by Kentaro Ide
From June 13th to 15th, 2023, the international conference entitled
“Ritual and Materiality in Buddhism and Asian Religions” convened at
Princeton University. This conference was intended to foster work that
explores the connections between ritual and different forms of
materiality—such as manuscripts, printed liturgies, paintings, icons,
statues, talismans, and bodily engagement—in Buddhism and the religions of
Asia. Scholars from around the world gathered to share their research on
ritual and materiality. Researchers and graduate students from the United
States, Europe, and East Asia also participated in this conference to deepen
their understanding of the conference’s subject. This conference was made
possible thanks to generous support from the Glorisun Global Network for
Buddhist Studies, Princeton University’s Center for Culture, Society, and
Religion, Humanities Council, Tang Center for East Asian Art, Department of
Religion, and East Asian Studies Program.
June 13th: Welcoming Remarks and Keynote Lecture
On June 13th, the conference began with the welcoming statements by the
co-organizers Prof. Stephen F. Teiser (Princeton University) and Prof. Shih-
shan Susan Huang (Rice University), the conference coordinator Junbin Tan
(Princeton University), and the graduate student convener Sinae Kim (Princeton University). Teiser explained that the conference’s theme reflects ongoing
interest among scholars in the relevant fields in the relationships between
ritual and different forms of materiality. The conference’s goal is, he
stressed, to rethink the state of fields in light of the holistic “ritual
assemblage” in which objects, language, and human body collaborate to enact
ritual performance. Huang stated that study of ritual materiality is by nature
interdisciplinary because such subjects as art, religion, and performance
constituted an integral part of it. She expressed hope that the conference
would encourage scholars to refresh their perspective on multisensorial matrix
of ritual, based on which different senses of materiality and ephemerality
work together.
The welcoming statements were followed by the keynote lecture by Prof.
Shu-fen Liu (Academia Sinica 中央研究院) entitled “The Arhat Cave Belief in
Four Stele Inscriptions and the Daitokuji Paintings of Five Hundred Arhats.” In
this lecture, Liu examined in great detail visual motifs surrounding arhat
worship in the Song dynasty 宋 (960–1279), which are depicted in a set of
scroll paintings of five hundred arhats preserved in the Japanese temple
Daitokuji 大徳寺. By analyzing the paintings together with textual sources and
inscriptions, Liu illustrated how the motifs of caves and rocks, as arhats’
dwelling place, were used for construction of arhat worship. She also stressed
that a closer scrutiny of inscriptions and other sources suggests that
different forms of worship of arhats and their sacred dwelling coexisted. Some
sources tell that arhat caves were naturally formed, while others explain that arhats dwelled in man-made replica caves. Moreover, the shifts in legends
about arhats and their sacred dwellings through the times also entailed the
changes in the content and format of the paintings. Liu concluded the lecture
by pointing out that, while much research on the Daitokuji paintings has been
conducted, more study awaits on questions such as who painted the arhat motifs
and gathered them all in the set of paintings.
The subsequent Q&A session was centered around the two issues pertaining
to Prof. Liu’s fascinating lecture. First, the audience raised a range of
questions on how to interpret the legends of arhats and their dwelling. For
instance, a question arose concerning whether Buddhist-Daoist interactions
informed the development of visual motifs in arhat worship, given that the
elements such as caves, rocks, bamboo forests are also commonly found in the
Daoist imaginaire. Conversation also turned to how eminent monks and arhats
were categorized and worshiped differently by the practitioners. Second, the
participants were interested in the ritualized materiality of the paintings.
Some questions focused on formal properties of the paintings. They thus
addressed, for example, how different layers—background and characters—in
the paintings were created and arranged. The discussion also touched upon the
issue of whether the materiality of rocks and stones—which rarely
change—could instantiate religious characters of arhats—who were old and
unchanging. The welcoming statements and the keynote lecture marked a great
start of the conference with a series of inspiring queries.
June 14th: Panel One
Panel One was presided by Prof. Anna Shields (Princeton University) and
accompanied by Prof. Justin McDaniel’s (University of Pennsylvania) comments.
The discussion in Panel One centered around the fundamental question that
would be addressed through the conference: Why do humans perform ritual? After
each panelist’s presentation, discussant McDaniel began by arguing that while
the panel covered diverse topics in terms of content and time, all papers
shared some cohesive themes surrounding the ways in which visuality could tell
us about ritual sequence, methods, sources, and purposes of rituals. Moreover,
he told, all of them combined the methods in different disciplines—art
history, historical anthropology, and textual study—to provide a very
detailed description of “how,” “when,” and “where” humans produced
ritual objects. Trent Walker (Stanford University) analyzed in detail the
nineteenth-century Siamese illuminated manuscripts used in healing and
funerary rituals. Kate Lingley’s paper (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa)
studied the sixth-century Chinese votive images and monuments commissioned by
female patrons. Maya Stiller (University of Kansas) discussed how the Chosŏn
period Korean temple mural paintings reflect patrons’ diverse doctrinal
interests. And Mengxiao Wang (University of Southern California) addressed the
ways in which the seventeenth-century Chinese theater arts incorporated and
materialized Buddhist rituals. However, while all these papers beautifully described “how,” “when,” and “where” ritual practice with its own materiality took place, McDaniel insisted, any of these papers did not necessarily deal with the question of “why” humans do ritual. Why do humans spend time, money, mental energy, and resources to perform rituals that do not work in a proven way? He raised this question by referring to Frits Staal’s famous article “The Meaninglessness of Ritual” (1979). Staal argued that in
contrast to languages that would undergo tremendous transformation to remain
meaningful in accordance with each time, ritual activities such as Vedic
mantras have remained changeless. This is because, he told, they are
“meaningless.” By drawing on Staal’s insight into the meaninglessness of
ritual, McDaniel reflected on the question of “why” humans do ritual in
terms of its productive ambiguity. Ritual is meaningless, since it constantly
absorbs meaning. Ritual is immutable since it continuously adapts to times.
Because of this potency, he argued, ritual has been repeated and resilient
overtime. Based on his reflection on such productive ambiguity, McDaniel
encouraged all participants to ask the fundamental question of “why” in
their own research.
In the subsequent Q&A session too, some important questions that would
recur throughout the conference were raised. For example, materialized ritual
assumes a certain “format” that frames its modal, sensorial experience. It
is thus important to consider what the “format” means in each case study.
Panelists also suggested that actual, materialized practice of ritual could
not be reduced to what a prescriptive text presents; and there is a potential tension between intellectual system in a given tradition and actual ritual
practice.
Panel Two
Panel Two was presided by Prof. Cheng-hua Wang (Princeton University) and
accompanied by Prof. Laurel Kendall’s (American Museum of Natural History)
comments.
The discussion in Panel Two more closely focused on materialized process
of producing ritual and ritual objects. Discussant Kendall first pointed out
that each panelist addressed the tension between what is in the prescriptive
text and what people actually do with materialized ritual objects. Then, by
drawing an analogy between ritual and cooking, Kendall suggested that the
concept of “recipe” would be of great help in examining the materiality of
ritual beyond this dichotomy. The selection of elements may be fixed in a text
or a formula, but actual practice of materialized ritual often requires
technique of an experienced practitioner who put them in a flexible way. The
concept of “recipe” allows us to understand the variability of ritual
practice. While, in producing rituals, people do refer to a prototype, they
could choose multiple elements at hand and mix them up within a specific
context. Kendall thus emphasized that a closer focus on the materialized
practice of ritual leads to rich descriptions of how things are made, how they
are activated, and how variations are implicated. For example, in her paper on
portrayal of the Qing Qianlong Emperor 乾隆帝 (1711–1799) as an emanation of a cakravartin in the thangkas paintings, Wen-shing Chou (Hunter College & The
Graduate Center, CUNY) argued that while the production of innovative thangkas
paintings referred to manuals and familiar visual languages, new elements were
added in Qing Buddhists’ interactions with the Jesuits. Aleksandra Wenta’s
(University of Florence) paper revealed that the range of “magical recipes”
used in tantric Buddhist technologies, points to a considerable degree of
fluidity and adaptability that characterizes tantric practices spreading
across multiple regions.
Kendall further maintained that the study of ritual materials calls
attention to ecology of their complex “sense-scape.” From an anthropological
viewpoint, she stressed, even while senses do have biological aspect, the ways
in which humans carve up a lexicon of sensory experiences are socially
determined. Once one goes beyond texts to obtain a comprehensive understanding
of materialized ritual practice, one will see that different senses have
constituted its integral part. In this panel, Sujung Kim’s (DePauw
University) study of “wearable” talismans in premodern Korean Buddhism
revealed how haptics played an important role in the practitioner’s claim for
the talismans’ efficacy. In her study of the material qualities of chanting
the Buddha’s name in the thirteenth-century Japan, Susan Dine (Vanderbilt
University) illustrated the ways in which aspirants envisioned the chanted
voice as “objects” that were both auditory and visual. Aspirants thus
engaged with various perceptive faculties to layer meaning and increase the
recitation’s efficacy. Kendall pointed out that in the earlier anthropological literature, ritual was often understood as symbolic system. However, when we engage with ritual at the level of substance, we will see it as something more than such symbolic system. Whether ritual may work or not, she concluded, and how to describe ritual’s own material and sensorial nature are major challenges for scholarship.
In the Q&A session, the panelists and participants mainly discussed how
the concept of “efficacy” works in study of ritual. The question also arose
as to how the material and sensorial experience of ritual could transform both
objects and practitioners into ritual “co-agency.”
Panel Three
Panel Three was presided by Prof. Jonathan Gold (Princeton University) and
accompanied by Prof. Justin McDaniel’s comments.
The discussion in Panel Three reconsidered scholars’ approach to
interactions between humans and non-human objects in materialized ritual
practice. Discussant McDaniel introduced two major concepts, “affordance”
and “entanglement,” to examine what is at stake in this panel. The concept
of affordance originated in the psychology of visual perception developed by
James Gibson. Gibson stressed that while the properties are objective
phenomena, they serve as “affordances” only relative to particular
observers. For instance, if the surface is raised approximately at the height
of the knees of the human biped, then it “affords” sitting-on. Likewise, the
chair “invites” humans to sit down. Affordances work in relation to the properties of other perceiving and acting entity. McDaniel argued that while the concept at first glance seems to invite deterministic approaches to describe a world of causes and effects, it does not. He emphasized that ritual objects do not determine human activities but “afford” a possibility of activities in future. Two papers in this panel examined how ritual
interactions between humans and non-human objects generated a sense of time.
They discussed not only rituals at work but also the periods of “pre-”
rituals and “post-” rituals throughout which humans keep interacting with
objects. Materialized ritual practice requires much preparation. Chihiro Saka
(International Research Center for Japanese Studies) examined how people
meticulously prepared silk cloths to be offered to a Japanese Buddhist folk
deity. Seunghye Lee’s (Leeum Museum of Art) study of textual relics in Liao
China suggested that relics do not just mark memory of the Buddhist teachings;
they “afford” ongoing contacts with them from present to future.
Another concept of “entanglement” highlights a state of being
essentially dependent on different entities. McDaniel argued that the concept
of entanglement is of great use in reflecting how co-dependencies and
interrelations make people change their ways that the nonhuman is acting on
the human and vice versa. In the panel discussion, the discussant and the
panelists agreed that this concept is of particular significance for study of
ritual space in which humans and non-human objects arise as an “co-agency.”
Keping Wu’s (Duke Kunshan University) paper on worship of deities with no statues in rapidly urbanizing Suzhou discussed how human bodies, physical space, and absent objects interacted to maintain the efficacy of ritual. Jingyu Liu (Wheaton College) explored the configuration of altars in the Water-Land ritual (shuilu fahui 水陸法會) in China to show how a particular entanglement of ritual space, objects, and bodily movement of ritual specialists conditioned this ritual’s later development.
All papers thus revealed that materialized ritual practice grew out of
codependent relationship between humans and objects in time and space. In
concluding remarks, McDaniel suggested the possibility that further study of
dependent arising of agency will enable scholars of Asian religions to
generate a “local theory” of ritual. In the Q&A, the panelists and the
audience continued to discuss how each case study contributes to the
theorizing of entanglement, dependent origination, and karmic affordances.
Panel Four
Panel Four was chaired by Prof. Bryan Lowe (Princeton University) and
accompanied by Prof. Laurel Kendall’s comments.
The discussion in Panel Four had two focuses: sensory experience of
ritualized matters, and community generated through rituals. First, discussant
Kendall praised for the hard work of the panelists who worked to reconstruct a
living context for ritual objects. This work of reconstruction is important,
she stressed, for any scholar who wants to think beyond the tension between
what is in the text and what people actually do with materialized ritual objects. Kendall then stated that multi-sensory experience of matters constituted an integral part of the ritual practices studied by each panelist. Ritual objects should be in motion, for instance, when the practitioners claimed for their efficacy. In Yoonah Hwang’s (University of Southern California) paper on the painted long banners from Mogao Caves, these banners were unfurled so that the practitioners might appreciate a sense of kinetic
flapping. Bodily experience of banners being carried too was integral to the
description of ritual sequence. In a similar vein, Ching-chih Lin (National
Chengchi University) revealed how incense-burning, which entailed experience
of smoke and ashes, played a role in the formation of local societies
dedicated to the worship of a local deity in Northern Taiwan. The panelists
and the discussant agreed that study of ritualized materiality should take
into account the instability of matters as well as sensory experience of them.
Community materialized through rituals was another focus in the panel
discussion. Regarding this point, Kendall first pointed out that more
attention should be paid to the economy underlying production of ritualized
matters. In the pre-industrial world, for instance, how did people in a ritual
community produce dyestuffs? While the practice of burning incense itself has
a long history, how has the market of incense changed through the times?
Kendall thus encouraged participants to pay closer attention to the very
substance of objects. Furthermore, she argued that, in each paper, ritualized
objects—such as banners, incense, sands, altars—too arise as actors that,
together with human practitioners, formed a community. In his study on Daoist fengdu 酆都 practitioners during the Southern Song 南宋 (1127–1279), David Mozina
(independent scholar) employed the “post-humanist” approach to this subject.
By describing ritual objects and altars as the actors that would invite human
practitioners to feel the bleakness of the unseen demonic realm, he
illustrated how ritualized materials gave a sensuous expression to the fengdu
community. Caroline Hirasawa’s (Waseda University) paper on mantra and visual
representation of its efficacy in medieval Japan demonstrated the network of
monks, constituents, mantras, and also objects that participated in the
ritualized exchanges.
Overall, the discussion confirmed that once produced and activated, ritual
objects could transform both humans and objects into co-agency that
establishes and maintains a ritual community or network. In the Q&A session, a
question also emerged asking to what extent is the category of “materiality”
relevant to papers that focused more on intangible elements like sounds and
smells.
June 15th: Panel Five
Panel Five was chaired by Prof. Thomas Conlan (Princeton University) and
accompanied by Prof. Justin McDaniel’s comments.
The discussion in Panel Five reconsidered agency of ritualized objects and
promising methods to describe it. Discussant McDaniel first urged every participant to reflect on an assumption underlying the study of ritualized objects. Scholars try to pick up fragmented objects from the past, reconstruct their living context, and make them understandable to those living now. He argued that such effort is at least in part human-centric, thus calling for the necessity of examining an assumption that there is a clear distinction between a scholar as an observer, and people, places, and things observed.
McDaniel then introduced Alfred Gell’s (1945–1997) concept of “art nexus”
as a tool for reflection on the relationship between humans and objects. The
“art nexus” represents the network of social relations in which art work are
embedded. It considers objects not in terms of their aesthetic value or
appreciation in the culture that produced them. Instead, Gell proposed to
consider art objects in performative terms as systems of actions. Art objects
are thus considered to be the equivalents of persons, more precisely social
agents. Gell’s idea of the social networks in which objects exert agency on
the various actors clarifies the issues at stake in each paper in this panel.
It sheds a better light on a process in which objects have changed their
“recipient” overtime, which in turn transformed the meaning of objects.
Youn-mi Kim’s (Ewha Womans University) study of talismans in the Chosŏn
period showed how study of simple talismans could open up a vast landscape of
practice stretching from medieval Dunhuang to the Chosŏn, and to contemporary
Korea. Chuck Wooldridge (Lehman College, CUNY) argued people in contemporary
Taiwan saw “maintenance” of temple buildings and icons as equivalent to
devotional practice that preserves a relationship to deities. The work on maintenance showed that the recipient not only takes care of objects but also adds new qualities overtime. In her paper on Sanskrit syllables in Japanese Buddhist embroideries, Carolyn Wargula (Bucknell University) argued that Sanskrit syllables often appear on images embroidered with human hair and evoke one’s somatic presence. All these papers suggest that different people through times involved in the social networks surrounding objects. As the way in which people frame the meaning of objects changed, from ritualized matters to past objects to be studied, so did their “recipient” change from the
practitioners to curators and scholars. The “recipient” is a part of the
material co-agency of object and changed its meaning overtime.
The issue of how to combine different methodologies was another focus in
the discussion. David Andolfatto’s (Heidelberg University) paper on Buddhist
clay materials in India and Mongolia stressed that the development of
archaeological study have illuminated a hitherto understudied aspect of those
objects—that they contain human flesh, saliva, feces, and urine. Megan Bryson
(University of Tennessee) reconstructed Dali-Kingdom rituals by combining
historical methodology and imaginative narrative. By doing so, she tried to
“voice” the lost past and restore a sense of temporality embodied by
ritualized objects. On one hand, the discussant McDaniel warned that use of
narrative raised a question of how one, as a scholar, could be fully
responsible to the past to be studied. On the other hand, however, the
panelists and the discussant agreed that multi-disciplinary approach to ritualized materials would open the possibility of reconstructing the living
context for them.
In the Q&A session, the panelists and the audience had further discussions
on promising methods for reconstruction of the past. They showed particular
interest in how one could properly adopt different types of account, such as
scholarly prose and narrative, to restore the meaning of objects.
Graduate Student Discussion
After all panel sessions ended, graduate student participants had a
discussion on what they have learnt from this conference. The discussion
covered a wide range of topics relevant to ritual and materiality, but two
issues drew particular interest. First, graduate students examined how to
address “efficacy” of ritual objects or whether the question of efficacy
makes any sense at all. Many papers presented in the conference used the term
“efficacy” to discuss how ritualized materials do “work” on those
involved. For people living in the modernized world, it is not always obvious
whether they could claim efficacy of a certain ritual. While students
acknowledged the difficulty in explaining ritual efficacy, they agreed that a
closer focus on the material practice of producing ritual objects would enable
a contextual approach to the question of efficacy. By studying “who”
produced objects and “how,” one could illustrate a fuller context in which
people claim for ritual efficacy. Second, graduate students examined the
status of theory in the study of materialized ritual. In this conference, discussant McDaniel encouraged scholars to be in dialogue with various theories (such as affordance and nexus) and also to consider how to generate a “local theory” of ritual. Some students were concerned that too much use of theories would undermine the particularity of each ritual experience that has its own modalities. All students, however, appreciated that to have a dialogue with theories allows them to go out of each’s field of study and hence to reflect on such fundamental questions as to why humans perform ritual.
Concluding Discussion
The conference ended with the concluding remarks by the organizers, the
keynote speaker, and the discussants. Each speaker commented on the major
issues discussed in the conference. Prof. Shu-fen Liu appreciated that each
panelist revealed how cultural relics in religious traditions developed
differently in diverse regions. Liu also stressed that further study should be
done to address “who” participated in material process of producing ritual
objects, such craftsmen, painters, and experts. Prof. Laurel Kendall
reiterated the metaphor of “recipe” to call for the need to discuss the
variability of ritual practice that arises from contact between materials and
the practitioners’ hands. Kendall then encouraged the audience to pay closer
attention to human and non-human objects’ motion that creates a dynamism of
ritual. Prof. Justin McDaniel once again urged each to reflect on the
fundamental question of why humans spend money and material resources to
create decorations that embellish ritual space. In addressing that question, McDaniel argued that materialized ritual gives a certain form to beings and
thus informs the movement or rhythm in which a body travels amidst the world.
Prof. Shih-shan Susan Huang showed appreciation towards the conference’s
interdisciplinary vibe, which allowed scholars from different disciplines to
have productive dialogues. Simultaneously, Huang recognized disciplinary
differences in each approach and thus encouraged the participants—especially
those taking a text-centered approach—to investigate what visual images tell
us about ritual. Finally, Prof. Stephen F. Teiser evoked the need to address
the sociopolitical power that ritual and ritualized materials exert. Ritual is
not just a pleasant thing to do. Rather, ritual subordinates people, alienates
people, and hides actual power relations under the guise of aesthetic unity.
Teiser suggested that study of materialized ritual should elucidate such
economy of subordination and disempowerment.
The three days conference was quite fruitful in that the participants shared many inspiring questions on the connections between ritual and different forms of materiality in Buddhism and Asian religions. It is hoped that the discussion in this conference will foster the flourishing of further study on this subject.
Author Bio: Kentaro Ide is a Ph.D. student in Department of Religion, Princeton University. He is currently working on the dissertation that investigates the Buddhist thinker Hōnen’s (1133–1212) unique contribution to the medieval Japanese debates over the salvific inclusivity of those deemed to be of lesser religious capacities—‘evildoers’. By integrating into a single narrative the intellectual history of Buddhist doctrines and the social history of aspirants’ lives, the dissertation argues that Hōnen criticized the conventional discourse of salvific inclusivity and, on that basis, conceptualized salvation as transcending the requirements of wisdom and morality.
