This beautifully illustrated book offers a study from the art historical perspective of the cults of the Prince Shōtoku (573?–622?), the purported founder of Japanese Buddhism. The first part of the book explores Shōtoku's ever‐changing identities as an object of veneration and devotion. Carr argues that narratives about Shōtoku's prior lives as well as cultic art formed a bridge to the golden age of the historical Buddha in the age of the decline of Buddhism. He further demonstrates how Shōtoku transcending sectarian differences became a national patriarch, who usurped Buddha Śākyamuni's place to such a degree that “one would be only slightly exaggerating to say that, in many medieval minds, Śākyamuni came to be seen as ‘India's Shōtoku.’ ” The second part of the book examines the functions of Shōtoku's earliest visual hagiographies. Carr shows how the images in the picture hall of Hōryūji, a temple founded by Shōtoku, served as a tool to establish a conceptual map of a Buddhist world with Japan and Hōryūji at its center. And finally, the epilogue gives an outlook of the later developments of the cult. This study is a very welcome addition to textual‐based studies about Shōtoku, such as M. Como's Shōtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanaese Buddhist Tradition and D. Lee's The Prince and the Monk: Shōtoku Workship in Shinran's Buddhism. Carr makes a strong contribution to the study of visual and material culture of medieval Japanese Buddhism and his monograph is highly recommended to all students and scholars of art history, Japanese religions, and Buddhism.
