The Water God's Temple of the Guangsheng Monastery: Cosmic Function of Art, Ritual, and Theater (review)

Tourists are not the only ones to benefit from rural China opening to travel; fieldwork opportunities for studying art and culture at the local level are also increasing. Consequently, scholars interested in Chinese art, religion, and popular culture have a new resource to tap: local temples and monasteries. Because religious institutions were frequently the object of conspicuous patronage in the staging of seasonal festivals as well as temple building and renovation activities, there is a wealth of information relating to village society both in stele inscriptions documenting various acts of patronage and in the physical remains of the temple sites themselves. Text-based historians have looked to these places for inspiration over the past two decades, but very few book-length studies on the art of a single sacred site have been published to date. As an art historical study focusing on a single popular temple, The Water God's Temple of the Guangsheng Monastery: Cosmic Function of Art, Ritual, and Theater is a ground-breaking work. Anning Jing seeks to place the art and architecture of the Water God's Temple into the larger context of the site and community. Through analysis of iconography and style, Jing shows the wall-painting program of the Water God's Temple to be both a reflection of the popular rituals that took place in the temple complex and a part of the larger cosmological program of the Guangsheng Monastery, the Buddhist institution that dominates the site.

The Water God's Temple (Shuishenmiao) is located in the Town of Guangsheng Monastery (Guangshengsi zhen), Hongtong County, in southwestern Shanxi Province. The temple and monastery complex consists of the Upper and Lower Guangsheng Monastery and the Water God's Temple. The present temple and the Lower Guangsheng Monastery are the result of an early fourteenth-century rebuilding after the entire complex was destroyed in an earthquake in 1303. The Water God's Temple is dedicated to Mingying Wang, the spirit of Huo Spring, but shares its east wall with the lower monastic complex and has been associated with Guangsheng Monastery from as early as the Song dynasty. The murals of this monastery are some of the best known in Chinese art history, both because of their quality and early date and because they have been exhibited in the West with examples in the permanent collections of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. The murals of the Water God's Temple have remained in situ within the main hall of the complex and are known for the vernacular quality of their style and subject matter. The most famous of these, reproduced in (among other places) The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, is a scene from a contemporary drama. As such the wall paintings from Guangsheng Monastery and the Water God's Temple are an important part of the American understanding of Chinese visual culture at its most introductory level. Given its presence in our museums and textbooks a monograph on the site is long overdue.

The book consists of an introduction, four chapters, epilogue, and appendix. In addition to giving an overview of the twentieth-century history of the temple complex, Jing uses the introduction to propose that the lower Buddhist complex and the Water God's Temple were designed as part of a larger program to stabilize the cosmic forces that caused the 1303 earthquake. He also lays out questions regarding the iconography of the murals in the temple and their relationship to the temple rituals that took place at the site, including their relationship to popular culture and the practice of rainmaking in premodern China.

In chapter 1, using a combination of unpublished stele...