Built Surface or Religious Vision? Leifeng’s Missing Exterior Buddhas in Wuyue Pagoda Networks

An incised stone fragment excavated from the Leifeng Pagoda ruins depicts a multi-story pagoda elevation densely inscribed with repeated Buddha figures. Previous scholarship has proposed that it records Leifeng Pagoda's initial appearance completed in 977. Yet no sources describing the pagoda's exterior attest to such a program of repeated Buddha figures at the site. This study argues that the fragment can be approached simultaneously as a visualization of Leifeng Pagoda's miraculous efficacy and as evidence for an actual built program of repeated Buddha imagery on exterior architectural surfaces, a practice shared across multiple Wuyue pagoda sites and extended beyond Wuyue in later centuries. Rather than competing interpretations, these two readings reinforce each other: the repeated Buddha imagery on exterior pagoda surfaces, while representing the numinous claims of the Wuyue court, reflects a material and spatial program that local Buddhist communities had already established at pagoda sites across the region.