Page 207 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

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new skepticism informed by European empirical traditions. Contemporary historians who wish to
break with the polemics of past centuries, however, need only raise their eyes from the textual to the
visual evidence of religion in Edo Japan.
The works of art exhibited here offer a powerful argument for the complexity, strength, and
diversity of religious, and particularly Buddhist, culture in the Edo period. In both subject matter and
style the art reflects a deep appreciation of religious traditions but also displays a remarkable degree
of innovation. This inventiveness, a playfulness that borders at times on the burlesque, both requires
and assumes a profound familiarity with artistic conventions. The more familiar an artist's chosen
convention is to the viewer, the more humorous the parody or takeoff (cats. 120,121). Orthodoxy and

206 irony, conservatism and reform, are often combined within a single work. Some Edo artists returned cat. 138
to ancient forms or searched for a lost purity or intensity of expression, which governmental and Tsushima Festival,
seventeenth century,
Buddhist institutions sought to control. Perhaps in reaction, syncretic preachers emerged as a social detail from an eight-panel
screen; ink, color,
force. They drew large urban followings, and mass pilgrimages attracted enormous and often ecstatic and gold on paper,
crowds, made up of all social classes, to distant temples and shrines. The popular culture of Edo 160.8 x 496 (6374 x igs'A),
Private Collection,
Japan, in which religion played no small part, exhibited an unruly vitality. Kyoto
For the preceding thousand years, from the sixth to the sixteenth century, Japanese art had
been religious in character, commissioned for use and display by an aristocratic, warrior, and clerical
elite. Religiosity was explicit in Buddhist sculpture and painting, while it was implicit in narrative
handscrolls. Handscrolls frequently included genre or secular scenes, but the stories themselves were
usually religious in nature, based on the creation story of a temple or the life of an eminent priest.
In the Edo period constraints on the production of religious art began to loosen, artistic personalities
began to emerge, and the audience became increasingly diverse. In earlier periods Zen art had been
created primarily by trained artists, while in the Edo period charismatic monks produced ink paintings
and calligraphy that were less symbols of enlightenment than expressions of gratitude given to temple
patrons in exchange for their monetary contributions. Paintings of shrine festivals served as valued
souvenirs for wealthy travelers, treasured emblems of family origin, or commodities offered in the
negotiation of regional marriages (see cat. 138). The uses and motivation for traditional religious art
had expanded remarkably. Religion, and the arts in which it took form, became popularized in radically
new ways.

B U D D H I S M , A type of painting known as rokudoe (see cat. 114) depicts the "six realms" of transmigration, represent-
T H E C E N T R A L ing a religious world view that reaches back to the earliest forms of Japanese Buddhism. This Indian
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C O S M O L O G Y concept of Buddhist rebirth remained, even into the Edo period, a central religious cosmology. Such
imagery — encompassing the realms of gods, humans, animals, fighting demons, hungry ghosts, and
the denizens of a variety of hells — was often complemented by images of buddhas and bodhisattvas
who offered a way out of the cycle of suffering.
The rokudóe included here depict violent extremes. With the exception of a merciful bod-
hisattva who raises a single unfortunate from the depths of his punishment, the scrolls are otherwise
preoccupied with the punitive consequences of karma. Those who have killed others are reborn as
demons, condemned to a violent existence; those who have overindulged their desires are reborn
as hungry ghosts whose cravings remain forever unsated; and those who have committed any of a