(jazz piano music)
- [Steven] We're in the Harvard Art Museums,
looking at a small wooden Shotoku Taishi.
And I'm very lucky to be looking at this
with a curator and a conservator.
- [Rachel] I'm Rachel Saunders,
the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Associate Curator
for Asian Art of the Harvard Art Museums.
- [Angela] And I'm Angela Chang,
Assistant Director for the Straus Center
for Conservation and Technical Studies.
- [Steven] I may never have seen a sculpture
that had this degree of presence,
while also seeming quite solemn.
- [Rachel] He's one of our most beloved objects
within the Harvard Art Museums.
The sculpture shows Prince Shotoku at age two,
when he was supposed to have taken several steps forward,
puts his hands together, and praises the Buddha,
and in that moment, he manifests a relic.
And this is of course a miraculous event.
- [Steven] And the figure, it seems to be leaning forward
ever so slightly.
- [Rachel] He does have his left knee
moving slightly ahead of his right,
which gives you this suggestion of movement.
On the right-hand side, there is a big swath of material
that's moving as he is just about to take the step.
Just this sense of that narrative moment
is present in this still sculpture.
He has a lot of features of a small child,
he has a little bit of fat
around the wrist and at the belly,
the back of the neck.
He has a very large head
but he has this very serene expression
and his eyes are somehow looking both down
and out at something that's beyond our mundane vision.
- [Rachel] There's a lot of debate about whether
he actually existed as a historical person.
Some scholars have argued that he was a construction.
Others suggested that he was a historical person,
that he died around 622
and he achieved a number of political objectives
including establishing the country's first constitution
and establishing Buddhism in Japan.
- [Steven] And building a large number of temples,
some of which survive today.
- [Rachel] He is thought to have been the founder
of Horyuji Temple and also Shitennoji Temple.
- [Steven] One of the things that I find most compelling
is the glint of the eye.
- [Angela] The eyes are made out of rock crystal.
The technique is called gyokugan.
It involves taking two pieces of rock crystal,
shaping and polishing them,
inserting them from the inside of the head,
back painting them to depict the pupils,
and then adding a layer of paper
and wedging it in place with wood and pins.
- [Steven] The result is a figure that seems to have
a kind of immediate presence.
So this child of royal lineage
has this extraordinary event early in his life
and becomes a signifier for the establishment
of Buddhism in Japan.
- [Rachel] The relic that he is believed
to have manifested between his hands
in some version of the story
is the left eyeball of the Buddha.
So that means that the left eyeball of the Buddha
has manifested in Japan
which is very far from India
which is the Buddhist homeland,
and it's thanks to Shotoku that that's happened.
- [Steven] But in this sculpture,
instead of the Buddha's eyeball
being placed between those palms,
what we found is a small nut.
- [Angela] Between his hands there's a compartment
that still has the shell of the lotus seed.
You can see that by close looking
and we've also seen it through technical imaging.
- [Steven] And it's a hint that this object
is not simply a sculpture that's meant to be seen
but an object that's meant to be used.
Because it holds within it quite a secret.
- [Rachel] When you just see it from the outside
you don't think about the inside.
But in fact, this sculpture contained within it
dedicatory objects that were placed there
by people who wanted to create a very personal connection
with this child icon.
- [Steven] And we believe that the sculpture
was likely made for nuns in a nunnery.
- [Rachel] There were also male members of this group
who put together this sculpture
but the majority appear to be nuns.
Probably aristocratic nuns who were associated
with a particular monk
who was working to reform and revive Japanese Buddhism
in the Kyoto, Nara areas of Western Japan
in the late 13th century.
- [Steven] So where has this sculpture
would have been seen in a fairly public context,
in a temple?
It holds within it these deeply personal objects
and is a real variety.
- [Rachel] From miniature sculptures to text
and written objects
and a number of those include short vows
written by people who were promising
to follow the Buddhist rules for life.
And they have dated those and written their names on them
and placed them inside the sculptures
so this is how we're able to date this to around 1292.
Some of the objects appear to have been long used
personal, devotional items.
One is chapter 25 of The Lotus Sutra.
Now this is a tiny booklet
and it contains the chapter which informs you
of the multiple ways which the merciful
bodhisattva Kannon can come to your aid
in any sense of peril.
So, this was a palm size object
that a nun owned and chanted and read so many times
that the first page is actually being worn away
by the action probably of her thumb against the paper.
So, we know this was a well-loved object.
- [Steven] And this was a time of peril.
This was a moment when the Mongols
are taking over the Song dynasty in China.
- [Rachel] Because of the destruction of Song China
the consequent difficulty of travel to China
to obtain Buddhist teachings,
Japan becomes a place of sanctuary for Buddhism.
By 1292 we are well into the end of days,
the end of the Buddhist law in Japan
where it was believed it was no longer possible
to achieve rebirth.
It was too long since the Buddha has left this earth.
- [Steven] This is a moment after there had been
a terrible civil war
and some of the most important temples in Japan
had been burned to the ground.
- [Rachel] So it really did seem as though
the end of the world was upon Japan.
- [Steven] What's so interesting is that
he also looks like the Buddha.
- [Rachel] He does, he has a lot of the signs of the Buddha.
He has these very large earlobes,
the hands that are held together in prayer.
He has this body fat, this feeling of being well-nourished.
There is a long and elaborate sacred biography
that grew up around Shotoku Taishi
but it was modeled primarily
on the life of the Buddha
as it was enshrined in Buddhist belief.
And so, we have three Buddhist nations
in this one reliquary.
Buddhism begins in India.
Within the sculpture we have remnants
of the body of the Buddha.
These are called shari grains
made of a kind of glass or crystal.
Those are the body of the Buddha, so that's India.
Then we have printed Lotus Sutra
that was created in Southern Song China
and it was imported to Japan
where it was given a beautiful cover
and its own special bag.
That's Buddhism coming from India
through China to Japan.
And then we have Japan because Shotoku Taishi
is Japan's Sakyamuni.
And so, to have an object like this,
a Japanese Sakyamuni containing the bones of the Buddha,
the Chinese Sutra, the words of the Buddhist law
and for it to be enshrined in Japan in this Japanese figure
was an incredibly significant act.
- [Steven] So we can learn a lot about this sculpture
from the historical context in which it was made.
From the specific writings
that were contained within it.
But what can we learn about this sculpture
from the object itself?
- [Angela] So we know that this sculpture
is made out of wood, it's made out of Hinoki cypress.
This would have been made by a technique
called yosegi zukuri which means joined wood technique.
The body and the head were one large log
at least 10 inches in diameter,
carved roughly, split and hollowed
allowed to season or dry for a year
so that all of the cracks and kinks and things
could be worked out.
It's a technique that was perfected in Japan at this time
in the Kamakura period.
- [Steven] So once the wood had been hollowed and seasoned
it would have been filled with the objects
that we were discussing.
- [Angela] It would have been packed.
The location of these objects
would have been very deliberate
their adjacencies or their placement in the body.
The sculpture would have been closed back up and joined
and then finally carved, lacquered and painted.
- [Steven] So I think what many people
would come to the sculpture saying,
"I just wanna look at it."
Why is it important that I know how it was made?
- [Angela] It reminds us that there was a process,
that somebody commissioned it,
that someone selected the wood.
The sculptor interacted with a community of people
who chose these objects to put inside.
There was some ceremony and ritual to all of that,
these were a series of events
that happened probably over many years.
And so, that history is as much,
if not more of this object
than the finished product that we're looking at.
- [Rachel] But everything about this sculpture
is intentional.
And the placement of each of these significant objects
within the sculpture would also have had meaning.
So, where was the most important part in the body?
Which was the most important object?
Where were they placed?
This arrived in the United States in 1936
and it wasn't until it arrived
at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston
which was its first stop,
that anybody realized anything was inside.
And the curator at the time
thought he could hear some rustling.
And so, they asked permission of its owner, Ellery Sedgwick.
They had a visiting Japanese conservator in Boston
and he opened a small hole
in the bottom of the sculpture.
And they then pulled out the objects
from inside the body cavity.
Unfortunately, those 1930s records
do not help us a great deal
with where the objects were kept.
So, it was at this point that I came to my colleague Angela
with all of these questions.
We are able to look not just from the outside in
but from the inside out.
- [Angela] I've used a borescope, x-radiography,
micro-computer tomography which is an x-ray technique
that takes data from lots of two-dimensional x-rays
and puts them together to make 3D volumes.
And also we were having the wood identified
by a expert in Japan who specializes
in the wood for Buddhist sculpture.
- [Steven] So, are there traces
of shelving within the object?
- [Angela] That was a very good question
and we did not see it until we looked at some CT scanning.
We see from this slice of the sculpture
that there are actually two opposing notches on the inside
and to me that would have been enough
to hold a shelf to wedge in objects in the sculpture.
So we know at least there's a shelf
or compartment here in the waist.
- [Steven] You've got a puzzle
and now you're trying to put it back together.
- [Rachel] When the objects
were originally removed in the 1930s,
research was begun, photographs were sent
to specialists in Japan
but the Second World War intervened.
And then there was a second campaign
by John Rosenfield who was curator
and professor of art history here at Harvard,
and he wrote a very comprehensive article on the sculpture
but it was written in English,
and it wasn't read in Japan until very recently.
And it's just now that we have a brand new museum building
with curatorial department, storage
and the Straus Center in the same building
on a university campus where we also have access
to pedologists, to graduate students,
to visiting scholars, to our connections
to our scholarly friends in Japan.
Now that we're in this situation,
finally work that was begun in 1937
is actually underway.
- [Steven] This is one of numerous sculptures
of this figure about this size,
although each one is a little bit different
but this figure is distinguished
because it's in such exceptional condition.
- [Rachel] What the sculpture does
and his importance in our museums is that
he draws people in to a sense of the historical,
of the complex, of things that are not immediately solvable.
And it requires a whole village of people.
It's taken maybe 60, 70 years
for us to come together with enough expertise
to even begin to unpack what this object is.
And yet, even if you don't know that
you don't know who he is,
you can still walk into this museum,
see him and know that you're in the presence of something
complicated and rich,
and that you wanna know more about.
This isn't gonna be over in an instant,
this is a relationship that builds.
And living with that complexity is I think,
one of the most attractive and important things
about this object in the museums.
(jazz piano music)