VISUAL ART AND THE SACRED

Two days later, buoyed by the oceanic good feelings of the Writing In Public conference, I fly to New York, where I’ll stay the night before traveling on to spend the week in New Haven with my oldest daughter and her family.

I check into my hotel at midday and walk to the Milk Gallery on West 15th Street in the meatpacking district to see an exhibit entitled The Vision and Art of Shinjo Ito.

Shinjo (True Vehicle) Ito was a 20th century Japanese artist and founder of the Shinnyo-en order of Buddhism. Ito worked mainly as a sculptor, but he also took photographs, carved reliefs and did calligraphy.

Shortly after I arrive at the gallery, a procession of four Shingon Buddhist monks walk in and begin to chant around the 16 foot long golden Great Parinirvana Image at the center of the gallery. One of the monks punctuates the chants by striking a small bell and another monk in a purple robe and high black hat blows into an instrument that resembles vertical pan pipes and sounds like an organ. The gallery is filled with people (many of whom are ethnic Japanese), and the spiritual energy is palpable.

I admire Ito’s small bronze sculptures of various Buddhist figures. It is clear with these pieces that he was influenced by classical Greek art (rare among Japanese religious artists). I like the Achalanathai altar the best, because it exudes a fierce spiritual energy. The central figure, Achala (The Immovable One), is a being with fangs who grips a sword with one hand to sever material connections and a rope in the other hand to tie up demons.

Near the entrance to the exhibit is a statement that says It may be useful to keep in mind that each figure is basically acting as a symbolic representation of an individual facet of enlightenment. I grew up Presbyterian, and Protestant Christianity’s prohibition against graven images programmed me to dismiss the spiritual value of visual models. This was a mistake, a missed opportunity.

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I recall looking at Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, a tiny (5 X 53/4 inches) beautiful painting by the Flemish artist Jan Van Eyck at the Philadelphia Museum of Art years ago. The painting was commissioned by a wealthy patron for use as an aid to prayer. Annika Fisher, a medieval art historian, told me these images were often wrapped in cloth and carried by pilgrims as portable altars.

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During the summer of 1996 I was in Paris for a few days prior to a trip to Les Eyzies in the Dordogne to look at Paleolithic cave art. Gary Snyder was one of the tour guides, along with Clayton and Caryl Eshleman. I tagged along with Gary and his wife Carole Koda one morning to visit the Musee Guimet (http://www.museeguimet,fr/ ).

I hadn’t heard of this museum prior to our visit, but it houses one of the great collections of Asian art in the West, and should be on every art lovers’ must see list.

I visit museums hoping that I’ll see things that will astonish and move me. This was certainly the case that morning. I saw the most extraordinary exhibit there, a group of twenty one exquisitely carved and painted wooden figures of Shingon Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Buddhist Wisdom Kings. Emile Guimet collected these sculptures from the Toji Temple in Kyoto in the late 19th century. Together they form a mandala, a symbolic representation of various manifestations of Buddha Mind. What I was looking at that morning was a beautiful and strange three-dimensional model of human consciousness that was profoundly different from Western notions of mind, and I tried to imagine what it would be like to work with this complex system of images to attain enlightenment.

The Toji Mandala is one of the great cultural treasures of mankind. There are excellent color photographs of these figures in Le pantheon bouddhique au Japon – Collections d’Emile Guimet, by Bernard Frank (Editions de la Reunion des musees nationaux, Paris 1991, ISBN 2-71182415-2).