Prison Buddha

In 1942-1943, a Japanese immigrant named Kiino Morio carved a statue of a Buddha in hard, dense wood during his then indefinite imprisonment in an American concentration camp. 

This description of a single historical moment begins with an understandable, even transcendent act—an individual created a statue of a religious deity—but its syntax leads us to the terror of racist and unjust imprisonment in the United States. In the “land of the free.” How, then, are we to fathom such a Buddha? What sort of past does this statue make present? Should we ask as well: toward what sort of future—religious, political, and ecological—might Kiino’s prison Buddha help lead us?  

Greg Levine is Professor Emeritus of the Department of History of Art, UC Berkeley. His current book projects are A Tree & A Buddha: Imagining Arboreal Humanities, and Buddha Heads: Fragments and Landscapes. His previous books are Long Strange Journey: On Modern Zen, Zen Art, and Other Predicaments (2017), and Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures of a Zen Monastery (2005).