Silk Routes: Material Cultural Encounters

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—attested in text and art from the Uygur era of Manichaean history (762-1024 CE), the Tang (618-907 CE), Liao (907-1125 CE), and Northern Song (960-1126) dynasties.  It focuses on core motifs seen on relief sculpture, banners, and hanging scrolls, including 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, 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.

This paper examines the scope and nature of Buddhism in Kucha according to the biography of Kumārajīva in The Biographies of Eminent Monks 高僧傳 Gaoseng zhuan during the early phase of Central Buddhism along the Silk Routes.  Kumārajīva travelled extensively in Northern India and Central Asia to study Buddhism from various teachers since his childhood in the fourth/fifth centuries.  Moreover, I am also interested in the sexuality issues of his life. The questions I tried to address regarding sexuality in this paper are: why did he decide to end his celibacy of monkhood towards the end of his life although he continued his major translation work/project in Changan? How common was the practice of having a wife or concubines for Buddhist monks in India, Central Asia, and China at that time? Is it related to a particular  Mahāyāna idea regarding women, indicated in the Lotus Sūtra ? Interestingly his father was an Indian monk who married a Kuchean princess, and we can also examine the examples of the married Buddhist monks in Kroraina  (樓蘭 Loulan in Chinese) along the southern route of the Silk Routes.

In recent years, archaeologists have discovered and excavated numerous significant tombs in and around Pingcheng (present-day Datong), shedding new light on the material culture, regional beliefs, and the cultural exchanges along the Silk Roads. One particularly notable discovery was made in May 2015, when the Xinghejiang Tomb of the Northern Wei Dynasty (386–535) was unearthed near Datong. The painted stone slabs in the tomb were rescued and pieced together into a painted sarcophagus with unique Buddhist themes covering all the interior walls, which thus far are the first to be found in tombs anywhere in the country. The subjects of the murals share great similarities with those in the Yungang Grottoes. Furthermore, the archaic tomb mural style and techniques are reminiscent of the early Buddhist murals in the Western Regions along the Silk Roads, highlighting the artistic influences that traversed these trade routes.

This paper revisits the significance of the paintings of Kṣitigarbha (Dizang 地藏) Bodhisattva and the Ten Kings in Dunhuang (Northwest China) from the tenth century onwards. It argues that the significance of such Dunhuang paintings lies in their in situ physical location within the cave architectural structure, specifically on the ceiling of the passageway in several Mogao caves.  Studying the relevant Kṣitigarbha cave art, alongside passages from the Abhidharmakośa, the Sūtra on the Past Vows of Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva, and the Sutra on the Ten Kings [of the Underworld], this paper argues that the shift in the physical location of Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva and changes in his iconography in this period in Dunhuang caves are efforts to translate into architectural and art imagery the place of the intermediate existence (Skt., antarābhava; Ch., zhongyou 中有or zhongyinshen 中阴身) within Buddhist afterlife cosmology, when the disembodied consciousness awaits its next rebirth.  Cave architecture offers the conducive structures that physically enacted the sojourn from this world to the interim existence and then, to the wishful destination of the next rebirth.  Thus, through architectural placement, Dunhuang cave art was able to materialize the antarābhava in a manner that no other media could achieve. 

This paper analyses the grammar, specifically the syntax and paradigms, of visual recollection in the c. 5th-century Qizil Yoga Manual (QYM). Associated with Kucha on the Northern Silk Road, the QYM examines visual recollection, combining Sarvāstivāda meditation sequences with some Mahāyāna and ostensibly local practices (e.g. Dhammajoti 2021, Abe 2024). As with certain Mahāyāna ontologies, the expansive Qizil meditations appear to eschew a formal grammar of meditation, focusing on expansive spatiality rather than temporality. However, the formulas also retain the Sarvāstivāda emphasis on visual elements in strict temporal sequence. The cue for this paper is taken from Yamabe’s analysis of the Turfan cave images in which he argues that the murals in Turfan represent a kind of visual language of meditation (Yamabe 1999). Recently, further progress has been made towards understanding this visual language in spatial terms by Vignato and Li (2024), yet many questions remain over the visual culture of Kucha and its significance for meditation. The paper engages a semiotics of image visualization and temporal experience. It finds both radical departures in the Qizil Manual from South Asian textual traditions as well as distinct local elaborations on how to gain ontological freedom.