Reflections of the Buddha - The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

View of the Main Gallery
These heavily gilded works look all the more ornate in
the austerity of Andō’s spaces, while the space around
them becomes more dynamic.
The Pulitzer’s presentation of Buddhist art
allows the visitor to see each work from several unobstructed
viewpoints and it silhouettes the sculptures,
offering them additional visual power and energy. These
Buddhist sculptures likely have never had the luxury of
so much space — neither in their original sites nor in
some of their new repositories, including the often
crowded galleries of encyclopedic museums. The placement
of these works in Andō’s architecture gives the
viewer the freedom to appreciate these works in an expanded
way. This approach is partially Minimalist. An
American museum director in the 1980s once spoke of
“the synchronic museum” that foregoes history in the
name of “a kind of intensity of experience, an aesthetic
charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is
now radically spatial . . . It is Minimalism . . . that has reshaped
the way we, as late twentieth-century viewers,
look at art: the demands we now put on it; our need to
experience it along with its interaction with the space in
which it exists.” 22
The dominant Asian influences in the United
States for much of the twentieth century were Japanese
art and Zen Buddhism. In the 1950s and 1960s, they inspired
Western Minimalist artists with the principles of
simplicity and understatement. In the 1970s, Western
Minimalism in turn informed contemporary Japanese architects
like Andō, with its systematic thinking
characterized by repetition and progressions of forms. In
a recent book about his own processes and ideas, Andō
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spoke about the Pulitzer’s architecture in Minimalist
terms: “[W]ith the simplest possible form, [the Pulitzer]
was composed as the ultimate box.” 23 It is “embedded
with a grid space based on an identical module in plan
and section.” 24
The use of repetitive forms plays a role in the
display of art in Reflections of the Buddha as well. For instance,
four-circle mandalas of the Sakya School of
Tibetan Buddhism (nos. 11-12) are displayed in the
Pulitzer’s eponymous Cube Gallery. These hierarchical
and geometric diagrams of Buddhist cosmology were
likely guides for meditation rituals. Based on the Hevajra
Tantra (a Vajrayāna text written sometime between the
late eighth and early tenth centuries), the Sakya School’s
teachings offer a practitioner a particular way to understand
a key concept found in both Mahāyāna and
Vajrayāna Buddhism: Nirvāna already exists in samsāra.
The defilements of samsāra simply cover this pure knowledge
from view. Each Sakya mandala in the Cube Gallery
depicts four circles symmetrically aligned. Each circle
represents an architectural plan of a palace with walls
and gateways at the cardinal directions. Inside each circle
is a square; inside the square is a circle. The symmetry offers
a sense of order and permanence found in a
particular deity’s celestial realm. This is the palace that
the practitioner visualizes as the home for the deity. As
one scholar has noted, the deity is like “a germinating
seed [that] is within, and protected by, its outer shell.” 25
It is here where the teacher (lama) helps the initiate connect
with the deity and understand that impermanence
and dukha can be “extinguished” in one’s own lifetime.
Andō, too, chooses repetitive forms — simple