Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China [Hardcover]

Eugene Yuejin Wang (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Shaping the Lotus Sutra ranges over a dazzling array of topics, all of them fascinating and all tied to the central goal of illuminating the visual logic of medieval Buddhist art." Robert E. Harrist Jr., Columbia University "I react to Wang's work as I do to Zizek's: I find it electrifying." Jerome Silbergeld, Princeton University "Shaping the Lotus Sutra explores what the medieval Chinese actually believed about spiritual matters, through careful analysis of artistic representations of its most beloved text, the Lotus Sutra." Amy McNair, University of Kansas

From the Inside Flap

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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 487 pages
• Publisher: University of Washington Press (February 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0295984627
• ISBN-13: 978-0295984629
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,004,318 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For advanced students of Chinese Buddhism, December 3, 2007

By 

Patricia Welch "Patricia Bjaaland Welch" (Singapore) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (Paperback)

This is an excellent treatment of the Lotus Sutra in Chinese art, primarily focusing on Dunhuang but of use to anyone who wants to gain a further understanding of medieval Chinese murals and sculpture. A basic knowledge of both Buddhism and Buddhist iconography is almost essential but a fast learning, highly motivated beginner would also find this book extremely helpful. No one going to all the trouble to visit the Dunhuang caves should go without reading this book, and anyone who finds this book hard reading or uninteresting with a trip to Dunhuang on their agenda, should choose another destination. For those interested in medieval Chinese Buddhist iconography and pictorial art, this book "pulls it all together" and is both readable and scholarly in its approach. Excellent photographs and detailed drawings to help one interpret the ancient paintings make this book an invaluable guidebook to Dunhuang or to any armchair traveller. A true find and a book one will be able to reread over and over again as one becomes an increasingly advanced student of the subject.