Jaina Iconography The T Rtha Kara In Jaina Scriptures Art And Rituals

In about 25 BC tribesmen of the kingdom of Meroe placed a bronze head of Augustus, cut from a full-length statue, beneath the steps of a temple of victory: the decapitated head of the Emperor was thus regularly trampled underfoot. Two millennia later, during the second Gulf War, Iraqis 'insulted' a toppled bronze statue of Saddam Hussein by beating it with their shoes. Do these chronologically distant but apparently related examples of the defamation of images imply that the persons represented were regarded by their detractors as in some way 'present' in the images? Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects reconsiders the notion of 'presence' in objects. The first book to address the issue directly, it contains a series of case studies covering a broad geographical and chronological range from ancient Greece and the Incas to industrial America and contemporary India, as well as examples from the canon of western European art. The studies reveal the widespread evidence for this striking form of response and allow readers to see how 'presence' is evoked and either embraced or repressed in differing historical and cultural contexts. Featuring a variety of disciplines and approaches, the book will be of interest to students of art history, art theory, visual culture, anthropology, psychology and philosophy.

John Cort explores the narratives by which the Jains have explained the presence of icons of Jinas (their enlightened and liberated teachers) that are worshiped and venerated in the hundreds of thousands of Jain temples throughout India. Most of these narratives portray icons favorably, and so justify their existence; but there are also narratives originating among iconoclastic Jain communities that see the existence of temple icons as a sign of decay and corruption. The veneration of Jina icons is one of the most widespread of all Jain ritual practices. Nearly every Jain community in India has one or more elaborate temples, and as the Jains become a global community there are now dozens of temples in North America, Europe, Africa, and East Asia. The cult of temples and icons goes back at least two thousand years, and indeed the largest of the four main subdivisions of the Jains are called Murtipujakas, or "Icon Worshipers." A careful reading of narratives ranging over the past 15 centuries, says Cort, reveals a level of anxiety and defensiveness concerning icons, although overt criticism of the icons only became explicit in the last 500 years. He provides detailed studies of the most important pro- and anti-icon narratives. Some are in the form of histories of the origins and spread of icons. Others take the form of cosmological descriptions, depicting a vast universe filled with eternal Jain icons. Finally, Cort looks at more psychological explanations of the presence of icons, in which icons are defended as necessary spiritual corollaries to the very fact of human embodiedness.