The Buddhist Universe in Early Modern Japan: Cosmological Dispute and the Epistemology of Vision
- Book Title:
- Overlapping Cosmologies In Asia: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Approaches
- Book Editor:
- Format:
- Book Chapter
- Year:
- 2022
- Publisher:
- Brill
- Place published:
- Leiden
- Language:
- Abstract:
The Jesuit introduction of European globes, world maps, and Ptolemaic astronomy in the sixteenth century and the later introduction and popularization of Copernican astronomy in eighteenth-century Japan, with its attendant theories of heliocentrism and a spherical earth, presented significant challenges to the cosmology of Japanese Buddhists. Japanese monks exerted a great deal of intellectual effort in refuting European theories about the physical nature of the cosmos and mining ancient Indian cosmological texts to argue for Japan’s place in a Buddhist universe. Image making was central to this discourse. Every argument for or against cosmological claims in this period was articulated visually. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Buddhist cosmological diagrams, illustrations, and maps were produced in manuscript and print. Elaborate clockwork mechanisms were designed and produced to demonstrate the operations of a Buddhist universe. This chapter analyzes the arguments, images, models, and mechanisms produced by the Japanese Buddhists who defended and reformulated Buddhist cosmology against the perceived threat of European astronomy into the late nineteenth century. In doing so, it argues for the importance Buddhist cosmology, and of an overlooked corpus of Japanese Buddhist visual culture, in the development of “modern” Japanese views of the world.
- What (Subjects):
- Where (Locations):
- When (Centuries):
- Worldcat URL:
- Publisher URL:
- Page Range:
- 195–229
- ISBN:
- 97890045116759789004511415
- DOI:
- Comment:
- Series: Crossroads - History of Interactions across the Silk Routes, v. 4