ABSTRACT
In the fall of 2000 I made a lecture tour of several universities and cultural centres in Japan. My topic for the tour was a short version, illustrated with fi lm clips, of what is now Chapter 7 of this book – its title: ‘Oliver Stone as Historian.’ After my lecture at the American Center in Tokyo, I went out for food and beer with some former students from the year I was a Fulbright professor at Kyushu University. One of them, a mathematician who is now a major fi gure in the Genome Project in Japan, and who is also a serious student of Buddhism, told me the following: my explanation about the history fi lm reminded him of the beginnings of Buddhist paintings in Japan. The priests (and here we are, no doubt, in the sixth or seventh century) realized that an illiterate population could not read the sacred Sanskrit texts, so they decided to create visual works, paintings (the mandala is one of the forms we know best) to instil in the population the ideas of Buddhism. Smart and educated men, these priests realized that these paintings could not contain all the information and all the complex ideas that were part of the sacred texts, that they were in fact a kind of simplifi cation of those written texts. Yet they strongly felt that the more public and more accessible medium of painting would convey the spirit, the feeling, and the meaning of Buddhism to the general public who did not have the skills to read. Over the centuries, these visual representations of Buddhist ideas began to take on an integrity of their own, as more and more people came, and still come, to know the ideas of the religion through these images rather than through the sacred texts that were their inspiration. Today they have for most people, including priests, taken the place of those texts; indeed, some fi nd them more characteristic and revealing of Buddhism than the original texts.
