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Surviving Nirvana: Death of the Buddha in Chinese Visual Culture

Online ISBN:
9789882207448
Print ISBN:
9789622091252
Publisher:
Hong Kong University Press
Book

Surviving Nirvana: Death of the Buddha in Chinese Visual Culture

Published online:
14 September 2011
Published in print:
1 March 2010
Online ISBN:
9789882207448
Print ISBN:
9789622091252
Publisher:
Hong Kong University Press

Abstract

The Buddha's nirvana marks the end of the life of a great spiritual figure and the beginning of Buddhism as a world religion. This is the first book in the English language to examine how this historic moment was represented and received in the visual culture of China, of which the nirvana image has been a part for over 1,500 years. Mining a selection of well-documented and well-preserved examples from the sixth to twelfth centuries, the author offers a reassessment of medieval Chinese Buddhism by focusing on practices of devotion and image-making that were inspired by the Buddha's “complete extinction.” The nirvana image, comprised of a reclining Buddha and a mourning audience, was central to defining the local meanings of the nirvana moment in different times and places. The motif's many guises, whether on a stone-carved stele, inside a pagoda crypt, or as a painted mural in a cave temple, were the product of social interactions, religious institutions, and artistic practices prevalent in a given historical context. They were also cogent responses to the fundamental anxiety about the absence of the Buddha and the prospect of one's salvation. By reinventing the nirvana image to address its own needs, each community of patrons, makers, and viewers sought to recast the Buddha's “death” into an allegory of survival that was charged with local pride and contemporary relevance.

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