Cloned Buddhas: mapping out the DNA of Buddhist heritage preservation

ABSTRACT

This article considers how technological innovation transforms the value of religious materiality in Buddhist heritage reproduction projects in Japan. To illustrate the religiously and politically charged landscape of heritage care, I focus on the reproduction technologies developed by the Tokyo University of Arts researchers to create highly precise replicas of Buddhist heritage. One such ‘super clone’ replica of Japan’s National Treasure homed at Hōryūji temple in Nara – a 1400-year-old ‘Shaka Triad’ sculpture of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha – was put on display at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum in Japan in April 2021. The ‘cloned’ statue is a highly precise copy that goes beyond the practices of exact duplication. With the use of 3D measurement, digital modelling technologies, and advanced casting techniques, this cloned religious heritage object transports the viewer back in time to the aesthetic moment of creation and allows them to experience anew the object’s affective presence as crafted centuries ago. In drawing on this example and its potential to intervene in other religious heritage reproduction projects globally, I argue that technology transforms religious heritage to generate alternative socio-economic afterlives of Buddhist objects. By analysing the scientific narratives and processes of heritage care, I show how the religious heritage reproduction is where the aesthetic, political, and economic dimensions of Buddhist material futures are imagined and realized. It is also a space of contestation between devotion, science, and memory-oriented practices of care in transnational heritage preservation.

KEYWORDS:

• ‘Super clone cultural properties’
• heritage reproduction
• the Shaka Triad
• heritage scientification
• Buddhist materiality
• Japan

Introduction

On 10 April 2021, the Nagoya Prefecture Art Museum reopened its doors to the public with a launch of the ‘Super Clone Cultural Properties Exhibition’ (sūpākurōn bunkazai ten). The exhibition, promoted by the slogan of ‘Connecting to the Future’ (mirai ni tsunagu), cantered the reproductions of predominantly Buddhist artefacts designated with the national status of a Cultural Property (bunkazai). It included the fabrications of a 1400-year-old ‘Shaka Triad’ (Shaka Sanzonzō, 釈迦三尊像) sculpture of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, which is one of Japan’s National Treasures (kokuhō) homed at Hōryūji temple in Nara. The ‘super clone’, a gold-plated fabrication of the centuries-old original statue, was the gleaming star of the exhibition.

The terms ‘super clone’ and ‘clone’ used to characterize the exhibited statue and other Buddhist heritage replicas included in the exhibition referred to the specific reproductive technology deployed to create them. They are not only the exact replicas of timeworn heritage statues. Rather, they are fabrications that recreate the objects’ aesthetics and materiality as art historians thought they had been in the moment of the original creation. As explained by the research team, they combine art history, craft, and restorative practices, as well as the use of technological interventions including 3D printing and digital photography techniques to ‘reproduce the texture, shape, material, colour and even the cultural context of the original object’ (Miyasako 2018, p. 845).¹

The technological advancement in the arena of cultural heritage from the 1990s and early 2000s, termed by heritage scholars and practitioners alike as a ‘digital revolution’, has promised to ‘advance the field in much needed areas of documentation, modelling and analyses, and the presentation and interpretation of heritage sites’ (Wong and Quintero 2019, p. 1145). Since then, it has only grown in prominence regarding the reliability of instrumentation, accuracy, speed, lowering of the costs, and innovation in physical and digital fabrication. This technology is therefore often seen as a solution to conservation objectives due to its archival capacities to offer alternative access and, in turn, alleviate pressures from mass tourism, and augment the experience of the heritage.

Heritage ‘cloning’ as a reproductive technology is one of the most recent articulations of such developments which has potential to influence secular and religious experiences of Buddhist heritage. It has been developed, patented, and registered as a trademark in November 2016 by the Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) and the research team led by Miyasako Masaaki,² and supported by the Ministry of Education, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) via their Centre of Innovation (COI) programme. They have been working on the ‘Clone Cultural Properties’ project since 2013. Since its conception, the project’s objective has been heritage preservation that ‘can resolve the tension between access and display capabilities of and the conservation responsibilities towards cultural properties’ (Miyasako et al. 2022, p. 12). Although 3D printing, for example, has been used in other Buddhist heritage projects, including in Japan, for example, in the ‘Barrier-Free Buddhism’ initiative at the Wakayama Prefectural Museum where replicas of religious statues are used to enable access (Graf 2022), heritage cloning seeks to ‘transcend’ the practice of faithful imitation in service of access and conservation efforts. Rather, it aspires to evolve the process of preservation to recreate ‘the object’s spiritual and affective qualities to generate an emotional response in the audience’ (Miyasako 2018, p. 847).

In Japan and elsewhere, preservation is one of the most pervasive categories in heritage. It has been the site of robust conceptual debates on the responsibilities, practices, and politics of care (Daly and Winter 2012, Brumann and Berliner 2016, Rots and Teeuwen 2020a, Wang et al. 2021), as well as the ethics of memory and practical preoccupations with who, how, on whose behalf, and for what purpose ought to perform preservation of heritage (Silverman 2011, Byrne 2014, Meskell 2015, Matsuda and Mengoni 2016, Meskell 2019, Mozaffari and Jones 2020). The use of technology in heritage care and fabrication has therefore become a critical site of opportunity and tension (Chen 2020, Jo et al. 2020, Li et al. 2010), particularly in relation to debates on access (e.g. Paladini et al. 2019), authenticity (e.g. Wong and Quintero 2019), and the damage and destruction caused to Buddhist heritage by violent conflict and natural disasters (e.g. Toubekis et al. 2017). At the time of ever greater preoccupation with technology, automation and AI that have been shaping the processes of cultural production (Andrejevic et al. 2023), the contemporary moment also reveals a transformative significance for the way we imagine and practice heritage care, especially in relation to religious heritage as a space of contestation between devotion, science, and memory-oriented practices of care.

Religious heritage reproduction is one site where the aesthetic, political, and economic dimensions of Buddhist material futures are imagined and realized. In this article, I consider the case of the Shaka Triad statue and its cloned replicas to argue that heritage cloning is a form of religious heritage-making which derives its value from the processes of scientification of religious heritage, facilitated by augmented and affective experience of history and its religious value. While it produces religious value, it simultaneously distances a Buddhist heritage object from the religious sphere. If heritage-making, as Aike Rots (2019) argues, secularizes the object before it transforms it into a new kind of ‘public sacred’ and a consumable and objectifiable thing under the tourist gaze (Urry 2002), heritage cloning intensifies these processes of secularization and public sacralization by enhancing the value of the cloned replica through the process-intense technologies of reproduction. While such technologies do not make the cloned religious heritage less powerful or valuable, the registers of value and authority between religious and secular spheres differ.

Therefore, my aim is to consider how technological interventions, the cloning technologies in particular, transform the value of religious materiality and memory in Buddhist heritage reproduction projects in Japan. An ever-expanding body of literature focusing on ritual ensouling of statues and reliquaries (e.g. Davis 1997, Horton 2007, Swearer 2004, Venkatesan 2014) and on the networks of patronage and devotion that enable these projects within specific traditions of practice (e.g. Chiu 2017, De Mersan 2012, Ruppert 2000, Sharf and Sharf 2001) attest to the fact that, for scholars of religion and religious practitioners, the question of religious value remains a pertinent one. Heritage-making, heritage cloning in particular, reveals even more complex networks of valuation and cares where religious objects enter the arena of art and culture. Building on the rich body of scholarship investigating objects and their value as ritual and display objects (Freedberg 1989, Gell 1988, Sejrup et al. 2023, Sullivan 2015), researchers of religious material culture (e.g. Davis 1997, Kendall 2021, Morgan 2010a, Rambelli 2007) and anthropologists of materiality more broadly (Appadurai 1986, Kopytoff 1986) advocated recognizing the agency of objects and their processual value as things with rich biographies that enable them to constantly move between different domains of social construction and different regimes of value. This article is an intervention into such debates to consider cloned Buddhist statues as religious heritage agents in their own right within the religiously and politically charged landscape of heritage care.

I draw on data collected via remote interviews with the members of the Tokyo Geidai research team in August-September 2021 and March-April 2022,³ as well as archival work with the audio-visual and written materials produced by the research team and the media, and participant observation during site visits at the Tokyo University of Arts and Hōryūji in April 2023. My focus is on the potential of technology to transform religious heritage and to generate alternative socio-economic afterlives of Buddhist materiality in-between past–present–future devotional and heritage worlds. Following on from the overview of the ‘Clone Cultural Properties’ project, the narratives surrounding it, and the discussion of heritage-making in Japan, I focus on analysing the scientific language and process used to define the practice of heritage ‘cloning’. The ‘cloning’ trope applied to the context of sacred heritage objects reveals new dimensions of identification with and separation from the sacred, while opening a possibility for new regimes of authenticity to emerge. I consider the value of such objects vis-à-vis their new material manifestations and the fabrication labour. In the process, I consider the implications of the project for the arena of heritage and science diplomacy to reflect on the complexities of utilizing such technology for intervening into the world of heritage practice locally and globally.

Buddha ‘clones’ of Hōryūji

As I stood in the museum space of the Tokyo University of the Arts during my visit in April 2023, the ‘Super Clone’ of the Shaka Triad dazzled me with its golden presence. The gold-plated copper statue with its immaculate hand-painted lapis lazuli head of hair curls was an augmented, highly precise replica of the original Shaka Triad statue dwelling in the Kondō Main Hall of Hōryūji in Nara Prefecture, which I was planning to visit the following week. It was a replica of what the original would have looked like during Japan’s Asuka Period (538–710). In the absence of the original, my eyes travelled next to the exact replica of the aged statue that occupied the space on the opposite side of the display platform to the left of its ‘super clone’ kin. Positioned in the centre between both clones was the glass-like see-through shimmering replica of the Shaka Triad. As I learnt later, it was the ‘hyper’ version of the same statue made of a mix of glass and transparent acrylic. As such, there are currently four versions of the Shaka Triad sculpture in existence: from the original statue dwelling in Nara to the precise aged ‘clone’ replica, the golden ‘super clone’ fabrication evoking the past with its illuminous presence, and the transparent ‘hyper’ version with its glassy eyes turned to the future of heritage care (Figure 1). Every single one of these fabrications represents a different narrative of heritage care that the heritage cloning is looking to advance.

Figure 1. The three cloned versions of the Shaka Triad sculpture on display at the Tokyo University of the Arts, including the golden ‘super clone’ fabrication (left), the transparent ‘hyper’ version (centre), and the precise replica (right). The image used with the permission of the ‘Super Clone Cultural Properties’ research team. ©Tokyo University of the Arts / ©東京藝術大学.

The ‘Clone Cultural Properties’ project began in 2013, supported by the MEXT and several industry partners including private corporations such as Yamaha, Soft Bank Robotics, JVC Kenwood, and public institutions such as the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. The cloning technologies were developed by the project’s researchers with a clear objective of resolving the tensions between conservation and public access to cultural heritage that might be inaccessible due to destruction caused by conflict and natural disasters, as well as due to concerns over the deterioration of the objects. While the researchers on the project acknowledge that ‘cultural properties are unique and inherently their authenticity is impossible to duplicate’ (Miyasako 2018, p. 845), they have developed heritage cloning as a way of (re)producing highly precise replicas of important cultural properties in Japan and beyond.

In 2017, when the researchers created the exact replica of the aged statue at Hōryūji, they relied on 3D measurements and artisan restorations techniques. The original statue represents a seated Shaka Nyorai (Skt. Shakyamuni Tathāgata, the historical Buddha) flanked by two attendants, Yakushi Nyorai (Skt. Bhaiṣajyaguru, the Buddha of healing and medicine) to its right and Amida Buddha (Skt. Amitābha, The Buddha of Infinite Life or Light) to its left. Several elements of the statue are missing, including the damage caused by the fire which ravaged Hōryūji in January 1949 and destroyed the Buddhist Murals lining the walls of the Kondō. In fact, as part of the cloning process, the Tokyo Geidai researchers recreated all twelve Mural Paintings, which in April 2019 could be viewed by the public at the Kyushu Geibunkan. For the research team, cloning as a precise practice of heritage reproduction constitutes an artistic and scientific process that imitates the presence and offers a potential for multiple life trajectories for the Buddhist heritage objects.

The next step in the evolution of the Tokyo Geidai cloning technology was to surpass the practices of precise duplication of age-old Buddhist statues. By 2021, the super-cloned Shaka Triad was put on public display in its timeless grandeur at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum. With the use of 3D measurement, digital modelling technologies, as well as advanced metal casting and woodwork techniques, the super clone Shaka Triad statue was fabricated to transport the viewer to the moment of creation and allow them to experience anew the statue’s (and the Buddhas’) affective presence and splendour as crafted centuries ago by Tori Busshi, the original credited creator.

As such, the ‘super clone’ replica has the same shiny gold appearance as when it was first created in 623. The difference between the two clones is staggering, especially when placed within the same display space. Apart from copying what was left of the statue, the researchers merged digital technology (high-definition digital camera, three-dimensional measurements, and a digital modelling system) to recreate the parts that have been damaged and cannot be measured (Miyasako et al. 2022, pp. 46–49). Starting with a 3D printed prototype, the researchers used advanced X-ray fluorescence analysis of the metal composition and ratios in the metal parts to improve the casting accuracy. They also drew extensively on more analogue expertise from art history research and handcrafting techniques including wood and metal carving and gold leaf painting.

As a result, they succeeded in restoring various elements that have been claimed by time, including the flaming halo with numerous deities in attendance, an element that is completely missing in the original and its clone. Further examples of enhancement include reconstruction of all lost or chipped rahotsu (curls of hair) on the head of the statue’s central figure. In the end, three distinct kinds of rahotsu were 3D printed, attached by hand to the Shaka’s head, and hand painted. Furthermore, byakugo (a small ball of hair) on the Shaka’s forehead has been restored and appears in the ‘super clone’ replica. Apart from various additions of missing parts, there are also some alterations: the positions of the two smaller figures flanking the Shakyamuni were reversed: Yakushi had been placed on the left (instead of the right) and Amida now features on the right of the Shaka statue. The decision to reverse the order was made based on the overall shape of the statue, rather than historical detail. As an ultimate step the ‘super clone’ had been furnished with its gold-plated appearance and hand-painted facial expression.

The objective for the super clone process is to ‘restore the past’ (Miyasako et al. 2022, p. 4) to its past glory in ways that not only imitates the material presence and processes of fabrication but also the intentions and affects of the original makers of the heritage object. Far from the notion of ‘palliative curation’ proposed by Caitlin DeSilvey (2017, p. 161) to describe processes of heritage care for the objects beyond salvation that ought to be left alone for the gradual deterioration to advance, cloning technology invites audiences to celebrate not value of decay and the nostalgic celebration of past experienced as such. Rather, it draws us towards the kinds of value that are generated through the processes of labour and affective encounters with the objects (Freedberg 1989). With the use of 3D measurement, digital modelling technologies, and advanced casting techniques, the super clone Buddha statue in particular, intends to transport the viewer back in time to the moment of its creation and let them experience anew the Buddhist heritage objects’ affective presence and splendour as crafted centuries ago. I therefore contend that such value implies affect-centred understanding of Buddhist history and heritage, oriented towards bodily attunement. As such it must be allowed to become relational and allow people to engage in diverse social relations and ‘forms of sacred imagination that structure their relations to the divine’ (Morgan 2010b, p. 12) (re)presented in the original and cloned objects. I agree with Rots (2019) that such trajectories of heritage-making establish a new category of ‘public sacred’ oriented towards not only re-sacralization of heritage objects but also to the authoritative presence they are potentially able to claim as incarnations of the original sacred object.

The case of the hyper clone of the Shaka Triad is an example that stretches the category of heritage preservation through reproduction. It represents a more abstract copy of the original. I use the term copy in parentheses here as the glass-acrylic hyper clone retains only partial verisimilitude, an appearance of being real. The Tokyo Geidai researchers see their hyper clone creation as an opportunity to imagine the future of religious heritage that retains referential features to the original (it follows the structural frameworks of the clone rather than the enhanced version of the super clone) but ultimately envisions an alternative materiality for the Buddhist heritage object, as it stops being the ‘representation’ and becomes the ‘presentation’ of the object by imitating realness (Freedberg 1989, pp. 197–199). The said realness is asserted through similarity and the assertion of the divergent present and future. It poses a pressing question whether heritage cloning constitutes an interference with heritage-making or reinforces it as it relies on the legitimacy derived from the provenance.

The terminology used by the Tokyo Geidai research team to describe their preservation practice is the process of cloning and reproducing the ‘DNA of art’. By combining the ‘analogue’ art practices and science technology innovation, their aim is to go beyond conservation and fabrication of the original heritage objects. Rather, they are developing a system of referential objects which can assert and derive value from each other, as much as from their engagement with their communities. For Birgit Meyer (2005, p. 160), ‘remediation (…) refers to the ways in which different media relate to, and indeed, quote each other’. The reference points here are other media, not their content per se. This implies coexistence of interrelated, yet separate media. The nature of the cloned objects as much as the language of cloning alone implies that the objective of the project is to actualize the alternative life trajectories for the heritage object’s whose ‘artistic DNA’ it taps into, thus affirming the authority of the cloned statues. I return to the discussion of the scientific language of cloning applied to heritage later, but it is important to highlight here that heritage objects are social beings ‘whose identities are not fixed once and for all at the moment of fabrication’ (Davis 1997, pp. 7–8). Every copy of the Shaka Triad has an agenda and a life trajectory of its own, partially dependant on the agency of their creators and partially open to the heritage object’s own material and affective agency, and the responses it is likely to garner.

Individually and collectively, the clone Buddhas of Hōryūji represent another potential ‘taxonomic moment’ (Clifford 1989) in the modern history of heritage care. Drawing on scholarship informed by Hobsbawm and Ranger’s ‘invention of tradition’ (2012 [1983]), Brumann (2012, p. 2) argues that the ‘attention has shifted away from the past as it ‘really was’ to the way in which present-day interests construct the past in their own image’. The patented cloning technology constitutes another shift in focus towards aesthetic beauty and craft in heritage, rather than the preoccupations with the divine presence of the deities that ensoul the original cloned objects.⁴ The technological treatment of the past and the sacred reveals the present preoccupation of heritage-makers in Japan and elsewhere with technologically enabled heritage encounters. To understand how technological innovation transforms the value of religious materiality and memory in Buddhist heritage reproduction projects in Japan, it is crucial to unravel the scientific language of heritage cloning and its mechanisms of valuation. However, before I address these two aspects, I want to place them within the broader context of heritage-making practices in Japan.

Heritage-making in Japan

While the clone Buddhas were touring various art museums across Japan, the original Shaka Triad statue stood in the centre of the raised platform at the Great Kondō of Hōryūji, partially shaded from the curious eyes of the visitors by the ever-dusky light inside the Main Hall (Figure 2). It stood behind a wooden and iron wired wall, preventing visitors from approaching too closely. When I visited in April 2023 and got to stand face to face with the original statue, I could just decipher the gentle presence of time-worn golden platting on the right cheek and chin of the Buddha and a sudden speckle of gold above the left eye and in the corner of the mouth. It stood in the quiet of the hall, calm and patient. In front of the Shaka Triad, there was an altar with an offering of what looked like green pine tree branches. Below the altar platform, at the floor level of the hall, stood a small table with incense, Buddhist rosary beads, two partially burnt candles and the sutra prayer book used by the priests in charge of the temple. The original Shaka statue is flanked not only by the two attendants incorporated into the original sculpture, but also by a host of other protective deities positioned to the right and the left of the statue and by a golden cage containing the Lotus Sutra and protecting the statue from the back with the teachings of the Dharma.

Figure 2. The original Shaka Triad statue at the Great Kondō of Hōryūji, Nara Prefecture, Japan. The image by the author, April 2023.

As I paused to take notes and sketch the space around me, two groups of people stopped in front of the Shaka Triad. The first group included a pair of tourists who came and sighed: ‘Oh well, it is really just a museum now, right (maa, bijutsukan ja nai ka)?’ The next group of visitors, however, paused and offered prayers to the Buddha. One of the petitioning men asked his companion: ‘What are you praying for?’ He whispered with a smile: ‘For enlightenment (satori no tame)’, and then focused on investigating the remains of the golden leaf on the statue. Those reactions point to an important tension in the development and realities of heritage-making in Japan. Buddhist temples are simultaneously museological and devotional spaces (Suzuki 2007, pp. 129–130).

Temple-museum and Buddhist heritage

The temple-museum connection is particularly apparent in the Japanese context. Apart from the Shaka Triad, Hōryūji is home to over 2300 important cultural and historical structures and articles, including nearly 190 that have been designated as National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties. In December of 1993, Hōryūji, as a ‘unique storehouse of the world’s Buddhist culture’, became first in Japan to be awarded the UNESCO World Heritage status. Yui Suzuki (2007) helps us understand how Buddhist devotional icons came to be perceived as objects for museological display. She traces this transformation to the premodern forms of display (kaichō or degaichō, ‘opening of the curtains’) within the temple settings as means of devotional practice, proselytizing activities, and fundraising events,⁵ as well as the development of modern cultural heritage legislation that institutionalized devotional objects as art for public display. Temple ‘airings’, when objects stored in temple repositories were exhibited, also created an atmosphere that likened Buddhist icons to objects of artistic, historical, and cultural significance. This set the stage for the creation of temple museums, including Hōryūji’s treasure museum established in 1941, and the advancement of the heritage preservation laws starting with the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties passed in 1950. The 1949 fire that destroyed the ancient murals in Hōryūji accelerated the enactment of the Law, the original intention of which was to preserve Japanese heritage that without the government’s protection would decline and fall into ruin.

Consequently, Suzuki notes (2007, p. 131), ‘the public perception of temple treasures, particularly those of devotional worship, shifted from predominantly religious to an emphasis on the aesthetic and cultural value of the objects’. Svetlana Alpers (1991) refers to this as the ‘museum effect’: a mode of seeing things where the public is encouraged by the ways objects are displayed to pay close visual attention. This mode of seeing does not involve touching. It frames objects as sophisticated culture of the past. However, as Crispin Paine (2013) observes, museumification of the object is strikingly similar with the process of sacralization or resacralization as identified by Rots (2019) as one of the triggering dynamics in the processes of heritage-making in East Asia. In other words, it constitutes a way to make the object sacred as it removes it from the mundane world, sets it apart physically and discursively, and presents it anew as a public non-negotiable symbol of communal unity (Rots and Teeuwen 2020b, p. 5).

The heritage cloning of Hōryūji’s Shaka Triad constitutes another stage in such processes of heritage-making by expanding the category of heritage preservation and further blurring of the boundaries between the secular and religious spheres in Japan and globally. As Rots (2019) shows, the category of heritage has long transformed worship sites, ritual practices, and, I might add, religious material histories. In Japan, since 1990s, the investment of the Japanese government, entrepreneurs, educators, and NGOs have supported the preservation, production, and promotion of heritage. ‘Clone Cultural Properties’ is just one of the latest examples of such an investment and collaborations between various stakeholders invested in validating and popularizing certain material histories and attesting to their national and international legitimacy.

Heritage-making and the ‘public sacred’

Scholars of heritage in Asia have shown how cultural heritage is continuously made and remade (Brumann 2012, Matsuda and Mengoni 2016, Rots and Teeuwen 2020a). Removing a designated sacred object of worship from a temple setting and diminishing it religious potency constitutes a real conundrum for the Buddhist temples and practitioners, for whom religious objects are manufactured as sensory objects that can be socially shared and circulated. This circulation involves them being ‘displayed, hidden, disguised, forgotten, destroyed, re-created’ (Morgan 2010b, p. 14). Heritage-making, while processual, attempts to stabilize the designated object and can sometimes mean that it will become divorced from its temporal moment and spatial circumstances, which characterizes the tensions between the religious and secular spheres of the heritage-making.

Heritage cloning appears to offer a potential for keeping the sacred objects within the devotional setting and facilitating their circulation within the public realm of heritage. As Aike Rots (2019) argues in his discussion of the category of ‘heritage’ in East Asia, heritage-making constitutes two de facto processes. On the one hand, we see the deprivatization and consequential secularization of religious objects and sites which reconceives them as public property (Rots 2019, pp. 159–160). On the other hand, it enables new processes of sacralization that imagine heritage objects as a new kind of ‘public sacred’. The negotiation of the boundaries of the heritage objects’ ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ identities are of particular importance in Japan as the category of heritage remains closely aligned with the religious contexts in Japan.

Concurrently, the preservation of religious heritage occupies an ambiguous space in Japanese legal frameworks due to the strict secularism of the Japanese state.⁶ Article 89 of the Japan’s 1947 constitution clearly states that ‘no public money … shall be expended or appropriated for the use, benefit or maintenance of a religious institution or association’ (Article 89). Heritage preservation and its various interactions, including the ‘Clone Cultural Properties’ project, entails a process of ‘discursive secularisation’ (Rots 2017) where the religious nature of objects and sites is downplayed, transforming them into public property that can be funded by the state. As noted earlier, this is important for understanding how the heritage cloning projects are funded and the complexities that emerge when these technologies cross national borders.

Authenticity in practice

The final characteristic of heritage-making in Japan that requires mention relates to the notion of authenticity. Masahiro Ogino (2016) highlights two important aspects of heritage management in Japan: the practice of bringing the past up to date in the present (‘logic of actualisation’) and the preservation of the present. Such understanding of authenticity and heritage-making aligns with what David Lowenthal calls ‘public approval of fabrication’ (1998, p. 7) and ‘a declaration of faith in the past’ (1998, p. 8) whereby he suggests that heritage must not be confused with history because heritage arena is indeed a space for affective exaggerations and omissions.⁷ In fact, Lowenthal (1998, p. 7) suggests that heritage not only exaggerates and omits, but also ‘candidly invents and frankly forgets, and thrives on ignorance and error’. In other words, heritage-making is a creative space where authenticity must not necessarily align with factual accuracy and leaves doors and windows open for recognition of heritage value via narrative, materiality, and craft.

Japan’s approach to heritage care led to the redefinition of the notion of authenticity through the 1994 Nara Conference on Authenticity. It opened a possibility of acknowledging and valuing heritage as a process rather than as a static category and challenging the Eurocentric notions of authenticity as a category of legitimation in the preservation, production, and promotion of heritage. Instead, we are seeing a push for recognition of heritage as ‘lived culture’ (Stovel 2008), beyond the Eurocentric stone bias. Nara document recognizes the culture-specific nature of the concept of authenticity that sets out to bridge the conceptual and practical gaps between universalism of heritage and cultural relativism. For example, the periodic reconstruction tradition (shikinen sengu) at the Ise Shrine in Mie Prefecture takes place every twenty years to preserve the architectural style of the site not by restoring the wooden structures susceptible to decay, but by preserving the traditional technologies needed to build it. Such an understanding of heritage care emphasizes its value and authenticity derived from the materials, labour, and methods used in the reconstruction. The ‘Clone Cultural Properties’ project is an intervention within this sphere of heritage care, reproduction, and authenticity. Equally, it challenges the existing frameworks of heritage appraisal, demanding more capacious regimes of valuation in reproduction that allow to reimagine the value of the past while obscuring the affective value of decay.

Beyond preservation: DNA of heritage cloning

The ‘Clone Cultural Properties’ project utilizes powerful scientific tropes, such as cloning and DNA copying, to convey the value of temporal and material continuity in the practices of heritage care advanced by the project. In our conversation back in November 2021, Professor Miyasako explained that the driving idea behind the project is the sustainability of cultural heritage and ‘the desire to pass on the memory of cultural heritage for longer’, mitigating against the destruction and deterioration of cultural heritage. While the ‘poster objects’ of the project are the multiple Buddha clones of Hōryūji, the research team has been involved in the cloning and reproduction of other Buddhist objects including the Hōryūji’s destroyed Mural Paintings in the Main Hall, the reconstruction of the ceiling painting in one of the caves of the Great Buddha of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, the Murals of the Gubyaukgyi Temple in Myanmar, as well as the Murals and the Cross-legged Statue of the Maitreya Bodhisattva from the Gunhuang Mogao Caves in China. As such, Buddhist heritage objects are an important aspect of the teams’ work, especially objects destroyed by conflict or natural disasters.

I suggest that this choice is not random and recalls Japan’s interest in a pan-Asian common Buddhist heritage, which goes back to the early twentieth century. As Aki Toyoyama (2012, pp. 339–440) observes regarding Japanese government’s involvement in the restoration projects at Ajanta in India, such interests developed in tandem with the rise of modernity in Japan. Okakura Kakuzō (1862–1913), whose writings are considered an early expression of pan-Asianism, argued that the adaptation of objects from other cultures, particularly Buddhist ones, was integral for what evolved into and what he catalogued as Japanese art (Tanaka 1994). Promoting the universality of Asian cultural modes, particularly Buddhism, constitutes a form of orientalism.⁸ It valorizes the spiritual connection with the past through Buddhism by accentuating the narrative of spiritual essence that unfolds from India to Japan and finds its expression in the spiritual and material spread of Buddhism.⁹ Professor Miyasako makes an intentional reference to the importance of maintaining the cultural network of practice that can reflect ‘the shared DNA of Buddhist art’ and highlights the important role that Japan might play in the process as a nation with ‘a long history of the culture of imitation (utsushi no bunka)’ (Miyasako 2018, p. 846). There are two aspects worth highlighting here: how, from the Japanese heritage perspective, the DNA of the Buddhist art is imagined as a shared heritage across Asia, and how Japan, as a ‘master imitator’ is best equipped to advance the practices of heritage care beyond preservation of objects.

Political formations

Since 1992, the Japanese government has provided Official Development Assistance (ODA) loans to a number of Buddhist heritage preservation projects abroad. Heritage diplomacy has become recognized as an effective and valuable tool for promoting Japanese national interests abroad and accumulating ‘soft power’ (Akagawa 2015). Overall, since the 1990s, Japanese diplomatic efforts have focused on promoting ‘traditional culture’ and ‘heritage’ to both domestic and international audiences. This has been reflected in the heavy governmental investment in heritage projects including the race to secure several UNESCO World Heritage designations (e.g. see Rots and Teeuwen 2020a). The support of heritage cloning represents another articulation of further ambitions to advance Japan’s influence in the heritage arena globally by means of scientific and heritage diplomacy.

Although Japan has never had any of its sites or objects on The List of World Heritage in Danger, it is an active player within this space. In 2016, the ‘Clone Cultural Properties’ research team has fabricated the replicas of murals destroyed by earthquakes in the Gubyaukgyi Temple in Myanmar. The team also continues to support the restorative efforts concerning the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan destroyed by the Taliban forces in 2001. The most recent exhibition of the ‘cloned’ technological reproduction of Dunhuang caves in China has been made available to the Japanese public at the Hirayama Ikuo Museum in Hiroshima Prefecture. Such examples of Japan’s heritage interventions are numerous, and the Tokyo Geidai research team anticipates becoming involved in similar technological reproduction projects of Buddhist heritage in the future.

Heritage care systems such as cloning are necessarily political endeavours motivated by the power structures of heritage diplomacy. The poster cases for the advancement and funding of the project became heritage sites and objects damaged by armed conflict and natural disasters. Through such examples like the Bamiyan Buddhas, the narrative of loss is politicized and operationalized. It represents a persuasive trend in heritage storytelling where we can now observe a shift from cultural branding to technological influence. For example, the nomination and subsequent inscription of the ‘Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution’ on the UNESCO World Heritage List can be read as celebrating Japan as a nation with a long history for technological advancement (Hølleland 2020, p. 56). It reflects a shift in the foreign policy of branding Japan as a cultural nation from the early 1990s onwards (Akagawa 2015, Akagawa 2016), signalling a move away from Japan’s former passivity and towards an image of technological sophistication (Meskell 2018, p. 152, Akagawa and Nagatomo 2020).

In recent years, science diplomacy has emerged as a new area of focus for policy makers, including in Japan with the advancement of the ‘Science and Technology Diplomacy’ programme developed since 2007, which has been shaping the fields of political science, International Relations, and science and technologies studies. The orientation of the Science and Technology (S&T) programme in Japan is to establish Japan as a producer and innovator in this space (López-Aranguren 2023). This also shapes the agenda for universities and research institutions aiming to participate in domestic and international policy making (Kunkel 2021, p. 474). As noted, Japan has long invested in heritage diplomacy and international conservation projects. With the advancement of the science agenda, heritage cloning is where science diplomacy enters the well-established arena of heritage diplomacy, providing Japan with the discursive and practical tools for shaping the global and local heritage agenda, and to influence the role of Buddhist heritage within the secular arena. As such, projects such as the ‘Clone Cultural Properties’ are an outcome of such reconfigurations and are bound to redefine our relationship with the processes of heritage-making.

Material formations

In fact, the creation of the ‘new’ is of value in such heritage-making, as the process of cloning does not always imply making an identical copy. Cloning in strictly scientific terms refers to the biological process of producing individual organisms with identical genomes, either by natural or artificial means. Therefore, a clone is an organism which is made from another organism’s cells that are the same, in which case the genetic information (DNA) of the original and of the clone are identical (Harris 2004, pp. 2–6). According to Professor Miyasako, he came up with an idea of cloning by observing the Yoshino cherry trees in Tokyo’s Ueno Park. Yoshino cherry, now ubiquitous across Japan, is famed to have been grafted from a single tree. He credits his use of the term ‘cloning’ to the inspiration derived from that process of grafting, whereby a new plant is created from a twig. This reveals that the scientific metaphors of cloning are intentional and that he sees cloning as a mechanism for transcending imitation that implies faithful reproduction of shapes, textures, and materials, which can be achieved partially thanks to the Japanese understanding of ‘copying’ as a mechanism for enhancement. Heritage cloning for the Tokyo Geidai research team means production of a new art form while the DNA of the original object is retained. It is therefore pertinent to acknowledge the value of evolved objects (Miyasako 2018, pp. 846–848).

Davis (2015, pp. 17–18) also sees duplication as a stage in the life of an icon. His research on South Indian religious icons and their reproduction highlights the referential connectivity a reproduction holds to the original objects, be it through the process of production, materials, or aesthetics. For the ‘Clone Cultural Properties’ research team there are three aspects that constitute the equivalent to the biological DNA in the work of art (Taira 2017, Taira et al. 2017, Miyasako 2018). First, the clone and super clone objects should be historically accurate in terms of the materials used, whereby the authenticity of an object is assured through precision in metal casting, choice of clay, and recreation of paint materials, among others. Second, the skills and techniques deployed to create the replica draw on the knowledge and expertise of the makers of the past. This, however, does not preclude the research team from utilizing technological innovation to aid the process. In fact, technological interventions are essential to facilitate the process of DNA mapping from the original object onto another. Finally, the genetic essence of the replica is contingent upon the charged affective qualities to generate emotional response in the audience that derive from the intentionality of the creator as imagined by the recreators (Miyasako 2018).

The ‘Clone Cultural Property’ only inherits the DNA of the original object if all three components are present. For that reason, for example, the ‘hyper’ glass-acrylic replica of the Shaka Triad does not meet those requirements. It does, however, seem to imply a natural progression of the reproductive practice that still relies on the referential components to the original heritage object for deriving some of its value. Drawing on Freedberg (1989, p. 196), I contend that cloned Buddhist heritage objects constitute an exaggeration as a means of engaging the audience in a directly empathetic relation with the object. Even if the said object has not been consecrated through an eye-opening ceremony (Swearer 2004) or a similar ensoulment ritual (Kendall 2021), as an object that is technically devoid of the spiritual potency, it evokes charged potency by imitating realness that is exact, augmented, abstract, and exaggerated. As noted earlier, of importance here is the verisimilitude, the appearance of being real, that channels attention and has the potential to activate emotional engagement with the replica, which in its ‘cloned’ value makes the absent, present (Freedberg 1989, pp. 200–201).

The temporal transformation that takes place in the process of heritage cloning results not in the mere recollection of the object it references. In the process of creation of new life, it becomes the object it references, not just a mechanism for preserving the snapshot of the slowly decaying Shaka Traid of Hōryūji. The researchers, in their objective to strive for resemblance and accuracy of the super clone, do not set out to achieve this. As noted earlier, they innovate and augment the presence of the statue and, in the process, attempt the ‘reconstruction of living reality by the beholder of figured form’ (Freedberg 1989, p. 201). This implies the emergence of religious heritage-making that derives its value from the processes of scientification of religious heritage, as much as from the augmented and affective experience of history and its religious value.

I find Freedberg’s idea of ‘striving for verisimilitude’ (1989, p. 205) to imagine how heritage ‘cloning’ appears to play with the different dimensions of accuracy: from laser sharp precision (as in the case of the clone) to the mere conviction of resemblance (as in the case of the hyper replica). The technological interventions and science are meant to deliver both, laying claims to the historical and heritage value of the Shaka Triad replicas. Through the scientification of the language and the processes of heritage-making, the heritage object is further distanced from the context of the sacred. Heritage cloning as a scientific and artistic process offers some potentiality of perfect verisimilitude of the heritage objects, but it does not constitute the lived reality of here and now. Instead, it reveals human desire for certain kinds of the past as imagined through the evidence of research, craft, aesthetics, and technological/scientific accuracy.

Often, religious heritage objects ought to be ‘deanimated’ through ritual action before repairs (Kendall 2021, p. 79) or before instilment in the museum setting.¹⁰ Equally, fabricated images must be consecrated as objects of veneration, which marks the transformation of the object from mere representation of the deity to constituting its presence (Sharf 2001, p. 11). The cloned heritage objects do not undergo any of the aforementioned processes. Instead, they rely on the excellence of artisanry, material accuracy, and the affective intentionality of their makers to be brought to life, to make them present, and to instil them with power.¹¹ The ‘Clone Cultural Properties’ project takes its point of departure from the idea of cloning as means of preservation. A Buddhist framework of valuation through copying that amplifies the spiritual value through ritual labour could potentially allow us to imagine how other kinds of value are produced here, but I have not been able to investigate the ritual side of the process yet. Instead, I turn to discuss the value generated through the scientific process and the labour of heritage-making.

On the value of heritage labour: from loss to augmentation

The crux of heritage cloning is in the labour-intensive and technologically enabled restorative work. Each replica involves a number of steps: from 3D scanning and modelling, prototype printing, wax, and gas mould casting, to indexing, hand carving and painting, and application of textures (Miyasako et al. 2022, pp. 43–53). The result is a new artefact with its own claims to authority as a piece of art, a heritage replica, and possibly a devotional object in the future. Yet, the referential aspect of the original object remains important, at least at the start of the replica’s life. Morris-Suzuki’s characterization of culture (bunka) as ‘burdened by the karma of previous incarnations’ (1998, p. 3) speaks to this referential relationality: the biographies of newly produced artefacts remain ever ‘in debt’ to the previous generation of objects they represent and constitute. Davis (2015) shows that these relations can remain strong throughout the objects’ complex lives, but also acknowledges that the process of fabrication gives life to a new object with its own life story and a potential future death. I contend that it is the process of fabrication where the object’s claim to authority emerges and invites its alternative modes of valuation.

While I agree with Davis (1997, p. 9) that the location of the object ‘plays a constitutive role in the act of looking’, heritage cloning presents us not just with the supposedly dichotomous relationship of the religious (sacred) and the heritage (secular or public sacred), but with the multiple, volatile, and aesthetically diverse replicas of the same Buddhist heritage object. By default, all three replicas are likely to be placed outside of the usual context of the Shaka’s throne room in the Main Hall of Hōryūji. It is perhaps reasonable to suggest, as Charles Lachman (2014, p. 375) does, ‘that the sculpture on a temple altar and the sculpture in a museum vitrine are not the “same” object in different locales, but rather different objects all together'. Such an understanding of multiple biographical journeys of the same object acknowledges the agency and the presence of the cloned replicas. Furthermore, it allows alternative modes of valuation to emerge that recognize fabrication as a value-producing process in and of itself.

How is this value produced then? Working with photography and film, Benjamin (1985 [1968]) argued that with reproduction, the aura of the image dissipates. He proposed his thesis on the diminution of aura of the reproductive image in relation to the mechanical reproduction to argue two things. First, he suggested that the sphere of authenticity exists outside of the technical quality of the reproduction, as the aura is tied to the image’s original context. Secondly, the aura of the image evaporates as it becomes detached from its ritual function and the exhibition value begins to supersede its ritual value. This is what Rots (2019) contends regarding the processes of heritage-making as a vehicle for secularizing heritage objects and distancing them from their ritual functions. For Rots, however, heritage-making does not constitute a static category and neither does it imply a complete dissipation of the sacred aura. Instead, a Buddhist object acquires a new status of authority as the ‘public sacred’. Heritage cloning affirms the latter but as the object constitutes the pinnacle of religious heritage technological and artistic reproduction, its aura is generated through the technical quality of the process and labour of reproduction. Those technological and artistic processes are what gives the cloned statues their aura of realness.

This matters because the labour involved in the generation of the affective, economic, and heritage value of the cloned fabrications does not conclude with a ritual action to enliven it. Angela Chiu (2017, p. 159) observes that the making of the Buddha image is not determined with the conclusion of the consecration ceremony. In fact, the statue continues to be understood ‘as a material object, with all of the physical strengths and weaknesses of its form’. It is therefore considered to be openly vulnerable to manipulation by human agency. Authority can be bestowed upon the replica through the process of reproductive labour, which can be ‘saturated with magical intention’ (Kendall 2021, p. 9) and the intended agency of the cloned object itself. Akin to Brox’s ‘faith labour’, Kendall (2021, pp. 76–79) shows how the care put into the fabrication of the statue increases its aura and its value. While Kendall recognizes the importance of the magical knowledge (e.g. workshop protocols and taboos) for the artisans she works with, I would like to recognize the aura of scientific knowledge of heritage care that comes to the fore in cloned heritage that has never been intended as a devotional object beyond its capacity to reconstruct the memory of the spiritual awe. The value of the cloned replicas stems from their capacity to hold the presence of the heritage object (its past, present and the unknown future), not as a vehicle for the divine presence.

Birgit Meyer and Marleen de Witte (2013, p. 277) write that ‘the reformation of religious forms as “heritage” entails a process of profanization through which their initial sacrality is being lost’. In a similar vein, Rots and Teeuwen (2020b) argue that heritage-making constitutes a type of secularization in which religious objects, sites, and practices acquire new meanings as embodiments of national culture. Is there something being lost or distorted when we clone religious heritage? Does a fraction of the aura evaporate in the process or is there a new kind of potency that emerges? Trine Brox (2019), in her article on mass-production and the aura of Buddhist material objects, recounts Walter Benjamin’s argument that ‘mechanical reproduction emancipated works of art from religious rituals and evaporated the aura of art’ (2019, p. 105). Brox counters Benjamin’s argument to propose that the value is not lost through democratization resulting from mass-production, because the spiritual value of objects produced in this way is defined through interaction and laboured through faith. In other words, it is relational. But her focus is on the mass-production of Tibetan Buddhist material objects, where the personal use-focused nature of these objects allows for the value to be produced through interactions. Heritage cloning appears as a more specialized form of reproduction, meant to preserve, and affectively connect people to the heritage and its religious meaning. It also reveals the complex processes of knowledge production and the discursive construction of the heritage-making arena. It constitutes a form of reproduction that is then carefully staged in a secular museum setting. Even though both reproductive processes (the mass and the high-tech ones) involve practices of value-making and authentication through labour (religious or otherwise), super cloning is a mechanization of a different kind. It concurrently speeds up and slows down the process of reproduction and the value of the object produced derives from the process-intense reproduction and reconstruction of the original affects. Heritage cloning extends beyond access: it is an exercise in time travel for the purpose of forging affective connections to the aesthetics and spiritual aura of the past, while resurrecting political tensions. However, thanks to the reproductive work, this past must no longer be imagined through the markers of time and processes of decay. Instead, we can sensorially experience its imposing (and here, also golden) presence.

The pursuit of such cloning techniques in heritage care is partially motivated by the permanent anxiety in heritage preservation about the material limits and fragility of human history. All the more reason, then, to pay attention to the relationship between the ideas (discursive narratives such as ‘cloning’) and the material realities they address, advance, ignore, or seek to transcend.

Conclusion

In this article, I have shown how paying attention to technological interventions in heritage care can illuminate the processes of scientific transformation and the consequential creation of distance between the secular and the sacred dimensions of Buddhist heritage, and the emergence of the public sacred that the secular enables. My argument is that such distancing through the use of technology allows new regimes of valuation and claims to authenticity to emerge. Therefore, we must consider the politics of heritage care as oriented towards different domains of material influence. I have mapped out the discursive narratives and practices of heritage cloning through the case of the ‘Cloned Cultural Properties’ project at the Tokyo University of the Arts. By showing how high-tech religious heritage care demands different regimes of valuation in reproduction, I urge heritage scholars and practitioners to acknowledge how technology transforms religious heritage to generate alternative socio-economic afterlives of Buddhist materiality in-between past-present-future devotional, heritage, and science worlds.

One of the leading narratives for the Tokyo-based and partially state-funded heritage cloning team is to support endangered heritage objects, Buddhist ones in particular. And this is a political intervention. Heritage cloning undoubtedly has the potential to transform the arena of heritage care in Japan and globally, and beyond the processes of value creation and authority. While 3D printing and other restorative practices have already been utilized locally such as in the case of the Wakayama Museum of the Art to facilitate access and embodied engagement with the heritage objects, as well as towards rural revitalization efforts (Aoki et al. 2020), the ‘Clone Cultural Heritage’ project and the now patented processes it utilizes are likely to influence our perceptions of Buddhist heritage in the future and further challenge the notions of authenticity and ownership in heritage-making.

Yet, despite the immense investment by the state and private stakeholders, none of the visitors to Hōryūji nor the staff at the local tourism centre knew about the ‘Clone Cultural Properties’ project encountered any of the clones, or were involved in the creation of resources related to the heritage cloning initiatives, which was another cautionary reminder that heritage-making at a macro level rarely contends with the lived realities of local heritage care (Kolata 2020). It also suggests that the initiative is indeed an exercise in science and heritage diplomacy, rather than a scalable practice of heritage care, at least for now.

Acknowledgements

I presented the early drafts of this article at the ‘Enshrining the Past: Religion and Heritage-Making in a Secular Age’ workshop at the University of Leipzig and later at the European Association for the Study of Religion in Cork. I thank Irene Stengs, Paride Stortini, Esther-Maria Guggenmos, and Trine Brox for their helpful feedback on the earlier versions of this article, as well as Aike Rots and the editors of the Special Issue, Nur Yasemin Ural and Marian Burchardt, on its final iteration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was funded in part by the Foundation Elisabeth Rausing Memorial Fund via Lund University.

Notes

1 All translations of Japanese sources, unless otherwise stated, have been done by the author.

2 I follow the Japanese naming conventions listing surname first.

3 The research was conducted under the Good Research Practice Guidelines issued by the Swedish Research Council and in use at Lund University. Since the research involved mainly professional interviews with the scholars involved in and regarding the project, the internal ethical approval was granted. Consent was obtained via the email communications, similarly to the permission for the use of the ‘Super Clone’ project’s images.

4 See also Davis (2015) and his work on Indian images and the afterlives of their fabrications.

5 Hōryūji held a degaichō in 1694 to raise money for temple repairs. During that time its sacred objects toured various cities in Japan where the public offered donations to view the sacred objects on display. See Kornicki (1994) for the discussion of the contested identities of sacred objects as devotional objects and commodities.

6 See Rots and Teeuwen (2017).

7 See, for example, Ian Reader’s (2020) discussion of Shikoku pilgrimage.

8 See also Lopez (1995) for a discussion on modernity, heritage, and identity with reference to Eurocentrism and colonial ideals.

9 See Stortini (2018) for a critical evaluation of modern reimaginations of the past linking Buddhism and the Silk Road, and Tanaka (1994) and Toyoyama (2012) for the critique of Asian orientalism.

10 I thank Tanya Uyeda for walking me through the process of staging sacred context in museums and the setup of the Temple Room in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, US.

11 I draw here on Swearer’s (2004, p. 5) description of the eye-opening ceremony as described in the Thai Buddhist context and apply it to the work of the art historians and researchers.