Nara: sacred images from early Japan

Nara is an amazing magical place. It was the capital of Japan in the 8th century, so we have an unbroken tradition of some 1400 years, and Nara is dotted with amazing ancient temples and shrines full of treasures. So Nara was the capital from 710 to 784 AD, so less than a century, but in many ways it is the cradle of much of traditional Japanese civilization, particularly its religious culture. The great institutions, the temples and shrines founded in the 8th century, mark the early consolidation of the Buddhist religion in Japan. Buddhism arrived in Japan from China and Korea in the 6th century. The king of Korea sent an image of a Buddha, probably a gilt bronze small statue, to the emperor of Japan. This is symbolically the beginnings of the imperial house in Japan adopting the Buddhist religion to bolster their own political position and to unify the nation. But there were pre-existing beliefs, of course, in Japan before Buddhism arrived, a belief in the spirits of nature and ancestors, which are called the kami in Japanese. We now call it the Shinto religion. One of the amazing things about Japan is, although there was some trouble at the beginning, rivalry between those who supported the traditional Japanese beliefs and the newly arrived Buddhism, although there was a bit of rivalry at the beginning, fairly quickly they found a peaceable way of coexisting. So although some of the great temples and shrines have been damaged by fires during civil wars at the end of the 12th century and again at the end of the 16th century, each time Nara has risen again out of the ashes and it's still very much a thriving living centre, particularly of the Buddhist religion. Nara Prefecture is very generously lending 15 religious treasures from the great temples and shrines of Nara and the National Museum there to the British Museum for a temporary special display, and they date from the AD 600s through the 1300s. We are introducing into the displays some amazing Nara paintings from the collection of the British Museum. This is probably the most important Japanese Buddhist painting in the collection of the British Museum. The central deity is known in Japanese as and that means the Bodhisattva of Compassion with the Never-Empty Noose. This is an esoteric form of the deity with four arms and three heads, and if you look carefully you can see in one of the hands is this noose, a kind of lasso, which the deity uses to snare the attention of the faithful. The Bodhisattva of Compassion is seated on a lotus throne on top of a rocky outcrop and is guarded by these two guardian figures. We are sure that this painting is closely associated with Nara, probably with Todai-ji Temple, the Great Eastern Temple, because one of the two guardian figures in this rare iconography, this is a copy of a surviving clay sculpture from the 8th century, which is a national treasure at Todai-ji Temple. The painting dates from around the year 1200, which is an important date in the history of Nara. In 1180, much of the city was destroyed by the Taira troops in the civil war, and so the period from 1180 to 1200 is a period of great revival, great rebuilding, and so there's a sense in which the painter of this hanging scroll was looking to the ancient sculptures of the 8th century in Nara as a source of inspiration. This painting is of a type known as a Kasuga shrine mandala, and it takes us into one of the great religious sites on the northeast corner of the city of Nara. The painting dates from the 1400s, and in that period the weave of Japanese paintings is often quite open. Unfortunately, this means that the paintings have a tendency to flake, and some of the pigment here has fallen off and it's perhaps obscured some of the details, but in essence we still have all of the original composition. And in fact, the landscape at the top of the painting is Mount Mikasa, this rounded mountain in the center, and then the mountains, the Kasuga mountains behind. Spreading out on the foothills of Mount Mikasa are the shrine buildings of the Kasuga shrine, and in particular we should focus on four little shrine buildings side by side in the central compound. And you'll notice also in the sky there are these five buddhas hovering in roundels. In Japan in this period there's a very interesting combination of Buddhism and native Shinto, where the Shinto deities are regarded as emanations or avatars or protectors of the Buddhist deities. And the four Buddhist deities hovering here in the sky are what are called the Honjibutsu, the original buddhas associated with these four Shinto shrines. The fifth one is associated with a wakamiya shrine off to the right. And because of the close association between Buddhism and Shinto in this period, this painting has the Kasuga shrine at the top and the Buddhist deities of Kofukuchi temple at the bottom. So the painting itself is a kind of manifestation of the closeness of Buddhism and Shinto in this period. None of the treasures that are being loaned from Nara have ever been seen in the UK before, and the Nara paintings that we have in the British Museum can only occasionally be shown because they're obviously very ancient but also very light sensitive, and we have to be careful to limit the amount of exposure to the light. It's just extremely gratifying to be able to unite them with some of the wonderful sculptures and religious objects that Nara Prefecture are lending on this occasion. It really is a unique opportunity to see the paintings together with the sculptures and ritual objects from their original context, and comparing the two we learn a great deal of new information.