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 Introduction Chajang lamented that he had been born in a borderland. He longed to go to the West [to China, to participate in] the Great Transformation . In the third year of the Inp’yŏng reign period, the pyŏngsin-year [636], he received royal permission and, together with his disciple Sil and more than ten junior colleagues, went West, entering Tang, and visited Mount Qingliang [Mount Wutai]. On the mountain there was a clay form [statue] of the Great Saint Mañjuśrī. The traditions of that country say that the Lord Śakra, king of the gods, had artisans come fashion it. Chajang supplicated before that image for resonance from the unseen world. In his dream-state, the image rubbed his forehead and conferred on him a Sanskrit gāthā [verse]. When he awoke, he did not yet understand [what the verse meant]. When morning came, a strange monk came and explained it. Furthermore, [the monk] said, “Even though you study myriads of teachings, nothing will ever exceed this [gāthā].” Moreover, entrusting him with a kaṣāya [monk’s robe] and śarīra [relics], he vanished.1 T his anecdote about the aristocratic Silla monk Chajang’s worship of and spiritual encounter with Mañjuśrī, a bodhisattva important to the Hwaŏm tradition, illustrates several of the themes with which this book is concerned: the adoption and adaptation of religious practices by elites and the role, in this process, of imported deities and systems of understanding the cosmos. This book deals with the origins, composition, and function of Buddhist cults in the early medieval Korean state of Silla (ca. 300–935).2 In this connection it touches on a few themes and topics that inhabit the overlapping boundaries between several fields in the study of history and religion: questions of class and cultural context, the role of literature, and ritual studies. Fundamentally, it calls into question a scholarly assumption that the  Domesticating the Dharma nameless masses are responsible for the dissemination of “popular” religious practices and that those practices are a static heritage of man’s primordial polytheism.3 More precisely, it challenges the two-tiered model of religion that divides the concept into two distinct groups based upon imagined perceptions of religious practitioners: elite versus folk religion, intellectual versus popular religion, philosophy versus vulgar practices, and other such designations deployed usually as heuristic devices. Although the limitations and inefficacy of the two-tiered model have been shown repeatedly by scholars in recent years—most notably in Peter Brown’s study of the cult of saints in Latin Christianity; Gregory Schopen’s work on the cults of the book, relics, and images in medieval Indian Buddhism; and Michel Strickmann’s research on the interconnections between Buddhist and Daoist rituals and medical practices in medieval China4—this model has been and is still pervasive among students of the history of religion. The conventional wisdom offered by the two-tiered model is wrong. Neither material nor literary evidence supports its conclusions. In this book I demonstrate the role that religious and social elites played in the domestication of the religion. I also consider the place of objects, images and icons, dreams, spells, repentance rituals, and devotional practices associated with buddhas, bodhisattvas, and other sundry deities in the religious life and organizations of lay and monastic Buddhists in Silla Korea between the sixth and tenth centuries c.e. The thesis of this work is that the popularity of Buddhist cults among Silla’s social and religious elites was the primary cause behind the successful domestication of Buddhism and that this form of the religion achieved its ultimate phase when codified with the observances of Silla’s Hwaŏm tradition, which provided a compelling vision of the relationship between ritual and reality by incorporating key cultic practices. The attractive potency and legitimating power of Buddhist symbols motivated the social and religious elites of Silla to rename the country’s famous sites in Buddhist fashion, re-inscribing the local geography as a past Buddha-land. In time this gave way to a Hwaŏm-inspired vision of Silla topography that imbued the country with a deeper religious significance that has remained to this day. The power and potency of these sites was made accessible to the people of Silla through cultic practices. The practices of Buddhist cults became so ubiquitous in the traditions of East Asian Buddhism in succeeding times that we tend to take their presence for granted. Although the origins...

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