USC Fisher Museum of Art
Discover art spanning five centuries at USC Fisher Museum of Art.
Ongoing
Discover art spanning five centuries at USC Fisher Museum of Art.
Ongoing
Medicine Master Buddha: The Iconic Worship of Yakushi in Heian Japan
CJRC Lecture Series
Friday, September 14, 2012 : 5:00pm to 6:30pm
University Park Campus
Doheny Memorial Library
East Asian Seminar Room (110C)
Free
A book talk by Professor Yui Suzuki of the University of Maryland on her monograph, Medicine Master Buddha: The Iconic Worship of Yakushi in Heian Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
The book explores the primacy of icons in disseminating the devotional cult of the Medicine Buddha, and analyzes surviving examples of wood Medicine Buddha statues from the Heian period (794-1185 CE) and contends that many were symbolically and ritually linked to Saich? (766-822 CE), the founder of the Japanese Tendai Buddhist school.
Worship of the Medicine Master Buddha (J. Yakushi) became most influential during the Heian Period (794-1185), when Yakushi's popularity spread to different levels of society and locales outside of the capital. The large number of Heian-period Yakushis statues found all across Japan demonstrates that the worship of this deity was an integral component of Heian material practice.
Medicine Master Buddha focuses on the ninth-century Tenda master Saich? (766-822 CE) and his personal reverence for a standing Yakushi icon. Suzuki proposes that, after Saich?'s death, the Tendai school played a critical role in popularizing the cult of the Medicine Buddha as a way of memorializing its founding master and strengthening its position as a major school of Japanese Buddhism. This study offers a fresh perspective on sculptural representations of the Medicine Buddha, and in doing so, reconsiders Yakushi worship as foundational to Heian religious and artistic culture.
Kana Yoshida