Linrothe wins Getty grant to conduct research

Associate Professor of Art History Rob Linrothe has received a grant from the Getty Foundation to support research on the Esoteric Buddhist (Tantric) deity Vajrasattva within South, Southeast, and East Asian social and religious networks during the eighth through 12th centuries. Linrothe will spend academic year 2008?09 as a residential scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

	Rob Linrothe

Linrothe's project, titled "Cultural Flows Across Asia: Esoteric Buddhist Representation and Transformation," will focus on the theme of Vajrasattva, which plays a critical role in Esoteric Buddhism in all the areas where it has flourished. He will build on research completed over the past two decades, including extensive fieldwork in India, China, and Tibet. His goal is to complete the first comprehensive original investigation of this key Esoteric Buddhist deity whose images and ritual systems united religious elites across Asia.

Said Linrothe, "Buddhism expanded across Asia in ways that both intersected and transcended traditional boundaries such as states and other political systems. Monasteries formed flourishing networks among monks, artists, and laity, sharing images and texts of Vajrasattva."

A significant form of Esoteric Buddhism, Vajrasattva embodies the ritualized identification of practitioner with enlightened being. "It collapses the difference between deity and devotee, master and disciple, emptiness and form, as well as spectator and image," said Linrothe.

He explained, "Vajrasattva is both deity with whom practitioners fuse and also the ultimate, 'real' being-state of the initiated master. Other deities can mirror deity and human, but Vajrasattva does so systematically."

The effects of Esoteric Buddhism were profound and in some cases, transformational, depending upon location. Linrothe said, "Esoteric Buddhism, for which images were inseparable from ritual and texts, inspired religious practitioners and artists as it crossed state and cultural boundaries and flowed among people and regions...In each context, groups defined and identified themselves on the basis of their privileged access to materials."

The project is concerned with the transmission of ideas and forms across geographic, cultural, and academic boundaries. "Tenuous diplomatic alliances have been forged between Indian and Tibetan studies?art historical and religious?as well as between Chinese and Japanese studies," notes Linrothe. "At a time when humanistic studies emphasize interdisciplinarity, it is still exceptional for a theme to be traced across five Asian cultures despite the utility of exploring what unites and distinguishes them."

Linrothe is particularly interested in the networks that fostered these multiple transfers, how cultural influences encouraged acceptance or alterations of ideas associated with Vajrasattva's image, and why countries such as Tibet and Japan institutionalized the Esoteric Buddhist movement, while in China and India it dissipated.

A member of the Skidmore faculty since 1992, Linrothe explored wrathful icons in India, early Tibet, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia in his Ph.D. dissertation. Over the past five years he produced five monographs and exhibition catalogs on Esoteric Buddhist art. He served as founding curator at the Rubin Museum of Art, and subsequently organized and curated Holy Madness: Portraits of Tantric Siddhas, a major international exhibition at the Rubin, which highlighted Esoteric Buddhist contacts between India and Tibet. He is trained in reading Buddhist texts, especially Chinese and Tibetan. For the Getty project, he will translate Chinese texts and Tibetan inscriptions.

While at the Getty Center next academic year, Linrothe will be part of a team of residential, visiting, and guest scholars participating in a program titled "Networks and Boundaries." International in scope, the program will foster connections among experts working on a wide range of topics. The goal of the program is to encourage cultural exchange across cultural, civilizational, ethnic, religious, and geographic boundaries.