182
book reviews
Glossary of Chinese Terms
should be
should be
Shijing Zhuan
should be
should be
(p. 84)
(pp. 173, 414)
should be Shi Jizhuan
(p. 188)
(pp. 282, 430, 431)
(p. 316)
should be
(p. 413)
should be
(p. 428)
should be
(p. 432)
should be
(p. 432)
Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China.
By Eugene Y. Wang. (Seattle and London: University of Washington
Press, 2005. 487 Pp. Paperback, ISBN-13 978-0-295-98685-2.)
The writing of Shaping the Lotus Sutra was inspired by Eugene Y.
Wang’s curiosity about the “visual culture of world making” in
medieval China, by which he means primarily the period from the
Northern and Southern dynasties to the Tang. Wang harks back to
Han and pre-Han art, informing readers how medieval “world
making” relied on earlier cultural practices, which continued down to
the Song, as shown in some visual representations in printed illustrations of the Lotus Sutra.
Scholars have long understood that a religion introduced from one
culture to another must negotiate with local cultures and indigenous
concerns. Buddhism was no exception. However, how this process
unfolded, how local cultures shaped Buddhism and, most importantly,
how indigenous Chinese political and Daoist religious concerns
shaped Buddhist visual culture in the Northern and Southern
dynasties, have not been as effectively addressed in previous studies
as the present one under review.
Arranged chronologically, Shaping the Lotus Sutra comprises six
chapters, beginning with the Yungang caves in present-day Shanxi and
Binglingsi in present-day Gansu, and ending with the Longhu Pagoda
in present-day Shandong. The bulk of the study, however, focuses on
the Dunhuang “transformation tableaux (bianxiang)” of the Lotus
Sutra and their connections to Tang metropolitan traditions. Though
they were temporally and spatially widespread, Wang links them
through scriptural, historical, and iconographic evidence.
book reviews
183
Chapter 1, “The Many Treasures Stupa, Visionary Signpost and
Cognitive Model,” presents an intriguing observation on Śākyamuni
and Prabhūtaratna, the twin Buddhas featured in chapter 11 of the
Lotus Sutra. Wang thoroughly explains the appearance of this pair in
the Buddhist context, and elucidates their pre-Buddhist Chinese
origins in Han mortuary art. As such, a Buddhist icon of twin Buddhas
may signify donors’ wishes for a safe afterlife journey for their parents
from this world to other worlds. Furthermore, imperial patronage of
the twin Buddhas and twin caves may have been inspired by the reign
of the “Twin Sages” of the Northern Wei: Emperor Xiaowen and his
step-grandmother, Empress Dowager Feng.
Chapter 2, “Textual Space and Pictorial Reconstruction,” begins
with the question of how a text can be envisioned in pictures, particularly when the text is as complex as the Lotus Sutra, which, as Wang
indicates, “offers dizzying cosmological dimensions and a full range of
highly graphic scenes that would galvanize the imagination of anyone
with even a minimal faculty in this regard, let alone the painter, the
‘professional visualizer’ of texts” (p. 67). The complexity of Buddhist
texts and their variant possibilities for visual and textual interpretations poses challenges for anyone seeking multifarious transformation tableaux of jumbled scenes scattered within a well-defined,
framed pictorial space. Different “readings” are inevitable. Wang
offers his interpretation of the Lotus Sutra transformation tableau in
cave 217 at Dunhuang. Exhaustively identifying the textual sources of
each vignette in the tableau, he suggests a reading consisting of two
main portions. With the square in the center as the imaginary stūpa in
a cave chapel, the viewer is to circumambulate the two-dimensional
picture clockwise, from below the right side of the square to the top,
then entering into the square. The right side of the tableau, according
to Wang, contains three vignettes derived from the Phantom City
parable, the parable of the prodigal son, and the “Life Span of the
Thus Come One” chapter of the sutra.
While providing extensive scriptural evidence to explain the
vignettes in cave 217 at Dunhuang in chapter 2, Wang devotes chapter
3, “The Circumstantial World and the Numinous Realm,” to the correlation between the design there and Tang metropolitan iconographic concerns, as well as court political intrigues linked to Empress
Wu Zetian, who ruled for fifteen years and changed the Tang dynastic
name to Zhou. Wang demonstrates the patrons’ (the Yin family’s)
deep ties to the Tang government and hypothesizes that the pictorial
program in cave 217 coincides with sentiments in the area of the twin
capitals. Wang offers a boldly tantalizing suggestion that the celebrated ninth-century art historian Zhang Yanyuan misidentified a
scene of the Ajātaśatru tale, and hence the mural in the eastern capital
184
book reviews
Luoyang’s famed Jing’ai Monastery, where Zhang made his “erroneous observation,” must have been identical to its contemporaneous
counterpart in cave 217 at Dunhuang. While the iconographic
program in cave 217 has a strong scriptural basis, the pictorial
meaning may be related to concurrent political intrigues at court, and
while the picture may contain Daoist sentiment, for the Yin family, as
Wang points out, birth in the “Land of Bliss (Pure Land)” was the
paramount concern.
Landscape depictions in cave 217 and other caves dating to the
Tang have been cited by art historians as stylistic sources for later
Chinese shanshui (landscape) painting. In chapter 4, “Mapping and
Transformation,” Wang contextualizes this landscape in terms of
myriad perils in the pre-Buddhist context, signifying it as a land of
unrest. When juxtaposed with Pure Land or the world of the Buddha,
the contrast is striking: in the transformation tableau of cave 217, the
central square is a tranquil, recessed land that draws us in, in contrast
to the treacherous, relentlessly undulating world beyond its boundary.
The same can be observed in a Wanfosi stele whose upper portion,
similarly tranquil and recessed, is the Buddha land, while the lower
portion, made up of undulating mountains, is inhabited by unenlightened beings whom the Buddha attempts to convert.
Chapter 5, “Mirroring and Transformation,” explores the mirror
from the transformation tableaux at Dunhuang. Wang explains how
the superimposed frames of Buddha land and Guanyin can be understood as both a mirror and a gateway, enticing the viewer/visualizer to
enter. Wang links this mirror pictorial device to contemporaneous
practice in mortuary art where, by inserting the squared image into a
landscape setting, the picture “ ‘let one’s spirit roam’ to faraway
lands” and it is “an optical device whereby one awaits the divine
manifestation from within.” This offers a way to see Buddhist images
and Pure Lands carved on polished stone and framed by gateways,
such as those at Dayan Pagoda and on the polished sides of traditional
Chinese mirrors. The complexity of this reading is achieved through
an analysis of Huiyuan’s quest for obtaining and understanding the
image of Buddha, and through introduction of mirror halls built from
the Northern Qi to the Tang in both religious and secular contexts.
In chapter 6, “Chronotope and Heterotopia,” Wang uses the Longhuta (Tiger and Dragon Pagoda) in Shandong to demonstrate
further how the Lotus Sutra served as a threshold to two competing
Pure Lands in medieval China––Maitreya’s Tu sita Heaven and
Amitābha’s Sukhāvatı̄. Wang offers an intricateɺ explanation of
Longhuta’s four sides, identifying them as two opposing/competing
pairs of Maitreya/Śākyamuni versus Raudrāks a/Amitābha. By anaɺ
lyzing patron/donor social and economical structures,
Wang proposes
book reviews
185
that the Longhuta design privileges Maitreya’s Tu sita Heaven for its
ɺ the Lotus Sutra,
alignment with Śākyamuni, the principal preacher of
and among the four Buddhas inside the four niches, the two occupying
Amitābha and Raudrāks a niches point their fingers toward the
ɺ In this way, they frame the center for
central figure, Śākyamuni.
viewers, highlighting the paramount importance of the Lotus Sutra in
medieval China. We can thus no longer treat multiple heavens/Pure
Lands coexisting in the same Dunhuang caves, and on or inside
pagodas throughout China, as discrete or unrelated entities. They are
integral to the iconographic program bound together by the Lotus
Sutra.
Shaping the Lotus Sutra has no concluding chapter or epilogue.
Wang intentionally ends chapter 6 with the statement “A world was
thus made,” but a conclusion or epilogue would further strengthen
this excellent study.
As diverse as the topics covered in this book are, a few theoretical
premises are common throughout: temporality and spatiality, which
can be translated Buddho-cosmologically as past, present, and future,
and the locality of these different Buddha Lands, pure and impure, as
well as their relative positions and importance to each other; mapping
and topography, which enables us to distinguish two visual modes in
the medieval Chinese Buddhist landscape—the enlightened and the
unenlightened. Even Foucaultian concepts such as “of other places,”
as well as gender, social, and economic issues come into play in this
book to elucidate the process of Buddhist “world making.” These
postmodern concerns reflect our quest to comprehend the “world
making” around us, past and present. Eugene Y. Wang successfully
integrates these theories to, as Robert E. Harrist, Jr. puts it, “[illuminate] the visual logic of medieval Buddhist art.”
An-yi Pan
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
The Philosophy of the Daodejing. By Hans-Georg Moeller. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 168 Pp. Paperback, ISBN10 023113679x. Hardback, ISBN-13 978-0231136792.)
In ten brief but elegantly presented chapters, Hans-Georg Moeller
explores a wide variety of comparative and textual issues relating to
the Daodejing, which students of philosophy and early Daoism will no
doubt find to be of great interest. Moeller stresses especially the
Daodejing’s far-reaching “non-humanistic” philosophy, outlining the
challenges that such a philosophy poses to contemporary ways of