If there is meaning to the term “visual culture,” it is the webs of connection organized by images. Some images are special—they stand like mountaintops in a society, managing the flow of thought and feeling that constitutes the body of a culture. The word for this class of imagery is icon. You know an icon when you see one because of the auratic sensation it provokes: gazing at it, you are in the presence of something or someone widely revered or reviled. It’s not merely an image, a visual sign, but more. What you see in an icon is archetypal, totemic, paradigmatic, universally recognized. What you see are the edges of a life-world because whoever does not recognize the image as an icon must be an outsider or a foreigner or an unbeliever. The proof of an image’s iconicity is the aura it radiates—the sensation of the image grasping and holding your attention. I’d like to reflect on iconic aura because I believe it can tell us something important about the visual culture of spirituality.

Images of John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara, Jesus, and the most familiar pictures by Norman Rockwell all command attention because viewers recognize in them something that they and many others want to see. These are icons, the images everyone talks about, images that seem to be everywhere and always have been. Take Rockwell’s undisputed “popular culture icon,” as it is so commonly tagged, “Freedom from Want,” painted in 1943 as one of a series of four images inspired by a war-time speech of Franklin Roosevelt. Why is it an icon?

Norman Rockwell's Freedom from Want

Several reasons come to mind. First, we have seen it so many times. “We”—it’s not a private image, but one shared by millions of people who experience something common in their recognition of this image. The image bestows on people an imagined sense of their Americanness, as do many of Rockwell’s pictures. Second, its ubiquity: we see it every Thanksgiving in magazines and newspapers, on television and the Internet. When Rockwell created the picture it was not an icon of Thanksgiving, but a propagandistic hymn to the way things ought to be and would be once again when Totalitarianism was defeated on the global stage. Roosevelt defined the “freedom from want” in terms of economic relations that “will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.” After the war, in the heyday of American plenty, Rockwell’s image was recoded and became closely associated with Thanksgiving, the American high holy day of Abundance, the feast day of American civil religion. We see no religious subject per se. Rather than Puritans or Pilgrims, we witness something more generic: the meal that all Americans celebrate. This points to the third feature of Rockwell’s icon—content and style. The image presents to people what they want to see—Thanksgiving as it ought to be, grounded in warmth and sentiment, in fellowship, in good cheer, in a ritual meal served up by two pillars of benevolence: grandmother and grandfather. And the scene is limned with the skill of an illustrator’s descriptive line and a composition that lures the eye and rewards it with balance and order, all packaged with the tidiness of a fine story. In his most fondly received works, Rockwell portrays the American past with a narrative gaze that interweaves humor, wit, nostalgia, and storytelling. Or maybe it’s not the past so much as a folkloric invocation of America as it should have been.

Ironically, what you see in “Freedom from Want” is what you want, which is to say, what you don’t have, which the picture promises to deliver. Aura is the substance of iconicity, the promise that beholding offers. Like a fragrance, it tantalizes. An icon exerts allure by revealing something of what viewers seek, but not everything. Icons open the door to the person or quality we want to hold. They modulate desire, direct the traffic of yearning. We see the picture of John Lennon and recognize him as the guy on whom the eyes of millions reside, in whom an age found its leader, spokesman, prophet, the hero we adore, the writer of songs that changed your life and the lives of millions. Or we look at a picture of Hitler and recognize with a shudder the maniacal evil that is uneasily, demonically fascinating. Icons bring us into the presence of the one and only, what we take to be the bedrock, the Real. In contrast to Plato’s insistence that images could not bear the Real, the icon does precisely that, indeed, it is only in the icon that the Real becomes accessible. The Real is not the actual. It is what seems to become actual in the icon, and only there. Something streams or radiates from icons. They hemorrhage uniqueness, leak the fluid of absoluteness, which is what I mean by aura.

But we need to say more about what aura is and how it constitutes the spiritual power of icons. An image has aura when we can’t ignore it, when it commands our attention. We say “That is Che Guevara” or “There is Marilyn Monroe.” The image captures the idea of the person, or the ideal, one might say. We behold the moment that changed history, as in the photograph of the raising of the flag over Iwo Jima. We behold the face of the ideal of feminine beauty in Marilyn or the face of the hero adored throughout Latin America in Che. Note in each example that it is not the ordinary we look for in the icon. We want the extraordinary. Icons are a visual strategy for securing the really real. We do not want Norma Jeane Mortenson, but Marilyn the goddess. We do not want Che the impatient and naïve ideologue, but the Latin Apollo and Romantic visionary. We want the Idea that animated the individual, that indwelled in her or him. In effect, we want an embodiment of what is otherwise invisible and inaccessible—we want something mythical or archetypal. Seeing icons is a visual practice of producing the Real as visible. The power of images consists of their ability to show the Real. In fact, rather than a Platonic gaze on eternal forms, the icon is a construction of the Real. After all, the photo at Iwo Jima was posed. Che Guevara practiced the execution of political opponents. Norma Jeane was a deeply unhappy, drug-addicted woman. An icon distills a singular idea of the subject from the complexity and accident of an individual person. More than the actual person it pictures, an icon is about the desire that its viewers bring to it. In some cases, the person may be virtually eclipsed by his icon. Is the particularity of a man named Jesus of Nazareth visible in pictures of Jesus the Christ featuring the authorized conceptions of his messianic mission and divine nature? Historians argue over his participles while believers seek the salvator mundi. Most of my Thanksgiving dinners aren’t as gleeful as the family feast in Rockwell’s icon.

Desire for what we do not have distinguishes the icon as a way of seeing. Beholding an icon without the desire that animates the devotee’s experience results in seeing a stereotype or a truism. Other people’s icons are just that to us, as alien as other people’s religions. If you don’t want what the icon offers, you see a cliché, not the truth. Your icon, by contrast, captures the essence of someone or something that you want. The aura of that elusive reality may be called spiritual, that is, the evocation of the Real. This truth is not discerned as the validity of a proposition, but is experienced as a sensation—the feeling of seeing the real thing. Radiated by an icon, aura is the sensation of the revelation of the authentic. Spirituality and desire are inseparable. “That’s it!” or “That’s her!” people say when they see an icon, and in the recognition wonder if they might have glimpsed her—the real her.

In a sparse, basement-level room of the Unitarian Church in a small Midwestern city—let’s call it Clifton—the fifteen or so members of the Clifton sangha gather on a Wednesday evening. There is no authorized teacher, though some members have studied with Zen or Tibetan teachers. Elaine, who convenes the weekly meditation session, pulls a ten-inch bronze Buddha statue out of a cabinet and places it on a small table. She leads a short Zen chant, and the group sits in meditation facing the wall for thirty minutes, followed by a reading, then ten minutes of walking meditation. After another brief chant, the group turns toward the Buddha image and bows deeply.

O  Shariputra, form is emptiness, emptiness is form

Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form…

Across the globe, there are countless images similar to the one to which these Midwesterners bow. This one was purchased in Lhasa, Tibet, at one of the dozens of open-air vendors on the circumambulation circuit around Jokhang Temple. Pilgrims come from all over Tibet to walk or prostrate around the circuit, spinning prayer wheels and chanting mantras. During a two-week trip to China, another member of the sangha, Carl, chose this statue from hundreds of others available. The vendor tried first to offer Carl a new factory-made buddha, but he asked for one that looked older, more antique, so the vendor dutifully mussed one up a bit and brought it back the next day. Finally they settled on an older figure that, the vendor claimed, was once used in a Tibetan monastery. After the monastery was dismantled by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, it stayed in a devotee’s house for a few decades and then found its way to the open market. Carl wanted an “authentic” image rather than one made in a factory, one that was made for a spiritual purpose rather than just to sell to tourists.

According to the vendor, the image was crafted by an artisan over sixty years ago. If this is accurate, it would have sat in limbo when completed alongside the other bronze buddhas in the studio with scarves wrapped around their eyes. When they were installed in a temple, a monk would have performed a consecration ceremony that has been going on since before the common era in which the Buddha is invited to take up residence in the image. In the final stage of the ritual, the scarf is removed and the eyes are painted in. Then the Buddha can look out at the devotees who come and prostrate themselves before it, praying for a better rebirth in the next lifetime, alleviation of sickness, or success on exams.

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Carl’s buddha now finds its home in the basement at the Unitarian Church, where it is kept most of the time in a dark cabinet. On Wednesday evenings, Elaine brings it out, sets it on a makeshift altar and lights a stick of incense before it.

A few in the sangha admit that they think there may be a special quality to items that have had intimate interaction with advanced practitioners—a kind of spiritual “energy.” But no one in the group thinks that bowing before it will give them karmic merit, success in business ventures, material prosperity, or a better rebirth. They are happy that it is old and consecrated, but they don’t believe that the Buddha dwells in the statue. Its eyes are as blind as metal deep in the cold earth.

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The image’s status in Clifton, therefore, is somewhat demoted from the one it enjoyed in Lhasa. Before we invite Max Weber in to declare it disenchanted, though, let us note the new kinds of enchantment it picks up in its new home at the far lower elevations of the Midwestern prairie. The biblical prohibition against idolatry, and its cousin, the scientific naturalist prohibition against naively attributing conscious life to an inanimate collection of atoms and molecules, demarcate certain limitations to this sangha’s reverence toward any statue. But there are deep currents of western culture that predispose these modern Buddhists toward disillusionment with the promises of modernity, its technology, its factories and corporations that promise to manufacture happiness for the masses. An old bronze statue from Tibet embodies the imagined antithesis of the failed promises of techno-rational-consumerist modernity. Tibet, in fact, has held such a place in the western imagination for well over a century—the last bastion of pre-modern wisdom, isolated beyond the Himalayas, its society devoted to spiritual wisdom that some even today hope will save modern humanity from itself. Coming from the land of the snows gives it the charisma of the mysterious, the lost, the authentic. And authenticity, as Walter Benjamin noted, is only possible after it has been replaced by the regime of mechanically produced commodities (after which, it is itself offered as a commodity).

The charisma of the lost Other of modernity only goes so far, though. The Clifton Sangha, after all, is an educated bunch. Of the fifteen, four are college professors (two in the sciences), three are engineers, and all but two have college degrees. Most are not content with dreamy, New Age longing. And some are a bit uncomfortable bowing to a statue. But they have agreed to continue the practice, insisting to anyone who asks that this is not idolatry and that the image is entirely symbolic. This object is ultimately a piece of metal, like any other. Nevertheless, for them it has its own kind of enchantment because it silently speaks of the possibility that beneath or within atoms and molecules—and especially within the mind itself—there is a cosmic spirit, a consciousness infusing the whole of things that connects everything with everything else, a vast interconnected network of life that weaves everything together into unity and harmony, over-riding the countless fragmentations and contradictions of the modern world. Buddha-nature, says 13th century Zen master Dogen Zenji, is neither east nor west, north or south. It pervades everything—is everything.

One bit of matter is, therefore, as good as any other for representing this cosmic truth. Thus, Elaine says, we choose a bit that represents someone seeing into that truth—the Buddha sitting under the tree of enlightenment. Spirituality in this sense does not oppose materiality—it encompasses everything—but it disposes of local gods, gods of a particular culture, place, and time. The Buddha can be in everything but not one particular thing.

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When the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, one of the sangha members insists, Buddhists weren’t bothered at all. “They’re just pieces of stone,” he says with a shrug.

A few weeks later in my Buddhism class, I discuss the image of the Buddha and its role in various Buddhist traditions. At one point I pull a small Buddha statue out of a bag and begin to place it on the table, but it slips a bit and almost falls over, clunking heavily onto the surface. The young Thai women in the front row gasps in distress.

…form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form…

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When Carl went to Tibet, he couldn’t help feel somewhat disappointed at the amount of ritual, liturgy, image-worship, and “superstitious” practices that he witnessed. He saw no one meditating. The reverence they seemed to show for the large buddha statues in the temples disconcerted him. Many Tibetans, he concluded, practice a kind of “cultural” Buddhism. It’s just a part of their culture, so they do it. Spirituality, as Elaine, Carl, and many other Western Buddhists understand it, transcends “culture.” It is the encounter with the universal. This puts them in an ambivalent relationship to even Buddhist culture.

Many western practitioners in the twentieth century have understood Buddhism as a matter of transcending cultural conditioning. Alan Watts insisted on a distinction between the “acquired self” and “your genuine, deepest self, not the self which depends on family and conditioning, on learning and experience, or any kind of artifice” but on Buddha-nature itself—the “original face” of the famous Zen koan. For Watts, Zen requires a person to realize that the “ego, the self which he has believed himself to be, is nothing but a pattern of habits or artificial reaction.” As Buddhism has been enfolded into western spirituality, it has often operated on some version of the idea, derived largely from Romanticism and modernism, that:

within each human being there is an individuality lying in potentiality, which seeks an occasion for realization but is held in the toils of the rules, beliefs, and roles which society imposes . . . that the real state of the self is very different from the acquired baggage which institutions like families, schools, and universities impose. To be “true to oneself” means . . . discovering what is contained in the uncontaminated self, the self which has been freed from the encumbrance of accumulated knowledge, norms, and ideals handed down by previous generations.

The East Asian conception of Buddha-nature—all-pervasive and embedded in each individual—is drawn magnetically to this indigenous western notion of transcendent selfhood, sometimes intertwining indistinguishably with it. Buddhist societies in East Asia, however, have generally been decidedly non-individualistic, seeing individual selfhood as deeply embedded in and dependent on social relations. Freedom from conditioning doesn’t mean freedom from society and its influences but from past karma. Universality doesn’t always override particularity.

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The Buddha statue of the Clifton sangha, therefore, displays the antinomies of its new function in its new home. It is an undeniably cultural product of another culture, deployed to symbolize the transcendence of one’s own culture toward a universal spirituality that overcomes, yet includes, all cultures.

The space for this particular articulation of Buddhism is created by specific cultural currents in the modern West: Romantics, Idealists, Transcendentalists, and their mid-twentieth-century counter-cultural successors, all of whom emphasize exploration of the deep interior of the mind, God as an all-encompassing spirit in nature, spontaneity, creativity, and suspicion of mechanized reproduction; Protestant Christianity, which eschews idolatry, privileges texts, looks askance at priesthoods and hierarchies; Enlightenment rationalism, which promises insight into the nature of things through careful observation and thought; psychology, which encourages introspection and exploration of the mind; and global capitalism, which allows for the flow of commodities newly valued in the West, like our Buddha image, by those who can afford them.

Thus Buddhism takes on yet another incarnation, blending with the indigenous cultures of the West, the United States, the Midwest, and Clifton. Even here, though, it turns out to be one incarnation among many. For our Buddha image unexpectedly finds its own kin scattered about—down the street in a temple where Vietnamese immigrants and their children bow and pray for good grades; in the backyard garden of a house in the suburbs; on a poster on the wall of a head shop downtown. The buddhas proliferate, mingle with the local gods, invite reverent or suspicious gazes, and take unexpected places on shelves, altars, and nooks throughout North America.