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51 It must be noted that the strong association between Buddhist monasteries and mountains— especially “sacred” mountains— is a typically Chinese phenomenon. —E. Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China CHAPTER TWO Entering the Mountains, Localizing the Sacred Presence In 645, in a dedicatory prayer to Mount Heng (Hengshan), the Northern Sacred Peak, Emperor Taizong (r. 626–49) wrote: The dignified peak of the sacred mountain [lingshan] that extends across the northern wilderness marks the most extraordinary [landscape]. Beasts roar and dragons ascend where wind and rain breathe; the rainbow is its dress, and cranes are its canopies [at the place] where immortals travel to and fro. Its hills overlap one another haphazardly, and icy-cold mist wraps around their vegetation ; layers of ridges crisscross randomly, all tinged here and there by rays of sunlight. . . . Soaring grandly, it is solid enough to last forever with Heaven and Earth; subtly potent, its energy has never been exhausted since antiquity.1 Although brief, and composed long after the sacred mountain cult was established in China, the prayer exhibits several basic characteristics of Chinese attitudes toward mountains. In ancient China, mountains were places of power, full of potencies and occult potentialities, and throughout China’s history, it was a fundamental belief that mountains were breathing and moving, possessing animated and living forces accorded to none but the spiritual. Mountains were not only the domiciles of immortals in early China but, to use a term from Edouard Chavannes, they were themselves “les divinités.”2 In concluding his prayer, Emperor Taizong made a supplication to the sacred peak for protection of the northern territory, for which he promised to perform the most elaborate sacrifice, “for only the divinities [of the sacred mountain] to partake of.”3 As much as mountains were deeply rooted in Chinese culture, the term “sacred mountain” has no precise Chinese equivalent. In Western religious tradition, the sacred is often associated with transcendent reality of a wholly different order, opposite to that of the profane.4 In Chinese, for the terms that are translated as “sacred mountain” in English, the roots “numinous and efficacious” (ling) or “divine” (shen) were most often applied, to form the compound words lingshan and shenshan (shan: mountain).5 In English, “sacred,” “numi- ENTERING THE MOUNTAINS 52 nous,” and “divine” all similarly refer to the category of ideas or things related to spiritual qualities, but concepts of ling and shen were quite different in ancient China, on two counts. First, they emphasized more specifically a sense of marvelous or extraordinary power, derived from the rarefied, potent, and dynamic energy (qi) that imbued an object or a site with a sacred quality or presence.6 In its etymological origin, shan, or mountain, means “diffusion, what is able to diffuse and disperse vital energy, giving life to myriad things.”7 The same vital energy that constitutes the entire universe is what gives mountains their critical role in the cosmological scheme as the very life-nurturing source of the world. All mountains in this regard could potentially be divine (and sacred) and an object of worship in their own right.8 Second, as seen in Taizong’s prayer, a mountain was considered ling and shen because it was efficacious: it could respond not only to the supplication of men but also to human affairs (e.g., protect the nation, ensure the virtue of the ruler). In addition, located as they were often found at the extremities of the empire, great mountains demarcated and guarded the boundary of the known terrestrial land. In other words, instead of lying outside of the human realm, mountains were an inseparable part of it in the conception of reality and worldview of ancient China. Seeing the numinous and divine in a mountain was thus to recognize its productivity and fecundity in its prominent form, towering height, and inner energy, as well as its divine resonance in the larger cosmological context that qualified it as a sacred mountain. With these fundamental understandings one can begin to observe the development of native traditions of the sacred mountain in China. For example, the cult of the Five Sacred Peaks (Wuyue) was instituted as an important state ritual dedicated to the chosen mountains located at the center and in each quadrant of the empire (see map 1, in introduction). Thus highly charged with spatial symbolism and geographic identity, the five peaks were the far points of the emperor’s inspection tours around the imperium and the sites of important...

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