 I'm Lucia Dolce, I'm the chair of the Center of Buddhist Studies here at SOAS and I'm delighted to welcome you to the first of this academic year, Robert Ho family foundation lecture series in Chinese Buddhism that are hosted by the Center of Buddhist Studies here. This is the first virtual event for us. The SOAS campus closed last March and our lecture seminars have been moved online and we remain basically closed with all teaching and other activities carried out virtually. And so we are, we are in a sense happy that we are able to continue our research event online. And I'm delighted that our first speaker has accepted to do this lecture with this new means. I'd like to say a few words about the series and then introduce our speaker. This is the fourth year that we are running the whole lectures in Chinese Buddhism. So the series is to engage with Chinese Buddhism from a variety of disciplines, non sectarian perspective, looking at the findings from historical sociological or historical material cultural perspective to explore the impact of Buddhism on Chinese culture and society in the past and in the present. So the series which is made of a lecture, a public lecture, which we normally would have at the theater, so as, and also a seminar for students. This is the occasion also for a platform for advanced graduate training, and I'm pleased again that our speaker today has been happy to do to agree to a seminar tomorrow. And at the great occasion of every year. We have normally three lectures. This first lecture is actually something that we had scheduled for last May and that we had canceled because of COVID-19. So this will be the first of four lectures that will entertain us this academic year. And I'd like also to take the opportunity to express our appreciation to the whole foundation for enabling us to create this moment of learning and sharing knowledge about Chinese Buddhism. And now is my great pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker, Professor James Robson from Harvard University. Professor Robson is the James Kralik and the Unilu Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilization at Harvard and the director of the Harvard University Asia Center, as well as the director of the regional study East Asia program. James Robson just a PhD from Stemford University and has done many years of research in East Asia and China, Taiwan and Japan. You would have read the details of his achievements in the announcement that we sent out, but I like to say a few words about his contribution to Chinese Buddhism. In many of areas that are perhaps the areas in between the mainstream narratives on Buddhism and covered also some of the gray areas of both in terms of topics and material. His interest in the Celtic centers and sacred mountains as a shared space by gods by different gods and different religious lineages as produced a wonderful study of Nanui mountain in a book from 2009 called the power of place, the religious landscape of the southern sacred peak in medieval China, a book that has been very well reviewed and received, and has been the recipient of two important prizes, the Stanislaw Julian Prize awarded by the Academy des inscription Abelette and the Toshiden Malaprise in Buddhist studies. One thing that has characterized Professor Robinson's work is the combination of different sources. He draws from canonical material official histories and sycropedias biographical collections to give the an idea of the variety of means that we have to retrace the history of Buddhism and the interaction between Buddhism and other, and other religious traditions. Also to note the interest of looking at China within East Asia and the exploration of practices so that are common to China and other station countries. He has a current project on which has been working for a very long time. I remember having listened to the early stages of this project on the conference of Buddhist monasteries and mental hospitals in Japan. But he has also worked in many articles on amulets, museums, material culture, and I think this is very much connected to what is going to talk about today. So, without further ado, I'd like to leave the floor to Professor Robinson. I'd like before to remind you that there is space for questions. You will have to write them down in the QA at the bottom of the webinar. And we will be happy to pick up your questions, the most popular questions if there are many, but we hope to have at least 30 minutes and maybe a little bit more to engage with the audience. So I leave the floor to Professor Robinson and please James imagine a warm applause to welcome you to the stage. Thank you. Let me go ahead and just share my screen, first of all. So hopefully everybody can see that okay is it coming through okay to you, Lucia. Yes, yes. Good. Okay. Wonderful. So thank you so much for the introduction Lucia and also thanks to everybody for helping to set this up at rather rather quickly which I really appreciate and also this goes back. So as Lucia said back to the spring when we were supposed to have this visit in person in London and at that time, I had been communicating quite a lot with Emmanuel Asala so I'd like to say thanks. This is the young Jude Lee who then picked things up the last couple of weeks to bring us here today. So, you know, this is a, I've been for the Asia Center I've been having to run a number of these kind of talks myself actually in the hundreds already and this is the first time I've actually done my own I've been sort of avoiding them but in some ways, you know, the, the not being able to be in person is is not ideal but, you know, as our world has become, you know, much smaller in many ways with this COVID crisis. There's also, it's also true that this new medium has sort of opened things up and made the things like this open to a kind of potentially worldwide audience so. Thanks very much everybody for for showing up so. So the this, the, this is also another project I've been working on for quite a long time and it's just changed a lot over the years. It really began some time ago with some small statues like this that that all come from the Hunan region of China and South Central China. In the area of the of the topic of my first book this this mountain site there, and was part of a larger collaborative project that was begun by Professor Alan Auro of the of the Ecole Française de extrema orient and then. So we had begun working on this and these are some of the contents that come from that type of a statue and out of that it kind of sent me on this long sort of many years of trying to explore this issue of statues that have materials put inside of them. I may try to come back to these statues at the very end of the talk but it's not going to be the main focus of this for various reasons but as part of that process of thinking about statues with contents inside of them. I realize that this is something that was not just unique to East Asia or even to this one region that I'd been that we've been looking at and, and as I looked around throughout the world you will find statues in museums in different collections that have contents inside of them. This one, a votive image of St. Foy from France from the 10th century that contains part of her skull and some of her bones inside of it. There's a some very famous images that come from primarily West Africa. This one of these Congo figures that are just in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that have contents inside of their bellies and we've now with the new technologies of being able to do CT scans of things. A lot of these images have been discovered to have medicinal medicinal put inside of the stomach cavity that you can see here. Many different types even these are some actually from the Kakure Christian period in Japan of images from northern Kyushu with rosaries and other things that are put in in a cavity that's in the backside of the statues as well. And then we get these wonderful sort of images that open up that have images inside of images that are quite interesting. These are quite rare that like the one I'm showing you right here, but there's a very famous image called the Morgan Madonna, which is a beautiful image that dates to the 12th century that's in the Met Museum. And this one, if you turn this wooden image around just very faintly on the back on the left side as you're viewing the screen but it's on its right shoulder you can see there's a very faint kind of a square there. And this image hopefully you can see it a little better. And this is a very small cavity that's in there that served as a container for relics that were put inside of this image. And there's also another image or another relic reliquary on the front side which I'll show you in just a second but in a description of this statue, a commentator wrote it says the image had a most secret little door between the shoulders. And when he heard this Giles the prior of the monastery ordered it to be carried into the sacristy. He called God for you the sub prior and Jervais the sacrament, sacrament and Gerard the constable and others finally he took a small iron hammer, and he tried to with us with a small knife and pulled away the colors and then was able to finally open it up and he opened the little door and in his hands. He was able to pull out a small lock of hair of the Immaculate Virgin and part of the same Mary so he also found bones of the John the Baptist. And so this image then actually had relics that were put in these two cavities here's the so you saw the backside and then on the front you can see right on the chest here another cavity that held those relics. One of the more interesting ones that I came across and doing and looking around at these different types of images was this 18th century Spanish image of Christ that when they began to do some repairs on it. They brought it down and began to work on it in the lab and they found that there was a cover actually covering the butt of the statue and inside of the cavity in the but they found all kinds of manuscripts that were stuffed inside of this and pulled these out and these were actually incredibly localized records that detailed the local history of this of the village where the statue was located and included all sorts of history about the harvest about different types of problems that were happening in the village. And these were all written down on these manuscripts that were put inside the body of that image. So these these types of statues are literally everywhere one begins to look for look for them. This image some of you may be aware of. I got sort of caught up in this sort of a controversy regarding this image of this John Gong Fusher from Fujian which had been on the art market as a think people thought it was a Buddha image. It was owned by a collector from the Netherlands who put it on display at a exhibition in Budapest and in preparation for putting it on display when they picked it up off the pillow that it's sitting on it separates from the body and the kind of some bones fell out of it and so they began to do some research on it and realize this was not a gilded Buddha or anything like that at all but in fact when they did a CT scan of it to try to figure out what was going on. They found actually it had a whole body mummy inside of it that had been wrapped and gilded and and and so on and then it had been stolen from a place in Fujian, which became part of the controversy of trying to repatriate it there. The collector was unwilling to do so and there's it's currently unknown where it's at now but it this attracted quite a lot of press. The sort of shock that people had of finding something inside of a statue and that's kind of an overall theme that one finds in these stories is that people are amazed to find that a statue might have something inside of it and what I hope to do today is to to sort of change your mind on this and convince you that in fact we should be more surprised when statues don't have things inside of them, rather than when they do. Some of you may have noticed just this past summer, there was a news report that came out of Japan about this Manjushri image at the at the Daiichiji monastery that's located in Kizugawa in Kyoto prefecture that has this 14th century Manjushri that they also did this scan on and it to be filled with quite a lot of different objects inside of it from manuscripts to to small images and this attracted quite a lot of press in Japan and you can see here just how sophisticated the scanning technology is now that one can actually see very clearly where everything is they can count objects and so one of the things you can see here is that there's an object that's put in the throat cavity here this will also be important as we go along to try to pay attention to where things are located inside of the the statues and then you have a number of scrolls that are in the base here and then also this is the small image that's in the throat that was also inside of a little reliquary that was then wrapped with inside of a bag and you can just see the detail that they can get on on that scan and then this is the a small manuscript that's inside of there. Normally, this wouldn't show up if it was written in Sumi ink which wouldn't get picked up but fortunately this one was actually written in red lacquer with gold and you see these different mantras that are all clearly these from the project apartment them in the heart suture here that are that are visible. So that image attracted quite a lot of attention as did one from the previous summer that was from the Hokage monastery and this is another monjushri image. And this one had been put on display it's also is a 13th century image very quite beautiful. And this is the image from Hokage Hokage and and Saidi which is another the former image that I just showed you from Kyoto prefecture actually was connected to Saidi and there was a lot of if you go through records on Japanese images with materials inside of them there seems to be a big connection to Saidi but in any case Hokage this 13th century one again that the imagery was done and you can see again cavity in the head cavity in the neck and then a cavity in the body so there's kind of three different zones. This one you can see a small stupa and other things up in the up in the head, and then there's something on the order of about 140 different texts that are put inside the body of this one. So again in here just to show you the clarity with which you can get on these scans nowadays to see what's inside of these images and then there's just a close up of it with all of the rolled manuscripts. So, one of the problems that we have in studying this topic actually of images with contents inside of them for China in particular. Is the fact that many of these statues that we would like to have access to were destroyed at different points throughout Chinese history and most recently during the Cultural Revolution from the 1960s and 1970s. And, but we do have some records actually of that. Give us some hints about this practice in China. And so I'm showing you here just one of these records and just showing how that during the Cultural Revolution when this statue was destroyed they found this cavity that had 6000 dren 6000 scrolls of Buddhist text from the Ming Dynasty, printing of the Buddhist Canon and so this is really quite incredible to think of the of the scale of that, where you know what happened to those manuscripts is entirely unknown at this point. This is a little unfortunate that when I was meant to give this talk in the spring I had planned to go to China to do some field work to track down some of this stuff and unfortunately, travel was cut off and so it was impossible to do that so some of the material all I just had to base myself off of archaeological reports and other materials to get a sense of what's available. That gives us a little hint. Now, so that's just a kind of a little opening here just to get us into the subject but before turning to the East Asian material I thought the first just a little bit of background when we think about the putting of things inside of statues. So, it became clear as we track this back, or trying to find, you know when did this begin and what are the earliest statues that we have or when can we, when did this sort of notion of thinking about putting things inside of Buddhist statues begin, and it I think goes back is related to relics and that are and textual material that would be put inside of stupas. And it seems as if there is no there are no extent examples of Buddhist statues from India that actually have relics inside of them though. There may be one exception, an interesting image from the Garjana Kodna that seems to have had a relic that was when this when the statue was broken. They found that there was a hole in the lower section of it on the backside between the legs of it, which contained a golden tube that had 95 pearls and some ash in it possibly bone ash but it's unclear. And Osmond Vaparachai also mentioned to me that that in fact the record may be more robust than we think it is in that some of the statues maybe because they were primarily of stone may not have had cavities inside of them but relics would have been placed between the image and the pedestal so down in a space that's created in the pedestal of the of the image. So may even though the the the images may not be extent or very few this practice of inserting relics in Buddhist images is in fact actually well attested in a variety of textual sources that range all the way from Sri Lanka, mentioned by Buddha in the 5th century to central and north India with mentions in the Mullah Sarvastava Vinaya, the monastic code of the Mullah Sarvastava Odins, and also in the writings of Chinese pilgrims who went to India including Shanzang in Yijing. Juhong Rhee has also in has a study that I'm sure many are familiar with and he has noted that quote, the Mullah Sarvastava Vinaya states in various recensions that to steal an image with a relic is a Pachitia, and to steal one without a relic is a Dukstra. So, this indicates then that the lesser offense was to steal an image without a relic and a more consequential offense was to steal one with a relic. And then we also know from a later text the Samantha Pasadika 5th century commentary on the polyveneas also states that quote, learned people having first set up either a reliquary or an image in closing relics, give gifts to both the sangha headed by the Buddha, and so on. And so, in the textual record then it seems we have citations that seem to suggest that this practice of inserting materials inside of statues began in India, and was transported to China and the rest of East Asia with the movement of Buddhism. So we have these statements by Shranjong, for example, here of the practice of India of making incense powder into paste to make small stupas five to six inches high, people write pieces of scripture and place them into the interiors of the small stupas. And these they called Dharma Sharida. If inside the stupa, one encloses the body of the Tathagatha down to even one minute portion of his relics, hair, teeth, beard or fingernails, or if somebody deposits the 12 section scripture, which is a storehouse of the Tathagatha's Dharma down to even one four line verse this person's merit will be as great as the 11. And then those who have worked on the Gilgit materials have also noticed this short text that states that image of the Buddha should be made either tall or short with either a relic or with a Pratitya Samutpada got inside of it that many people have studied. And then there's a later, quite much later, Indian text the Vajravali by by a Kara Gupta that states that quote you should at the time of making an image. This is I think really quite interesting and pay attention to the date here as we move forward and across in East Asia as well so here 11th, late 11th century, you should at the time of making an image leave the head or back hollow. When you're completed you should write a Durrani on birch bark with saffron or bees or and wrap them around the relic which has been purified through bathing through the bathing ritual and then place them in the hollow space so here. Actually, this is, at least as far as I know in terms of stating clearly about leaving a cavity in the head or the back of a statue that we have from South Asia. And then we're moving finally, where he says whether they build images or make chakyas be they gold silver bronze iron paste lacquer brick or stone, or the heap up sand like snow when they make them they place inside two kinds of relics, one of the bodily relic. Second is the Dharma verse. Okay. And then at the end he says the image or stupa should be like my present body equal without any difference so again that conjoining of stupas and images there. So when we think about East Asia, however, the most famous clearly and everybody I'm sure is aware of this is the very famous Savioji Shaka image that was brought from China to Japan in 988. This image has attracted a large amount of attention, because of, well for a number of reasons, but for the purpose of this talk to do to the large cavity that's in the back this is almost a life size image by the way quite quite large, but it included a large amount of texts that were inside of it and a huge cache of textiles as well in addition to coins and other inscriptions that were on it it's been studied a lot by Henderson and Herbert's have her bits have written about it and a number of Japanese scholars but the inscriptions tell us exactly where it's from who the donors were and all of that. So the statue, which was initially opened when, fortunately, the Abbot of the Savioji temple happened to be the very famous Chinese Buddha or Japanese scholar of Chinese Buddhism Tsukamoto Zenryu, and so he was willing to allow scholars to to open up this image. When they opened it then they found all of these materials inside and then the first publication in English was the article by Henderson and her bits in 1956. And so, people have known about this kind of practice for quite a long time. And it didn't seem to have spawned much curiosity or further research by scholars but again this is the most famous probably image in there from that statue is the viscera, the five organs inside made of silk and embroidered. And then these are the donor list in the story about the the two pilgrims that went there are printed editions of the project part of Mita text there's also printed a lot of lotus sutra and there's also a manuscript version of the lotus sutra as well so the textual material is also quite robust. What really kicked off interest in Japan, and in the study of other images was the publication in 1973 of Kurata Bunsaku's the special edition of Nihon no Bijitsu, where he introduced, in addition to while the main focus was on the Savioji image. In fact, in the introduction to it he introduces statues that are held at a number of different temples from Sai Daiji which I mentioned to Dengkouji, Todaiji, all of these. And that actually kicked off a steady stream of publications and research articles and books and all kinds of things on, particularly on Japanese Buddhist images. But it also opened people's eyes to the fact that more statues than we might be aware of actually have contents inside of them. So here's just some of the terminology that cross over as we'll see here. A practice that extends from South Asia to China to Japan and also, as I'll come to a little bit later in Korea with this Pope Chung tradition that's there for consecrating statues. Now, there's been a number of different images that have been opened, some very famous ones that I'll get to a little bit later. But one of the earliest images and this again really was shocking to me in terms of thinking about chronology and also materials because most people thought that the only images that might have contents and that might be wooden images just because of the ability to put a cavity into it easily. But some of the cast images that we have, such as this image that's from the Harvard Art Museums, which I chose just for an example, comes from dates probably to the third or the fourth century. In this one you can see in the Ushinisha at the very top there's a cavity on the top of the head that would have contained a small relic in it there. And the base of it is also hollow, but it seems it's unclear if anything was ever put inside the base of it, but the relic would have been inside the head of it. We also have a number of images that are scattered throughout museums throughout the world and now I'm focusing just on the earliest Chinese images. And in most cases, one would go to one of these museums and all you would see is perhaps the image on display, but there would be nothing to indicate that it had anything. And in the way that, at least earlier on, the way the images were often displayed in museums, it was not possible to see around the back sides of those images, which fortunately curators these days pay much more attention to this and the ability to now observe and see what kinds of to walk around an image in 360 degrees and see it. The back sides are very important, but prior to that, the only indication was, if you were to look this image up in the museum cataloging or in their acquisition notes. They might have noted something and so for this one we find in fact in the notes that were kept on it. It says that there is a cavity in the back. It says that it had lapis lazuli rock crystal mother pearl to silk textiles and four small blocks of fragrant wood and it's unclear what happens to these often when after the notes were taken what they've done with the contents of them. I'll say a little bit more about that in just a minute but so here we have a fifth century bronze image that had all of that inside of it. And again here a northern way my tray image. Again, quite beautiful. And if one this one they did a radiograph scan of it and showed a cavity in the back of it, a chamber for for a relic it seems that would have been put inside there. So, I can keep going in terms of showing the regional spread of this. This image coming of image of Guanyin that from Yunnan province from the Dolly Kingdom 11th 12th century. And again, this one had a small, this cavity on the on the backside of it. And seems to have had to one in the lower part and then also in the in the in the body of it. And some of you may be aware of the, the famous example of the lenience, which is in Shandong province which has these really quite incredible collection of 40 are hot statues, and these date to around the 11th century, have been celebrated by their similitude and the quality of the carving. And when, when scholars began to work on these. You can see here the, just the beauty of the sculpting of them, when they began to do research on these they found that like the savior image. These were stuffed with the five viscera in these long sort of intestines here made of cloth and different colored other organs that were part of it and also contained bronze mirrors and this is another common theme that we'll see in a lot of them is the putting of mirrors inside of the inside of the statues as well. This is the, unfortunately, gaining access to precise information about what's on the inside of these statues is often very difficult because often all we have are those acquisition notes or this is a report that one who did of those are hots from the lenience. It's very difficult to make out the, the textual material that's in inside of there which they say that it contained, but there's been very little published on that but here you can see the mirrors and in, and the viscera that were put inside there pretty clearly. So, um, so the question here for me was that that every time there was one of these discoveries of images with with contents inside of them often the scholars will represent will express a certain type of surprise or say these are unique statues or that this is such a rarity, when in fact, as scholars, we should have known much more about this earlier on and the scholarship on this on the Chinese statues actually lags behind the work in Japan by quite a lot, even though some of the earliest and most detailed published descriptions of statues in their contents concerns Chinese statues ironically. In fact, today most people think of the, the, the, the quantity of statues in Japan is sort of representative maybe something was going on there but in fact many of the images and precisely the ones I've shown you thus far are scattered in museums throughout the world. And in fact, those come from originated in China but, but, but moved to different collections. So, in fact, one of the most unlikely sources, perhaps, for finding information and this is where one has to, I became frustrated a little bit by this inability to track things down or find things that were in situ. But then realize that one of our most valuable resources here and unlikely ones was late 19th and early 20th century missionary records that were written by those who were actually quite inimical to this practice of icon animation or icon constant consecration. So, I'm sure you can see the irony here is that those who were the iconic last that were bent on destroying images in their descriptions of those images, they actually preserved the best information that we have about most of the about images in East Asia and particularly in China. So, for example, so the iconic last then turns out to be the preserver and the one account. I'll just give you a couple of examples. And I've written about these elsewhere so pardon me if you're aware of them but one of them is by the British Protestant missionary Joseph Edkins, who wrote in in his chapter entitled images and image worship in 1880 he wrote this so just think a little bit now about how this early date when we have a this description, and he says, the picking custom in making large images whether they're brass iron wood or clay is to construct them with the internal organs as complete as possible. When the, when the smaller images are filled with incense or cotton wool, the larger have the interior arranged according to Chinese notions of anatomy. The heads are always empty. The chief viscera of the chest and the abdomen are always represented they are of silk or satin, and their shape is that found in drawings of the organs and native medical works around piece of silk represents the heart whose element is fire. It's the size of a dollar, and it is in the lungs which are white or divided into three lobes and attached to a piece of wood around which a piece of yellow paper having on it a prayer. To the wood is attached a silk threads of five colors and a metallic mirror. This represents intelligence the heart being regarded as the seat of the mind, the lungs cover the heart as the umbrella or lid as if to preserve it from injury in the abdomen the intestines are made of long narrow pieces of silk with cotton wool stitched along the concave This may, and then he goes on and says what it represents but then interestingly he says the larger and older idols have in many cases been rifled of these little valuables no one knows when poor priests in want of money, if, if the fear of sacrilege is not strong in their minds, know where to get help, so that the idols in their interior of which gold and silver were once deposited have now have none and so he says that that even gives us very precise description of what was put inside, but but says that now many of them have been pilfered and take in the contents taken out so even in many cases the earlier ones would have already been taken out slightly later just seven years later than that. And so we have in 1887, the following account of an idol factory in North China by the Presbyterian missionary Hum Hampton seed debows, and he says, now, and this is the image that's up on here he included these woodcuts with his in that publication, and he says walk into one of the shops with a hundred images of all sizes, from three inches to 10 feet high. If of wood, the head is on the counter, the arm on the bench, the body on the floor, and the foot on the shelf. And then he says, the foot is pinned to the leg, the leg to the body, the arm to the shoulder, the head to the neck and low, it is now a God. And then he says and includes a new woodcut like this, and he says, note the hole in the back. And he says, a frog, a snake, a lizard or a centipede is caught and put inside for the soul, and then it is a living deity end of quote. Okay, so this is really quite incredible to have. Actually, first of all to see the image or statue represented from the backside I mean this was quite shocking to come across. And it's exactly like we see on these images with primarily the cavities in the, in the back of the torso. Now, I, another place where, in addition to some of those early books that one finds these in there's in missionary writings from again from the early 20th century And in one of these I encountered in the, in a one of those collections of the church missionary Gleaner from 1916 it had a very intriguingly entitled article entitled an idle soul which caught my attention after reading the previous passage where they described that as the soul of an idle. This turned out to be a really fascinating kind of story and to try to track down what was going on here, but clearly what was going on in the early 20th century is that missionaries in China in addition to describing those statues they were also taking them off of altars out of temples, and sending them back to Europe as proof that they had made a conversion of somebody, and it got in those images out of their hands, and some of them sorry for the poor quality of the image these are very hard to find actually there were, but many were sent back and then put inside of the London Missionary Society Museum. And so there were, there were different museums set up by different groups there was the church missionary society the London missionary society the the Methodist Missionary Society, and the London Missionary Society was had a quite a large collection of these and so you can see very kind of faintly here Buddhist images and smaller statues that are in some of the cases I'll show you a slightly better one here. This one somebody is actually mapped out where the different regions they weren't just collecting from East Asia but from all over the world from Africa from Polynesia other area just basically everywhere that they could find things where heathens supposedly were living and these were their proofs of conversions. And so, so this was the one clue was that it seemed as if, and this is another one you can see actually a Buddha image on the floor here, as well and then the cabinets that are filled. And this is a was done in 18 this image in 1847. In any case, I figured since we were giving a talk at so as early as virtually here. It's interesting to note that that the materials that had been in the London Missionary Society collection are actually now were sent to so as actually to be managed. And this is what I was hoping to be able to look at if I were there in person to go through some of this material, which seems to be mainly textual material I've tried to look through the collection records that you can see is linked on here as well. But there were some intriguing notes that were in there that caught my attention in one of the boxes talks about correspondence about transfer of curios to the British Museum. And it's unclear right now this one was a little bit later but it seems to be the fact that the London Missionary Society Museum closed in 1910. And it seems as if the objects at least that were in that many of those went to the British Museum, and also perhaps as I'll show in a minute to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and others were sold generally, unfortunately dispersed. So, so then I decided, okay, let's follow the track and I had also heard from Roderick Roderick Whitfield some stories about something he mentioned after I had given a talk on or mentioned the soul of an idol he said you know I think I remember something that we used to be passed around in the British Museum that people jokingly called the soul of an idol. So, on a visit to the British or to the UK to give a talk I spent a day and thanks to the kindness of Jessica Harrison Hall I think maybe signed on today. And I look around for some of this stuff and try to track it down. And so, in the storage rooms there was a cabinet that had some of these small statues and I that we're hoping to do something with in the future. And sure enough, I mean there's some very cool ones you can see this guy, I don't know if you can see my pointer but in any case on the lower right here with a with like a British bowler hat on, which was quite interesting but you'll see many of those are Buddha images as well. So the thing that caught my attention was the tags that have a 1910 date on them, which is exactly the year that the London Missionary Society Museum close. So it seems, perhaps that these are precisely the those statues that had been originally sent back by the mission we in fact we know these work as there's writing on the pedestal on the backside, and explaining who they were but we're probably part of that collection. So interestingly, and this was the image used after we had looked at those statues and we're kind of looking through some other materials. There was a drawer that was primarily metal work and jewelry if I remember correctly, but this caught my eye immediately, and this this object. When I went back to my hotel room and and looked back at that article in the Church Missionary Gleaner from 1916. I realized this is exactly the object that had been published in the Church Missionary Gleaner in 1916, which describes very clearly where it says this particular soul of an idol was taken from one of the principal images of. So it describes here them going around destroying temples and. And then he says, you know, once they remove the images their removal cannot have failed to dispel some of the untold darkness and superstition in the minds of many thousands of people blah blah blah. But then they go on to describe it very precisely of how it was inside the statue so it said this particular soul of an idol was taken from one of the principal images. And then the thin pieces of gold and silver small pearls and stones in its eight inches in length, it is not hung on the outside of the image as decoration might be, but in the hollow chest of the idol which is specially constructed to receive it, a religious ceremony of exceptional form to consecrate it blah blah blah and it goes on I mean it's and then it gives all of the same kind of symbolic correlations of the elements and the colors and directions and all of that that we know from Chinese correlative kind of cosmology and making those connections so here they are side by side unmistakably the same thing with the writing with even labeling the organ organs of the body with the lungs and spleen and I'm not sure why they use this shank character on the two other lobes but 12345 would have been the representations of the five organs. So that was really quite interesting to be able to really confirm that indeed those materials were being sent back and that the missionary accounts were so robust and then here in the at the pit rivers museum I just made a quick spin through there but in the cat and one of the cases just filled with all kinds of icons it was a little harder to do anything because it's all glassed in but I sort of could get a shot around the backside of one where you can see the cavity that had been where the gesso is just being revealed a little bit on the backside of it there. Now, my point here is that that's even from very early on, even though we still today scholars are expressing surprise at finding these things, even in a newspaper like the New York Times, dating back to 1926 had an interesting article about there was titled rare tokens found stuffed in a Buddha and describes the hollow chest of this of this cavity. Here's the full report on it and it describes precisely how when this they were moving it for after it had been sold at auction or preparing it for auction he says when it was lifted up the hollow chest of the Oriental God was found to be stuffed with manuscripts. There were seven large Chinese prayer books, each containing several hundred feet of invocations in Chinese script illustrated with pictures the binding of one contained remains of fine Chinese silk, and so on. So here we know and what happens to all of these. These manuscripts and the materials from them is just is totally unknown today unfortunately. But nonetheless they had all of this information that also included other things that were inside there, including bits of mica pearls chips of cedar member the other ones that we read about had bits of minerals, and also incense inside of them, including pearls and other things like that. So, so this report then again going all the way back to 1926 is something to take note of just how early on people knew about this practice. The first academic article that I could find on this of somebody who was a curator publishing on this was from 1927 just a year after the New York Times article Helen Fernald published this first one and she had been a was a curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and published on this dry lacquer, but it Buddhist image that was found to be filled with a variety of materials. When they were studying the construction techniques of the of the image, and they found all this material in it and she doesn't really focus too much on the contents because they were more concerned with the construction techniques and finding the date of the image. But nonetheless she writes, she says it might be hope that among the papers found in the statue would be something to indicate the identity of the figure, but apparently these books are merely portions of sutras or Buddhist scriptures. And then she goes on and and and also says that together that also inside of it were bags of perfumed ashes and a small parcel containing the five organs made in silver but very rudimentary. Just in this incidental comment and then passes over we don't know you can see in the picture on the right, the scrolls bound up and stacked together there. And so one hopes that these are still somewhere in the museum the first time I tried to find them I couldn't locate them but hopefully they're they're still there somewhere. The next major sort of publication on this at least academic publication was by Robert Hawkins. An art historian at Princeton University, who studied this Chinese gilded wood statue of a seated guanyin in its contents that were in the Princeton University Art Museum. In the full research report Hawkins who seems to have been attuned to the fact that a statue might have things in it because he cites the work of Helen Farnold. And again he's hopes that the contents of the statue would also assist him in dating this image, but he noted that quote, what few reliable dates we have for the sculptures and would executed after the fall of the Tong dynasty have come about through the practice of making cavities in the back of the statue, in which magic or symbolic materials were placed. The contents of these cavities might include a record of the making or repairing of the image, or an inscription might be written on the plug of wood which sealed the cavity end of quote. So he, he went on and listed quite a number of other statues in other museum collections that he was aware of when he wrote in 1953 and remember that this, that this is happening around the time then we're still around the time when that Savioji image was was first found but these are Western curators that knew quite a lot about what about statues with materials inside of them. So for example he mentioned this guanian image. Again notice the dates around the 11th and 12th century. This one in Toronto that contained incense and cloth viscera according to the reports. This wonderful image again from the Met from 13th century again of a guanian that has its inscription on the plug of the cavity, but also the cataloging note this one you can see there's two cavities one in the torso and then one down below as well included colored silk organs again seeds incense and precious stones. So, then again at the take us back to London at the Victorian Albert Museum this guanian image from 1200 that in the cataloging note says that when this scripture when this sculpture arrived at the museum. It contained a lacquer lacquer box with offerings of silks gauze grain and a bronze mirror. And then again on that same visit. When I went to the British Museum made a trip to the Victorian Albert and Ricardo brush very kindly agreed to let me look through a lot of the cataloging notes and then also some of the material that was in storage and sure enough that lacquer box with the materials inside of it was in the in the collection and this shows the the cloth symbolic five colors of the viscera and the other organs and a bronze mirror and a small bell that was included with it. These interestingly had these the inscriptions noting different repairs that were done to it at different time periods that stretched from the very the first one was in 1374. And then there was another one of repair that was done in 1417. This one's a little bit fragmentary it's hard to see but you can see the date here. So you and then describe has the person's name Leo Yuan Ming, and then it's then it describes it was repaired at that time this one's a little bit clearer from the Yongle period of the Ming. This is 1417. After all the dates here then you have that this Guanyin Tong be shown me the, the nun from the Guanyin Tong. Her name is Jing Man, and then she Chong show so she then repaired it again at that time. So, again, we, there's another Guanyin image from the 13th century again where you see the cavity this one I don't know about the where the contents presently are. But in, again, just to show again back to Japan in the collection of the conical prefecture museum also has a seated Guanyin, again from this about the same time period from the 11th and 12th century that included cloth human organs again it's noted in the collection notes and incense inside of it as well. And indeed this one we have images of the of the viscera that were in there that are shown on the right there. Just a quick just to show you a few more if one digs a little bit deeper in these this oxhobia image again from a little later from the Ming that said it contained fragrant wood seeds mother pearl lapis lazuli rock crystal and sutra fragments. And I hate it every time that I would come across this note that it said sutra fragments and no details are given whatsoever about what sutras where those objects and documents presently are. And so it's really, I think, time to reassess all of these extent images that are in museum collections and their contents to see if there's any way to put some of this back together at least see if any of the images still have materials or they're in other parts of the collection. This, just to, again from the Ming. This one we know a little bit more about this is a child attendant of guanyin that had been opened up at the Seattle Art Museum, and you can see the same variety of things that are inside of there. In 1957 time magazine even I mean to just to show you how this was leaking out into the popular press time magazine even had an article about this golden boy also at the Seattle Art Museum and describes the opening it up of how the curator put the boy face down and used a small knife to cut where the layer of gesso was and after 30 minutes, he took off this rectangular section of the back of it and poked inside, and he pulled out crumbling paper with writing in Tibetan and raw silk strips of colored cloth, a chain of silver emblems and bronze mirror silk bag made up in the shape of a human stomach containing all these a variety of metal wood seeds and beads and things like that so here again we get this mixture of of textual material cloth, metal and also sometimes stone and things like that. Moving forward in dates to the 17th century, again back to the Victorian Albert Museum is also these aren't all just Buddha images as well or Buddhist images, but we also have Chinese popular gods like one D. Again, there are no cataloging notes on this one as far as I can tell but this one also had contents inside of it that range from these kind of symbolic metal working things to a bronze mirror all kinds of seeds and other cloth materials put inside of there and then what looked to be the shape of some of the wu zong or the five viscera organs as well some of them in a bell. And again, thanks to to Ricardo, we could see that in their storage they actually have all of this and this shows you the baskets of the stuff lined up and if I just show you this here you can see the bell here. These are the metal objects here and then all of the seeds here and these funny shaped things I'm not sure exactly what all all of these necessarily are but hopefully will be able to do more work and analysis and on those at a future date. So, now just to show a few more of these of why the material in China is a little bit more difficult to get a hold of is the destruction of things but there were a few that had earlier archaeological reports that allow us to know what was inside of them on of these Chinese statues in situ. This is from the, the jiu ha se in Beijing, dated to the 13th or 14th century. And again, when it was originally the base of it was being repaired and the images are really horrible and the archaeological report, but they found that it had these cavities had a cavity inside of it that had all of this material and in fact it had a large number of scrolls of Buddha Sutra scrolls and other materials that were in there that they just called, you know, that they don't specify what the titles of anything are, and they merely in the report, there's a lot of coins as well. Well, they merely summarize in their report here that it says that in total that there were 31 Dran Buddhist sutras that were inside of it and then all the coins and everything so again a very intriguing kind of information but doesn't tell us much in detail. But they fortunately, in a different report I was able to find we can see some of the printed editions of the text there like the Fufu Fazang Yin Yuan Dran. And you get a lot of the editions of Lotus Sutra like you find here, but nonetheless it would be nice to be able to assess that entire collection. I present I don't know what happened to these 31 Dran of texts. Hopefully they're still preserved somewhere here's a part of the Lotus Sutra that one font that was found in there as well. In a different report. This one was quite interesting as well where it describes the opening or this set of statues. And you can see here that when they did these scans of them they found that they had these hollow cavities so that when it describes them doing the Samyal they they discovered that each of the statues in their chest cavity had materials in that had been put inside of them. And it says Kashi, this is a quite a classic phrase, but unfortunately due to historical circumstance, we all know what that is the materials that had been inside are no longer visible they're no longer available they're no longer they're no longer extent. So again, clearly showing images that have materials but are no longer accessible to us. So clearly one of the. And above one of it was due to the iconoclastic periods in Chinese history that have have caused these this absence, if you will, that are created an absence in the historical record of what we can know about. But interestingly, some of you may be surprised that the enshrining of things inside of statuary in East Asia is not limited to the Buddhist tradition, even though that seems to be the most prominent. One, one might ask the question what about Taoism in fact it's very rare, at least to find early on any kind of earliest, early textual records of putting things inside of Taoist statues there's just one short comment in do guangting text from the 10th century that describes this but but we know is probably going on much more even though it doesn't get represented in text. We never hear is about Confucius stat statutes having things inside of them, but we have this record that scholar at Tsinghua University, Jun Jing had discussed about an image of Confucius that was made and he says he describes an image of Confucius that was made in China, and he says following the custom that quote a statues internal parts must approximate the anatomy of a real person in order to activate the deity's ability to respond to human supplications. Thus a Ruby and an art and artificial pearls were installed in the statue of Confucius to represent his heart and intestines, and then and so on. And then we have this very interesting report from 1966. That a scholar by the name of Wang Liang has as described, and this is a statue that was kept at the temple of Confucius and Chufu right in his home town there. And it says that when the red guard stormed into the temple, in their iconic plastic fervor to destroy the statue, one of them thrust his hand inside of the image and you can see actually this is the image of Confucius with the belly broken open with his hand inside and as he used his strength to make a hollow in old Kong's belly, others joined in and from within the whole they pulled out a bunch of cotton books and the lousy guts of old Confucius end of quote. So here, it must have shocked them even more I mean if you're doing your iconic, you know, destroying the statue to find that it was actually something that had human organs inside of it making you even a further abomination in their eyes. So, what this led to was, and I think I'm probably getting close to time here was then to run a number of projects and I think I saw maybe a few people who might have been on one of these. I had a collaboration with the Frogbear project out at UBC to do field work in both Korea and Japan and then China the China, we decided to do last but thanks to some wonderful connections there. This opened up a whole world of, at least to me, and I think of scholarship and actual materials in Korea that was literally mind blowing. So they gave us incredible access to materials in the National Museum of Korea and also at many of the different temples to show to look at the manuscripts and other objects that have been placed inside of them, some from the, from the temples like Sudoksa and very generous to show the types of materials that are in there. And it was really quite shocking to me to realize how much excellent scholarship there was done by scholars in Korea about this material, but so little that had been translated was made available to kind of international scholarly audience except for the Korea specialist which seemed to be kind of a shame given how much was known about the material in Japan. And so some of these even list the exact objects that should be. This is one thing we're lacking from on the Chinese side are real descriptions of everything that should go inside, but we have this record from from a Korean image that details all the objects that should go in. And one of those scholars, by the name of Song Il-gye had produced an incredible I thought article detailing all of the rare Buddhist sutras that had been discovered inside of statues in Korea, and had been just when they were immediately classified as national treasures and many of these are in print but also in manuscript form and some in movable type. In any case you get a kind of list of get a sense of what of what all of that is many of these. He shows were actually no longer extent in Korea and so this is the only surviving version of them as well so the importance of the icon as a kind of preserver materials as well so I have written about some of that before as a kind of internal archive, we might think of it that way. And similarly in Japan, the things that come out. So, for those I'll put in a plug for those who are interested in the Korean Pochang tradition. My colleagues Song Il-gye, myself and you and me Kim edited a volume of essays on this entire on all the different practices of image consecration in Korea all translated into English. And I have to find that it's not just images that had these consecrated items. There's some fascinating chapters on how paintings actually had a pouch that was either would have been put on the front but then moved to the back that were when paintings were also received a consecration, just like icons did. Recently, Keith Wilson down at the Freer Sackler had put on a, actually a symposium this was my last trip before the lockdown. This was in late February of this year, where they did a really wonderful day long symposium about this Abelu Kiteshwara image and had many of the scholars that contributed to that Kaedeh extremizee volume, just to bring attention to it had it on display and then also did a dedication ritual the following day with a master who's well known for this Pochang tradition which is alive and well in Korea and actually quite prominent again. And then the year after Korea we went to Japan to do research on on images there. And here it's kind of funny to look at this all with mass on back then and this is in the Kanazawa Bunko storage room for wearing masks for totally other reasons to protect the materials but also very generous scholars giving their time and expertise to look at some of the Japanese materials and then this included a symposium with Abe Yasuro, Chikamoto Kensuke, Okutake O, very famous scholar of that material, and Nagaoka Ryusaku as well and Akira Akiyama all participated and to contextualize it on the Japanese side looking at the materials. But I don't have time to go into it but for those who are familiar with the Japanese material realize the, just the bulk of material that survives in those and, and it's just absolutely astounding to see the enormous range of textual material and manuscript that's inside of those. Some wonderful resources for studying the Japanese material like this collection and there's many others I just put it up here just to show you but the catalog are these the indices to these in themselves are incredibly helpful. Just to show the number of entries of texts and other materials. So, so I'll end with very quickly here just just to show you the variety of things that one finds in turn that are put inside of statue from relics to sutras derani organs, mandalas, materia medica, mirrors, coins, all of this. And we really, I think now have this moment to be able to study these in a different way now that with new scanning technology but hopefully now with now that people are more aware of the fact of what types of things can be put inside. Hopefully museum collections and will will make some of that material more available to us as well. Let me, let me just end to take us back to so as really quickly. You'll recall these little images that I showed you from the British Museum. One of the unsung heroes in this story I think is a scholar by the name of Keith Stevens that some people may know the name of maybe not he was a British foreign officer but he had studied at so as got his degree from so as and then went off and served in the military, he was really kind of a private scholar and was super interested in the small statues this is him in his office at home with the images you can see on the bookshelves here, and he was actually the first foreign scholar that I know of to actually publish on these small images and he published a number of articles that are today still hard to find but on on really cool topics like like cults that are found among people who are boat people in Hong Kong for example and the images that they keep on their boats for example for safety and all of that. So his collection was massive. And not to end on a sad note but he, this was his great. This was the one book he kind of published on a lot of this material, interestingly called for shang shun shang so Buddhist images and God images here, often even those small ones are the words of Buddhist images. In any case he. When he passed away in 2015, I had hoped so much to see if there was a way to keep that collection together of over 1000 images that he had but unfortunately, it went up for auction in 2016 and now those images are dispersed all over, presumably all over Europe, I would, I would assume, but it seems as if one of the others was somebody in Singapore, Malaysia. I'm, I'm hoping. I don't know if anybody out there knows how to get in touch with or track down these kind of people. If there's a large collection it would be. There wasn't enough time before he passed away to actually catalog the entire collection live screenshots of the entire auction. So this is these these the ones that I opened up with this is. This is going to take us into the level of kind of popular religion which I won't continue with today but this is where we have a huge number of these, something on the order of eight to 9,000, where we have photographs and all of the documents scanned on these, and where religion comes together, Buddhist Taoist local practices cults to gods you've never heard of and all of that kind of thing. The topic of another day or my colleague along a row at the call for on says is just also published a book on these entitled cultic images in China on some of the earlier collections so why don't I stop there. Luchia and be happy to take any questions or talk with people about this. So, thank you. I think you're muted. So should I go ahead and thank you I was just saying thank you. Okay. Thank you for a wonderful talk but for sharing with us such a wealth of material to think as aware of such a work of material having worked on Japan for many years I know more details to the Japanese material but I was surprised to see the amount of Chinese stuff. Well, of course, it shouldn't be surprising I mean the state of the state is supposed to come from China right to the narrative about the state is that of a Chinese image so it's in a sense that rings a lot of bells, but it's really interesting to see it. As a, as a Pan-Asian phenomenon, I'd heard a little bit from Yumi Kim's research about Korea and it's kind of the materials are so so different and the, the, yeah, what we can get the kind of what the stages archive is very very interesting but and I must say that I was surprised to see how much stuff is in London is around the museums in London and even downstairs and so on. That's, that's another, another reason to regret to that you're not here. I've seen a lot of this stuff together but I'm sure there will be other chances. This is a wonderful project to carry out many hands. Actually, I should just mention really briefly one of the notes in the comments which I should have mentioned on that. The metal work piece from the, from the British Museum. I actually think it was perhaps the missionaries that might have actually written the organ names on top of there so what they had done the two sides that had the shiang character in there, miswritten characters for the kidney so that, that is exactly so that that was probably, I mean the script is looks a bit funky on there anyway so just they probably were learning what those things were and labeled them perhaps so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, good. So what we will do, I will relish my usual chair's privilege to ask the first question perhaps and see what the questions on the Q&A are and I need a second perhaps and join here by my colleague Stefania Travagnin who will also help. I had seen a long question from Stuart Young, maybe I'll start about that because it was something I was going to ask. And Stuart says it's curious about silk, what silk is doing inside images that materials here have different functions, medicinal, apotrophic, karmic, symbolic, practical, vivify, vivify, but how might how might silk fit in? What is the range of kinds of silk items placed in the statues are any relation to the silks that often adorned statues externally, robes and such, connection to silk and mortuary practices, how corks were wrapped, something like that and connection to silk is Dana. And finally is there, have you seen the textual discussions of why silk is used in statues specifically? What do you think? Well, Stuart is the master of all things silk in my mind, so I was hoping he would be able to answer his own question there but I think he's touching on a lot of things. There's no descriptions of why silk that I know of, but in fact one of the big areas of research on these statues and going all the way back to that initial article by Henderson and Hervitz, the things that interested them were not the text, it was the textiles actually because they had some very rare fabrics that were inside of them that seemed to have been Central Asian making and in fact, there's a lot of study of those textiles and so, in fact, the archaeological or the reports that I put up of some of the Chinese reports, indeed they weren't interested in the text either the one I showed of the 31 that were inside of them, that was a report that was entirely about the textiles that was in them as well or the silk that was used on the pedestal that it was sitting on and so there seems to have been, there's places out there where the research has been done on these that I think would be that you could explore in the Kyodek Extreme Museum issue that is just out on the Korean tradition, however, Yoonmi Kim has an article in there about the clothing put inside of used clothing, silk robes and things that were put inside of Korean statues and she has an argument about why that was the case. These are a very high royalty and elite figures who put sort of like a kind of, you know, relic of themselves in the reason for them, you know, actually having been worn than put inside of the statue but so I don't know we actually, you know, everything that's put inside clearly has symbolic value some kind of meaning and I think it's really important to ask exactly the types of questions you're asking here and but in addition to that, if we don't have, you know, consecration texts that really tell us what that is, even if we can't, you know, figure it out necessarily, there's still important reasons to now combine the kind of work that we do in humanistic scholarship with people working in the sciences right now and so, you know, there's a lot of ways to use the resources or what's inside of these statues for other types of questions to study textiles but also paper making the different forms of paper, kinds of paper that are the manuscripts are written on and all of that. And material Medica is a whole other huge issue that for at least for the smaller statues that along a row and I've been working on we did a little experiment and brought samples of those to a pharmacology college in Paris to get everything identified and and it was quite amazing how the variety of stuff that's in there, just in terms of the herbs and minerals and things like that which are Chinese medicinal that were that were put inside there, then the question is why do you put medicines inside right that's a whole other question so any case that leads off into a number of directions that range from paper to textiles to material Medica to manuscripts and all of that so but I in other words I don't have a great answer for all of your questions about silk but I hope to stay in touch with you steward and talk about it more sometime and tell me what you think. Yes, actually, there are more questions about what is put inside and why, especially. So we have a couple of people want to know why mirror, a broad bronze mirror, or why other medical substances and why living insects. And I suppose here, if I can, I'm sorry, I can't answer several of these questions. I'm not mentioning one by one, but I think what we can do is really can we, what is your supposition about. Yeah, different range of objects that are inside. So there's no one key to answer all of these type of questions. And in fact there's probably a range of reasons why and different ritual manuals are going to give different reasons and it ranges regionally across China and it also ranges regionally across Asia so one of the things is to be very that we actually had to tune myself to be about was not making assumptions about a similar practice similar practices that ranged across from China, Japan, Korea. And it gets a little complicated but even just the issue of the five colors that are represented in their, you know, in some cases this is symbolic representation of the viscera that's very clear in some of them. In other cases and in many of the Korean statues. It has nothing to do with the viscera but is really related more to esoteric Buddhist symbolism and is totally different context. So not all of them are about what we might think of as say and livening it of a of an image through the pudding of symbolic viscera inside of it. But, you know, there's a, you'll read different things in different manuals or in other scholarship about, for example, the mirror. I think it was even in the record of one of the missionaries that he reported where, you know, the mirror represents the mind right so it's often, you know, it's quite a common metaphor that you find in in meditation texts and other things too of the of the mirror, being like the mind and so you'll get those. You will sometimes see I saw that somebody had commented about seahorses that they probably saw one in that image there. So you get. Actually, this is a good chance to answer the question about small animals or insects that are put in there. Again, in different regions and in different statues you'll find little either spiders or a small, a small lizard that's put in their salamanders bees for example like a are often put inside. And so, and yes seahorses as well. Some of these it seems and again based on more contemporary ethnographic work where a live animal is put inside of there. And, and when it dies it imparts the life to the soul of the statue it's part of the enlivening ritual. And this is common you find this in actually an early Mediterranean religions to you find similar practice of putting small animals inside. But in other cases it may not that the description or the understanding of this is different and it's a sometimes it's a play on words of the name of the if it's a bee or a wasp or something that fun to in thief something is also a reason for that as well. I've heard different explanations about the seahorse some people have described that as being like a small dragon so it has that looks like a little, you know, dragon so it has all the associations that come with that as well. But in any case it's very complicated to map it all out and they're just different explanations and different texts for what's going on with the with the animals and insects. So if it is not living an image which is really the main argument made by Japanese scholars and including visceral or objects that are that that are not necessarily devotional objects let's say what what would be the other possible explanation for putting stuff in. And I think it's, you know, as part, you know, all of these are part of a Kaiguang ritual, right, the, the eye opening ritual and are put in at the time of that. When that ritual is performed so there is a kind of activation of the image through this that goes with the dotting of the externally the dotting of the eyes of the statue as well. I mean that even the, the sort of title for today I kind of, you know, is a loosely related to the zone I know new he and the Japanese version of that to adorn something from the inside and, and I think the notion, I mean in a more general sense whether the symbolism is all adding up to a kind of enlivenment or not is making something special that people know that there are these on the one hand making something special with the materials that are put inside, but also creating a kind of connection. And those are the, the, where I think the, the manuscript becomes really valuable for us in terms of getting to different types of historical sources because those often name, as you saw in the one nuns and women. And all of that Sadioji one is filled with information about the nuns who, who, who did the sewing of the, of the organs for it. And so you, it does open up a kind of world like that, that Christian image that I showed to where you get some kind of local history even or other types of historical records that are just aren't available to us in addition to all the kind of variants of things like that. I always wondered this was a big question and this is related to what you just asked is, how did they choose what to put in what text to put inside right. So some people thought, oh, oh yeah just, you know, this would be a place to just to get rid of, you know, text we have a lot of and you might think oh yeah just throw, you know, a fascicle of the lotus sutra in there, blah blah blah, you know, and maybe you know, just toss whatever's, you know, in excess inside of there for the consecration. There's clearly some of that because you get a lot of packing of the space to fill the cavity that are like a lot of Durani texts, mandalas, things like that, that are reproduced or a lot of these in Japan they call an Inbutsu right these little mass produced images of Buddhas that are just masses and masses of that kind of paper put inside of there. But when you read, if it's true for China and Japan as it is for Korea, the fact that this report by Son Yulge tracking and looking at those, those were actually really quite rare texts that were put inside as well so it wasn't the ones that were most commonly reproduced otherwise there would have been others of those around to and yet he's finding, you know, unique examples of them inside of those texts. So very much connected to personal circumstances of the donors of the of the of the stage itself, or something. Yeah, it certainly could be yeah. I want you to refer back from some of the questions. Akiko Wali notes that the metallic that you showed in the soul of a Chinese idol is the shape of isn't the shape of the Abishaka ceremony metal flag, the Kando Japanese. And that's quite interesting and she says that perhaps also the Sergio G. Shaka included the Kando ban, together with the silk organs. That's that shows some something that's I mean the Abishaka. It's a different type of ceremony it's not about the consecration of the statues and the fact that yeah maybe there is already a lot of esoteric Buddhism understanding of the five viscera as you are also drawing on but can we say can we say something else about to the specific link to Patrick practice. Yeah, I, you know the I, I've wondered about those you know tracking down those shapes and things like that as well and those. The information that we have now are in some of the articles about the Korean material because so the reason why the Korean material is so valuable in my view is that they in Korea is preserved a consecration manual it's made up of a number of different consecration texts five of them all kind of put together and called the Cho Sang Yong. And this was, well, there are different ways to think about it one is that it's very precise in terms of describing the symbolic associations what should be put in. And there's a there's a couple of good articles in the in that in the journal that unpack the information from that ritual manual and it goes in a couple of different directions on the one hand. And there's a strong esoteric Buddhist Buddhist element and a number of those scholars point that out for the Korean side, and indeed it's unmistakable and in some of the small objects that are put inside with sit him and around the inside and five directions and all of that that it makes it very clear. But it seems that others are connected to a kind of Hawaiian tradition that Rick McBride writes about based on what the kind of transformations that have it may be a slow transformation over a time in Korea kind of moving from esoteric into the Hawaiian stuff but in any case, that it's it's still looking at all of those symbolic shapes particularly of the metal, sort of, I'm not sure what to call them they're kind of hanging, not really a pendant but some kind of a thing where there there actually would have been strung together with five of them with the different shapes is something I it's very standard across the different ones to see those shapes and but I've never seen a precise explanation of why those particular ones so there was a question earlier on about the possibility of having stone statues inside the, whether bronze or wooden statues and you've seen anything like that. That's a good question I don't know about stone there are many images inside of images this is kind of a cool thing so some of you may be aware of the big show talk. Exhibition that happened at Harvard of the Sedgwick image, Ellery Sedgwick family image of Shotoku that had all those materials inside it equally curious collection of materials inside of there to very hard to try to people have been working for years trying to figure out that but also very important information again about women practitioners nuns things like that. It also has small. I can't remember. There's like a. There's a very, very, very small kind of a wooden image that's inside of that as well. One of the one of the image is from the Lingyan so also had a statue inside of it but I gosh if somebody had to correct me but I believe it's of wood. Though for some reason I'm hedging a little bit on that I have to go back and look at the report again. It's very common to find or to have these images that are multiple images inside of the statue. I think that's very famous one of the that Hank Glassman studied of that Giso image in in Japan as well that has a small image in it as as well. Right. There are not lots of very interesting questions so I'm not sure what to do but I'll just put down a couple of them. A couple of comments. That's repetition and copying figure in this practice. Shane McCosland asks another question is about what do you think about reinserting the material in in the context of a museum. And maybe you can do something together with the Buddhist representatives. She's kind of interesting. About the historical period. Sorry, I'm saying it to just all of them so that you can decide the historical whether there is a specific historical period in which the practice maybe occurred. Yeah. Okay. Let me try to bundle those. Should I take this first of all. I'll do I can do I think pretty quickly. Yeah, so the, you know, there's actually been a lot of scholarship on the kind of multiplication and replication on the for particularly for the Japanese the inputs of images a lot of Japanese scholarship on that and a graduate student at Berkeley who's doing a dissertation, precisely that topic. And one finds a similar type of repetition of mantras and Durrani's and Mandela's in the Korean statues, you don't I haven't seen as much from the ones from the Chinese material that have that. In any case, it's a big part of I think the real devotional side of the practice of kind of a catchy end type of a phenomenon of creating a connection with the with the with the image. Somebody had asked, what was the other question about putting things back inside. Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So, so this is obviously gets into some really I think kind of sensitive terrain to have just how to handle or deal with these types of materials. And we're sort of bound to dealing with those images which are either removed from their ritual context or in museums or already had materials taken out of them. For all of the ones that I've worked on personally, a collector who's about 1200 images, actually in another one with about another 2000 or so. Those were all in a private collector who agreed to allow them to be opened materials taken out photographs scanned all the materials and then everything put back inside again. And so I think it is important, you know, to do that to keep everything together for future scholars and also to keep the integrity of things what what clearly happened in a lot of the early collections was that the contents became separated from the images and they're often catalogs totally separately. So I don't know, you know, nowadays what curators might think of this in terms of what should be done but it in most cases it seems to me, at least in Japan. It's very hard, except for the materials. So, it turns out Oku Takeo, who is the one in charge of the Gio Bunkazai the important cultural properties, and to sign off on things is that mentioned that the only time they're allowed to open a statue, which is why you see so many CT scans and opened images is when an image is deemed to be in dire need of repair and then you can in the process of doing restoration you can open it and analyze the material so I think they've been flooded. Now that you get more, I think, you know, with object or statues with materials in them seem to attract attention and gain value so I think a lot of places are interested whether their statues have materials inside of them. There's not going to be time when they're supposed to do it. So that's why we're mainly dealing with things that are, you know what museum curators choose to do and but my own feeling is that those are the really the only safe ones that we can, you know, that we should be working with so. Yeah. How about periods specific periods in which. Oh yeah the periods yeah. So that's why I was having everybody. So attention to the dates. The ones if you notice the earliest ones were metal that that had had cavities in them and so having those in the in the metal ones seems okay and and it may be related to preservation and I it's just hard to know, because the, the wooden ones. There's a lot of stuff in the 10th century 9th 10th century and there's a massive explosion for some reason and again whether this is related to or just skewed by the chance survival of these in that are in collections. 11th 12th century 11th 12th 13th century really is when we have the most. I'm sure that means that there were more kind of produced at that time is, is hard to determine it may just be based on collections or it may be based on survivability of wood over as opposed to metal and in those earlier ones were in metal so it's, it's tricky but nonetheless we do have a large number, particularly late 11th and 12th century. We normally stop at seven but I think we can go on a little bit more. I'm fine. Yeah, I don't care I've got nowhere to be at snowing in Boston today I mean it's like dumping snow outside so I'm happy to hang out. I have a question for you about specific top things that you mentioned. Can you actually can you save the, the Q&A or the chat because I'd love to, I can't possibly speak and read everything at the same time but I'd love to learn from everybody and see people suggestions. It's difficult to come back to what exactly went so I think the question on repetition and copying was not really about your camera was thinking about the argument made in China, for instance by by Shannon Chen on on the practice of copying reproducing so it's difficult to come back to everything. But there was a very large question here that I think worth maybe to think a bit about it by some, some of the last so what is the implication of these practices for our understanding of the station Buddhist. What do they challenge, or do they challenge our current understanding in any way. Hi, I know song you up well. It's a very good question so this was one of the. I'm not sure if it, it's getting kind of. How would I say the field has changed over the years in terms of what this does in terms of material right. I mean if one thinks back to, say, 20 years ago. These kinds of things were maybe even a little bit earlier were quite shocking right and, and, and the fact that there would be this kind of animation of Buddhist icons was was also not easily or well accepted and. And I think we're over that I mean, and with the impact of people studying relic traditions and all of that that has heavily transformed the field in many ways and there's good scholarship. I think it seems Dobbin signed on a little bit ago and also who just just came out with his new book on behold the Buddha where he tracks a lot of the development of some of this discourse about statues. And, and there's, you know, you know, there's a lot of things that have come out just in terms of thinking about of living icons and actually quite a lot of debate really was that really the main purpose was it to enliven an image or, or not. And so there's, I'm not sure, you know, at this point, whether it challenges anything of our current understanding. But I would say it provides new possible resources for for accessing parts of the Buddhist tradition for which we do not have a very ample textual record for. And that's why I think the, the access to and preservation of the types of documents and inscriptions that are in there. In many cases, can can add something there particularly and I, you know, the, the, the larger kind of temple type statues, and I would divide these into there's many different kinds we can't really lump all this together. So for example, you know, would we learn anything new from just having a new addition of a one fascicle of the Lotus Sutra perhaps not. Is there a manuscript of the Lotus Sutra that might be of interest yes. But when when one goes down to the kind of lower level of images that are coming off of alters inside of people's homes and things like that, which is the images that I started with that are from a particular region and who none there. That we are now gaining insight into a totally different level of religious practice that gives us a kind of social context that we're often just don't have have access to. And just East Asian Buddhist though, they're, like I said, those are kind of, they're kind of mixed. So, so anyway, that's one, you know, one possible way, I think to, you know, to respond to that type of a question there's it may provide some nudges in different ways, but I think, you know, at least among specialists this, you know, the awareness of putting materials inside of statues during a consecration ritual isn't is really nothing new anymore. But we may still learn things about by reading those documents that may add to our understanding about how what devotional cults were like devotional practices and how things were how things were used so Yes, indeed, there was a comment about the fact that the practice is also widespread in Tibetan Buddhism, and most in this case mostly as treated as badryana practice that is distinct from Mahayana tradition. So that maybe here we can see, I suppose, cross influences between Tibetan China. And then there are other questions about the spreading of this practice, whether it is practice today, elsewhere than in Korea, since you mentioned cases about Korea, you know, when you think about at China or the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. And there was an example given of a statue made now with the studio room of a was it of the critical thing. Sorry, what was it, what was the second part of that. It is a practice also a path today by the time in China or that by Chinese Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. And I hear that I read an example of a statue made with a studio room inserted in it. Oh, yeah. So let me Just very, very briefly, I mean, this again, in terms of the connections with Tibet I didn't go into it at all but actually some of the earliest scholarship was on Tibetan images. And other, particularly Chandra Riddhi did some really interesting study of ones at the LA County Museum of Art and then the most important work is Yale mentor obviously who's done a tremendous amount on the consecration rituals of Tibetan images so there's a lot to learn about comparing those the traditions as they extended to that I just couldn't cover everything, possibly today on that the reach into South Southeast Asia, yes. I spent some time in Vietnam, looking around and attended a few statute consecrations there as well very similar type of a practice with cavities in the back a Laurel Kendall that the American Institute of Natural Museum has written a little bit on some of those and some of the controversies actually of putting newly consecrated ones on display and she has a very interesting article on those. One of just how they are treated as a living image, or at least were you know one of such respect that it has to be treated with deference and an issue of when the museum was preparing an exhibition, and one of the ritual masters who had done the consecration, and stopped by the museum to see up and check on the progress and saw that one of the statues was on the floor as it was being worked on and that almost endangered the the exhibition so. But yes, so the extends down to Vietnam and also into peninsula Southeast Asia to. I've heard about I've never been there myself but I know people who have gone where there's one temple I think it's in Penang of a kind of a statue swap place where people who have a statue in this this maybe gets back to your earlier question about why putting all this stuff in there, you know, it's really all about efficacy to it's about in the Chinese context to make it link to make it powerful to make it respond and so in Southeast Asia at this place when your statue has been lost its power it's Ling it's new monocity. Then you can bring it to this temple and swap it out for another one you just you leave yours and take another one home and, and I also think that helps to account for why in some of the. The statues that we study when we take the consecration certificates out I'll call them that that we sometimes find multiple consecrations where they're done periodically where the image must have been losing its power and therefore was re consecrated to give it. to give it power again so yeah. Very interesting. Just quickly questions about the fact that in Japan we also find bodily parts inside the statues and have not mentioned that about China, examples in China and Korea that you know of the statues with body part. And if it's a if it's a relic it's a body part ostensibly or at least ideally I mean they, as we know relics can be sort of fashioned. We know that they're not always human bodily parts but you know I think. Yeah. Yeah, but I would still I would still classify those as a kind of contact relic right of somebody but nonetheless it's different than say a relic of the Buddha but you're right actually and other scholars know more about this than I but on the. On the east side you do have this where on that list that I showed and I'm trying to figure out how to make sense of all of the variety of things and sort things out but. Your own relic to say as a donor or support it or sponsored the making is quite different from having all sorts of precious gems that think of the relic to the saint or something like that. No, absolutely. I think it's absolutely different. And so yes you do in the list of if you go through the catalogs of those who study this oh no new he and everything just even looking at the index to that massive volume. I basically listed all of the different categories of things that were that were in there. And in addition to hair you also have like hair combs women's hair combs, for example are a very common thing to put inside their fans, which isn't a bodily part obviously but some that same type of kind of personal connection as well so. I haven't seen that for. Actually, I might have the closest thing you find in some of the archaeological ports for China are bags of ash. So there's another set of a very interesting. I didn't show them because they're there's some controversy over exactly what they are but there's these. There's wooden statues from northern China that have a cavity in the belly of it that that was just filled with the bunch of ash and some people have speculated that that was the ash of the donor that was put in. And so it may actually be and and if I can put in a just another plug for a really excellent curators Donna stray hand, who has a very interesting article about how even the lacquer that was on the outside of some statues was mixed in sort of bone fragments when they did some microscopic studies of the lacquer they found that bone had been mixed into it as well. So again, we don't have a lot of really, and it may just be because of the detail of the reports of China versus Japan. But there are hints that that kind of material was put in there we do have a lot that had kind of noted a few along the way where we have collections of ash, ash that are in there. Now you mentioned lacquer. And it was another question also about talking about differences or similarities of the difference or similarities between statues and powered with objects and stages that are actually mum mummified covering up with the mummified of some masters. Yeah. The only reason I put them together was to sort of make a point at the beginning of how people are often shocked or still surprised about finding, you know, something inside of a statue and that was, you know, kind of a famous case of it but I the logic is totally different they come out of totally. I think rather separate traditions in China. You know the the history of mummification is well known now by scholars and the transition from a natural mummification to adding kind of hemp soaked cloth lacquer soaked or hemp soaked in lacquer to it, but this was really a way to try to control that mummification process and so you get this evolution towards wrapping and then even gilding on top of that. So I think that's a slightly different thing where you're not. The issue wasn't for me the issue is, what is the what's going on here of hiding putting things inside of cavities that ostensibly were not meant for other people to see later. But what but we're put in and hidden away in the fact that they're just over and then gilded. They're not meant to be reopened. You know, this is, is something that I think is an interesting part of it of just that the kind of hiding of it in there and but I think I do think it's qualitatively different than than say what's going on with with mummification. Did I miss some questions? Actually speaking out to the meanings that there was also a suggestion that Well, a question whether you are interpreting all this or how you are situating yourself within the debate on material agency more in general that perhaps it would go beyond what is the more specifically Buddhist. Yeah, sure. I mean, I'm, I definitely see this issue here. The, it's also reflected. And again, I think it's impossible to generalize across all of these. But clearly, and in fact in the seminar tomorrow I'm going to show a passage where once and relic was inserted inside of the of the Savioji image, supposedly a drop of blood appeared on the forehead, which gets really noted but that is an interesting claim there right so that notion of, you know, does, you know, that that sort of agency or the life of the image is there and I think in some of the vocabulary it's clearly the case where a consecrated image is sometimes referred to in Chinese as a living Buddha. And indeed, so I think you could make it could go on both sides of the argument or of that of those arguments about materiality and agency of statues and things like that. You get great stories obviously in literature right about some of those and you get the famous ones from Japan about photo images that, you know, when they're putting the place that they don't like they fly back to their home on that famous one in Tokyo I forget the what's it called they forget the name of the temple but it you know I've been moved to Osaka and then it would fly. It's called the Toby Fudo temple right and so you get a lot of those kinds of stories and agency involved with statues but it doesn't mean all of them were considered that way. The ones that really intrigued me however, are ones where in the consecration document or the consecration materials where it. Are definitely not for the category of say standard Buddhist images or Buddha images or Bodhisattva images, but in the more votive images that one finds and some of those seem to have been done for living people. In other words, the language is very clear in it they they describe they carved the alkay sheng shiang a living image. And it seems to. So then I think it. This is where it may add, you know, song you up that what does it add to our understanding of Buddhism well. It does add to our understanding about images in East Asia, particularly in China where, if these are images of an ancestor. This goes against everything that were part of ritual ritual texts that said ancestors should only be represented in in a in a shun way in a spirit tablet. That is to say a written name on a spirit tablet and we're not to be represented in an anthropomorphic fashion and here we definitely have cases where it's a living ancestor who is depicted and then you start to look at him really differently and it gets kind of interesting because you're now looking at a portrait statue. It becomes kind of like what you have in Japan with say like Shinzo type images and things like that. And you just look at it differently they're not kind of mass produced generic images but really are of somebody. Very personalized you could say yeah. Yes. Yeah, then there would be and there are a number of questions to relate to the Buddhist statues with other deities with Taoist deities and what. Yeah. But I wonder whether we shouldn't stop. May I just jump in with what there was a question from Gregory Scott going back to China and asking why do you think you James think that this practice is not so much remark upon in Chinese historical sources. If it's for anti religious bias or why why there is not much written in there, well actually for you know. Yeah, it's a great question because that question is like haunted me for over a decade actually. It's literally it's really confounded me of what's going on here and I, you know there's a kind of a perhaps easy answer to that which is probably totally unsatisfying, which is, well, there's a couple and both of them. They wouldn't satisfy me personally and I'm sure they wouldn't satisfy you one of them is is goes in the direction of actually their polar opposites to on the one hand one can say that the practices were so common that they just weren't written down right that these were just just common in the rituals and then the corollary to that was that the rituals had been passed down, kind of secretively the, and these are in fact that that may have some truth to it in fact the kinds of rituals were done somewhat, they were done secretively and by ritual specialists that probably came just with a code, an oral component to it that we just don't have access to that may be the case I don't know but we all, we often find secretive stuff that's written down you that shouldn't have been that we find you think of all of those kittigami and stuff in Japan or other, you know, things that you get surprised by so, so that doesn't entirely satisfy me but, but it is shocking that it took I just haven't, you know, found the material yet. It's really not until the, maybe, you know, late 19th century into early 20th century when we start to get kind of. Now you can find these are, you know, quite common all around from the most kind of village level small scale rituals specialist that are ritual manuals that they again receive from their master hand copy themselves and then they work with those. And so those we have definitely plenty of those and those go back to gosh, probably Minghua period, and maybe a little bit before. I also have a lot that you can find all kinds of stuff on the internet now about sort of Taoist, you know, statue consecration and what's there's quite a lot actually available for Taiwan, for example. And lean way King at Thai national Taiwan University has written quite a bit on on consecration of Taiwanese popular images and things like that. I really don't have a good answer to necessarily why it's just kind of speculation but it still haunts me and, but there is something kind of. I don't know, interesting about the fact that when we do get it written down the earliest writing of it down that it comes from the iconic last themselves I mean that to me is, is just, you know, part of the story here and that's important to to bring it up visually and, and, and, you know, this isn't to beat up on the missionaries at all in fact I have kind of a some respect for them in the sense that they were really careful observers and and wrote down an incredible amount of detail in some cases about this. We have nothing like that as far as I know from contemporary Chinese writing. I want you to close but there is a last question that brings back the question of, well, destroying it's not to buy iconoclastic action but to buy volunteer they'd say by conscious action. So when I asked whether you have ever found the instructions to put to remains of old stages inside a new one of something that has been destroyed as a way of disposing the old one. And before that there was a question that was speaking about somehow about disposing of old sutras that you had so many of them and you didn't know where to put them and so you can very well put them inside the statue. So is there this this sort of repurposing stuff or preserving an older statue or older material by putting it into the new one. Yeah, those are I mean those are things that I think people have speculated about again just of what goes inside and I mean if if you're if your point is to to draw nyan or to, you know, to, you know, to think about an old one, then you would put something of value you would think inside of it rather than get rid of the old but I'm not saying that that would be, you know, across the board either probably, you know, people were doing that just to also to fill space as well. And so you get, you know, many old sutras that are just put in like that that are very common to I've never, I haven't come across anything it doesn't mean it didn't happen of old statues being put inside. So the question of is interesting. So there are D consecration rituals as well of how to take the power out of an image and, and also people would get rid of them. So I mentioned the, the, the, the one place in Penang for for, you know, temples where you would bring it to get rid of it. It doesn't seem to have been something that was taken lightly either. You know, we know other things like during cultural revolution, for example, in order to that. You know, these were, this is when the altars were just stripped bear and these in this region and why we have so few and I think that's why we have so many foreign collections as well as things became uprooted from their local areas and moved out and were sold bulk. One of the collections of those popular images was a customs bust from there was being containers being shipped off from Changsha and Hunan down to Hong Kong. And that collection has primarily Buddhist images in it because it would be what they would be recognized on the international art market, but locals, you know, would at times then bury the images as well. And ostensibly go back and get them after things calm down. But so, so, yeah, there are, you know, there are ways to get rid of a, of a, of a statue that's no longer efficacious. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I think we have to stop here. It would be really generous in sharing more. No, I love it. I wish anybody to write to me too, because I've learned a lot. I mean, it's, it's so many. Everybody comes. Very nice suggestions from all. Yeah, you know, you do not know, but we'll ask that on. And I'm really sorry for everyone knows the question I didn't manage it to put across in the right terms. I tried to summarize a lot. So, thank you again, for all of you who have attended the lecture. Thank you very, very much to our speaker, and you have all the my flows here. I like to remind you, just of you have registered for the seminar, what our students mainly and a few people from here around here that the seminar is going to be held tomorrow at 12 o'clock British time at an English time for Professor Robson, which is six o'clock in the morning for him. Thank you again also for that. I also the questions also about recording the lecture is going to be recorded all our whole lectures are recorded and you can find them on the website of the center in a while. The seminar tomorrow would not be recorded will be just a more important way of talking about this. Thank you very much to all participants and have a good evening. If you are on a British time or have a good day. If you are as well.