• Corpus ID: 11958868

THE HUAYAN / KEGON / HWA Ŏ M PAINTINGS IN EAST ASIA 339 as long and complex as the Huayan

@inproceedings{Wong2008THEH,
  title={THE HUAYAN / KEGON / HWA Ŏ M PAINTINGS IN EAST ASIA 339 as long and complex as the Huayan},
  author={Dorothy C. Wong},
  year={2008}
}

• D. Wong
• Published 2008
• Art

Huayan (J. Kegon; K. Hwaŏm) Buddhism, whose teachings are based on the Huayan jing, the Avataṃsaka-sūtra or Flower Garland Sūtra, is one of the most important schools of East Asian Buddhism. The Huayan jing has provided inspiration for the creation of numerous artworks, ritual objects, and architectural complexes. We are familiar with the portrayals of Vairocana (Ch. Darirulai 大日如來, or Piluzhenafo 毘廬遮那佛), Mañjuśrī (Ch. Wenshu 文殊), and Samantabhadra (Ch. Puxian 普賢) – the “Three Holy Ones” of Huayan Buddhism. The Gaṇḍavyūha, or Rufajiepin 入法界品, the last chapter of the Tang translation of the Huayan jing, recounts the young boy Sudhana’s (Ch. Shancai tongzi 善財童子) pilgrimage to visit fifty-three spiritual friends (kalyāṇamitra) in search of enlightenment. This originally independent text has inspired a variety of popular pictorial narratives and sculptural reliefs. In this study I discuss a group of Huayan paintings that hitherto has received relatively little attention. These are the so-called Huayan bian 華嚴變, or “transformation tableaux” (referring to bian 變, bianxiang 變相, or jingbian 經變), that are intended to embody, or make manifest, the entirety of the sūtra’s teaching in a pictorial format. I examine the Chinese examples from Dunhuang, of ninthto eleventh-century dates, and the slightly later Japanese ones dating to the Kamakura