, quoted in 
            Sylvain Levi, La Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brahmanas [1898; 
            Paris, 1966], p. 77). 
            [11.] Quoted in Francois Berthier, Genese de la sculpture bouddhique 
            japonaise (Paris, 1979), p. 313. The formalist approach of Japanese 
            art historians to Buddhist sculpture is well documented (and 
            replicated) in Berthier's book. 
            (12.) Another representative instance of the aestheticizing tendency 
            is Hisamatsu Shin'ichi's construction of a Zen aesthetics under a 
            definition so broad that it allowed him, like Fenollosa's friend 
            Okakura Kakuzo and Suzuki Daisetsu, the scholar and lay Zen 
            practitioner who popularized Zen in the United States, to include 
            under the banner of Zen a broad variety of cultural products such as 
            the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, no theater, and haiku poetry. 
            I have discussed this aspect of Zen ideology elsewhere. See Faure, 
            Chan Insights and Oversights, pp. 52-88. Hisamatsu defines Zen 
            aesthetics under seven rubrics: asymmetry. simplicity, timelessness, 
            naturalness, subtle profundity (yugen), freedom from convention or 
            attachment, and aloneness. See Gregory Noyes, "The Rainbow of Zen 
            Aesthetics" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1993). For a direct 
            contact with Zen ideology, see Hisamatsu Shin'ichi, Zen and the Fine 
            Arts, trans. Tokiwa Gishin (Tokyo, 1971); Okakura Kakuzo, The Ideals 
            of the East, with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (London, 
            1903); and Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, 2d ed. 
            (Princeton, N.J., 1970.). 
            (13.) E. H. Gombrich, "Malraux's Philosophy of Art in Historical 
            Perspective." in Andre Malraux, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1988), 
            p. 137. 
            (14.) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, prod. George Lucas and 
            Frank Marshall, dir. Steven Spielberg, 1989. 
            (15.) Andre Malraux, epigraph to Victor Segalen, The Great Statuary 
            of China, trans. Eleanor Levieux, ed. A. Joly-Segalen (Chicago, 
            1978); hereafter abbreviated GS. 
            (16.) Augusto Gilbert de Voisins, Ecrit en Chine, in Le Voyage en 
            Chine: Anthologie des voyageurs occidentaux du Moyen Age la chute de 
            l'Empire chinois, ed. Ninette Boothroyd, Muriel Detrie, and Fernand 
            Bunel (Paris, 1992), pp. 1053-54. 
            (17.) See also Yvonne Y. Hsieh, Victor Segalen's Literary Encounter 
            with China: Chinese Moulds, Western Thoughts (Toronto, 1988), pp. 
            31, 107-8. 
            (18.) Another case in point is that of Michel Leiris, a surrealist 
            writer who became an ethnographer when he joined the mission 
            organized by Marcel Griaule in Africa to collect specimens of 
            african art and culture for the Musee de l'Homme. Leiris denounces 
            colonial violence, but he also recounts in his diary, later 
            published despite Griaule's opposition under the title L'Afrique 
            fantome, how he stole precious fetishes from unsuspecting villagers. 
            On Griaule, Leiris, and Segalen, see James Clifford, The Predicament 
            of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art 
            (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 55-90, 152-74. 
            (19.) A similar point is made, in a different context, by Mitchell 
            in his discussion of the modern "rhetoric of iconoclasm." See 
            Mitchell, Iconology, pp. 160-208. On the Buddhist "rhetoric of 
            iconoclasm," see Richard Gombrich, "The Consecration of a Buddhist 
            Journal of Asian Studies 26 (Nov. 1966): 23-36. 
            (20.) On the animate icon, see Richard Gombrich, "The Consecration 
            of a Buddhist Image," and Strickmann, Mantras et mandarins. On the 
            indian "gaze" (darsan), see J. Gonda, Eve and Gaze in the Veda 
            (Amsterdam, 1969); on the tessera, see Max Kaltenmark, "Ling-pao: 
            Note sur un terme du taoisme religieux," in Melanges publies par 
            l'Institut de Hautes Etudes Chinoises, 2 vols. (Paris, 1960), 
            1:559-88; on the stupa, see Mus's monumental work, Barabudur; on 
            power, see Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert A General Theory of Magic, 
            trans. Robert Brain (New York, 1972); Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, The 
            Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets: A Study in 
            Charisma, Hagiography, Sectarianism, and, Millenial Buddhism 
            (Cambridge, 1984); and PI. 
            (21.) Edmund R. Leach, "The Gatekeepers of Heaven: Antropological 
            Aspects of Grandiose Architecture", Journal of Anthropological 
            Research 39 (Fall 1983): 244; hereafter "GH." The worst-case 
            scenario, only too common, is that of these icons who, like the 
            Buddha from Hoti Mardan described by Foucher, came to decorate the 
            mess hall of a British frontier garrison, "leaning against the wall 
            of the dining-room and no longer inhaling any incense but the smoke 
            of cigars" (quoted in "IW," pp. 85-86). (22.) See "GH," and Rolf A. 
            Stein, "The Guardian of the Gate: An Example of Buddhist Mythology, 
            from India to Japan," in Asian Mythologies, trans. Wendy Doniger et 
            al., ed. Yves Bonnefoy (Chicago, 1991), pp. 122-36. As Roland 
            Barthes pointed out, the French word duel has both the meanings of 
            "dual," or contest, and "dual," the category in Greek grammar 
            between singular and plural. See Roland Barthes, "Introduction to 
            the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Image-Music-Text, trans. and 
            ed. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), p. 108. 
            (23.) See G. Ecke and P. Demieville, The Twin Pagodas of Zayton: A 
            Study of Later Buddhist Sculpture in China (Cambridge, Mass., 1935). 
            
            (24.) The same is true of Buddhist relics and regalia. See, for 
            instance, Faure, "Relics, Regalia, and the Ideology of Secrecy," in 
            Rending the Veil, ed. Eliott Wolfson (forthcoming). 
            (25.) Stella Kramrisch, Exploring India's Sacred Art: Selected 
            Writings of Stella Kramrisch, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller 
            (Philadelphia, 1983), p. 217; hereafter abbreviated El. 
            (26.) On the metaphysics of presence, see Jacques Derrida, Of 
            Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1974). 
            (27.) See Hubert Delahaye, "Les Antecedents magiques des statues 
            chinoises," Revue d'esthetique, n.s., 5 (1983): 45-53; hereafter 
            abbreviated "AM." 
            (28.) Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Etude comparee des religions antiques," 
            Annuaire du College de France 77 (1977): 426. 
            (29.) See Konjaku monogatari shu, trans. and ed. Bernard Frank, 
            under the title Histoires qui sont maintenant du passe (Paris, 
            1968), pp. 94-96. 
            (30.) Lu Xun, Gu xiaoshuo gouchen (Hong Kong, 1970), p. 428; quoted 
            in "AM," p. 48. 
            (31.) Hong Mai, Yijian zhi, ed. Congshu Jicheng (Beijing, 1981), p. 
            129; quoted in "AM," p. 51. 
            (32.) For a discussion of the Marxist notion of fetishism, see 
            Mitchell, Iconology, pp. 185-96. 
            (33.) "On Lustful Love for the Image of Kichijo-tennyo, Which 
            Responded with an Extraordinary Sign," Miraculous Stories from the 
            Japanese Buddhist Tradition: The "Nihon Ryoiki" of the Monk Kyokai, 
            trans. Kyoko Motomochi Nakamura (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), p. 178. 
            (34.) Gaoseng zhuan, in Taisho shinshu daizokyo, ed. Takakusu 
            Junjiro and Watanabe Kaigyoku, 100 vols. (Tokyo, 1924-32),50:860b. 
            On the legend of the Buddha image, see Hobogirin: Dictionnaire 
            encyclopedique du bouddhisme d'apres les sources chinoises et 
            japonaises, ed. Demieville, Levi, and J. Takakusu, s.v. "Butsuzo," 
            and Donald E McCallum, The Zenkoji Icon: A Study in Medieval 
            Japanese Religious Art (Princeton, N.J., 1994). 
            (35.) Lewis R. Lancaster, "An Early Mahayana Sermon about the Body 
            of the Buddha and the Making of Images," Artibus Asiae 36, no. 4 
            (1974): 289. 
            (36.) See Hobogirin, s.v. "Butsuzo." For this story, see also John 
            S. Strong, The Legend of Upagupta: Sanskrit Buddhism in North India 
            and Southern Asia (Princeton, N.J., 1992), pp. 104-17. 
            (37.) See the rendition of Divyavadana in Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, 
            The Transformation of Nature in Art (New York, 1934), p. 102. 
            (38.) On the "visualization" of images according to Buddhist 
            scriptures, see Demieville and Emile Benveniste, "Note sur le 
            fragment sogdien du Buddhadhyanasamadhiagarasutra," Journal 
            Asiatique 223 (Oct.-Dec. 1933): 193-248. 
            (39.) On this point, see Alvin Cohen, "Coercing Rain Deities in 
            Ancient China," History of Religions 17 (Feb.-May 1978): 244-65. 
            (40.) See, for instance, in the Jingde chuandenglu (Record of the 
            Transmission of the Flame in the Jingde), the story of the "mad 
            monk" Shide, who beats up a monastery god for seeming unable to 
            protect the monastery (Taisho shinshu daizokyo, 51:434a); or, in 
            Mangen Shiban, Enpo dentoroku (Record of the Transmission of the 
            Flame in the Enpo; 1706), the case of the Zen monk Kyoo Unryo 
            (1267-1341), who threw the mountain god of Hakusan into a pond after 
            this deity had failed to protect his community from an epidemic (see 
            Enpo dentoroku in Dai Nihon bukkyo zensho, ed. Takakusu Junjiro et 
            al., 150 vols. [1931; Tokyo, 1970-73], 108:212a). Incidentally, the 
            fact that not only children but also adults are affected (although 
            in different fashions) by the violence done to inanimate figures was 
            brought home to me on the occasion of my daughter's birthday as I 
            watched the beating of a pinata. 
            (41.) See Foulk and Sharf, "On the Ritual Use of Ch'an Portraiture 
            in Medieval China." 
            (42.) To give just a couple of examples, a lingwei is a tablet 
            placed in front of the coffin, a lingwu, a paper house burned at 
            funerary rituals. 
            (43.) Florence Dupont, "The Emperor-God's Other Body," in Fragments 
            for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Nadaff, 
            and Nadia Tazi, 3 vols. (New York, 1989), 3:403. 
            (44.) Ibid., p. 413. Although we are dealing with a different 
            context, it is particularly interesting that the term 
            representation, in French royal funerary rituals, means a 
            catafalque, a funerary effigy. On this question, see Ralph E. 
            Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva, 
            1960). 
            (45.) According to Audrey Spiro, Gu Kaizhi's famous line on dotting 
            the eyes of a portrait ("`What conveys the spirit and portrays the 
            likeness lies precisely in these dots'") must be understood in the 
            context of ritual empowerment (Audrey Spiro, "New Light on Gu 
            Kaizhi: Windows of the Soul," Journal of Chinese Religions 16 [Fall 
            1988]: 1). 
            (46.) Zanning, Song gaosengzhuan, in Taisho shinshu daizokyo, 
            50:711c. An earlier translation of this biography may be found in 
            Chou Yi-Liang, "Tantrism in China," Harvard Journal of Asiatic 
            Studies 8 (1944-45): 276-77. 
            (47.) On this question, see Strickmann, Mantras et mandarins, pp. 
            165-211. 
            (48.) Here is how Father Longobardo describes a drought that plagued 
            the inhabitants of the Guangtong province: "So they gave up hope in 
            the city gods, and for the occasion they brought in a celebrated 
            monster from the country. Its name was Locu [read Luzu, the Sixth 
            Patriarch, that is, Huineng]. They paraded it about, bowed before it 
            and made offerings to it, but like its counterparts it remained deaf 
            to their pleading. It was this occasion that gave rise to the 
            saying, `Locu is growing old'" (Matthew Ricci, China in the 
            Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583-1610, trans. 
            Louis J. Gallagher [New York, 1953], p. 425). 
            (49.) On the Chan "rhetoric of immediacy" and the central role of 
            mediation, see Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. 
            (50.) As Jean-Francois Lyotard puts it: "This is the way 
            philosophers enter the stage of `criticism,' by way of this gap 
            through which the work escapes being converted into meaning" 
            (Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their 
            Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity," trans. 
            Maria Minich Brewer and Daniel Brewer, The Lyotard Reader, ed. 
            Andrew Benjamin [Oxford, 1989], p. 182). 
            (51.) For an "art historical" presentation of some of these boyish 
            figures, without discussion of their power of sexual arousal, see 
            Christine M. E. Guth, "The Divine Boy in Japanese Art," Monumenta 
            Nipponica 42 (Spring 1987): 1-23. For a discussion of Buddhist 
            pedophilia, see Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy, pp. 248-57. For a 
            discussion of the homoerotic tradition of Western humanism through 
            the figure of Ganymede, see Leonard Barkan, Transuming Passion: 
            Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford, Calif., 1991). 
            (52.) John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972; London, 1977), p. 7; 
            hereafter abbreviated WS. 
            (53.) The German Kunstbetrieb could be translated, more literally, 
            as "bustling activity around art." 
            (54.) Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," Poetry, 
            Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1971), pp. 
            40-41; hereafter abbreviated "OW." 
            (55.) See Faure, Visions of Power, pp. 224-74. 
            (56.) Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph 
            Manheim (New Haven, Conn., 1959), p. 98. 
            (57.) Another practically invisible mark of the Buddha has caught 
            the Buddhist imagination: his hidden reproductive organ; his 
            sheathed, as it were, "invaginated" penis, which is often compared 
            to that of a horse or an elephant. 
            (58.) In Chan/Zen, the term usnisa (in Chinese, dingxiang; in 
            Japanese, chinzo) came to designate the portrait of an enlightened 
            abbot. On this question, see Foulk and Sharf, "On the Ritual Use of 
            Ch'an Portraiture in Medieval China," pp. 202-6. 
            (59.) Il n'y a d'image a penser radicalement qu'au-dela du principe 
            de visibilite, c'est a dire au-dela de l'opposition canonique -- 
            spontanee, impensee -- du visible et de l'invisble. Cet au-dela, il 
            faudra encore le nommer visuel, comme ce qui viendrait toujours 
            faire defaut a la disposition du sujet qui voit pour retablir la 
            continuite de sa reconnaissance descriptive ou de sa certitude quant 
            a ce qu'il voit. [Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous 
            regarde, p. 76] 
            See also Didi-Huberman, Devant l'image. 
            (60.) Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in 
            Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial 
            Style (Oxford, 1972), pp. 1, 2. (61.) See Dan Sperber, Rethinking 
            Symbolism, trans. Alice L. Morton (Cambridge, 1975), p. 33. 
            (62.) Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies. After Marx and Freud, 
            trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), p. 67. See also 
            Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. S. Moore 
            and E. Aveling, ed. Friedrich Engels, 3 vols. (New York, 1967); 
            "WA"; Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and 
            Ian McLeod (Chicago, 1987), chap. 1, hereafter abbreviated TP; Louis 
            Marin, The Portrait of the King, trans. Martha Houle (Minneapolis, 
            1988); and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks 
            (London, 1983). 
            (63.) "Glorifier le culte des images (ma grande, mon unique, ma 
            primitive passion)" (Charles Baudelaire, "My Heart Laid Bare," "My 
            Heart Laid Bare" and Other Prose Writings, trans. Norman Cameron, 
            ed. Peter Quennell [New York, 1975], p. 198). 
            (64.) Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of 
            Narratives," pp. 43-58. 
            (65.) Ibid., p. 277. 
            (66.) See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, 
            Mass., 1962). On the indirect, see Coomaraswamy, The Transformation 
            of Nature in Art, pp. 121-38; on "twilight language," see Roderick 
            S. Bucknell and Martin Stuart-Fox, The Twilight Language: 
            Explorations in Buddhist Meditation and Symbolism (New York, 1986). 
            (67.) Whereas the five-degree or "five-wheel" stupa symbolizes the 
            five elements of the Buddhist cosmos, the ovoid or seamless stupa 
            represents the pre- or postcosmic stage, the stage of 
            indifferentiation and chaos before the emergence of the symbolic. 
            (68.) Coedes, Pour mieux comprendre Angkor, p. 62. 
            (69.) On the symbolism of turgescence and the "phallic effect that 
            is not necessarily specific to the male," see Derrida, "Foi et 
            savoir: Les Deux Sources de la `religion' aux limites de la simple 
            raison," in La Religion, ed. Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Paris, 
            1996), p. 63. 
            (70.) Mus, "Civilisations d'Extreme-Orient," Annuaire du College de 
            France 54 (1954): 238. 
            (71.) See Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy, pp. 148-78; see also 
            Sharf, "The Idolization of Enlightenment." 
            (72.) The translators of The Truth in Painting explain as follows 
            their choice of cise for taille: "To render this second sense of the 
            French taille, and to preserve the uncertainty between the two 
            senses which is vital in some of what follows, we shall use the word 
            `cise,' an obsolete spelling of `size'... and suggestive of cutting 
            (cf. incision)" (TP, p. 120). 
            (73.) See Jean-Pierre Albert, Odeurs de saintete: La Mythologie 
            chretienne des aromates (Paris, 1990), p. 232. 
            (74.) This question was raised by Janet Gyatso in her discussion of 
            my book, The Rhetoric of Immediacy, and I owe this insight (or 
            afterthought) to her. On the smell of death in art, see Mieke Bal, 
            "Dead Flesh, or the Smell of Painting," in Visual Culture, pp. 
            365-83. 
            (75.) See, for example, this account in Fozu tongji (General Records 
            of the Buddhas and Patriarchs): "When master Sengqie died, a royal 
            decree ordered that his body should be lacquered and that a stupa 
            should also be erected at the Jianfu Monastery. Soon after this, a 
            foul smell pervaded the city. An edict ordered the body to be sent 
            to [his former monastery at] Sizhou. At once, a fragrant breeze blew 
            over the imperial capital" (Zhipan, Fozu tongji in Taisho shinshu 
            daizokyo, 49:372). 
            (76.) See the entry for Wuliao in the Fozu tongji: 
            Twenty years after its completion, [Wuliao's stupa] ... fell down 
            owing to a flood in a hill stream. His disciples then saw that the 
            corpse had suffered no physical deterioration. When the prince of 
            the Min State heard this news, he sent a messenger and took the 
            corpse to his house to worship. Immediately a bad smell came out of 
            the corpse. After the prince had offered some incense and prayed, 
            and it had been reenshrined at the original place at Guiyang, a 
            fragrant smell came out soon after its restoration. So all the 
            people of that city went out and paid homage to that stupa. [Ibid., 
            49:389] 
            (77.) See also the following: "This double trait of a cise which 
            limits and unlimits at one and the same time, the divided line upon 
            which a colossus comes to cise itself, incise itself without cise, 
            is the sublime"; "the colossal is, in other words superelevates 
            itself, on both sides of its own cise, it is on both sides its own 
            cise, it is of its own cise on both sides. A priori and from the 
            start double colossus, if not double column. Whence its resonance" 
            (TP pp. 144, 145). (78.) After writing this, I came across a 
            reference to the tessera in Michael Ann Holly's recent essay on 
            Wolfflin. She writes: "The corpus of Wolfflin's work can be read 
            according to the trope of tessera coined by Harold Bloom to explain 
            the `anxiety of influence' often `suffered' by poets" (Michael Ann 
            Holly, "Wolfflin and the Imagining of the Baroque," in Visual 
            Culture, p. 351). And: "In Bloom's terms, Burckhardt's Renaissance 
            provided the tessera for Wolfflin's baroque" (ibid., p. 362). Here 
            is Bloom's definition of the tessera: "I take the word not from 
            mosaic-making, where it is still used, but from the ancient mystery 
            cults, where it meant a token of recognition, the fragment say of a 
            small pot with which the other fragments would reconstitute the 
            vessel" (Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry 
            [Oxford, 1973], p. 14). Yielding to the anxiety of influence, I add 
            this fragment to my little vessel, although it may belong to another 
            larger and more artistic one. 
            (79.) I owe this information to Mimi Yiengpruksawan. 
            (80.) See Robert Des Rotours, "Insignes en deux parties (fou) sous 
            la dynastie des T'ang (618-907)," T'oung Pao 41 (1952): 34. See also 
            the standard definition of the substantive tally, which includes the 
            meanings "a reckoning or score"; "a stick on which notches are made 
            to keep a count or score" or "a stick on which notches were formerly 
            made to keep a record of amounts paid or owed"; "a mark used in 
            recording a number of acts or objects, most often in series of five, 
            consisting of four vertical lines canceled diagonally or 
            horizontally by a fifth line"; and "something that is very similar 
            or corresponds to something else; a double or counterpart." 
            (81.) Significantly, the same term was used in Chan/Zen for the 
            definition of the patriarchal robe, which was the main emblem of 
            transmission. 
            (82.) Des Rotours, "Insignes en deux parties (fou) sous la dynastie 
            des T'ang (618-907)," p. 5. 
            (83.) Before the Tang, they had the shape of a tiger; during the 
            Tang, usually that of a fish, sometimes of a tortoise. Until the 
            Tang, the inscription was written on the edge, before the insignia 
            was slit; later it was written on each side of the fault line; 
            finally it was written inside the insignia, while the characters 
            hetong, engraved on the edge, are split in the middle and must be 
            reconstituted when the two parts of the insignia are reunited. In 
            some cases, the inscription inside, reading tong ("same"), carved in 
            relief (yang) on one side, must also fit together with the text 
            carved en creux (yin) on the other side. So one part of the fu was 
            kept inside the palace, the other (or others, for there were 
            sometimes as many as twenty) were distributed to functionaries, who 
            were sent to the provinces. After the Song, they were replaced by 
            tablets (pai) -- but their symbolic value (in both senses) remained. 
            
            (84.) Among the various meanings for qi we find "pact, contract, 
            convention; to carve, to incise; to concord, to match, to agree." 
            This term is also used to designate awakening -- tallying with truth 
            -- -and Chan transmission -- tallying between master and disciple, 
            between mind and mind. 
            (85.) Paul M. Harrison, "Buddhanusmrti in the 
            Pratyutpanna-Buddha-Sammukhdvasthita-Samaddhi-Sutra," Journal Indian 
            Philosophy 6 (Sept. 1978): 42. See also Miranda Shaw, "Buddhist and 
            Taoist Influences on Chinese Landscape Painting," Journal of the 
            History of Ideas 49 (Apr.-June 1988): 196. 
            (86.) Harrison, "Buddhanusmrti in the 
            Pratyutpanna-Buddha-Sammukhdvasthita-Samdhi-Sutra," p. 39. 
            (87.) See Rolf A. Stein, The World in Miniature: Container Gardens 
            and Dwellings in Far Eastern Religious Thought, trans. Phyllis 
            Brooks (Stanford, Calif., 1990), pp. 5-48. 
            (88.) See also Delahaye, Les Premieres Peintures de paysage en 
            Chine: Aspects religieux (Paris, 1981), and James Cahill, The 
            Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese 
            Painting (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). 
            (89.) Aura -- "souffle" -- is not, like aureole, derived from 
            aureus, "golden [crown]." 
            (90.) Perhaps owing to Brechtian influence, Benjamin is nevertheless 
            ambivalent about this evolution, which he also saw as a sign of 
            democratization, of the legitimate ambition of the "masses" to 
            overcome cultural privileges: "Every day the urge grows stronger to 
            get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, 
            its reproduction" ("WA," p. 223). The desacralization of the work of 
            art was also for him an emancipation from its "parasitic" existence 
            as an clement of ritual ("WA," p. 224). In an earlier essay on 
            photography, Benjamin attributed the aura to the technical 
            conditions of photography. The nihilism of "The Work of Art in the 
            Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is also contradicted by his later 
            essay, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire." On this question, see Rainer 
            Rochlitz, Le Desenchantement de l'art: La Philosophie de Walter 
            Benjamin (Paris, 1992), pp. 174-94, trans. Jane Marie Todd, under 
            the title The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter 
            Benjamin (New York, 1996); and Mitchell, Iconology, pp. 178-85. For 
            a positive conception of mimesis and reproduction, see also Michael 
            Taussig, Mimesis and Allerity. A Particular History of the Senses 
            (New York, 1993). 
            (91.) See Christine Guth Kanda, Shinzo: Hachiman Imagery and Its 
            Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. 73: "The sheer bulk and 
            lack of mobility either in pose or in the articulation of bodily 
            mass gives them a primeval aura" (my italics). 
            (92.) See Yiengpruksawan, "Gods in Pieces: The Ontological 
            Ramifications of the Joined-Wood Technique in Japanese Buddhist 
            Statuary" (forthcoming). 
            (93.) Guth Kanda, Shinzo, p. 20. 
            (94.) See Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of 
            Amulets. (95.) See Li Chi: Book of Rites; An Encyclopedia of Ancient 
            Ceremonial Usages, Religious Creeds, and Social Institutions, trans. 
            James Legge, ed. Ch'u Chai and Winberg Chai, 2 vols. (Hyde Park, 
            N.Y., 1967), 1:173. See also J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System 
            of China: Its Ancient Forms, Evolution, History and Present Aspect, 
            Manners, Customs, and Social Institutions Connected Therewith, 6 
            vols. (1892; Taipei, 1982), 2:806-11. 
            (96.) The Dictionnaire francais de la langue chinoise (Taipei, 
            1976), s.v. "ou," has: "statue (representing a person), doll, idol; 
            even number; together; to pair, to mate; pair, couple, member of a 
            couple, spouse, partner; to match, to go together, etc.; to 
            coincide, hence coincidence: fortuitous, chance, accidental." Qi 
            also means "to exceed," "remainder," "bad luck," "bad omen." 
            (97.) See Donald E. Gjertson, "The Early Chinese Buddhist Miracle 
            Tale: A Preliminary Survey," Journal of the American Oriental 
            Society 101 (July-Sept. 1981): 297. 
            (98.) In his famous description of sympathetic magic, Frazer 
            mentions the Chinese "effigies made of bamboo splinters and paper" 
            known as "`substitutes of persons,'" which could be used to inflict 
            harm on one's enemies (J. G. Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution 
            of Kings, vol. 1 of The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 
            3d ed. [London, 1911], p. 60). See also Taussig, Mimesis and 
            Alterity, pp. 44-58. 
            (99.) See Hwui Li, The life of Hiuen-Tsiang, ed. Samuel Beal 
            (London, 1914), p. 62. See also Malcolm David Eckel, "The Power of 
            the Buddha's Absence: On the Foundations of Mahayana Buddhist 
            Ritual," Journal of Ritual Studies 4, no. 2 (1990): 68. 
            (100.) Sigmund Freud, "The `Uncanny,'" Collected Papers, trans. and 
            ed. Joan Riviere, 4 vols. (New York, 1925), 4:386-87; hereafter 
            abbreviated "U." 
            (101.) See Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York, 1993). 
            
            (102.) Quoted in Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and 
            Richard Rand (Lincoln, Nebr., 1986), p. 28. 
            (103.) See Clement Rosset, Le Reel et son double (Paris, 1976), p. 
            84. 
            (104.) Arthur Rimbaud, "A Georges Izambard," in Rimbaud, Cros, 
            Corbiere, Lautreamont: Oeuvres poetiques completes, ed. Alain 
            Blottiere et al. (Paris, 1980), p. 184. 
            (105.) See Alain Boureau, Le Simple Corps du roi: L'Impossible 
            Sacralite des souverains francais, XVe-XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1988) 
            -- a critical complement to Ernest H. Kantorowicz's The King's Two 
            Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J., 
            1957). 
            (106.) "Les differents aspects de l'illusion decrits ci-dessus 
            renvoient a une meme fonction, a une meme structure, a une meme 
            echec. La fonction: proteger du reel. La structure: non pas refuser 
            de percevoir le reel, mais le dedoubler. L'echec: reconnaitre trop 
            tard dans le double protecteur le reel meme dont on croyait s'etre 
            garde" (Rosset, Le Reel et son double, p. 123). 
            (107.) Quoted in Shaw, "Buddhist and Taoist Influences on Chinese 
            Landscape Painting," p. 199. See also Erik Zurcher, The Buddhist 
            Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early 
            Medieval China, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1959), 1:242-3. 
            (108.) On the rhetoric of iconoclasm in Western discourse, see 
            Mitchell, Iconology, pp. 160-208, and Goux, Symbolic Economies, pp. 
            134-50. 
            (109.) See Guth Kanda, Shinzo, pp. 18-22. 
            (110.) Susan L. Huntington, "Early Buddhist Art and the Theory of 
            Aniconism," Art Journal 49 (Winter 1990): 402; hereafter abbreviated 
            "EB." See also Vidya Dehejia, "Aniconism and the Multivalence of 
            Emblems," Orientalis 21 (1990): 45-66. Dehejia argues that, while it 
            is true that Foucher misstated the nature and extent of aniconism, 
            he was accurate in perceiving its existence; see p. 64. 
            (111.) On Foucher, see also "IW." 
            (112.) See Mus, Barabudur pp. 43-45, 60-66. 
            (113.) The best representative of this trend is probably Wassily 
            Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings 
            on Art, trans. and ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, 2 vols. 
            (Boston, 1982), 1:114-219. (114.) See Mus, Barabudur. 
            (115.) This calls to mind the painting of a nineteenth-century 
            experiment, whose reference escapes me, in which real cows are put 
            in front of painted cows to test the mimetic quality of the painting 
            in the painting. 
            (116.) Liu Yiqing, Shishuo xinyu jiaojian (Collected Notes on "A New 
            Account of Tales of the World"). 
            (117.) Mus, "Le Buddha pare. Son Origine indienne. Cakyamuni dans le 
            mahayanisme moyen," pt. 2 of "Etudes indiennes et indochinoises," 
            Bulletin de l'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient 28 nos. 1-2 (1928): 
            197. 
            (118.) See Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: 
            Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago, 1992), p. 12. 
            (119.) See Rochlitz, Le Desenchantement de l'art, p. 181. 
            (120.) Lyotard, "Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their 
            Experimentation," p. 189. 
            (121.) See Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyans, ce qui nous regarde, 
            p. 125. 
            (122.) See Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy 
            Kamuf (Chicago, 1992) pp. 6-7, and Faure, Visions of Power, pp. 
            282-85. 
            Bernard Faure is professor of religious studies at Stanford 
            University. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A 
            Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism (1991), Chan Insights and 
            Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition 
            (1993), Visions of Power: Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism 
            (1996), and The Will to Orthodoxy: A Critical Genealogy of Northern 
            Chan Buddhism (1997).