TOPICS: BUDDHIST ART IN ASIA in Spring 2027 (AH2091B)

Buddhist art has been carried across Asia for over two millennia, making it one of the most widely dispersed and long-lived artistic traditions in the world. While often treated as the illustration of doctrine, Buddhist images and monuments raise significant material, ritual, and art historical questions about the interpretation of iconography and the organization of sacred space. Spanning the period from the third century BCE to the modern era, this course examines how Buddhist art gave form to doctrine and sometimes exceeded it, as devotional practices moved from the Indian subcontinent through the Himalayas, Southeast and Central Asia, and into China, Korea, and Japan. It proceeds chronologically and geographically, treating each regional tradition not as a variant of an Indian original but as a distinct expression of institutional and personal devotion. The contents range from early stupas and reliquaries to cave temples, colossal rock-cut sculptures, portable bronzes and painted scrolls, and the museum displays through which much of this material reaches us today. This course strives to incorporate novel formats, such as VR reconstructions of cave sites and sessions in Parisian museum collections, in investigating these works from the angles of ritual use, patronage, and cross-cultural transmission, with a special emphasis on the translation of form across linguistic and religious boundaries.