Making Sacred Ground: Buddhist Monuments, Pilgrimage Landscape and Sacred Waste

When we think of the making of shrines, we often approach the landscape or monument in its localized cultural and geographical contexts, studying it through the immediate cultural, intellectual, geographical, and socio-political dynamics that contributed to the shaping of the site. Beyond that, the shrine also has its own life cycle and sometimes even extended lives beyond its immediate spatial and temporal origins. In other words, we can speak of the lifecycle or even the lives of a religious center, which are associated through architecture, landscape, narratives, objects, and rites. Pilgrimage sites and religious spaces can employ material, narrative, and ritual associations to link themselves into a global network across time and space. Following this broader perspective of religious sites and devotional spaces, this panel explores the making of Buddhist sites in varying cultural geographies ranging from India and Central Asia to China and Nepal. The panel organizes the four papers into nodes in the lifecycle(s) of religious shrines and objects, from the birth of a shrine, its reproduction beyond the geography of its origin, and finally, the treatment of “expired” shrine objects. 

The first paper (Kāliṅgabodhi jātaka’s classification of Buddhist shrines revisited”) sets the stage with a discussion of the birth of Buddhist monuments.  The Kāliṅgabodhi jātaka is particularly noteworthy since it enumerates three distinct categories of Buddhist sacred buildings known as cetiya (Skt.: caitya), which are supposedly approved by the Buddha himself. The paper revisits the three types of cetiya from the Kāliṅgabodhi jātaka and suggests a new meaning of the uddesika-cetiya category. In addition, the paper discusses the three types of cetiya connections with different modes of pilgrimage. In many ways, the cetiya/stūpa is the putative origin of all Buddhist shrines and pilgrimages. The Kāliṅgabodhi jataka thus sets into cycle the life/lives of Buddhist shrines. 

The next two papers discuss the transportation or extension of pilgrimage centers beyond their original cultures and geographies to produce new Buddhist sites, particularly through architectural and literary associations.  Both papers unravel the continuities and connections between Buddhist shrines and landscapes across the very different cultural geographies of China and what is present-day Nepal. In “Exploring Sacred Landscape:  An Account of Mañjuśrī and Wutai Shan in the Vṛhat Svayambhū Purāṇa,” the presenter analyzes Sanskrit and Newari versions of the Purāṇa’s depiction of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī coming to Kathmandu from Wutai Shan, his mountain pilgrimage abode in China.  The paper considers how the Mañjuśrī cult in Kathmandu narratively traces its origins to the five-peak mountain of Wutai Shan, how this invocation of the Chinese pilgrimage mountain and its sacred geography define devotion to Mañjuśrī in Kathmandu.

Reversing the cross-cultural currents, the next paper (“The Chinese Frontier of Newar Buddhist Art”) studies the presences of Newar Buddhist artistic traditions under Mongol rule in thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The paper discusses Arniko (1205–1306), the recorded builder of the “White Pagoda,” a stūpa or chorten at the center of the walled city of Beijing, the new capital of the Mongols. Arniko was an extremely talented artist and architect from Kathmandu whose work in central Tibet attracted the Mongol rulers of China who brought him into their new city.  This paper describes the surviving evidence of Arniko and his atelier’s enduring presence in China and explores possible connections of his work with the religious architecture of Mañjuśrī’s pilgrimage center in Shanxi Province, Wutai Shan. The paper’s second part discusses the activities of two later Newar visitors, the monks Sahaja Śri (at Wutai Shan 1369-1374) and Śri Śariputra (1335-1426), who appear in the Chinese annals.

The panel concludes with a paper discussion of making a repository for expired religious objects.  In “Secret waste and its storage in Manichaean manistans and Buddhist viharas of Uygur Kocho along the Silk Road in East Central Asia,” the presenter treats the repository sites in that were deployed in Central Asia cave monasteries to house what might be termed “sacred waste,” namely, the remains of religious objects or expired objects that were formally used in religious lives.  The paper examines Manichaean and Buddhist archeological finds dating to the ninth and tenth centuries from Kocho (Gaochang in Chinese) in the Turfan region (Xinjiang province, PRC) of East Central Asia, and which are now housed in the Asian Art Museum in Berlin, the British Museum in London, and the National Museum in New Delhi.  Given the physical conditions of the fragmentary manuscripts and painted textiles, the paper argues that the objects in question are really “sacred waste” which are intentionally deposited in geniza-like repositories that were set up during the Manichaean phase (9th-10th century) and continued to be used for similar purposes during the Buddhist phase (11th-13th century) of these monastic sites.  While the first three papers dealt with the creation of Buddhist sites for devotion, this last paper deals with the creation of repositories for the “sacred waste” generated in devotional and religious lives. 

The panelists include a religious studies full professor and an associate professor, a comparative cultural studies and art history professor, and a postdoctoral scholar, all from different institutions. 

Our preferred format is 120 minutes, with 4 paper presenters, a respondent, and a presider.
If a 120-minute session is not possible, and the only option is a 90-minute session, then we will not have a respondent.