In The Japanese Buddhist World Map, D. Max Moerman covers half a millennium of Japanese Buddhist mapmaking practices, introducing the reader to a vast number of artifacts and the contexts of their production.Chapter 1 introduces the centerpiece of the book, the earliest extant Japanese Buddhist world map, a fourteenth-century map known as Gotenjiku zu .Moerman describes the contents of the map, both in terms of its geographical extent as well as the many annotations on the map.Central to the map is the itinerary of the Chinese monk Xuanzang (602-664), marked as a red line.In chapter 2, Moerman focuses our attention on two landmasses shown on the Gotenjiku zu that are unrelated to Xuanzang and his journey: Japan, which appears in the upper right corner of the map; and Mount Potalaka, a mountain paradise, the geography of which merges with the actual pilgrimage site of Putuoshan (Zhejiang, China), well known in Japan at the time.Their addition shows how Japanese mapmakers transformed the geography of Xuanzang in order to situate themselves in the Buddhist world it represented, and emphasizes that the Gotenjiku zu is an object comprised of multiple temporal layers.Chapter 3 further contextualizes the temporality of the Gotenjiku zu by tracing its reproduction over time.Replicas would be repeatedly created down to the late nineteenth century, and Moerman identifies thirteen later versions of the Gotenjiku zu.Eleven of them are reproduced in the book, allowing the reader to easily follow Moerman's argument.Moerman contextualizes these later versions, highlighting the ways in which they correspond with and differ from each other, not only in terms of the map's text and shape of its landmasses, but also in its material and artistic aspects.Chapter 4 examines how Buddhist maps interacted with other modes of mapping the world during the Tokugawa period, showing how different world views-Buddhist and Renaissance European-were able to coexist.By the early eighteenth century, Buddhist world maps would also transform the shape of the continent and start to represent Europe in the upper left margin.These representations drew from a variety of sources, including
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