Classifying Buddhist Deities 1. “What are Nyorai (Buddhas)?” With Mark Schumacher

Hosted by filmmaker Yujiro Seki, Carving the Divine TV is a series of Q&A sessions with Buddhist scholars and practitioners. These Q&A sessions explore the basic concepts of Buddhism, the history of Buddhism and of course Buddhist sculptures/sculptors (bustuzo/busshi) so that when viewers finally watch the documentary Carving the Divine - Buddhist sculptors of Japan, they will get the maximum value of the documentary.

This is a special episode about categories of Butsuzo (Japanese Buddhist Statuary/Statues/sculptures).  We will have an art historian/scholar Mark Schumacher to discuss the category "Nyorai (Buddhas)."  * To fully enjoy the visual presentation of the slides, please go to our YouTube video: https://youtu.be/8b1q1zxLGxM

Mark Schumacher is an independent researcher who moved to Kamakura (Japan) in 1993 and still lives there today. His website, The A-to-Z Photo Dictionary of Japanese Religious Statuary, has been online since 1995. It is widely referenced by universities, museums, art historians, Buddhist practitioners, and lay people from around the world. The site's focus is medieval Japanese religious art, primarily Buddhist, but it also catalogs art from Shintō, Shugendō, Taoist, and other traditions. As of August 2018, it contained 400+ deities and thousands of annotated photos of statuary from Kamakura, Nara, Kyoto, and elsewhere in Japan. The site is searchable. LINK TO A-TO-Z PHOTO DICTIONARY = http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/buddhism.shtml

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