[DOWNLOAD] "Images, Legends, Politics, And the Origin of the Great Xiangguo Monastery in Kaifeng: A Case-Study of the Formation and Transformation of Buddhist Sacred Sites in Medieval China (Case Study)" by The Journal of the American Oriental Society * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Images, Legends, Politics, And the Origin of the Great Xiangguo Monastery in Kaifeng: A Case-Study of the Formation and Transformation of Buddhist Sacred Sites in Medieval China (Case Study)
- Author : The Journal of the American Oriental Society
- Release Date : January 01, 2005
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 339 KB
Description
Buddhist sacred sites are places connected with the Buddha, with various bodhisattvas and deities, and leading religious figures celebrated for their role in the development of the religion. Sacred space is an essential component of any religious tradition. It is especially significant for a trans-cultural religion such as Buddhism, which originated in India and spread through the whole of East Asia via Central Asia. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of Buddhist sacred sites in the history of Buddhism. The spread of Buddhism in Asia may be viewed from one perspective as a protracted and complex process in which numerous sacred sites were created and recreated in different cultural settings. The story of Buddhism increasingly penetrating into all levels of society in Asia is mirrored by another narrative in which some of the most sacred sites--both historical and legendary--in India were reproduced in other parts of the world. This reproduction or doubling was, however, never a simple matter of transplantation; rather it involved complex cultural adjustments and inventions. The far-reaching and widespread significance of Buddhist sacred sites has attracted the attention of scholars from various disciplines, yet there is still no clear sense of what the overall contours of a history of Buddhist sacred geography might look like. Regarding Chinese Buddhist sacred sites, most scholars have focused their attention on the veneration of a selected number of marchmounts, typically the so-called "Four Marchmounts" (siyue [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or sida mingshan [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), usually referring to Mounts Wutai [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Emei [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Song [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], and Putuo [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (1) Very limited efforts have been made to explore the Buddhist histories of other important sites that were overshadowed by that later set of four march-mounts. Very few Buddhist monasteries, for example, have been seriously studied as sacred sites. This is particularly perplexing in view of the fact that a Buddhist monastery (usually a group of monasteries) constituted the most essential part of a "Buddhist mountain." Not only mountain temples/monasteries, but also cosmopolitan monasteries, should be studied as sacred sites. This article presents a case study of such a cosmopolitan monastery.