The World on Stage: Multicultural Music and Dance at Tōdaiji Temple’s Eye-Opening Ceremony

On May 26, 752, Japan’s political, military, and monastic forces gathered to witness the eye-opening ceremony of the Great Buddha at Tōdaiji Temple in the capital city of Nara. On this occasion, the Great Buddha’s pupils were painted in, thereby enlivening the statue and transforming it into a religious icon.

This activation ceremony comprised local and overseas religious specialists, as well as music and dance troupes specializing in performing arts from Japan and mainland Asia. Through the ceremony and the multicultural festivities that followed, the Japanese court announced its presence as a cosmopolitan Buddhist country with comparable technological prowess, Buddhist legitimation enterprises, and cultural capital as its East Asian neighbours.

In this presentation, I pull together textual descriptions and remaining artifacts to emphasise how the eye-opening ceremony's multicultural flavour blended Buddhist ritual with imperial posturing. Additionally, I consider what these multicultural performances demonstrate about the roles of music, ritual, and performance in Buddhism’s circulation at this time. In looking past these performances' simplistic country-based names, I argue that this music and dance provided glimpses of other countries, peoples, and cultures as well as layers of blending and racial stereotypes that were preserved in the costumes and movements. 

This ceremony demonstrates how Buddhism's complex cosmology and pan-Asian transmission provided the philosophical model and rich material culture that allowed the early Japanese court to better conceive of the world and their place within it.

About the speaker

Dr Abigail MacBain is a lecturer in pre-modern Japanese history and religion at the University of Edinburgh. She specialises in early Japan’s overseas relationships and Buddhism’s transmission to Japan through Silk Road trade and communications, especially during the eighth century. 

Her current research focuses on multicultural music and dance in Buddhist settings as well as a deeper consideration into the importance of monastic precepts in the circulation of overseas monks to Japan. 

Registration

This event free, open to the public, and held both in person and online. If you would like to attend, please register using the available links.

• Organiser: SOAS Japan Research Centre
• Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk

Header image credit: Legends of the Daibutsu 紙本著色東大寺大仏縁起 shihon chakushoku Tōdai-ji daibutsu engi (1536). Image from cover of Kanshō Tsutsui, Motto shiritai, Tōdaiji no rekishi. Tōkyō : Tōkyō Bijutsu, 2010.