Building a Sacred Mountain: The Buddhist Architecture of China's Mount Wutai

Three. The Sacred Presence in Place and in Vision

89 The mountain top is a revelatory landscape, its height offering both the vision of heaven and a broad perspective on earth. —Diana L. Eck, “Mountains” CHAPTER THREE The Sacred Presence in Place and in Vision Vision was critical in Mount Wutai’s conversion into a Buddhist sacred site. Traditionally in China, great mountains were admired foremost for their towering height. The renowned Sacred Peaks (Yue) were eulogized in a poem from the Book of Odes (Shijing), beginning with the lines: “Grand and lofty are the Sacred Peaks, / their magnificence reaching to the heavens.”1 Close to Heaven’s view, the landscape of the high mountains evokes otherworldly and revelatory visions in China, as well as in many other cultures. But in Chinese premodern history, the sight of the mountains and the visions that people saw or hoped to see there were inseparable from the cultural and religious significance of the mountains. Early visitors at Mount Wutai, however, were looking for a more specific vision, namely that of the presiding bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, to whom Mount Wutai was gradually tied over the course of the sixth century. To have sight of the bodhisattva’s divine presence there became the chief aspiration for the religious practitioners visiting the site. A “tenth-stage” bodhisattva, Mañjuśrī was described in several canonical texts as possessing extraordinary divine power (S: abhijñā; C: shentong) and thus able to perform supernatural acts in order to save and enlighten all beings. Most specifically, according to the Mañjuśrī Parinirvāṇa Sūtra (Wenshu shili ban niepan jing), he could manifest in various transformations (S: nirmāṇa; C: huaxian); moreover, the sutra continues, now that the Buddha has entered nirvana, whoever hears the name of Mañjuśrī and sees, meditates, and worships his image could receive bountiful benefits and wisdom that would assist the pious in treading the path.2 The salvific or redemptive reward that came with “seeing” Mañjuśrī must have been one of the factors that contributed to the rise of the sacred mountain cult at Mount Wutai, especially given the anxiety over the demise of the Dharma that then pervaded Buddhist communities.3 By the time the Ancient Records of [Mount] Qingliang was compiled circa 680, the manifestation of the bodhisattva at the mountains was something people could count on. As Huixiang remarks, “If you believe in [Mañjuśrī’s] divine power [shentong], [his holy presence] is near!”4 Mount Wutai was not only a mountain of THE SACRED PRESENCE 90 towering peaks but the place where the revelatory vision and immanent presence of the bodhisattva could be experienced. This place-specificity, however, is not unproblematic. Theoretically, early Buddhism did not recognize places as spiritually distinct, and any place on earth could be “sacred” or, at least, be treated with some respect. But as time passed, Buddhist practitioners were able to establish and sanctify the place of practice and salvation by various means—in China, as we have seen, by virtue of sutra carvings, stupa caves, or colossal statues, which literally altered, marked, and transformed mountains into a sacred site. The early cult of Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (known as Guanyin, in Chinese) raises questions regarding a “demarcated ‘sacred’ realm,” in which the divine manifests. As many miraculous tales circulated during the fifth and sixth centuries indicate, the divine interventions of Guanyin did not occur at specific sites but in response to immediate need anywhere in this world. The “real” presence of the bodhisattva was marked “by a characteristic [temporal] precision, clarity, and effect.”5 In other words, Guanyin’s presence was not localized but universal ; “unlocalized conceptions of Buddhism as universal doctrine”6 in fact deny that there can be a specific sacred locus to which a Buddhist deity is exclusively bound. As such, turning Mount Wutai into a sacred abode of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī not only subverts the Buddhist notion of the possibility of salvation in any place in the universe, but also begs the questions, how the utopian vision of Buddhism could be “emplaced,”7 and how it could be replaced by such a different vision and conception as we see in Mount Wutai. In Chan Buddhism, a site can become sacred, but sacredness is not a quality reserved only for sites with specific features or for certain specific sites.8 In this sense, the Chan view is utopian, and its notions of place and space include no distinguishing physical particularities. In contrast, some...