International Conference

The Makers of Buddhism:

Practical Arts and Professional Disciplines in the Construction of the Buddhist Cultural Heritage from India to Japan and to Mongolia

Organized by Vesna A. Wallace and Fabio Rambelli

University of California, Santa Barbara, March 3–5, 2025

This international conference aims at reconsidering Buddhism and its cultural heritage by looking at them through the lens of the professionals (artists, performers, and craftspeople) who were directly engaged in producing, maintaining, and reconstructing Buddhist sites, and by studying the various systems of practical knowledge they created and transmitted. Buddhism is always studied from the perspective of its complex doctrinal apparatus, its elaborate system of rites, and, more recently, is rich visual and material culture. This conference aims at focusing instead on the various professional figures who played a crucial role in establishing and spreading Buddhism, their labor, and their creative activities.

Since ancient India, professionals specialized in various practical arts and disciplines were affiliated with Buddhist temples and monasteries. They were in charge of various disciplines defined by the general term of śilpa-vidyā (“science of practical arts”) in India, Tibet, Mongolia, and Japan; their know-how was codified in texts in treatises on practical arts (Sk. śilpa-śāstras). Śilpa-vidyā included wide range of disciplines such as architecture and carpentry, engineering, sculpture and painting, music, and dance. Related fields of specialized, professional expertise also included poetry (which belonged to the science of linguistics), medicine, and astrology/divination. Several of these texts from medieval India remain, but only a few have been studied, especially in relation to visual arts. Some information related to śilpa-vidyā made its way into the vinayas set of monastic rules, such as information on the architectural structure of monastic compounds and various practical activities within the temples.

In the case of Mongolia, practical arts made their way to the monastic curriculum following the example of traditional Tibetan monastic education, which was based on the instructional model developed in India at Nālandā.

In the case of Japan, a number of these systems of practical knowledge from India where transmitted to China and Korea, where they were combined with local systems of knowledge, technologies, and practices; in this hybrid form, they were transmitted to Japan, where they were known as kugyōmyō 工巧明). Some forms of professional guilds are recorded in Japan already toward the seventh century; a system of professions was codified in the early eighth century, but later on, from around the tenth century, many professional guilds came to be affiliated with Buddhist temples, and some monastics were experts in some of these practical technologies. The practical arts carried out at Buddhist temples included a broader range than the classical Indian śilpa-vidyā: in Japan, they also include poetry, medicine, astrology and various forms of divination known as onmyōdō 陰陽道. However, this is a blind spot of research, and very little is known about who these people were, how they learned, and what kind of documents they left. A significant exception is constituted by Gagaku musicians; between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, some of them wrote encyclopedic works that contain not only specific information about instruments, music practice and performance techniques, but also describe a more general system of knowledge, which is extremely useful for the reconstruction of the intellectual system and the mentalities of the time.

For this conference, we have the fortune to be able to work closely with Shitennōji temple in Osaka. Since its establishment in the early seventh century, this temple has been not only an important sacred place and the focus of systems of beliefs and devotional activities, but also and importantly a center for all kinds of practical arts and a hub for professional experts. In fact, Shitennōji, possibly the oldest, continuously active Buddhist large temple in the world, is an excellent example of the multiple intersections between doctrinal discourses, ritual and ceremonial systems, popular devotion, the arts and professional technologies and expertise that together constituted Buddhism as a living religious tradition.

We hope that this conference will contribute to a better knowledge of these traditional arts and systems of knowledge and practice. By bringing together experts and practitioners from Japan and Mongolia, we aim to identify fundamental structures and local and historical transformations, in order to better understand those elements that belong to a shared Buddhist heritage and those that are the result of innovation and cultural change. We expect this conference to be the beginning of a multi-year research and dissemination program about practical arts and professional disciplines in the Buddhist world of Japan and beyond.