内容简介

The Lotus Sutra has been the most widely read and most revered Buddhist scripture in East Asia since its translation in the third century. The miracles and parables in the "king of sutras" inspired a variety of images in China, in particular the sweeping compositions known as transformation tableaux that developed between the seventh and ninth centuries. Surviving examples in murals painted on cave walls or carved in relief on Buddhist monuments depict celestial journeys, bodily metamorphoses, cycles of rebirth, and the achievement of nirvana. Yet the cosmos revealed in these tableaux is strikingly different from that found in the text of the sutra. Shaping the Lotus Sutra explores this visual world.

Challenging long-held assumptions about Buddhist art, Eugene Wang treats it as a window to an animated and spirited world. Rather than focus on individual murals as isolated compositions, Wang views the entire body of pictures adorning a cave shrine or a pagoda as a visual mapping of an imaginary topography that encompasses different temporal and spatial domains. He demonstrates that the text of the Lotus Sutra does not fully explain the pictures and that a picture, or a series of them, constitutes its own "text." In exploring how religious pictures sublimate cultural aspirations, he shows that they can serve both political and religious agendas and that different social forces can co-exist within the same visual program. These pictures inspired meditative journeys through sophisticated formal devices such as mirroring, mapping, and spatial programming - analytical categories newly identified by Wang.

The book examines murals in cave shrines at Binglingsi and Dunhuang in northwestern China and relief sculptures in the grottoes of Yungang in Shanxi, on stelae from Sichuan, and on the Dragon-and-Tiger pagoda in Shandong, among other sites. By tracing formal impulses in medieval Chinese picture-making, such as topographic mapping and pictorial illusionism, the author pieces together a wide range of visual evidence and textual sources to reconstruct the medieval Chinese cognitive style and mental world. The book is ultimately a history of the Chinese imagination.

作品目录

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xiii

The Many Treasures Stupa: Visionary Signpost and Cognitive Model 3

The Apparitional Stupa 3

Images of the Many Treasures Stupa at Yungang: Cave 5 6

The Many Treasures Stupa Scene in Cave 169 at Binglingsi 13

Two Women's Vision and Threshold Moment 24

A Memorial Scenario 29

Beyond Narrative Space: Two Northern Wei Stelae 47

The Pivot of the Symbolic Universe 52

Textual Space and Pictorial Reconstitution 67

Imaginary Space in Texts and Pictures 67

Imaginary Topography and Protopicture 68

The Lotus Sutra as a Spatial and Temporal Fiction: Problems for the Painter 79

The Duplicity of Pictorial "Illustration'': Nirvana with a Royal Face 82

A Buddhist Paradise without a Buddha 102

Which One of the Three? Architectural Forms as Moral Choices 112

The Rhetoric of the Formal Design 119

The Circumstantial World and the Numinous Realm 122

The Royal Scenario and Circumstantial Referentiality 122

The Monastery of Reverence and Love (Jing'aisi) 132

The Yin Family at Dunhuang 139

Two Lotus Sutra Tableaux; Two Moods 141

The Daoist Turn circa 700 C.E. 146

Postmortem Scenario 151

The Patron Family's Agenda 176

The Ritual Space of the Cave Shrine 178

Mapping and Transformation 182

Enchanted and Generative Topography of Transformation 183

Numinous Vulture Peak and the Man-Bird Mountain 192

The Incantatory Landscape 206

The Guanyin Tableaux from Wanfosi 219

The Talismanic Landscape under the Tang 228

Mirroring and Transformation 238

Seeing as Piercing 238

The Shadow Image 245

The Mirror Image 247

Mirror Hall 256

Cave Shrine as Mirror Hall 262

Mirror and Gateway 277

Mystic Vision 292

Grotto Heaven 310

Chronotope and Heterotopia 317

The Lotus Sutra Topography as Threshold to Other Worlds 317

Pagodas, Miracles, Transformation Tableaux 321

Longhuta: The Iconographic Program of Its Relief Sculptures 330

The Buddhas of the Four Directions and the Rhetoric of Time 340

Temporal and Spatial Fiction of the Relic Pagoda 347

Chronotope and Traditional Cosmological Scheme 353

Between Past and Future 361

Here and There: From Subjugation of Demons to the Amitabha Pure Land 364

Transformation and the Inconceivable 371

Walking and Circumambulation 376

Agency of Transformation 380

Competing Pure Lands 382

The Primacy of the Tusita Heaven in the Longhuta 386

The Dense and the Sparse: Two Stylistic Modes and Their Implications 396

List of Abbreviations 398

Notes 399

Chinese Glossary 442

Bibliography 447

Illustration Credits 469

Index 475