Investigating Buddhist Wonder Houses: The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Museums of the Buddha

“The Wonder House appropriates remnants of Buddhist art into a Western taxonomy of order that is meant to make the art understandable to Western as well as contemporary Indian viewers.”

——— Stanley K. Abe (1995)

The title of this panel invokes Stanley Abe’s seminal essay on Buddhist art in which he pointed to the decontextualization and Orientalization of Asian religious objects interred in museums or “Wonder Houses,” institutions said to have originated in Europe that privilege colonial and Western discourses of knowledge over native expertise. However, as Christina Kreps (2006) and others argue, non-Western indigenous communities have historically deployed forms of curation attuned to their specific needs. Yui Suzuki (2007, 130–131), for example, points out that in Japanese temples, premodern practices such as storing valuable objects in “treasure repositories,” and the temporary unveiling and “airing” of religious icons are the direct antecedents of modern-day temple treasure museums. What is sometimes called the adaptation or creolization of the Western museum model by native societies may in fact be a misnomer that disregards a “world full of museologies and spaces for the convergence of diverse museological forms and practices” (Kreps 2006, 470).

Recent studies of Buddhist museology—broadly referring to Buddhist objects in secular museums, Buddhist-themed exhibitions, and Buddhist museums—extend the “material turn” in religious studies by interrogating the confluence of Buddhism and museums. These studies take the epistemological assumption that Buddhist traditions and practices are as much embedded in museum forms as they are in temples and monasteries. On one hand, Justin McDaniel (2017) argues that the proliferation of Buddhist museums, monuments, and amusement parks illustrates a side of Buddhism that is socially disengaged, ecumenical, and non-reformist. The cases he examined “did not seem concerned with promoting a particular type of Buddhism or a particular way of living religiously” (McDaniel 2017, 171). On the other hand, other scholars such as Louis Gabaude (2003) and Aik Sai Goh (2022) have argued that the establishment of Buddhist museums should also be seen as tacit acts to promulgate the Buddha śāsana in the face of perceived secularism and religious rivalry through the skillful means of edutainment, spectacle, and aesthetics. In other words, in a bid for legitimation and followers, a Buddhist space parading artworks and reimagined as a modern cultural institution associated with arts and sciences has immense appeal for populations imbibed in varying degrees with notions of Asian religions as unscientific, outmoded, and superstitious. More recently Shu-Li Wang and Valentina Gamberi (2023) examined the Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum in Taiwan and conclude that its spaces can trigger religious effects on visitors similar to temples.

Despite McDaniel’s groundbreaking monograph in 2017, the study of Buddhist museums has lagged behind academic studies of other religious museums such as World Religions museums (Orzech 2020), Jewish museums (Ariese 2022), Bible museums (Paine 2021), high-profile Protestant museums in the USA (Bielo 2018; Thomas 2020), Islamic museums (Junod et al. 2012), and Japanese shrine museums (Aoki 2013). This session thus aims to begin a timely conversation amongst scholars working on disparate cases in various regions—from monumental open-air Buddhist museums in Greater China and temple-museums in Japan to Buddhist exhibitions in Indian and American museums—and in doing so, contributes to the advancement of this field.

The session will examine past and present manifestations of Buddhist museums broadly defined. They may be archaeological museums, museumified temples, memorial museums, open-air museological theme parks, arts museums, art galleries, museums inside temples, temples inside museums, hybrid stūpa-museums, or temple-museums. What do these tell us about secularity and sacredness in cultural spaces such as museums? Why did governments, organizations, or individuals establish Buddhist museums? What regional differences may account for the different types of Buddhist museums?

References

Abe, Stanley K. 1995. “Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art and the West.” In Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism, edited by Donald S. Jr. Lopez, 63–106. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Aoki, Yutaka, ed. 2013. Jinja hakubutsukan jiten. Tokyo: Yūzankaku.

Ariese, Paul. 2022. “The Entanglement of Things: Perceptions of the Sacred in Musealised Synagogue Space.” Jewish Culture and History 23 (3): 240–261. https://doi.org/10.1080/1462169X.2022.2098635.

Bielo, James S. 2018. Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park. New York: New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479872305.001.0001.

Gabaude, Louis. 2003. “A New Phenomenon in Thai Monasteries: The Stūpa-Museum.” In The Buddhist Monastery: A Cross-Cultural Survey, edited by Pierre Pichard, and François Lagirarde, 168–186. Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient.

Goh, Aik Sai. 2022. “Enlightenment on Display: The Origins, Motivations, and Functions of Hagiographic Buddhist Museums in Singapore.” Southeast Asian Studies 11 (1): 79–114. https://doi.org/10.20495/seas.11.1_79.

Junod, Benoît, Georges Khalil, Stefan Weber, and Gerhard Wolf, eds. 2012. Islamic Art and the Museum: Approaches to Art and Archeology of the Muslim World in the Twenty-first Century. London: Saqi.

Kreps, Christina F. 2006. “Non-Western Models of Museums and Curation in Crosscultural Perspective.” In A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald, 457–472. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996836.ch28.

McDaniel, Justin Thomas. 2017. Architects of Buddhist Leisure: Socially Disengaged Buddhism in Asia’s Museums, Monuments, and Amusement Parks. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824866013.

Orzech, Charles D. 2020. Museums of World Religions: Displaying the Divine, Shaping Cultures. London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350016279.

Paine, Crispin. 2021. “Bible Museums.” In The Bible and Global Tourism, edited by James S. Bielo, and Lieke Wijnia, 179–200. London: T&T Clark. https://doi.org/10.5040/9780567681416.ch-008.

Suzuki, Yui. 2007. “Temple as Museum, Buddha as Art: Hōryūji’s ‘Kudara Kannon’ and Its Great Treasure Repository.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 52 128–140. https://doi.org/10.1086/RESv52n1ms20167748.

Thomas, Paul. 2020. Storytelling the Bible at the Creation Museum, Ark Encounter, and Museum of the Bible. London: T&T Clark. https://doi.org/10.5040/9780567687159.

Wang, Shu-Li, and Valentina Gamberi. 2023. “The Museum Is Like a Temple: The Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum in Taiwan.” Asian Anthropology 22 (1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2022.2117963.

Winfield, Pamela D. 2021. “Curating Culture: The Secularization of Buddhism through Museum Display.” In Secularizing Buddhism: New Perspectives on a Dynamic Tradition, edited by Richard K. Payne, 95–114. Boulder, CO: Shambhala.