Surviving Nirvana: Death of the Buddha in Chinese Visual Culture

Chapter Four - Impermanent Burials: Relic Deposits

203 Impermanent Burials Chapter Four Impermanent Burials: Relic Deposits Master Zhaoguo was a survivor of war. Like the many residents of Dingzhou who lived in the decades following the fall of the Tang dynasty, the monk was caught in the relentless fighting between the invading Khitans and the native defenders from a succession of short-lived regimes better known in history books as the Five Dynasties (907–960).1 After a particularly fierce battle in 947, Zhaoguo was captured and taken northward. Following years of captivity in Liao territories, the monk somehow managed to escape and returned home to rebuild Jingzhi Monastery, at which he was once the monastic residence head. A chance for renewal came one day, when the monk uncovered three secret relic deposits from the temple ground in 976 (Kaibao 9) under the recently established Song dynasty. The discovery immediately attracted generous support from several highranking government officials in the area and an eager congregation whose number grew by the day. Within a year, the relics along with numerous offerings were redeposited under a newly built stone pagoda.2 Fruits of Master Zhaoguo’s labor at Jingzhi Monastery came to light again in the modern era. In May 1969, a major archaeological discovery was made in the city center of Ding County, Hebei, where the temple once stood (map 4). While the pagoda above ground was destroyed a long time ago, what was put underground in 977 had been preserved intact for nearly a millennium. Altogether, the crypt yielded over twenty-five thousand coins and some seven hundred items of metalwork, jades, textiles, wood carvings, ceramic and glass wares, and stone caskets, along with a set of exquisite mural paintings rendered on the walls of the hidden brick structure.3 The many donor inscriptions from the site indicate that some of objects were originally made for four previous deposits, but were reused in the latest round of interment in the tenth century. In retrospect, the find at Jingzhi Monastery was one of over eighty relic deposits unearthed in the past fifty years across China, the majority of which date from the ninth to twelfth centuries.4 This growing body of archaeological evidence shows that Buddhist relic worship had remained vibrant and widespread after an initial phase of development that was driven primarily by imperial rulers 204 Surviving Nirvana in the sixth and seventh centuries. In fact, the practice by then had permeated deeply into different segments of the population, thus becoming more conducive than ever toward local adaptation and reinvention. There is no better gauge of the situation than the nirvana image, which was one remarkable continuity throughout the history of relic worship in medieval China. Previously, the motif appeared as a sophisticated narrative format under the Wu Zhou regime, which seized upon its symbolic richness as a propagandist tool to advance the empress’s legitimation campaign. By the tenth century, the nirvana image had solidified its association with the relic cult by making the hidden space of relic deposits its new home. The motif’s entry into the domain of the invisible necessarily spelled changes in medium, mode of presentation, contents, as well as in viewership, function, and intent. Perhaps the most revealing indicator of all was the breakup of the nirvana iconography into a mosaic of multi-media. In foregoing the compositional coherence that once held the various components together in a unified setting, the motif now manifested itself synecdochically on different objects in the deposit, whose placement within the assemblage did not always allow for ready identification as before. In some cases, one particular element—be it the reclining Buddha or the mourning audience—was featured Map 4 Northeastern China in the tenth century. Map by John M. Marston. 205 Impermanent Burials by itself without any supporting material in the same spatial vicinity. In other cases, different elements were made in disparate representational media as if in tandem, with one as the subject of a mural painting, and another in threedimensional form as an object of offering, or a third as a verbal reference in a donor inscription. The increasingly defused, malleable character of the nirvana image in relic deposits poses considerable challenges for researchers. The potential danger of misidentification is all too real, for a coffin-shaped metal reliquary alone does not denote the nirvana theme, especially without the presence of any other iconographic elements associated with the motif. On the...