visual ethics; Cambodia; Buddhism; Buddhist painting; visualculture; Buddhist ethics of love; Khmer Rouge; Buddhist funeral practices; Buddhism and death; Mahāparinibbāna; Cambodian artist Sum Pon
摘要
This essay draws on Kenneth George's ethnographic study of the Indonesian painter Abdul Djalil Pirous and his art, as well as Pirous's own characterizations of his paintings as “spiritual notes,” to theorize and examine how paintings serve as ethical media. The essay offers a provisional definition of and methodology for “visual ethics” and considers how pictures and language (such as scriptural texts) can function quite differently as sites for ethical reflection. The particular painting analyzed here is a large temple mural of the death of the Buddha (mahāparinibbāna) located at Wat Unnalom, a prominent Buddhist monastery in Phnom Penh, painted in the 1980s by Cambodian artist Sum Pon. After discussing the lifeworld of Pon's Mahāparinibbāna and varied Khmer Buddhist interpretations of the painting, I suggest that the painting's rendering of “moral vision” helps us understand Buddhist ways of seeing more generally. I conclude by returning to George's question about how our understanding of ethics would change if we took pictures as the “fulcrum of moral relationships,” arguing that pictures can embody certain kinds of tensions or paradoxes that are difficult to explain and grasp discursively, such as paradoxes that arise from the inevitability and yet inexplicability of death as well as the tensions between Buddhist aims of cultivating “boundless” love and the particularities of our own individual experiences of love.
目次
1. Introduction 17 2. Painting the Death of the Buddha 21 3. Lifeworld of a Painting 24 4. The Weeping Monk in the World of the Buddha-time 37 5. Moral Vision in the Mahāparinibbāna 43 References 48
