Session 22: Printed Matter: Buddhist Printing by China, Xi Xia, and Korea, Eleventh–Seventeenth Centuries

Organizer and Chair: Shih-shan Susan Huang, University of Washington

Discussant: Valerie Hansen, Yale University

Keywords: Buddhist, print, China, Xi Xia, Korea.

The invention and development of printing by China and her neighbors led to the spread of Buddhism and Buddhist art, whose patrons often used printing as a way to propagate Buddhist teachings or accumulate merits. Recent scholarship has tended to focus on the non-religious prints of later periods (17th–19th centuries), leaving a significant group of earlier religious prints little studied.

This panel presents cross-cultural studies of Buddhist prints by China, Xi Xia, and Korea from the 11th to the 17th centuries. Using recent publications of archaeological materials excavated from Khara Khoto and Ningxia, Sören Edgren explores the Buddhist woodcuts produced by the Tangut (or Xi Xia) people and compares them to those made by the Song-Yuan Chinese, the Khitan Liao, and the Jurchen Jin. Shih-shan Susan Huang examines the 13th-century printed divination sticks known as Tianzhu lingqian from Hangzhou’s Tianzhu monastery; these pictorial symbols may have been regarded as efficacious for those temple-goers who came to seek guidance from the deity Guanyin. Drawing textual and visual evidence from the Sino-Korean histories, Hosun Kang investigates the sutra-bestowing and sutra-printing activities of three Koreans, King Chung-seon, Monk Ui-seon, and Lee Byun-seung in Dadu and other areas in Yuan China. Focusing on the Ming Empress Dowager Li’s patronage of Buddhist art, Marsha Haufler compares different versions of court paintings and stone steles that bear the same iconography, and re-evaluates the role of reproducible rubbings in the spread of the cult of the Nine-Lotus Bodhisattva.

Xi Xia Buddhist Woodcuts and Song-Yuan China

Sören Edgren, Princeton University

The Xi Xia Empire (1038–1227) of the Tangut people existed as a significant social and political entity coeval with the Song dynasty. With cultural ties to Tibet and Tang China, the Tangut state developed a peculiar form of Buddhism at a time that coincided with the rise of woodblock printing. Buddhist texts were translated into Tangut and published in their unique script and others were published in Chinese throughout the Xi Xia reign. Many of the texts were accompanied by narrative woodcuts. Important examples were brought to light in the early twentieth century, especially by the Russian Kozlov’s discoveries at Khara Khoto, 1908–1909. A major Chinese discovery was made in the Ningxia region in the following decade.

Xi Xia publications constitute an important chapter in the history of East Asian print culture. The recent large-scale publication of these original materials offers a rare opportunity for comprehensive investigations. This paper attempts to analyze existing specimens of Tangut printing and explain their relationships with Buddhist publishing in Song-Yuan China and will be illustrated with comparative examples. Tangut Buddhist printing outlived the Xi Xia Empire, which is evidenced by printed products from as late as the fourteenth century, and other traces exist well into the Ming period. Reference also will be made to the Buddhist woodcuts produced by contemporary border states such as the Liao (Qidan) and the Jin (Ruzhen).

Praying for Officialdom: The Printed Divinations Efficacious Sticks from Tianzhu

Shih-shan Susan Huang, University of Washington

This paper investigates the subject matter, pictorial narratives, and cultural meanings of the Southern Song illustrative prints Tianzhu lingqian. Over ninety scenes in total, these illustrations were printed along short texts, which included divinations ("gua") and interpretations ("jie"), and might have been primarily used as fortunes written on bamboo sticks ("qian") temple-goers picked from a container. A close study of the pictorial motifs and narratives reveals a set of unique pictorial patterns and symbolism used in illustrative divinations. Many motifs, such as a deer, a flying bird, a snake, a tiger, a boat parting at the shore, a roll of document flying on clouds, a house radiating with lights, and a scholar official, all stand for auspicious or ominous symbols of luck, wealth, disaster, health, pregnancy, officialdom, and so on. Their straightforwardness and naïveté form a contrast with the refined and complex vocabulary used by literati artists. Surprisingly, a large proportion of the divination sticks focusing on the inquiries of future prospects in officialdom imply that the intended audience of the Tianzhu lingqian were officials or people who were interested in officialdom. Here, Tianzhu may refer to the Upper Tianzhu Monastery in Southern Song Hangzhou—a prestigious monastery dedicated to Guanyin. Noted for her efficacy in averting natural disasters and her oracles transmitted to pilgrims in dreams, the Guanyin of the Tianzhu Monastery was particularly favored by educated people, who came to Hangzhou for governmental exams (in order to achieve the jinshi degree) and who sought guidance from Guanyin.

Goryo Patronage of Buddhist Sutra Printing in Yuan China (1279–1368)

Hosun Kang, Seoul National University

This paper presents three case studies from the Sino-Korean histories in order to evaluate Korean patronage of Buddhist sutra printing in Yuan China. The first case study focuses on the imperial patronage of King Chung-seon (r. 1298, 1308–1313), who sponsored sutra printing and bestowed sutras on temples in Jiangnan and the Yuan capital of Dadu. His officials also contributed personal funds for sutra printing. The second example is the Goryo monk Ui-seon of the Chon-tae Sect, who served as the abbot of the Yansheng si Monastery and Guangjiao si Monastery in Dadu. During his abbacy in Yansheng si, he reprinted the Li nian mi tuo daochang chan fa (Repentance Ritual Procedure for the Sanctuary of Amitabha Veneration), which stressed the need to repent in order to achieve rebirth in the Amitabha’s pure land. During the early Choseon dynasty, it was included in the Goryo Tripitaka kept in the Hae-in sa Monastery. Finally, I examine the case of a lay couple, Lee Byun-seung and his wife, who sponsored the reprinting of several sutras from the Puning Tripitaka, originally printed in the Puning si Monastery in Hangzhou during Qubilai Khan’s reign. Lee and his wife bestowed the reprints on several temples in Goryo including the Man-il-sa in their hometown of Chon-la. The patronage of Goryo people who lived in Yuan dynasty China played a key role in sutra printing in the Yuan. They were also important to the history of Buddhism in Korea since they introduced new versions of Buddhist texts there.

The Nine-Lotus Bodhisattva on Silk and Stone

Marsha S. Haufler, University of Kansas

Pictorial steles are usually seen as secondhand reports on an artist’s creation. When art historians use steles, such as those with designs credited to Wu Daozi or Guanxiu, it is usually to reconstruct a remote era from which few paintings remain and little survives from the hands of the masters. When they turn to later periods, from which we have abundant paintings, pictorial steles generally drop from view. Yet down to modern times, pictorial steles and paintings worked together to promote beliefs and create contexts of religious and social practice. Each medium has its virtues: expensive paintings on silk glorify their subjects; images on stone give them permanence. Study of pictorial steles together with paintings affords access to aspects of visual culture not readily appreciated by the study of paintings alone.

This paper presents a case study in Buddhist art: the cult of the Nine-Lotus Bodhisattva promulgated on stone and silk from the Wanli period (1573–1619). The Metropolitan Museum’s beautiful painting of the bodhisattva is well known, but a stele that replicates and predates this scroll takes us deeper into the cult, the miraculous events that inform its imagery, and the personality of its patron, Empress Dowager Li, who was recognized as an incarnation of the deity. I will speculate on the appearance of the original (apparently lost) model for the stele, consider other versions in stone, and introduce two paintings that testify to the continuation of the cult, or at least its imagery, in the Qing dynasty.