James ROBSON is the James C. Kralik and Yunli Lou Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University.
關鍵詞
Mummies; Statues; Relics; East Asia; Buddhism
摘要
The renewed attention that has been paid to Buddhist relics over the past twenty years has done much to redress the “Protestant Suppositions” in Buddhist scholarship and to retrieve relics from being considered as unimportant or a sign of the decline of the tradition into superstition. Scholars of Buddhism have produced important studies that have gone a long way in documenting the place of relics within the Buddhist tradition. It might now be time to ask questions about where this “relic turn” has left us. In this essay, I recognize that there is the potential to overly exoticize relics in the Buddhist tradition. Here, therefore, I seek to experiment with thinking about some of the ordinary, rather than merely extraordinary, aspects of relics and their place within the Buddhist tradition. I do this primarily through an analysis of the ubiquity of relics in Buddhist statues and the widespread presence of mummies in East Asia. Recent scholarship on the contents of statues reveals that it was the norm to insert relics as part of the consecration ritual. It is also becoming evident that there may be many more Buddhist mummies than we have previously thought. Some of those mummies were destroyed during iconoclastic moments in Chinese history, while others may have survived but remain hidden underneath layers of lacquer and gold gilding such that they look like normal Buddhist images. By discussing the more ordinary facets of Buddhist relics and mummies, I try to show how they were part of quotidian and rather ordinary aspects of Buddhist devotional practice.
