August 9-September 27 1998

Introduction and Overview
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Over fourteen centuries ago, Buddhism's migration across Asia along the famous Silk Route brought it to Japan. Two hundred years later (A.D. 752), with the blessing of Japan's ancient Shinto sun goddess, a colossal gilded bronze statue of Buddha--weighing hundreds of tons and towering over 50 feet tall--was consecrated in the vast new imperial monastery of Todai-ji in Nara, Japan's capital at the time. Ten thousand Buddhist monks, many from China and Korea, attended the ceremony. Buddhism, founded 3,000 miles away in India, had become one of the most penetrating, enduring hallmarks of Japanese culture. And the city of Nara had become so central to Japan's self-understanding that today, virtually every Japanese citizen has visited its National Museum and historic temples as a school child.

Now 87 of the most remarkable sculptures, paintings, manuscripts, and decorative works of art ever to emerge from Buddhist beliefs, long housed at Nara's National Museum and in its nearby temples, have been lent exclusively to the Cleveland Museum of Art. The most significant loan of Japanese Buddhist art ever viewed outside Japan, the exhibition Buddhist Treasures from Nara opens August 9 and remains on view in CMA's main special exhibition gallery through September 26, 1998. Admission is free.

Buddhist Treasures has been organized over the past four years by CMA Curator of Japanese and Korean Art Michael R. Cunningham as part of an exchange of exhibitions between the Nara National Museum and CMA.

Commenting on the project, Cleveland Museum Director Robert P. Bergman said:

"It's been my particular pleasure to work with Hiroyasu Uchida, director of the Nara National Museum, in the most cordial and fruitful of partnerships. I have delighted in the expressions of esteem for Cleveland's great Asian collection that have emerged during the times CMA staff have spent with our Japanese colleagues and visitors, and I look forward with great anticipation to opening Buddhist Treasures here. Cleveland's star as a cultural tourist destination will certainly rise even higher with our unique presentation of these rare and amazing works of art."

Japanese authorities consider the Nara National Museum collection its most important ensemble of Japanese Buddhist art. Indeed, only a few works from Nara's holdings have been loaned to U.S. museums in recent decades. The nearly 90 works in Buddhist Treasures from Nara are sacred materials dating from the 7th through 15th centuries, particularly rich in works from the 10th through 14th centuries, including 32 paintings, 20 sculptures, 5 works of calligraphy, and 31 objects of lacquer, metalwork, and textiles.

One of the distinguishing aspects of this one-time-only array is the number of "National Treasures" (12) and "Important Cultural Properties" (45) included. Such designations have been established and reassessed for about 75 years by Japan's Bunka-cho (Agency for Cultural Affairs) to ensure the preservation of the country's cultural legacy. A National Treasure (the highest ranking) or Important Cultural Property may be a building, a festival, a person such as a musician or artist, or works of art such as these. Buddhist materials make up the vast majority of National Treasures, indicating the central role Buddhism has maintained in Japanese cultural history. Elaborating on the rare privileges of this show, curator Cunningham says: "Even in their repositories at the Nara National Museum or at the nearby temple complexes, any light-sensitive National Treasures such as the beautiful calligraphic scriptures on colored paper or painted silk scrolls would only be on view for a month each year. We in Cleveland are extremely fortunate to have secured these loans for eight weeks."

The exhibition focuses on objects that helped transmit Buddhism, the oldest of the world's three major international religions (the later two being Christianity and Islam) as a new religion to Japan and demonstrates how these precedents were adapted over the centuries. Critical to the Buddhist faith and its rituals are the building of temple complexes, the copying of scriptures, and the creation and contemplation of religious images. One of the most historic manuscripts on view is a sutra transcribed in gold dust on purple-dyed paper for the 8th-century emperor, Shomu, under whose reign the new religion was embraced and a system of national temples instituted. (The word sutra comes from the Sanskrit for "string" or "thread," meaning Buddha's teachings sewn together as scripture.) Incorporating such luxurious materials constituted an offering to Buddha, in addition to the very act of the copying.

Among the National Treasures in the exhibition that have never left Japan before are a pair of mandalas from the 11th century, painted in gold and silver. A mandala is a visual diagram of the path to Nirvana or enlightenment, a kind of map or chart populated by various deities divided into their courts, or spiritual realms. Cunningham says that, at nearly 15 feet in height, these monumental paintings would have been hung facing each other between columns in a large devotional hall. Not only does their scale set them apart from any other works, but they are in more pristine condition than any related mandalas. Also, as he puts it, "a mesmerizing display of elegant brushwork has rendered golden ranks of deities that seem to emerge as low-intensity beacons glowing in their background of indigo-dyed silk."

Colorful decorations that would have relieved the overall solemnity of a temple atmosphere include a pair of interior ornaments made of lacquered and painted cowhide, which would have been suspended from the horizontal beams of temple halls and would have swayed in the breeze of these rooms open to the elements. Called keman, they represent sprays of tied flowers that were once used to adorn temples, with bells and pendants attached at the bottom. Given the perishability of flowers, artists conceived such floral decorations over time in textiles, leather (like these), metal, then wood. (Examples of each are included in this exhibition.)

Among the most unforgettable images in the show are two 12th-century painted scrolls, each a National Treasure. One has graphic depictions of the tortures of hell specific to thieves, purveyors of unclean food, persons who set fires, and others their bodies ground by mortars, surrounded by maggots, or torn apart by the beak and talons of a flame-spewing bird. The other scroll portrays benevolent deities vanquishing evil spirits, in one example by the gruesome method of dipping them into a vinegary sauce and biting off their heads. As Cunningham says, these "epitomize that rare and unusual melding of visual elegance and appalling subject matter in Japanese art."

Especially hypnotic to view in person is one of the sculptures on loan from Nara's many temples, in this case the Great Eastern Temple (Todai-ji) where the giant bronze Buddha still resides. Not quite 16 inches tall, the compelling 9th-century figure of carved cypress wood in this exhibition depicts the "Future" Buddha. The subtleties of his pose convey the promise of rebirth in the Western Paradise to the discerning faithful. The sculptor disdained traits of natural proportion in favor of giving the figure a massive head and shoulders and chiseling a direct, intense gaze into his facial features.

Of particular interest to Cleveland visitors is that the Nara National Museum is lending the mate to Cleveland's own 12th-century lacquered tabernacle of identical dimensions, a lavishly decorated cylindrical container some 5-1/2 feet high, meant to contain half of a 600-volume set of scriptures. CMA recently lent its tabernacle to the Nara National Museum for its 100th anniversary exhibition, where it has remained to be conserved by their lacquer experts under the auspices of a Japanese government conservation project.

Cunningham acknowledges the general unfamiliarity with the appearances and ideas represented in these works, but is confident that museum visitors not only at CMA but in all major museums are aware of the increasing prominence of Asian art. He feels that "the cumulative effect of these seemingly arcane, mysterious objects will be profound." The works in this show convey the fundamental religious messages and spiritual values of the various schools of thought and practice that emerged as Buddhism, like Christianity, evolved over the centuries mostly the branches called Esoteric Buddhism and Pure Land Buddhism and the images that grew from Buddhism's melding with Japan's indigenous Shintoism. But understanding of the intricacies of Buddhist thought is not required to sense the psychological impact of the devotional images or to marvel at the technical wizardry involved in a gilt bronze icon or crystal reliquary. Similar religious objects apear in Christian art, too. The variety among the works on exhibition is such that the same personality in Buddhist religious life may be portrayed as an austere figure, smoothly carved from one piece of Japanese nutmeg, or in a seductive painting in color and gold on silk, framed by a moon and set in a landscape of cherry blossoms and rushing water.

Dr. Cunningham has overseen and written much of the catalogue for Buddhist Treasures from Nara, which includes essays by John Rosenfield, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University, on the history of the transformation of Buddhist objects into "art;" and Mimi Yiengpruksawan, Professor of Japanese Art, Yale University, on the significance of Nara as a site in the history of Japanese Buddhism ($35 softbound, $65 clothbound).

A conference, supported by the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies and open to the public, will mark the closing weekend of the exhibition. The keynote speech, on Friday evening, September 25, at 6:30 p.m., is free: "The Japanese Buddhist Image: Magic, Power and Art," by catalogue essayist John Rosenfield. Saturday's events will include the following presenters in addition to Rosenfield and curator Cunningham: James Dobbins of Oberlin College, Robert Scharf of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis of Boston University, and catalogue essayist Mimi Yiengpruksawan of Yale University. (Saturday, September 26, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. $20; $10 for CMA members and students.) A free evening lecture series will also bring local and out-of-town speakers to the museum stage.

Plans are in the works for a world premiere on Wednesday evening, September 2: the internationally renowned Maureen Fleming, an American choreographer born in Japan, is creating a work inspired by the works of art in Buddhist Treasures from Nara.

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The CMA is one of only three art museums in the West selected to participate in a Japanese-government-sponsored exhibition exchange program with the Bunka-cho and three Japanese national museums. The pendant to Buddhist Treasures in this exhibition exchange is Highlights of Asian Painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art, featuring 100 of CMA's Asian masterworks, which opened in February at the Nara National Museum, and is at the Suntory Art Museum in Tokyo through June 21. This has been the first time a major exhibition drawn entirely from CMA's collection has traveled abroad. These paintings are from the CMA's famous holdings of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian art.

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Buddhist Treasures from Nara and Highlights of Asian Painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art are joint projects of the Nara National Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, under the auspices of an exhibition exchange program of the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs. Major funding for the exhibitions is provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. The exhibitions are supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, an agency of the United States government. Additional support is provided by Japan Airlines. Funding has also been provided by Audio Technica, Bridgestone/Firestone Trust Fund, Honda of America Mfg., Inc., NACCO Industries, Inc., Nordson Corporation, and The Standard Products Company/Nishikawa Rubber Company. Promotional support is provided by WCLV 95/5 and Northern Ohio Live.