Shaping The Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture In Medieval China

by Eugene Y. Wang

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.

487 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2005

Reviews

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Ceef · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd book for me to rate, as I wanted to simultaneously give it both five stars and one (which is why I decided on the average). Here's the thing: on one hand, Wang provides an encyclopedic and erudite examination of art, life and culture in medieval China, masterfully weaving together material from histories, religious texts, and the various Dunhuang corpora; on the other, he often does an injustice to these background materials in attempting to apply the to a small selection of (alleged) Lotus Sutra Transformation tableaux. As such, it was a book that raised a lot of questions and provided a wealth of bibliographic material that I would love to pursue, while also continuously over-reaching in its attempt to prove various (increasingly dubious) conjectures.

In some ways, reading Shaping the Lotus Sutra was like working through a detective novel whose author thrills you with incredible settings and descriptive prose, only to disappoint with a paper-thin plot.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful pictures.

A backcover blurb compare the excitement-inducement potential of Wang's insights to Zizek's. Uh, kind of a stretch. But this book does develop a new theoretical vocabulary to talk about cave/temple art. I found the second three essay-chapters more "exciting" than the first three.

Is willing to comb depths of Chinese art history back to pre-Buddhist days in order to recover motifs and themes, but not as willing to do the same with Buddhist art history. Would have liked to have seen more 'class & gender.'

Still, well-organized, well-argued, and fun.