Buddhist bounty

Art stardom wasn’t what the founder of Buddhism had in mind 2,500 years ago when he left his family, gave up his worldly riches and set off on a quest for spiritual enlightenment. But that’s exactly what he has achieved this fall in California art museums. Ten Buddhist art shows are already on view or opening soon and more are on the way, along with related programs.

Like Buddhism itself, the exhibitions cover a lot of history and geography. They also take different tacks. “Tibet: Treasures From the Roof of the World,” opening next Sunday at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, is a blockbuster-style spectacle of 200 objects made for Dalai Lamas, on loan from major museums in Lhasa. In sharp contrast, “From the Verandah: Art, Buddhism, Presence,” to be unveiled today at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, is a contemplative environment that encourages visitors to slow down and savor two artworks, a marble sculpture by Wolfgang Laib and a field of cracked clay by Hirokazu Kosaka.

Between those extremes, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art offers 160 pieces of Buddhist meditational art in its big fall show, “The Circle of Bliss,” also opening today. The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco is gearing up for the Oct. 18 opening of a landmark 110-work exhibition of historic Korean art, including many Buddhist pieces.

The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and two Claremont colleges, Scripps and Pomona, also have Buddhist art on view, in special exhibitions drawn from their collections. Yet another show, “The Art of Rice: Spirit and Sustenance in Asia,” appearing in tandem with “Verandah” at the Fowler, also has a Buddhist component.

This lineup might sound like an intricately organized Buddhist bonanza, but that isn’t exactly the case. “Verandah,” several performances and educational programs grew out of “Awake: Art, Buddhism and the Dimensions of Consciousness,” a consortium of arts professionals who recently investigated the relationship between Buddhism and the arts in America. But most of the exhibitions developed independently.

“It’s a happy confluence of events,” says Marla C. Berns, director of the Fowler. And it seems to reflect a growing, nationwide interest in all things Buddhist, from yoga and meditation to artistic depictions of Buddha. “Awake” is the West Coast counterpart of “The Buddhism Project” in the New York area. “Himalayas: An Aesthetic Adventure,” a major traveling exhibition of Buddhist and Hindu artworks that debuted at the Art Institute of Chicago this year, opens Oct. 18 at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C.

“For a long time, art people thought Buddhism was just a fad, a New Age thing,” says Jacqueline Bass, who became program director of “Awake” after retiring as director of the UC Berkeley Art Museum. “But partly because of interest in the Dalai Lama, they now see that Buddhism is here to stay as a part of American culture.”

An attractive flexibility

Buddhism appeals to many Americans because “it is not a theistic religion,” Bass says. “The Buddha was just a person who sat and focused on problems for seven years and figured a few things out. It’s a very pragmatic religion or philosophy or psychology -- however you want to think about it. Also, it’s very malleable; it takes on different forms wherever it goes. Here in the United States, it has tended to hook up with psychology and artistic practice, and it is clearly continuing to develop in ways that meet the needs of American culture.”

Himalayan Buddhism is particularly popular in the U.S., and Stephen Markel, head of LACMA’s department of South and Southeast Asian Art, thinks he knows why. Earlier forms of Buddhism “postulate that one needs to go through many lifetimes to achieve enlightenment,” he says. “In Himalayan Buddhism, you can do it in one lifetime. We live in a fast-food, fast-lane culture, so that’s very appealing.”

If he’s right, the two largest Southern California exhibitions -- both of which deal with Himalayan art -- should find an appreciative audience.

“Tibet,” at the Bowers, is drawn from collections housed at the Potala Palace and the Norbu Lingka, the historical winter and summer palaces of the Dalai Lamas, and at the more recently established Tibet Museum. About half of the pieces left Tibet for the first time in 2001, for an exhibition in Shanghai, but all are making their first trip to the U.S., says Bowers director Peter C. Keller.

“We have a very distinct story to tell about the history, art, religion and ritual objects of Tibet and the daily life of the Tibetan nobility,” Keller says. He chose the objects with Terese Tse Bartholomew, curator of Himalayan art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the final venue for the nationally traveling exhibition in summer 2005.

“It takes guts to do something like this,” Bartholomew says. “Nobody wants to deal with the China-Tibet question, and it’s very difficult to make the arrangements.” But she didn’t hesitate. Given the chance to work with objects housed in Tibet’s best museums, everyone in her field would be “dying to do a show,” she says.

Still, it wasn’t easy. Keller made six trips to Tibet with Anne Shih, a Bowers board member who has negotiated with Chinese cultural officials to bring several exhibitions to Santa Ana.

The exhibition was canceled twice -- in July 2002, when the new director of the Chinese Cultural Relics Administration refused to honor the contract signed by his predecessor, and last October, when the Chinese became concerned about the security of the artworks, Keller says. He and Shih made their last trip to Tibet last December, when they got the show back on track.

“Bottom line: They are very nervous,” Keller says. “They have never let these things out before.”

Feelings run high about China’s takeover of Tibet, the exile of the Dalai Lama and public display of sacred objects, but Keller expects no problems.

“We are simply presenting a pretty comprehensive picture of Tibetan culture,” he says. “I don’t see why anyone would want to protest that.” While the exhibition in Shanghai included a large Buddha from a Tibetan place of worship, all the objects in the Bowers’ show come from museums, he says.

Visitors will encounter a vast array of finely crafted objects: gilded statuary, devotional paintings, jewelry, amulet boxes, musical instruments, ceramic vessels, prayer wheels, manuscripts and mandalas with striking imagery. One sculpture depicts the angry deity Mahakala, who is revered for his protective powers; another portrays Avalokiteshvara, a deity with 11 heads and 1,000 arms who is thought to see all misery and alleviate all pain.

The show will also provide extensive educational information in wall text, labels and catalog essays.

“It’s important to explain clearly the meaning and use of these objects for a general American audience,” says Robert Warren Clark, a Tibetan art specialist who has worked as an interpreter for the Dalai Lama’s office in India. Clark, Bartholomew and Patricia Berger, an art history professor at UC Berkeley, are the exhibition’s guest curators and catalog authors.

With works from Tibet, Nepal, Mongolia, India and China from 40 museums and private collections, LACMA’s “The Circle of Bliss: Buddhist Meditational Art” also offers a huge amount of material. But it has been selected to illuminate a single theme: Buddhist religion.

“The exhibition is not about the works of art. The works of art are about the religion,” says John C. Huntington, the show’s principal curator, who teaches art history at Ohio State University. “Buddhist art has been appreciated for its beauty and mystery for a long time, but most people who admire the art have not paid much attention to the Buddhist religion. I felt the time had come to do something radically different. This exhibition is about the aesthetics of human perfection and the notion that an individual can become so perfect that it is possible to devote one’s life to the aid of others.”

Even so, art aficionados won’t be disappointed, he says. “We selected the finest pieces we could find, and there are some amazing things. But if we were struggling to fill in a particular lacuna and we couldn’t find the perfect piece, we didn’t skip that area. We took an almost perfect piece.”

Visitors will be invited to follow a path to enlightenment that focuses on the Chakrasamvara Tantra and other key Himalayan Buddhist doctrines -- with the help of paintings, manuscripts, sculptures, textiles and ritual implements.

Markel expects “Circle of Bliss” to tap into what he calls “an incredible interest in Buddhism” and provide an unusual opportunity. “This is not just a survey of aesthetic treasures,” he says. “It’s an in-depth treatment that puts the objects in context and shows how they were used in religious practice.”

Rare artifacts

At San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, Buddhism forms a story line that runs through the entire permanent collection. But the big fall attraction, “Goryeo Dynasty: Korea’s Age of Enlightenment (918 to 1392),” will focus on Buddhist art made under the patronage of the Goryeo aristocracy.

The celadon ceramics, metal crafts, lacquer wares, illustrated sutras, paintings and sculptures exemplify “a high point of classical and courtly Buddhist art,” says museum director Emily Sano. And assembling them is “the life dream” of Kumja Paik Kim, the museum’s curator of Korean art, Sano says. “She has talked about this exhibition for years, but the importance and rarity of the objects makes it difficult to get loans.” Kim got her wish when the museum offered to stage the show as a special event, the first temporary exhibition in the institution’s new home in the Civic Center.

Those who visit the exhibitions will see part of the artistic legacy of a religious leader who was initially portrayed as a symbol. Figurative images of him weren’t widely accepted until about 500 years after his death. Since then, a rich iconographic tradition has taken shape in everything from cosmic diagrams to images of deities who help the faithful meditate.

If the current spate of exhibitions proves nothing else, the curators say, it makes the point that Buddhism is a living tradition -- as art and religion.

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Treasures on display

What: “Circle of Bliss: Buddhist Meditational Art,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art

When: Today to Jan. 4

Contact: (323) 857-6000

What: “From the Verandah: Art, Buddhism, Presence” and “The Art of Rice: Spirit and Sustenance in Asia,” UCLA Fowler Museum

When: “Verandah,” today to Jan. 4; “Rice,” today to April 25

Contact: (310) 825-4361

What: “Tibet: Treasures From the Roof of the World,” Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, Santa Ana

When: Oct. 12 to May 16

Contact: (714) 567-3600

What: “Goryeo Dynasty: Korea’s Age of Enlightenment (918 to 1392),” Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

When: Oct. 18 to Jan. 11

Contact: (415) 581-3500