Daitokuji

"The Zen Buddhist monastery Daitokuji in Kyoto has long been revered as a cloistered meditation center, a repository of art treasures, and a wellspring of the "Zen aesthetic." Gregory Levine's Daitokuji unsettles these conventional notions with inquiry into the significant and surprising visual and social identities of sculpture, painting, and calligraphy associated with this fourteenth-century monastery and its enduring monastic and lay communities." "Illuminating canonical and heretofore ignored works and mining a trove of documents, diaries, and modern writings, Levine argues for the plurality of Daitokuji's visual arts and the breadth of social and ritual circumstances of art making and viewing within the monastery. This diversity encourages reconsideration of stereotyped notions of "Zen art" and offers specialists and general readers alike opportunity to explore the fertile and sometimes volatile nexus of the visual arts and religious sites in Japan."--Jacket.