The co-emergence of end-of-life rites in Buddhist and Manichaean art along the Silk Roads

This project concerns artistic expressions of interreligious ideas and practices related to last rite rituals and teachings about the start of the afterlife—shared between Manichaean and Buddhist communities—as attested in text and art from the Uygur era of Manichaean history (755/762 -1024 CE) as well as from the Tang (618–907 CE), Liao (907-1125 CE), and Northern Song (960–1126) dynasties.  It focuses on a set of core motifs seen on relief sculpture, banners, and hanging scrolls.  They include traditional/old motifs, such as rebirth into the New Aeon (Manichaean) or the Pure Land (Buddhist); and innovative/new motifs, such as a divine guide for the start of the afterlife and a figure of the deceased as the guided.  Through a contextualized assessment of these motifs, I aim to demonstrate that despite the separate origins of their respective doctrines about the afterlife, Manichaeans and Buddhists along the Silk Roads came to portray the rite of passage from life to death analogously.  Starting from the 8th/10th centuries, they co-developed strikingly similar art and ritual to envelope the moment of death, aiming to inform and comfort the dying and the mourner alike.