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83 Transformation Chapter Two Transformation: Pictorial Narratives In November of 690, Empress Wu Zetian (624–705; r. 690–705) ordered the establishment of a Dayun or Great Cloud Monastery in every prefecture of the empire and in the two capitals.1 The imperial edict came just one month after the empress ascended the throne of the Tang house and declared the founding of the Zhou dynasty in its place, thus becoming the first and only female sovereign ever to rule the middle kingdom.2 Central to this momentous event in Chinese history was the Great Cloud Scripture (Mahāmegha Sūtra; Dayun jing, T. no. 387), an obscure but otherwise authentic Buddhist scripture which Wu’s ideologues had skillfully reinterpreted to legitimize her claim to power.The Dayun Monastery was designated as the local venue at which this scripture was stored and expounded to the public by the Buddhist monks in residence.3 Not long after the edict took effect, the monastic and lay members of a newly renamed Dayun Monastery in Yishi, or today’s Linyi in southwestern Shanxi, commissioned a stone stele to be placed at a multi-storied structure dedicated to Maitreya. Since then, the work is purported to have remained in situ until the twentieth century, when it was removed to the local Confucian temple and later the provincial museum in Taiyuan.4 This stele from Yishi (hereafter Shanxi stele) contains one of the most elaborate pictorial narratives on the Buddha’s nirvana from medieval China (fig. 2.1). What is more, its compositional program was labeled as niepan bian 涅槃變, or literally “nirvana transformation,” in the main dedication line: “The Great Dayun Monastery of the Great Zhou reverently made this stele with niepan bian for the Sacred Divine Imperial Majesty (shensheng huangdi, i.e., Empress Wu)” (fig. I.3). This was the earliest known instance in which a nirvana image in narrative form was consciously identified with a verbal signifier. The extraordinary circumstances leading to the making of the Shanxi stele make it clear that the work ought to be recognized at once as an object of religious devotion and a cogent political statement. The material and inscriptional evidence at hand, accordingly, supports an interpretation of the pictorial nirvana narrative that decorated the stele as a localized response to the Wu Zhou regime, whose 84 Surviving Nirvana political ideology built on a particular understanding of Buddhist metaphysics prevalent in the seventh century. As discussed in Chapter 1, the progression from the present age of Śākyamuni to the future of Maitreya dominated the doctrinal and visual discourses of the sixth century. A great number of stone implements were produced expressly to highlight the thematic alliance of the two deities, which in many ways was designed to persuade for the everlastingness of the Dharma. The pairing of Śākyamuni and Maitreya was to remain relevant in the succeeding period, as the theme and the worldview behind it were thoroughly reworked to become a compelling argument for Wu Zetian’s legitimacy as Emperor of China. Specifically, a work like the Shanxi stele was meant to project her as the rightful custodian of the relics of Śākyamuni, a role which by default would guarantee the right to rule the world until the coming of Maitreya. This symbolic identity was to complement another key aspect of the legitimation campaign, which was to portray Wu as a predestined universal wheel-turning king (Skt. cakravartin rāja) like the Future Buddha. In this scheme of things, the pictorial nirvana narrative was assigned a crucial task of visually demonstrating the production of authentic relics from the body of the historical Buddha. The pictorial nirvana narrative on the Shanxi stele was made to tell a story in real space, and the story was the transformation of the Buddha in three stages through the course of attaining nirvana.5 Figure 2.2 illustrates the three key modalities of presence entailed in the composition: 1) the Buddha in anthropomorphic form, first seated in a preaching assemblage, then in recline at the moment of nirvana; 2) the coffin in which the expired Buddha is encased; and 3) a heap of relics resulting from the cremation of his body. Significantly, the same general layout was shared by a great number of contemporaneous examples on stone implements and inside cave temples, thus suggesting that it was a pervasive pictorial idiom from the late seventh century and throughout the eighth. Fig. 2.2 The three key signifiers in a pictorial nirvana narrative...

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