The 14 Million Dollar Buddha
By DR. YOKO HSUEH SHIRAI
SPECIAL TO THE RAFU
Saturday, April 4, 2009

This is the first part in a feature that will run in the Arts & Entertainment Section the next few weeks. It is a non-fiction work, written by USC lecturer, Dr. Yoko Hsueh Shirai, that follows the trail of a recently auctioned Japanese Buddha sculpture at Christie’s New York (sold at over $14 million, hence the title) that set off a craze in Japan involving museum professionals, scholars, Buddhist temple administrators, icon sculptors, and the public at large. Dr. Shirai earned her doctorate in 2006 from the Department of Art History at UCLA, specializing in early Buddhist statuary that has primarily been excavated in Japan.

An x-ray image (right) of the Buddha statue does not give the written evidence needed
to properly identify its creator.

If you read Jonathan Harr’s “The Lost Painting” (2005), a non-fiction book that chronicled the modern search for a missing Caravaggio painting, here is a similar tale that has been unfolding in Japan with much fanfare over the past few years. Yet unlike the owners of the Caravaggio painting–Jesuit priests in Ireland–the Japanese owner of the 800-yearold wooden Buddha (identified as “Vairocana”) about 24 inches in height, put the icon up for auction at Christie’s New York in March 2008.

The sale went on despite public opposition towards selling what had become considered a part of Japan’s cultural heritage in the space between 2008 and the spring of 2004, when the icon was reported in daily newspapers as a newly discovered work by the acclaimed Japanese master sculptor known as Unkei (? —1223).

To get a sense of how Unkei is generally perceived, Christie’s lot description informs us that his “early work has been equated with the muscular, masculine style of Michelangelo.”

News of the auction generated anxiety among some Japanese that this recently found sculpture might once again be lost to a collector or museum outside the country.

Not to worry; a sigh of collective relief was breathed as the highest bidder for the relatively small Vairocana turned out to be a Japanese Buddhist sect, Shinnyo-en (“Borderless Garden of Truth”), a New Religion of Buddhism founded in 1936 by Ito Shinjo and his wife Tomoji. Prior to the auction, Shinnyo-en was not particularly well-known and was not featured in the media as a potential buyer.

Represented at the auction by Mitsukoshi, Shinnyo-en purchased the Vairocana for over14 million dollars, the highest amount ever paid for a work of Japanese art at auction.

Maybe it was the fear of losing other national treasures due to the acts of individuals who buy objects from art dealers and seemingly prefer to make a tremendous profit over the preservation of a cultural legacy. Maybe it was the astounding price tag that raised the status of a Buddha created by Unkei and his assistants. Perhaps for these or other reasons, the auction and the wooden statue generated a kind of sustained interest in Buddhist statuary associated with Unkei that continues to resonate and amplify in Japan as the months pass.

The story is, as expected, quite complicated for a number of reasons.

Important aspects of the icon’s recent history are still concealed, including the name of the man who bought and then sold the icon to the highest bidder, the dealer who initially sold it to him, and the private family that reputedly owned the icon before it passed into the hands of the dealer.

Extreme secrecy might be necessary here as there is no second guessing what might happen due to an uncertain degree of public resentment and anger directed against these players.

As for the attribution of the icon as being the work of Unkei, this is generally accepted by most scholars. But since most of the evidence is either based on stylistic grounds or is circumstantial in nature, there remains the possibility that future research might refute this attribution to Unkei and his studio. One way to confi rm this attribution, once and for all, would be to open up the body cavity and search for a written document or an inscription inside the Vairocana that records the image’s maker, as has been the case for several other Buddhist icons sculpted by Unkei.

But why bother, as several of my undergraduate students at the University of Southern California (USC) argued during our seminar on this image: the public already believes it is by Unkei, so why take the risk of finding out that it was made by another master sculptor or studio?

In time, however, this small Vairocana (or Dainichi Nyorai in Japanese) will be opened and its physical contents presumably revealed to the world when necessary repairs and restoration work occur (if this has not taken place already). We know what to expect in general because of the x-ray photographs taken of the image, but the rays did not expose any writing so the Vairocana still hides some of its secrets inside its body—though, most likely not forever.

The second part of Dr. Shirai’s story will appear in next Thursday’s Arts & Entertainment section.