Secrets of the Sacred: Empowering Buddhist Images in Clear, in Code, and in Cache (Franklin D. Murphy Lecture Series)

Buddhist iconography is undeniably sophisticated, ornate, and quite often gorgeous. Attending only to these aesthetic qualities though is to miss the boat on the reason these wondrous sculptures and paintings were produced with so much painstaking effort and significant outlay of resources, namely, to function as a proper medium to channel a divine presence right here among us. "Secrets of the Sacred" stands out for offering an extended and concretely detailed consideration of this function along with the doctrinal and ritual contexts that inform it, not to mention the sociopolitical imperatives mixed up with it, all primarily in an East Asian context.Somewhat disproportionately organized, the first shorter chapter explores the various sacred items encased within Buddhist sculptures so as to enliven them with the deity depicted (with an eventual indirect focus on the statue of Shakyamuni at Seiryoji Temple in Kyoto), while the second longer chapter deals more with the elaborate cases crafted to house spiritually potent objects (leading up to a minute dissection of the richly decked-out multilayered container for the Buddha's finger-bone relic at Famensi Temple in Shaanxi Province). Perhaps because it's based on a series of lectures, the presentation can seem a bit rambling and the structure somewhat loose and uneven here and there, but really this does little to blemish the eye-opening analysis enclosed within these nicely illustrated pages.