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Paths to Paradise: Buddhist Heavens and Pure Lands in Early Medieval China (3rd- to 6th century)
Zhao, Yi
Zhao, Yi
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Abstract
This dissertation examines how four types of artworks, namely “soul urns (hunping),” “pensive bodhisattva,” and two groups of early illustrations of the Sukhāvāti, embody shifting beliefs in the paradise held by people in early medieval China, when the foreign religion Buddhism reshaped Chinese imagination of paradise. Chapter One argues that hunping embodies the Chinese theme of “ascending to Heaven through the axis mundi” and those with Buddhist images embody a proselytization strategy devised by early clergy to identify the Chinese axis mundi Mount Kunlun with its Buddhist counterpart Mount Sumeru. In Chapter Two, I propose that although the iconography of pensive bodhisattva was derived from the narrative illustration of Siddhartha’s first meditation, it was reconstructed as a visual sign to symbolize the pursuit and attainment of Buddhahood. It was incorporated into the iconography of Maitreya’s palace in Tuśita Heaven in 470s, to elevate the latter into a quasi-Pure Land by displaying the connection between attaining rebirth there and achieving Buddhahood. Chapter Three suggests that fifth century Sukhāvāti illustrations were often combined with Lotus Sūtra tableaux. I argue that the designers invented several visual devices to direct the viewers’ gaze from the Lotus Sūtra tableau on the bottom to the illustration of Sukhāvāti depicted above, indicating the efficacy of Lotus Sūtra in granting admissions to Sukhāvāti. In Chapter Four, I reconstruct the meditational experience conditioned by the pictorial program in Toyok Cave Twenty, which features one of the two earliest illustrations of Sukhāvāti created based on the apocryphal Visualization Sūtra. I argue that the contemplation on the impure was designed as a preparational meditation practice to improve the karmic merit and spiritual purity of the meditators who would perform each of the “Thirteen Visualizations” separately and successively in the cave, until entering the Western Pure in meditational concentration.
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2023-01-01
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Art history, Religion, Asian studies, heaven, hunping, paradise, pensive bodhisattva, tusita, western pure land