Lotuses Grow in the Land of the Setting Sun

A hall inside of the San Francisco Asian Art Museum.

As a kid growing up in NYC, California always struck me as a kind of far flung, mystical destination. I'm certainly not the only one who thought of California as the "Land Furthest West", one of sun, surf, and hippies. The Golden State! The desire to explore the world beyond the northeastern US was one reason I decided to head to the San Francisco area for graduate school. Grad students, as a rule, generally do not have much free time but when I first arrived, I did make it a point to check out what San Francisco had to offer. One of the first places I visited was the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

Presently located directly across from San Francisco's city hall, the museum was originally a wing of the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. In 2001, the collections were relocated to the former site of San Francisco's main library and in 2003, the museum reopened once again.

Front view of the Asian Art Museum.

San Francisco's City Hall.

On a cool but sunny autumn day, I got off at the Civic Center BART station and took a short stroll to the museum. The lack of crowds on this particular day and time created a very calm atmosphere at the museum, which made me enjoy my visit even more.  Something I found particularly interesting was how the galleries were arranged. As you might expect, "Asian art" encompasses an enormous amount of history and culture. The museum also has one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Asian art on the planet. How then, can one coherently present such a multitude of art and culture? In a word, Buddhism. For all of the diversity that Asia has, the common thread that unites all of these cultures is Buddhism. Simply put, every part of Asia was or is currently Buddhist. In this context, the galleries of the San Francisco Asian Art Museum are generally arranged according to the spread of Buddhism throughout Asia..

Gandharan sculpture of the
bodhisattva Maitreya.

The suggested tour of the museum begins with an escalator ride to the third and highest floor, and the first galleries one encounters are the ones covering South Asia. As I walked in, I was immediately struck by fine examples of Gandharan art. Gandhara was a historical kingdom that existed from ~1000 BCE to ~1000 CE, occupying the area of what is now eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan. Gandhara is historically quite significant since it is generally thought to have been where the first buddha images were created. This region was at the crossroads of many cultures (Persian, Greek, Turkic, Indian) and artwork from the Buddhist era (~1-500 CE) famously reflects these various influences. I've always found Gandharan art to be especially elegant and life-like.  In fact, there was one sculpture of the bodhisattva Maitreya (dating from ~200-350 CE) that looked quite a bit like an uncle of mine! Before I continue, let me apologize in advance for the many blurry photos. Using a small, mediocre-quality handheld camera with no flash was a bit tricky, especially in the days before I became more serious about photography.

While the basic thread uniting the galleries may be Buddhism, there's obviously far more to Asian art than just that. There were two objects in the South Asian gallery in particular that caught my attention; a fragment of a Jain scripture and a Qu'ran from the Mughal era, both from around 1550 CE. Whenever I look at stone sculptures, the figures always seem so solid and strong, very often having endured centuries of existence. I could easily imagine people centuries from now gazing at them. Books, however, are very different. They're inherently much more fragile than stone, which to me makes their preservation even more remarkable. I also think books are in some ways more personal than sculptures in the sense that the words, from different times, different places, and in different languages, are still speaking directly to whoever gazes upon them. If anyone happens to be reading this blog centuries from now, let it be known that I'm also I'm speaking to you right now.  Yeah, YOU!

Page from the Jain Kalpasutra.

A Qur'an from Mughal India.

The jeweled buddha.

I slowly made my way to the South East Asian galleries and there I saw what was perhaps one of the fanciest buddha statues I'd ever seen. It was from Thailand and it was the first time I'd ever seen such a buddha statue. On one hand, I was fascinated and amazed at the craftsmanship and delicacy of it. It was truly a masterpiece. On the other hand, I was quite puzzled. I always think of the Buddha as the embodiment of simple living and without any fancy adornments. What, then, should I make of such a fanciful representation?  Not having come to a definite answer, I just snapped a picture, enjoyed a closer look, and continued on. 

Tibetan statue of Tara bodhisattva.

The South East Asian galleries lead to the Himalayan art section. I was excited. I was a huge fan of Tibetan and Himalayan art long before I had any spiritual interest in Buddhism. Perhaps my favorite piece in this gallery was a statue of the bodhisattva Tara. Although I'm not a practitioner of the Tantric/Vajrayana (Tibetan) tradition, I've always found its various expressions of the "female" aspect of spiritual practice to be fascinating and also unique amongst the various Buddhist traditions. The topic is very complex and certainly beyond the scope of this blog (or any academic study, in my opinion) but the Berzin Archives are a great place to start if you're really interested. Getting back to the Tara statue, I found it not only very beautiful on a physical level but also on a spiritual one as well. The elegant pose and blissful expression wasn't just great art, but I also found it very soothing, comforting, and encouraging, almost like looking at pictures of close friends or family. But I suppose that's just what those who create such works have in mind.

Wooden
Samantabhadra statue.

After crossing the Himalayas, I found myself in China, or rather the gallery of Chinese art. Of all the many wonderful pieces on display, a simple statue of Samantabhadra bodhisattva really stood out for me. One reason was that it was made out of wood. As I mentioned earlier with books, the continued existence of such delicate objects made from fragile materials always amazes me. In contrast to the gilded and glitzy figures I saw in the Himalayan gallery, this statue was not all shiny. It looked as if it had once been painted yet the faded colors and multiple cracks definitely left me with a very humble impression. While the Tara statue embodied the supernatural and mystical aspects of the path, this wooden Samantabhadra felt very down to earth. Aside from this point, artistic depictions of Samantabhadra are not quite as common as for other bodhisattvas in East Asian art. He is, however, almost always shown riding an elephant.


Perhaps one of my favorite pieces in the entire museum was a lovely black and white ink painting of a building, perhaps a temple, during a snowy winter day. What I loved most about it was the simplicity and directness of it. There was nothing to embellish the scene but also nothing to detract from it. It was what it was. In that sense, I found it reminiscent of Zen-style ink and brush paintings.

A snowy winter day.

The last gallery on the tour focused on Japanese art, which I found quite appropriate. Here I was, looking at art from the land of the rising sun in a museum in the land of the setting sun. Pretty neat. As I left the galleries, I noticed a large inscription in one of the main halls. It was obviously left over from when the building was a library but I thought the spirit of the message could be applied to any place of learning: "Books bear the messages of the wisest of mankind to all the generations of men".





In many ways, California is the heartland of the dharma in America. The first Buddhist temple was built by Chinese immigrants in San Francisco in the mid-1800s and the large numbers Asian immigrants who arrived and settled on the West Coast greatly expanded the community. In the 20th century, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, California became a magnet for many Buddhist teachers and groups, and still remains the area with the highest concentration of Buddhists in the US.

One year I went to a Vesak celebration at the Jodo Shinshu Center in Berkeley. It was a fascinating experience. People and representatives from essentially every major Buddhist tradition were there. During the keynote address, a monk from the Dharma Realm group (Chinese Chan tradition) mentioned that the number of groups present at the event was about 40. The number of various Buddhist groups known to have resided in the ancient Chinese capital of Chang'an (present day Xi'an) during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) was about a dozen. And let's not forget that the Tang Dynasty was the golden age of Buddhism in China. There's more to the story than just numbers, however. Interactions between traditions that historically had little or no contact with each other, for example the Tibetan and Theravada traditions, are becoming quite common. What this type of confluence will lead to is anyone's guess. All we can say is that thousands of years and thousands of miles away from it's land of origin, the lotus buddha's teachings is blooming beautifully after a long journey to the West.