Discovering an unexpected gem

Bangulzai SG

Skeptic that I am, upon hearing there was an historical exhibition on the lives and art of Japan's Buddhist nuns, I assumed that this would be a drab show of temple artifacts and feminine articles veneered in the dust of incense smoke. As the show is largely curated by Western female academics, I also assumed the whole thing might be wrapped around a feminist agenda designed to overcompensate for centuries of male domination by exaggerating any female achievement, no matter how slight.

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True beauty: "Death of the Buddha" (above) by Abbess Tokugon Riho and a kannon by Abbess Shozan Gen'yoTOKYO UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS

Although a skeptic, I'm eager to experience exhibitions that I may be wary of, and in the process, occasionally discover unexpected gems.

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This was the case with "Amamonzeki — A Hidden Heritage: Treasures of the Japanese Imperial Convents" at Tokyo's University Art Museum, one of the most aesthetically pleasing of all the exhibitions this year, and certainly the best researched.

Thanks to the participation of non-Japanese academics, such as Patricia Fister of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, who kindly showed me around, the catalog is fully bilingual, casting an international light on an area little known in Japan, never mind the rest of the world.

The great surprise of this show is its sheer beauty, both in the items selected and the design of the displays, which include reconstructions of rooms and altars. The objects, such as scroll and screen paintings, calligraphy, miniature Buddhist statues, dolls, games and other knick-knacks, have been gathered from the 13 surviving Imperial convents — amamonzeki — exclusively female Buddhist establishments that have long-standing ties with Japan's royal family.

While each of the 13 convents is well represented, the curators, who include experts from the Tokyo University of the Arts, have managed to minimize any sense of repetition in the displays, giving the show a wonderfully varied feel, evoking but not exhausting aspects of the convents as they now are and once were.

The elegance and charm of many of the pieces is unexpected because, as a belief system, Buddhism is not supposed to be concerned with the attractions of this world. As the Buddhist scholar Hajime Nakamura pointed out in "The Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples" (1960), though, Japanese Buddhism has always been a lot less otherworldly than its Indian and Chinese antecedents.

Another important factor was that the Imperial convents were repositories of daughters of the good and the great, including among their inmates the surplus ladies of the Imperial family. This meant that they tended to echo the living standards and high cultural tastes of the court.

In addition to the gorgeous fabrics and furnishings on display, some of the other items — elaborately made dolls with their own furniture, incense-sniffing games and a shell-matching game with scenes from the "Tale of Genji" — suggest that there was a certain amount of frivolity and hedonism among the cloistered inmates, indicative perhaps of a degree of immaturity only to be expected among young women deprived of the callings of motherhood and marriage. But much here shows that many of the nuns found a higher sense of fulfillment through religiously directed art and ascetic exercises.

One of the most astounding items is a small wooden plaque in a gilded case, on which the names of Buddhist deities have been skillfully and beautifully formed using fingernail parings. This was made in 1686 by the Zen Abbess Daitsu Bunchi, daughter of the Emperor Gomizuno-o, who used the fingernails of her dead father to commemorate him in such a remarkable way.

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Portrait of Abbess Daitsu Bunchi by Prince-Abbot Shinkei TOKYO UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS

Depicted in a large scroll painted one year after her death in 1697, the Abbess is one of several impressive characters to emerge from the exhibition. A keen ascetic who reportedly cleared away thorn bushes by hand to found the convent of Ensho-ji, near Nara, the portrait presents a credible picture of a tough, uncompromising spiritual matriarch. Like any Zen master, in her hands she holds the hossu, the ceremonial fly whisk, a symbol of ridding oneself of the illusions of the material world.

The extreme spiritual asceticism of Abbess Bunchi, which included cutting off pieces of her own skin to write sutras on, is rare. Instead, the true glory of the Imperial convents is that they were able to unite spiritual and material beauty with that same unique Japanese sensibility that conceives the material universe to be populated by 8 million gods.

A key figure in this sense was the Abbess Tokugon Riho, a daughter of the Emperor Gosai and a niece of Abbess Bunchi. Entered into Hokyo-ji Convent in Kyoto at the age of 12, she later received artistic training from a professional artist, Kano Chikanobu of the renowned artistic dynasty.

While her large-scale calligraphy shows a surprisingly masculine energy, her paintings combine delicate artistic technique with a sense of serene devotion. Her "Death of the Buddha" (18th century), shows the expiring deity surrounded by dozens of disciples and animals. The attention to worldly detail suffused with spiritual love in the picture strongly reminds us that the spiritual and material don't necessarily have to occupy different planes of reality.