Presents works of art selected from the South and Southeast Asian and Islamic collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, lessons plans, and classroom activities.

This wide-ranging collection of essays examines the arts of Southeast Asia in context. Contributors study the creation, use, and local significance of works of art, illuminating the many complex links between an object's aesthetic qualities and its origins in a community.

Ellora is one of the great cave temple sites of India, with thirty-four major Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain monuments of the late sixth to tenth centuries A. D. This book describes the Buddhist caves at Ellora and places them in the context of Buddhist art and iconography. Ellora's twelve Buddhist cave temples, dating from the early seventh to the early eighth centuries, preserve an unparalleled one-hundred-year sequence of architectural and iconographical development. They reveal the evolution of a Buddhist mandala at sites in other regions often considered "peripheral" to the heartland of Buddhism in eastern India. At Ellora, the mandala, ordinarily conceived as a two-dimensional diagram used to focus meditation, is unfolded into the three-dimensional program of the cave temples themselves, enabling devotees to walk through the mandala during worship. The mandala's development at Ellora is explained and its significance is considered for the evolution of Buddhist art and iconography elsewhere in India.

The volume looks at how South Asian art was sourced for external appreciation at a variety of institutions in Europe, North America, and Asia from the mid-19th century onward. These essays speak to the colonial legacies that created such collections but that now must be viewed though a post-colonial lens. The volume also addresses contemporary concerns for todays's museums: collecting, building and practices, provenance, and repatriation.

Relations between China and India underwent a dramatic transformation from Buddhist-dominated to commerce-centered exchanges in the seventh to fifteenth centuries. The unfolding of this transformation, its causes, and wider ramifications are examined in this masterful analysis of the changing patterns of interaction between the two most important cultural spheres in Asia. Tansen Sen offers a new perspective on Sino-Indian relations during the Tang dynasty (618-907), arguing that the period is notable not only for religious and diplomatic exchanges but also for the process through which China emerged as a center of Buddhist learning, practice, and pilgrimage. He proposes that changes in religious interactions were paralleled by changes in commercial exchanges. For most of the first millennium, trading activities between India and China were closely connected with and sustained through the transmission of Buddhist doctrines. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, secular bulk and luxury goods replaced Buddhist ritual items. Moreover, policies to encourage foreign trade instituted by the Chinese government and the Indian kingdoms transformed the China-India trading circuit in

Written by one of the leading scholars of Japanese religion, Protectors and Predators is the second installment of a multivolume project that promises to be a milestone in our understanding of the mythico-ritual system of esoteric Buddhism—specifically the nature and roles of deities in the religious world of medieval Japan and beyond. Bernard Faure introduces readers to medieval Japanese religiosity and shows the centrality of the gods in religious discourse and ritual. Throughout he engages theoretical insights drawn from structuralism, post-structuralism, and Actor-Network Theory to retrieve the “implicit pantheon” (as opposed to the “explicit orthodox pantheon”) of esoteric Japanese Buddhism (Mikkyō). His work is particularly significant given its focus on the deities’ multiple and shifting representations, overlappings, and modes of actions rather than on individual characters and functions. In Protectors and Predators Faure argues that the “wild” gods of Japan were at the center of the medieval religious landscape and came together in complex webs of association not divisible into the categories of “Buddhist,” “indigenous,” or “Shinto.” Furthermore, among the most important medieval gods, certain ones had roots in Hinduism, others in Daoism and Yin-Yang thought. He displays vast knowledge of his subject and presents his research—much of it in largely unstudied material—with theoretical sophistication. His arguments and analyses assume the centrality of the iconographic record as a complement to the textual record, and so he has brought together a rich and rare collection of more than 170 color and black-and-white images. This emphasis on iconography and the ways in which it complements, supplements, or deconstructs textual orthodoxy is critical to a fuller comprehension of a set of medieval Japanese beliefs and practices and offers a corrective to the traditional division of the field into religious studies, which typically ignores the images, and art history, which oftentimes overlooks their ritual and religious meaning. Protectors and Predators and its companion volumes should persuade readers that the gods constituted a central part of medieval Japanese religion and that the latter cannot be reduced to a simplistic confrontation, parallelism, or complementarity between some monolithic teachings known as “Buddhism” and “Shinto.” Once these reductionist labels and categories are discarded, a new and fascinating religious landscape begins to unfold.

How do archaeologists explore the various dimensions of religion? Lars Fogelin uses archaeological work at Thotlakonda in Southern India as his lens in a broader examination of Buddhist monastic life. He discovers the tension between the desired isolation of the monastery and the mutual engagement with neighbors in the Early Historic Period. He also sketches how religious architectural design and use of landscape helped to shaped these relationships. Drawing on historical accounts, religious documents, and inscriptions, as well as results of his systematic archaeological survey, Fogelin is able to shed new light on the ritual and material workings of Early Buddhism in this region, and shows how archaeology can contribute to our understanding of religious practice.

In June 1978, a forty-five year old Indonesian named Sawito Kartowibowo was pronounced guilty of subversion. He was charged with having composed a number of inflammatory documents criticizing the government's failings and requesting that Suharto stand down as President. These documents would have been quite insignificant if those who had endorsed them had not been so well known. Their signatories included former Vice-President Mohammad Hatta and four very prominent and well-respected religious leaders: the head of the Catholic Church in Indonesia, Cardinal Darmoyuwono; the Moslem publicist and writer, Hamka [H. Abdulmalik Karim Amrullah]; leading mystic and founder of the Indonesian Police, Said Sukanto Tjokrodiatmojo; and retired General T. B. Simatupang, a Protestant leader and former Armed Forces Chief of Staff. As it was, the controversy over the documents became a national issue and the Sawito affair is one of the enigmas of recent Indonesian history. Puzzles abounded from the afternoon in September 1976 when the government dramatically announced the discovery of a "plot to topple the President," and a number of subsequent arrests. Had a coup been planned? Who was behind it? And who on earth was Sawito, the man the government declared had tricked Hatta and his fellow signatories into the "dark conspiracy"? Much of the public interest in Sawito, in the months following the announcement, derived from the publicization of a diary written by a former Indonesian diplomat describing a series of spiritual pilgrimages undertaken by Sawito in the early 1970s. According to the diary, Sawito had meditated on a sacred Javanese mountain-top and there received supernatural signs that he was destined to rule Indonesia. Subsequently, in a solemn and archaic ritual involving symbols of the fifteenth century Majapahit Kingdom, Sawito had been invested as Ratu Adil, the messianic Just King. The press, and later the courts, drew the conclusion that Sawito, convinced of his regal destiny, had then embarked on a mission to replace Suharto as President. In order to achieve this, so the story went, he had drafted a number of subversive documents and, with guile and deceit, obtained the signatures of several gullible dignitaries. One newspaper ran a cartoon of a demented-looking Sawito, praying before a row of Javanese daggers (keris) and a fuming incense pot, dreaming of the presidential throne. The tiny figure running towards him and brandishing a piece of paper calls to Sawito: "It's not the age for that sort of thing any more, mas!" The general impression was thus created that the affair was essentially a product of Sawito's mystically inspired claim to power. This became the accepted perception of the Sawito affair, both for a large majority of Indonesians and in a number of Western academic treatments of the subject. A classic historical pattern of political challenge seemed to be repeating itself, and parallels were drawn between the "Sawito challenge" and messianic Ratu Adil movements of Java's past. Analysts also invoked Javanese cultural tradition in an attempt to come to terms with the government's remarkably severe response to the affair. Some sought to explain the danger Sawito posed to Suharto by referring to traditional conceptions of the linkage between earthly and supernatural authority still exercising an influence in Indonesian society. As some readers will be unfamiliar with the cultural-historical frame of reference alluded to here and elsewhere in this study, it is necessary briefly to identify a few key elements of the Javanese cosmology.