About Arts of Bodhi
Arts of Bodhi is a reading log for Japanese Buddhist art — iconography, sculptural lineage, painting traditions. Published as a free, advertising-free reference; edited by Sam Shephard against verifiable museum and primary-text sources.
What Arts of Bodhi is
A curated visual reference. Five active clusters at launch:
- Kannon — the canonical forms of Avalokiteśvara in Japan: the Six and Seven Esoteric Kannon, the Thirty-three pilgrimage forms, the per-form iconographic readings.
- Pure Land and Raigōzu — the descending procession; Heian, Kamakura, and Nanbokuchō recensions; the doctrinal arc from Genshin through Hōnen and Shinran.
- Kamakura sculpture — the Kei school: Unkei, Kaikei, Tankei; the gyokugan crystal-eye realist turn; the Tōdai-ji and Kōfuku-ji rebuilding programmes.
- Mikkyō — Esoteric Buddhism in Heian Japan: Fudō Myō-ō, the Five Wisdom Kings, the Tō-ji golden hall pictorial canon.
- Cross-cutting — transmission, technique, and methodology: Asuka and Hakuhō foundations, Korean and Tang precedent, yosegi-zukuri joined-block sculpture, how a Buddhist image is read.
Jizō, the Earth-Store bodhisattva, and Daruma (Bodhidharma in Japanese reception) appear within the corpus where the iconography intersects the five clusters — Jizō in welcoming-descent and Six-Realms contexts; Daruma in late-Edo Zen portraiture. They are not yet declared standalone clusters; coverage will consolidate when the framing-discipline reading is ready to carry it.
What Arts of Bodhi is not
Not a practice site, shop, academic journal, pop-Buddhism outlet, sovereignty platform, or a replacement for ColBase, the Met OA collection, or Cleveland Open Access — all of which we link to and cite, never duplicate. The site does not characterise living practitioners, take sovereignty positions, claim spiritual authority, or offer medical, therapeutic, or healing guidance.
Editorial standards
Every published piece carries:
- At least four sources — a Tier-1 museum accession, a named-scholar passage with page reference, a primary-text citation, and a cross-institutional reference.
- A Tier-1 image hero (CC0) or a verified Tier-2 image (open-access in practice) with attribution preserved verbatim where the source requires it. ColBase images carry the verbatim Japanese attribution line.
- Cross-institutional sourcing — every iconographic piece cites works from at least two collections.
- Hepburn macrons for Japanese, IAST diacritics for Sanskrit, kanji and kana on first mention. Source-language fidelity is editorial, not decorative.
The full editorial contract — voice, observation discipline, source
standards, image rights, never-do — is maintained in the project’s
agent-os/ directory (the operating manual, kept under version control
for editorial accountability).
Editor
Sam Shephard. Independent editor; no institutional affiliation. Curatorial focus on East Asian Buddhist art with an emphasis on the Japanese reception of trans-cultural icons and the Kamakura sculptural turn.
Editorial method
Every article is researched, written, and verified to a fixed scholarly floor before it is published: a Tier-1 or Tier-2 museum accession, a named-scholar citation with a page reference, a primary-text source, and a cross-institutional reference. Research and source-triage tooling assists the editor, ingesting museum APIs, ColBase, scholarly bibliographies, and exhibition catalogues into a structured working knowledge base. The editorial judgment, the prose, the source floor, and the final sign-off are the named editor’s. Nothing reaches the published surface without that review.
How to read this site
Articles are evergreen. Where information is time-sensitive — a museum acquisition, an exhibition opening, an attribution shift — it appears in the digest, which carries dates. Articles do not.
Wikilinks resolve to either an article (longform reading guide), an entity primer (figure, sculpture, painting, technique, concept, or tradition), or a disambiguation table. Every entity has a Wikidata identifier and a reciprocal P973 statement (where applicable).
Contact
Editorial corrections, source disagreements, image-rights concerns, or typo reports: see the Image rights page for takedown procedure; for everything else, the GitHub issue tracker is the canonical contact surface.