Daoist Images of Body and Landscape in Song Dynasty

Note: This is a brilliant and highly readable survey of religion in China and its relation to art. It has a great summary of major scholar’s theories about Taoism’s development in China that is alone worth reading (even if you are not focused on art history). Also includes long sections on Chan (Zen) Buddhism at the same period. Readers of this thesis will learn a lot about Taoist history, theory, and iconography. – Michael Winn

Text below does not include images. Text + images at: https://www.academia.edu/1045890/Chinese_Images_of_Body_and_Landscape_Visualization_and_Representation_in_the_Religious_Experience_of_Medieval_China

Chinese Images of Body and Landscape:
Visualization and Representation in the Religious Experience of Medieval China

Anna Madelyn Hennessey

Author’s bio, awards, acknowledgements are posted after the article.

ABSTRACT

liated with different religions and ideologies of the Song period (960- 1279 CE) utilized artistic, literary and visual representations to merge the natural world with the human body. This fusion of natural and human worlds in representation appears in a variety of contexts, including paintings of famous Song landscape artists, writings of literati thinkers, architectural developments of Neo- Confucian scholars, body charts recorded in the Daoist Canon, and artwork connected to Chinese Buddhism. Traditionally, scholarship within the field of religious studies relies heavily upon textual sources, and material objects are often seen as accessory to the findings related to these sources. When found within the context of religion, art objects are in this same vein often described as representational as opposed to foundational of religious experience or its aspects.

This thesis asserts that Song Chinese people used art and other material objects not only for the purpose of representing the world in which they lived, but also as a means of expressing, developing and empowering their religions and ideologies. So powerful were these material representations, in fact, that in certain cases they may have acted as a primary conduit through which the religion was experienced. As the dissertation will show, the interaction between the non-material activity of visualization, or how people create images in their minds, and representation, or how people create material objects to reify the images in their minds, is often pivotal, as opposed to accessory, to some of the later ideological developments of the Chinese people.

This thesis also examines sacred space of the Song period, theorizing that an important spatial synergy took place between physical representations and the religions of medieval China: images had become intertwined with how different groups of people visualized their bodies, as well as how these groups represented a human relationship at work with the natural world. In essence, Song representations of mountains, landscape and other natural formations act as material records of how people visualized their own bodies in microcosmic and macrocosmic form.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………1

A. The Merging of Body and Landscape in the Material Culture of Song
China’s Religion and Ideology ……………………………………………………………………1

B. Mediating Between the Material and the Ideological: Art and

Representation in the Field of Religious Studies……………………………………………4

C. Body-Landscape Fusions and the Material Culture of Song Period Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism………………………………………………………..11

II. Chapter One: A Literary Review: Preliminary Considerations in the Study of Chinese Religion…………………………………………………………………………………………..21

A. Contemporary Approaches to the Concept of Religion in China ……………….21

B. Towards a Discursive Definition of Chinese Religion………………………………59

III. Chapter Two: Envisioning the Mountain as Man: State Ideology and the Appropriation of Sacred Space during the Song Period ……………………………………..66

A. Literati Interest in the Material World: Natural Objects as Representations
of Humans and their Experiences ………………………………………………………………69

B. Anthropomorphism and the Appropriation of Space in the Writing and Painting of Guo Xi 國熈 ………………………………………………………………………….. 77

C. From Anthropomorphism to Physical Appropriation: Neo-Confucian Academy Building and The Spatial Power of Human Lineage………………………88 D. Ideology as Tool in the Appropriation of Space: A Lefebvrian Approach…..95 E. The Representational Space of Mountain-Body Fusions in Song China ……106

IV. Chapter Three: Representations of Internal Alchemy in Song Daoism: Envisioning the Body as Vessel of World and Cosmos…………………………………….110

A. Yangsheng 養生 in the History of Daoism……………………………………………112

B. The Rise of Alchemical Maps of the Body as Religious Expression in the Song Period…………………………………………………………………………………………..118

C. A Meeting of Song Representation and Visualization: Map of Rise and Fall
of Yin and Yang in the Human Body Tixiang yinyang shengjiang tu 體象陰陽

升降圖………………………………………………………………………………………………….131

D. Alchemical Representation and the Externalization of Internal Alchemy….136

E. Daoist Bodies and Material Representation within a General Theory of
Space …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 143

V. Chapter Four: Expressions of Domesticated Buddhism in Southern Song Art: Mountain-Body Fusions in the Paintings of Liang Kai 梁楷 …………………………….156

A. Liang Kai as Daizhao 待詔 and Figures in Landscape in Southern Song
Court Painting ……………………………………………………………………………………….159

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B. Liang Kai’s Sakyamuni Buddha: Emerging from the Mountains……………..171

C. Religio-Cultural Hybridization and Developments in Ink Painting during the Northern Song Period……………………………………………………………………………..180

D. Artistic Visualization of Man as Mountain and Chan Buddhism in the Later Paintings of Liang Kai ……………………………………………………………………………190

VI. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………210

A. Song Art and Religion: the Materiality of Religious Experience ……………..210

B. Towards Metaphysical Unity in a Contemporary Theory of Religion……….215

VII. References …………………………………………………………………………………………..218

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LIST OF IMAGES
Figure 1. Guernica (1937), Pablo Picasso ………………………………………………………….9

Figure 2. Han Shan and Shide 寒山拾得圖 (ca. 1200 CE), Liang Kai 梁楷…………19 Figure 3. Ink Monochrome Bamboo 墨竹圖 (11th c.),Wen Tong 文同…………………72 Figure 4. Early Spring 早春圖 (1072 CE), Guo Xi 郭熈……………………………………82 Figure 5. Neijing tu 內經圖 (Chart of Inner Landscape, 19th c.)………………………..122 Figure 6. Xiuzhen tu 修真圖 (Chart for the Cultivation of Perfection, 19th c.) …….123 Figure 7. Tixiang yinyang shengjiang tu 體象陰陽升降圖 (ca.1226 CE)…………….134 Figure 8. Sumeru at Dunhuang 敦煌 (830 CE)………………………………………………..147 Figure 9. Gentleman of the Eastern Fence (Dongli Gaoshi 東籬高士圖 late 12th

c.), Liang Kai 梁楷 ……………………………………………………………………………..164 Figure 10. Detail (Gentleman of the Eastern Fence Dongli Gaoshi 東籬高士圖)..165 Figure 11. On a Mountain Path in Spring 山徑春行 (c. 1200), Ma Yuan 馬遠 …..165 Figure 12. Winter Birds (Dong niao 冬鳥, ca.1200), Liang Kai 梁楷 ………………..169 Figure 13. Strolling on a Marshy Bank (Zeyan xingyin tu 澤畔行吟圖 ca.1200),

Liang Kai 梁楷…………………………………………………………………………………….170 Figure 14. Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountains (Chushan shijia tu 出山释迦

圖 1204) Liang Kai 梁楷 ………………………………………………………………………173 Figure 15. Detail, Painting of the Eight Monks (Bagaoseng gushi tu 八高僧故事

圖) ca.1200), Liang Kai 梁楷 ………………………………………………………………..196 xiv

Figure 16. The Sixth Chan Patriarch Huineng Chopping Bamboo (Liuzu pizhutu 六祖劈竹圖 ca.1200), Liang Kai 梁楷……………………………………………………202

Figure 17. Splashed Ink Immortal (Pomo xianren tu 潑墨仙人圖, ca.1200) Liang Kai 梁楷……………………………………………………………………………………………..204

Introduction:

The Merging of Body and Landscape in the Material Culture of Song China’s Religion and Ideology

As a way of expressing their ideas and practices, representatives from different religious and ideological groups during China’s Song period (960-1279 CE) increasingly utilized artistic, literary and visual representations to merge the natural world with the human body. This fusion of natural and human worlds in representation appears in a variety of contexts, including paintings of famous Song landscape artists, writings of literati thinkers, architectural developments of Neo- Confucian scholars, body charts recorded in the Daoist Canon, and artwork connected to Chinese Buddhism. Traditionally, scholarship within the field of religious studies relies heavily upon textual sources, and material objects are often seen as accessory to the findings related to these sources. When found within the context of religion, art objects are in this same vein often described as representational as opposed to foundational of religious experience or its aspects. In this dissertation, I demonstrate in an interdisciplinary fashion how Song Chinese affiliated with different religions used art and other material objects as a means of expressing, developing and empowering their religions and ideologies, and not only for the purpose of representing the world in which they lived. Although no uniform reason exists behind which the makers of these images sought to fuse human and natural worlds through their representations, the images share an aspect in that they ultimately became objects used as powerful

expressions of religious or ideological experience. So powerful were these material representations, in fact, that in certain cases they may have acted as a primary conduit through which the religion was experienced. Encounters between visualization, or how people create images in their minds, and representation, or how people create material objects to reify the images in their minds, emerge from the textual histories and material cultures of Chinese religions, arts and philosophies of the Song period. As the dissertation will show, this interaction between the non-material activity of visualization and the material output of representation is often pivotal, as opposed to accessory, to some of the later ideological developments of these different groups of people.

This research focuses special attention on how sacred space of the Song period interacted with representations of mountains in the form of human bodies and human bodies in the form of mountains. The sacredness of mountains and other natural landscapes had maintained a strong presence in China’s history prior to the time period of the Song. In fact, in pre-modern China, all mountains would have been thought of in one way or another as “sacred,” and thus no true dichotomy ever truly existed between the sacred and the secular in the context of Chinese mountains. Yet during the Song period, this sacredness manifested in a way that was distinctly material, strongly connected to the human body and within different tangible forms (art and representation). It may not have been an accident that while the mountain-body connection was being explored by some within the sphere of Song art, proponents of different schools of thought were during this

same time frame in the process of discovering, assimilating and appropriating sacred space, effectively juxtaposing actual mountain territory with their ideologies.

Although my research is divided into chapters devoted to each of China’s three traditional religions (the “Three Religions” or sanjiao 三教), which include

Confucianism (rujiao 儒教), Daoism (daojiao 道教) and Buddhism (fojiao 佛教),

I will also show how many of the images discussed here could not have been created exclusively within the confines of just one of these religions. Instead, the ways in which the images were created and developed do point to a larger theme of how China’s religions had become hybridized during the Song, intertwined not only with one another but intimately bound also to China’s greater social fabric, including its spheres of art, ideology, literature and politics. These findings agree with those of contemporary scholars who have described Chinese religions not as separate entities but as a complex system of interrelated practices and ideologies.1

Studying ways in which art and representation meshed with religious and

ideological visualizations of the Song period, I also examine contemporary

theories of space, contending that there exists an ideological and intellectual

connection to sacred space often occurring in conjunction with developments in

material culture. In China, sacred space, as well as appropriations of it, appear to

have benefited schools of religion and thought, especially as those schools

competed for a variety of resources during the Song. The motivation in exploring

1 Such scholars include Vincent Goossaert, Edward Davis and Robert Hymes. For these and other sources, please see the literary review of Chapter One for a detailed discussion.

contemporary theories of space is my understanding that material representations played an active role both in the way that members of certain groups interacted with the physical land of Song China, as well as in how these people came to perceive of an ideological space as connective of the natural world to the human body. I theorize that an important spatial synergy took place between physical representations and the religions of medieval China: images had become intertwined with how different groups of people visualized their bodies, as well as how these groups represented a human relationship at work with the natural world. In essence, Song representations of mountains, landscape and other natural formations act as material records of how people visualized their own bodies in microcosmic and macrocosmic fashions. I shall also evaluate theories of space as they might relate more generally to art, religion and ideology.

Over the past few decades, scholarly interest in material culture has grown within the field of religious studies and in other areas of the humanities. A long history of underplaying the material in favor of the textual, however, continues to influence how objects are approached academically within these fields. I look now to a brief discussion of that history.

Mediating Between the Material and the Ideological: Art and Representation in the Field of Religious Studies

Much of modern philosophy has bolstered the perception of a metaphysical duality at work between the imaginary worlds of the material and the ideological, and these perceived dualities have in turn influenced scholarly approaches to

studying religion. In the final chapter of his seminal work, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual, Jonathan Z. Smith famously pointed out that the entire study of religion has been marked by a Protestant bias.2 Smith’s point of contention primarily had to do with the bias as he saw it directed towards rituals, which he claimed had been unfairly relegated to a sphere of superstition or habit, and not to that of religious studies.3 Smith believed that eminent scholars within the field of religious studies, such as Mircea Eliade, had overemphasized the importance of “linguistically rich myths” in their constructions of religious history.4 Rituals, claimed Smith, are “linguistically impoverished” and have therefore not received the attention they are due.5 Artworks and other forms of material culture share with ritual this linguistic impoverishment. Although much progress has been made over the past few decades in how scholars of religion utilize sources of material culture in recovering the history of religions, the bias of elevating text and idea over the material is still often a pervasive factor not only in how scholars approach religious history, but in how students are taught to approach their subject matter.

Working on the history of religions within the context of China, sinologist John Kieschnick has explained the academic tendency to disregard serious study of relationships between religion and objects,

…material things have seemed at best trivial and at worst a distraction from what is important in religion. Yet religion, like all forms of

2 Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place 98. 3 Ibid., 100.
4 Ibid., 102.
5 Ibid.

communication, is intimately linked to the material world. Not only do objects play important roles in all forms of religious activity, but people who engage in religious activities in general recognize the importance of things and comment on them at length, leaving behind a wealth of material for historians willing to explore the place of material culture in religion.6

While Kieschnick’s own work thoroughly explores the rich field of data pertaining to religious objects and their significations as found throughout the history of Chinese Buddhism, the author himself explains the need for a more interdisciplinary understanding of the world—an understanding that holds in esteem artifacts as highly as it does textual materials,

The relative lack of attention to artifacts in historical studies is in large measure the result of practical difficulties: archaeologists and historians are trained in different departments and publish in different journals. Historians do not in general find artifacts irrelevant or trivial in the course of human development; they are simply unfamiliar with the material. Historians of religion, on the other hand, have expressly placed objects outside their field of inquiry.7

Like Smith, Kieschnick ultimately traces this academic aversion to material culture within the field of religious studies to Protestant ideology,

The origins of this disdain for religious goods are diverse but can be traced in part first to Protestant reformers like Zwingli and Calvin, who railed against “externalism” and concern for “outward things,” and called for a return to the scriptures as the source of spiritual insights and strength. In the field of religious studies, this tendency was reinforced in a less direct way by the writings of major scholars like Durkheim, Weber, and Eliade, who focused on the separation between the sacred and the profane and insisted that religion at its core constituted a separate special realm. This assumption was tied to the division between spirit and matter.8

6 John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003, 21.
7 Ibid., 20-21.
8 Ibid., 20. Kieschnick agrees with religious studies scholar, Colleen McDannell, whose work on material culture and American religion has also explored the influence of Protestant ideology on the field of religious studies. See McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture

Much of the root of this Protestant divide between spirit and matter rests also in the overemphasis within the field on transcendental philosophies such as those found within the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). The intellectual result of this is a Protestant focus, be it of a conscious or subconscious nature, on that which appears to be of a transcendent, as opposed to immanent nature when studying religions. Even in influential interpretive examinations of artwork within the field of religious studies, we often note a focus on the transcendent, an ironic fact since the artwork itself is an immanent object. A great example of this occurs in the work of twentieth-century theologian and philosopher, Paul Tillich (1886-1965), whose philosophy of religion has been highly influential within religious studies and the philosophy of religion. Tillich’s ideas were highly influenced both by Hegel and by the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).9 In his work, Tillich maintains that it is from within a man’s realization of his own being, and the understanding of the finitude of his being, that he becomes capable of realizing the existence of another being— God—who mirrors him yet transcends him in that this other being (God) is infinite.10 This dialectic relationship between human and God clearly resembles

in America, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1998; and “Interpreting Things: Material Culture Studies and American Religion” in Religion vol. 21, London, England: Reed Elsevier, 371-387, 1991.
9 In his discussion of the numinous, Tillich is also clearly influenced by the German Lutheran theologian, Rudolf Otto (Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 7 and 131).

10 Ibid., 10-11.

that which Hegel devised in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion of 1827.11 The need to question Being comes from Heidegger’s Being and Time of 1927.12 Tillich states, for example, that, “ontological awareness is immediate…it is present, whenever conscious attention is focused on it,” and the concept of the existence of a human ability to make the self aware ontologically comes from Heidegger’s emphasis on the process of consciously questioning Being, which in turn brings

one closer to Being.13 Both Hegel and Heidegger are concerned with the ontological question of the nature of Being. Tillich sees ontology as the necessary root from which the philosophy of religion must grow. Cosmology, which concerns the nature of the universe and is external to Being may be part of the philosophy of religion, but it should not be its foundation, he claims.14 In the sixth chapter of one of his core works, Theology of Culture (1959), Tillich takes on the topic of “Protestantism and Artistic Style,” making the argument that Picasso’s “Guernica” (Fig. 1) is a Protestant painting. Such an essay provides a key example of the manner in which an influential philosophy of religion infused with Protestant ideology attempts to make immaterial the material space of art. Tillich ultimately argues that the painting is “Protestant” because through the situation Picasso has depicted (the 1937 Nazi bombing of Guernica, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War [1936-1939]), the artist has already transcended it,

11 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827), trans., Peter C. Hodgson and J.M. Stewart, Vol. I: Introduction and The Concept of Religion, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984.
12 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans., John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

13 Tillich 23. 14 Ibid., 11.

…the human situation in its conflicts should be expressed courageously. If it is expressed, it is already transcended: He who can bear and express guilt shows that he already knows about ‘acceptance-in-spite-of.’ He who can bear and express meaninglessness shows that he experiences meaning within his desert of meaninglessness.”15

The interpretation is problematic in that Tillich’s focus on “transcendence” in relationship to events such as the devastation of Guernica or of the Spanish Civil War, a transcendence achieved through the depiction of the event, diminishes the possibility that the painting may have served a very human, immanent cause—that of expressing the horrors of war—as opposed to the demonstration of some

Fig. 1 Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Guernica (1937)
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain

15 Ibid., 75.

transformative transcendental act of the artist.16 Emerging from Tillich’s intellectualization of Picasso’s painting appears to be a Protestant appropriation of the art form. In this appropriation, a strong ideological attempt is made at transforming the material into that which is immaterial.

As Kieschnick explains in his work on Chinese material culture, the academic tendency to divide spirit from matter is tied to a Protestant ideology that persists in the field of religious studies. As in the case of Tillich’s work, much of this Protestant ideology appears to be based on a Hegelian philosophy devoted to a description of the dialectical relationship between spirit and matter in which matter (material) itself can become “transcendent.” This type of philosophy, however, is founded on the faulty premise that subjects and objects, or spirit and matter, are divided to begin with, and that they are not actually one and the same thing.17 Hegel, for example, believes that human consciousness is the primary factor that elevates human subjectivity above other objects of the “sensible world,” and yet he never presents a clear argument enabling his readers to understand how it is that complex human thought is not just another manifestation of the material world.18 He never answers the basic query regarding what the particular quality is that makes human cognition particularly special or elevated, as opposed to just different (when compared to the experiences of animals and all other living beings,

16 Another different point to consider would be the fact that Picasso was an artist with a Catholic upbringing, raised in a Catholic country. Thus Tillich’s interpretation of Guernica could also be seen as a Protestant appropriation of a Catholic space.
17 Anna Hennessey, “Spinoza, Substance and Subjectivity in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion” in the Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, Villanova University: vol. 4, issue 2, 1-15, Fall 2007. http://www.philosophyandscripture.org/index.html.

18 Ibid., 14.

for example).19 Although human consciousness may indeed be a complex matter, Hegel’s argument never provides a succinct argument for explaining how such consciousness is not, once again, just another material element of the world.20 And as such, the theoretical basis behind which many scholars have assumed a division to exist between immanence and transcendence is frankly flawed.

The academic perception of a divide between the material and the immaterial, or the subjects and objects of the world, has had huge ramifications on the ways in which some scholars of religion have avoided approaching objects when studying religion. With an understanding that this perception is based on shaky theoretical foundations, one gains insight into the possibility that material objects are actually integral to the religious experience.

A paradigmatic example of how material developments are enmeshed with the history of religions is found in the context of Song period China. Representations of the body and of the natural world stand out as material markers that define religious history of this time. I now turn to a brief summary of how these representations acted as key elements to the development of Song religions.

Body-Landscape Fusions and the Material Culture of Song Period Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism

I begin my exploration of Song religion and material culture with a look at art connected to the imperial state of the Northern Song period (960-1127 CE).

19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 14-15.

During this time, scholars and artists linked to the state increasingly represented the natural world in their art and literature as symbolic of the human world. Such appreciation for nature had already existed within the literary arts of Chinese culture for some time, present, for example, during the Southern Dynasties (南朝

various dynasties of the 5th and 6th centuries CE) when yongwu 詠物 poems, or

poems devoted to detailed descriptions of natural world objects, flourished within the literary culture of the court.21 However, the emphasis on how the symbolic relationship between humans and the natural world could be represented in the visual arts took on a new and more complex dimension during the Song period. An interest in material objects from the natural world grew within the framework of Northern Song literati scholarship, for example, wherein famous scholar- officials (shi dafu 士大夫) such as Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037-1101) and Ouyang Xiu 歐

陽脩 (1007-1072) described natural objects as emblematic of the human experience. Writing about the material world in which they lived, these scholars,

known as the literati (wenren 文人), envisioned certain natural objects as

representative of human character. In addition to their representation of these symbolic unions between natural world and human character in their writings, however, some of these scholars also began to represent this amalgamation in the form of ink monochrome paintings. In this way, paintings of natural world objects such as bamboo and plum blossom came to be embedded symbolically with

21 Maggie Bickford, Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painting Genre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 21.

human characteristics such as nobility and intellectual vitality. The Song period thus saw the creation of a literati painting tradition (wenren hua 文人畫).

In the meantime, artists in the imperial city of Kaifeng 開封 worked as court painters at the Hanlin Academy, (Hanlin xueshi yuan 翰林學士院),

developing a tradition of painting that flowered during the Northern Song period: monumental landscape (Beisong shanshui hua 北宋山水畫). Painting ink and

color onto enormous hanging scrolls, usually made of silk, artists created impressive mountain settings for imperial and aristocratic audiences. Within the monumental landscape scroll, miniature images of people sometimes emerged, half hidden within the scene and overshadowed by the natural landscape itself.
Yet although artists diminished the presence of human bodies in these monumental landscapes, the works were not necessarily meant to make humans entirely insignificant. For in some cases, the imperial artist painted his mountains symbolically as if they were representational sites of a human, imperial power. The Linquan Gaozhi 林泉高致 (“Lofty Record of Forests and Streams”), a well-

known manual on pedagogical rules of Northern Song painting, instructed artists to paint the mountain anthropomorphically, as if it were the human body of the emperor himself.22 The author of the manual’s sayings, Guo Xi 郭熙 (c.1020-

1090), was an artist and member of the literati class, serving the imperial state under Emperor Shenzong 神宗 (1048-1085). Guo Xi advocated this approach to a

22 Guo Xi 郭熙, Linquan Gaozhi 林泉高致 (“Lofty Record of Forest and Streams”), translated by Shio Sakanishi, Frome and London: Butler & Tanner Ltd., 1935, 37.

visualization of nature not only in his writing, but in his own painting as well, envisioning the mountain as man. I shall examine how this artist actualized his theories of painting in his own monumental landscape painting, Early Spring 早春

圖, which is dated 1072. In light of the imperial context in which Guo Xi and

other court artists created their works, there is a distinct possibility that these paintings had come to act as a material means through which political ideologies of the Northern Song could be expressed. As I maintain from Guo Xi’s thoughts in the Linquan gaozhi, monumental paintings were not just representations of China’s landscape, nor did they act simply as great human expressions of the natural world. Instead, they also acted ideologically, merging the spheres of human body and natural world in a material way that could benefit the imperial state.

Guo Xi and others employed by the state have often been described as “Confucian.” I consider the concept of Confucianism and its import on Song religion and ideology, seeking to explain whether it played a role in the representations that Song artists developed. Following the case of Confucianism in the art of the Northern Song, the research discusses Neo-Confucian material developments that took place during the Southern Song period (1127-1279 CE), in observance especially of how they may have related to an ideological merging of body and nature. Particular attention focuses on the role that Neo-Confucian academy-temple building played in the creation of a physical mountain space in which human body, nature and Neo-Confucian ideology fused. The construction

of Neo-Confucian temple complexes increased and flourished on various sacred mountains during China’s Southern Song period. Interacting with different schools of religion, Neo-Confucians built their individual architectures in mountain locations across the empire, often appropriating geography that other competing Daoist and Buddhist groups had previously deemed as sacred to their own practices. The phenomenon of appropriating sacred space in this manner is perhaps most evident in the flourishing academy movement endorsed by Neo- Confucian scholar, Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1230 CE), who built academies on

mountains formerly associated with spaces considered sacred only within contexts of Buddhism and Daoism. A Neo-Confucian envisioning of a sacred space in which humans and nature merged is plausibly manifest in the academy movement. This section also takes into consideration spatial analysis related to the appropriation of space and the use of sacred space as a tool through which the promotion of religion and ideology could take place.

Discussion then turns to a fascinating development in the material history of Chinese Daoism that also took place during the Song period. The Song marked a time in which Daoists were in the process of developing a visual tool that could represent both the internal processes of human bodies, as well as the relationship of these bodies and processes to the external world. This visual tool came in the form of a map or chart (tu 圖) of the body. Such representations offered their

viewers the visualization of a system of microcosmic and macrocosmic correspondences perceived to be at work between body and world. In these map

images, or body charts, Daoists depicted the human body as a microcosm that contained inner landscapes of both natural and cosmic dimensions. Unlike literati writers or imperial artists such as Guo Xi, these Daoists did not represent natural world objects, such as mountains or landscapes, as human symbols. Instead, they represented human bodies as regulated by complex systems of internal processes that also resonated with the natural world. These body charts, some of which are still used in Daoism today, are representations of internal alchemy, and thus the research considers the relationship between the rise of internal alchemy, or neidan 內丹 and the creation of these charts during the Song. Based on the historical

knowledge we have of these charts, it is the case that just as Daoism was entering a phase of internalization in the form of internal alchemy, externalization in the form of alchemical representation was also rising as the material means through which a Daoist religious experience could be actualized.

Daoist body charts also functioned in an important spatial manner, merging the spheres of body, natural world, cosmos, imagery and mental world through visualization and representation. Sacred microcosms have played a significant role within the Chinese religious tradition, and these body charts point to one way in which representations have been used within Daoism to make material the visualizations of a microcosmic space. This look at space in its Daoist context can be useful within the broader field of spatial analysis, for it provides a contradictory example to traditional theories of space that describe space as something immaterial, or as a vast container external to the human body.

Lastly, I examine Chinese Buddhism, focusing on a new style of painting that emerged towards the end of the Southern Song, when an amalgamation between human body and natural world occurred in the realm of art. As popularity of the Northern Song monumental landscape movement waned, court artists focused once again on the human figure, which became integral to many compositions of Southern Song painting. As opposed to the mountains and natural landscapes of Northern Song monumental landscape painting that had engulfed the human body, minimizing individuals or hiding them within the work, landscapes in Southern Song art often acted as natural world backgrounds to individual human figures. The theme of landscape as figure, a theme found both in the work of Guo Xi and in the Neo-Confucian appropriation of sacred mountain space, morphed in two ways during the Southern Song, both of which are manifest in the art of Liang Kai 梁楷 (ca.1200 CE), a reclusive painter who at the beginning of the thirteenth-

century left his decorated post as court artist for the Southern Song Imperial Painting Academy (Nan Song hua yuan 南宋畫院) to paint at Chan Buddhist

monasteries in and around the Southern Song capital of Hangzhou 杭州. Strong

differences are clear between Liang Kai’s early academic style, in which he depicted the human figures in landscape; and his later individualistic style, in which body and landscape are fused. In the first thematic shift, the landscape as figure theme morphed into a theme devoted instead to figure in landscape. The second and more drastic of the thematic shifts, however, occurred around the time that Liang renounced his position as court artist to participate artistically in

activities of the monastic world. At this time, the artist began using a broad stroke technique with splashed ink (pomo 潑墨), creating ink images of human figures

that were focal to his scrolls. In some of these later works, Liang’s figures
replaced landscape entirely. Yet just as landscape receded or disappeared in his paintings, the technique that the painter used to depict the human body took on the same stylistic qualities found previously in landscape paintings. Liang’s use of his ink wash method therefore acted to render human bodies as if they were mountains. Attached to the iconography of Chan Buddhism 禪宗, these figures merged with

the natural world by mimicking in ink the images of the mountains, rocks and natural formations themselves. In one painting attributed to Liang, for example, the artist presents an image of the two legendary monk-poets, Hanshan 寒山 and

Shi De 拾得, who lived during the ninth-century of the Tang Dynasty (618-907)

[Fig. 2]. Poetry and imagery surrounding the figures of these monks had become popular in the literary culture attached to Chan Buddhist institutions of the Song period.23 Liang’s use of an untrammeled brushstroke style to paint figures such as these is representative of an ink wash technique more commonly associated with the production of landscape than of figure painting.24 The bodies of the two painted monks merge together like the rocky cliffs of a Chinese mountain

23 Yukio Lippit, Awakenings: The Development of the Zen Figural Pantheon, The Japan Society Article Database, www.japansociety.org.
24 Valérie Malenfer Ortiz, Dreaming the Southern Song Landscape: The Power of Illusion in Chinese Painting, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999, 101-104.

Fig. 2 Liang Kai 梁楷 (attributed) ca.1200 Han Shan and Shide 寒山拾得圖
The Hakone Museum of Art, Hakone, Japan

landscape, and in the style of Liang Kai’s later works suchas this, the second thematic shift took place and body became landscape, or body as landscape.

This last portion of the dissertation is in the end interested in considering how this artistic fusion of body and nature may have related to a domesticated form of Buddhism or Buddhist art in Southern Song China. Hangzhou’s religious climate during the Song was one of hybridization. It is through Liang Kai’s artistic representations in which nature and body merge from his brushwork that a domestication of Buddhist art may be found. Furthermore, the research explores

how Liang’s work acted not only as a means of domesticating Buddhist art, but of transforming Buddhism itself, first in China and later in Japan.

The research of this dissertation ultimately hopes to demonstrate how immanence and transcendence coalesced in the context of Chinese art and religion of the Song period, and as such how art and representation have been as influential to religious developments and experiences as have been texts and rituals. I also contend that a better understanding of how art and material culture relate to religion will contribute more broadly to how we as scholars acknowledge religious experiences as bound to human interaction with the material world.

Chapter One:
Preliminary Considerations in Studying Chinese Religion

Contemporary Approaches to the Concept of Religion in China

Before considering how visualization and representation may have aided in the process of hybridizing Chinese religions during the Song period, I must first examine questions surrounding how the term “religion” applies at all in the context of China and Chinese history. These questions are certainly relevant to the study of this dissertation, which will attempt to describe material aspects of the ways in which different religious and ideological groups of Song China interacted with one another. In recent years, specialists in fields such as Chinese Religions and Religious Studies have strongly questioned the division of China’s religious traditions into succinct categories, and in particular into the three categories of the sanjiao 三教 (“three religions” or “three teachings”). One cannot avoid the

possibility that Western intrusion into foreign cultures may have had something to do with such clean-cut institutionalizing of China’s complex system of beliefs. In his article devoted specifically to the topic, “The Concept of Religion in China and the West” (2004), Vincent Goossaert presents “Chinese Religion” as an all- encompassing, interrelated system of beliefs that are based on Chinese cosmology. The main point of the article is useful for any scholar in the field of Religious Studies in that it asks the reader to question the manners in which religions and religious identities in China have been categorized and defined in the modern world. While focusing on Chinese religions, Goossaert also makes a contribution

to the field of postcolonial studies in that he underlines how western religious ideologies greatly influenced modern shifts in the structuring of religious institutions in China after the nineteenth-century.25 However, Goossaert’s thesis also reminds and warns all scholars of Chinese religions, regardless of the time frame in which their work is focused, to understand that perhaps there was no such comprehension of a division of belief systems in China during China’s past. His argument is therefore highly relevant to studies of the Song period, for example, since religions during this timeframe have until recently also often been divided into relatively neat categories.

Goossaert’s fundamental argument relies on his point that in China, as in other countries around the world, there existed no such concept of religion until the twentieth-century, and that the transformation of the idea of religion from concept to actuality greatly changed the way that the Chinese themselves behaved in organizing their religious systems. This process of transformation ultimately resulted in Chinese conformity to the definition of religion as construed according to modern western standards. Goossaert emphasizes that it was not until the beginning of the twentieth-century that the neologism, zongjiao 宗教 was formed

in China, imported from its earlier usage in Japan.26 Thus a word was created in China to accord with the western idea of religion as a system of beliefs and practices structured independently from society, matching the manner in which

25 Vincent Goossaert, “The Concept of Religion in China and the West” in Diogenes 204, London; Thousand Oaks, CA; New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005, 13-20.
26 Ibid. 14.

western societies had organized their own churches and places of worship.27 The creation of the word and subsequent category, religion, however, was not solely intellectual in nature, contends Goossaert. Rather, it was indeed an imperialistic creation of the West, utilized by western groups for the purposes of destroying and repressing those manners indigenous to the Chinese in which their religious systems had previously been structured.28 Prior to the introduction of the concept of religion into China, Goossaert points out, Chinese religion had no name and instead comprised a wide variety of practices. Western colonial ideology, however, forced the Chinese to re-organize the great mélange of their religious practices. Before long, the Chinese Republic during the twentieth-century began to recognize only five religious institutions as actual “religion”: Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism and Daoism.29 Hundreds of thousands of local temples and cult associations were never state-approved, labeled instead as part of superstition (mixin 迷信). After the 1960s, some local religions did receive recognition when

the state created the new title, “popular religion” (or ‘popular beliefs’ minjian xinyang 民間信仰) to describe them.30 However, such categorization of these

systems of belief as “religion” and not “superstition” only perpetuated the colonial procedure of picking and choosing the indigenous belief practices to be deemed legitimate or illegitimate. Many practices in China have been forced over time to incorporate western ideologies into their frameworks when construing themselves

27 Ibid., 14.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 15.
30 Ibid., 15-16.

as “religions” in the eyes of the modern world. Western influence has in fact been so pervasive in China, states Goossaert, that the new foundations of Chinese religion are inextricably bound to the models forced on the Chinese by Christians and the models of their religions.31

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, contemporary scholars have begun to approach in a new manner the ways that the Chinese have over time practiced their religions, questioning how earlier scholarship set forth clear divisions between the complex variety of Chinese religious practices. Some of these approaches have been particularly influential in approaching the history of religions in China, including as those religions occurred during the Song period.

In his 2007 book, The Taoists of Peking, Vincent Goossaert furthers his critique of contemporary work on Chinese religions as found in his 2004 article, opposing not only scholarly segregation of the sanjiao but also that of a fourth category, “popular religion,” to which he refers briefly in his earlier article. Goossaert ultimately rejects the category in its entirety, stating that the structures of the “three teachings” encompass all religious beliefs and practice in China, and that the creation of such a fourth category is derogatory.32 Following in the

31 “the Chinese case seems to me to stand out by the radical manner in which western ideas of religion and religious policy have forcibly brought about a re-ordering of religion at the grassroots…it is the narrow definition of the idea of religion, following a model inspired primarily by Christianity, that appears as the most pronounced western influence in China as regards religious theories and policies.” Ibid., 19.

32 “I find it convenient to dispense with the much-abused notion of ‘popular religion’ or ‘folk religion,’ and indeed with the very word ‘popular.’ Each of the many independent communities and networks that formed the social structure of Chinese religion chose, within the shared repertoire of beliefs and practices and the services offered by the Three Teachings and their clerics, those that gave them relevant meaning” (Vincent Goossaert, The Taoists of Peking, 1800-1949: A

footsteps of Kristofer Schipper, Goossaert would like to study Daoism by studying the people—Daoists—and their practices.33 He does not want to focus all attention on individual Daoists who were of some special import to the tradition. Rather, partially in an attempt to fight anticlericalism in the field of Daoist Studies, Goossaert in this work takes the approach of attempting to study all of the people he defines as Daoists who lived and worked in Beijing during a particular timeframe (1800-1949).34 Goossaert’s approach, which could be helpful to any contemporary study of Chinese religion, focuses on as many aspects as possible of a certain group living in a certain place at a certain time (Daoists in Beijing during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Goossaert does not attempt to make broad generalizations about what Daoism is or what defines Daoist identity. Instead, he decides to study meticulously the activities and interactions of a group of people connected to Daoist practice, and who lived during a relatively short timeframe in a small area of China.

Although his manner of approaching Chinese religion is quite different from Goossaert’s, Louis Komjathy is in his comprehensive study, Completion of Perfection: Soteriology, Mysticism and Self Transformation in Early Quanzhen

Social History of Urban Clerics, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London: Harvard University Asia Center and Harvard University Press, 2007, 7).
33 Kristofer Schipper, “An Outline of Taoist Ritual,” paper prepared for the International Conference on Asian Rituals and the Theory of Ritual, Berlin (Wissenschaftkolleg), June 1984, 1 in Davis Society 10n21.

34 “I am not interested in ‘representative’ or ‘eminent’ figures; I do intend not to merely chronicle colorful leaders, authoritative authors, bitter conflicts, and institutional developments, but to place all of these back into the context of a clergy full of variety, and sometimes of contradictions. I have tried to trace all documented Peking Taoists, the anonymous as much as the famous, and to incorporate solid evidence as well as anecdotal gossip, in order to take a balanced view of their place within society. I have tried as much as possible to challenge anticlerical prejudices in the scholarly tradition of Taoist studies…” (Goossaert, Taoists of Peking 15).

Daoism (2007), similar in the sense that Komjathy chooses to provide in-depth information on a specific group and timeframe of Daoism.35 Komjathy’s focus is upon the early development of Quanzhen Daoism (全真道) as it occurred during

the twelfth century of the Song period under the leadership of Wang Chongyang (王重陽). He is particularly interested in the definition of what it means to be

“Quanzhen” (as opposed to focusing on the broader areas of “Daoism” or “Chinese Religion”). This approach avoids normative definitions of the Daoist religion, focusing instead on one strong strand of the Daoist tradition, and appears to be in accord with Jonathan Z. Smith’s method of viewing religions as polythetic and not monothetic. In Imagining Religion (1982), Smith argues that scholars of religion often make the taxonomic mistake of dividing religions up by forcing them into categories. Smith believes that any one religion can take on many different forms, characterized in many different manners. Likewise, Komjathy believes that many different models of Daoism have existed over time, some of which coexist and some of which do not.36 Komjathy’s research is highly informative to the work of this dissertation not only in that the author traces the history of an important religious movement of the Song period, but in that he also examines the crucial role that visualization played in Quanzhen practices. Some images associated with Quanzhen are intimately bound to its practices. Komjathy’s research on the history of Quanzhen provides a valuable resource in

35 Komjathy, Louis. Cultivating Perfection: Mysticism and Self-transformation in Early Quanzhen Daoism. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007.
36 Ibid.,19-20.

the understanding of how Quanzhen practitioners and artists derived the images when creating their representations during the Song.

Turning to influential work of other contemporary scholars, Edward Davis in his Society and the Supernatural in Song China (2001) points to the same problem discussed by Goossaert regarding how religions have been divided in China. Yet Davis focuses not on the effects that nineteenth-century western intellectual colonialism had on the subsequent development of religion in China. He instead examines more specifically how theories commonly related to Chinese religion of the Song period have in particular acted categorically to divide religious traditions in China into the three teachings of Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism.37 According to Davis, the division in this case usually acts to present Confucianism, or rather Neo-Confucianism, as superior to the practices found within the spheres of Song Daoism and Buddhism. This type of categorization, for example, may be found in historical works such as Marcel Granet’s 1922 work, La Religion des Chinoises (The Religion of the Chinese People). Granet’s work sets forth Confucianism as a system of authority that has dominated China’s religious and political structure not only during the Song, but also over the entire course of China’s long history. Davis focuses on the problematic nature of such categorization when analyzing the timeframe of the Song, contending that these attempts at theorizing Chinese religion ultimately fail for three reasons: first, they advocate the essentialist view that there exists something called “Confucianism”

37 Davis, Edward L. Society and the Supernatural in Song China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001, 6-7.

which encompasses Chinese culture and society; second, they tend to reject religion as something that is “a community of behavior,” instead marking it as something that emanates from individual beliefs; and third, they fail to recognize the rich source material found in the Daoist and Buddhist canons, as well as in miscellaneous writings of the Song literati.38 Davis does not wish to replace these theories, which he sees as prioritizing and privileging Confucianism, with a new theory that prioritizes or privileges Daoism or Buddhism. Instead, he would like to present an entirely new model of Chinese religion as one that cannot be divided into the Three Teachings. This model is, “characterized as tension among three groups placed along a vertical axis.”39 Davis’ use of the term, ‘vertical axis’ here does appear to be hierarchical in nature, yet Davis believes that each of the three groups described is quite complex and comprises different people from Song social life. Importantly, the three groups that Davis describes are not those of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. Additionally, Davis’ groups are not segregated from one another, but instead comprise a system of social sets that overlap with one another and through which members of different groups may cross over into other groups.40 Instead of looking at Song religion as something that can be defined by three institutional blocks (Confucianism, Buddhism,

38 Ibid., 5.
39 Ibid., 7.
40 Ibid., 7; “At the top we find a group broadly defined to include the emperor, the court, and the bureaucratic and religious hierarchies (civil and military officials and their families, Daoist priests, and Buddhist monks); at the bottom are village spirit-mediums and Buddhist acolytes, local landowners (large and small), tenants and servants, and sub-bureaucratic servicemen and functionaries. In the middle I place a new and expanding group of lay Daoist exorcists called ‘Ritual Masters’ (fashi), Esoteric Buddhist monks, doctors, ritual experts and religious specialists (shushi, xiangshi, daoren, etc.), and those who passed one or more of the examinations but were without official posts (shiren).”

Daoism), Davis regards it as a phenomenon inseparable from a complex system of social developments that were occurring at the time.41 Of interest is Davis’ claim that regardless of community, a Daoist figure most often served as the person responsible for remedying conflicts between individuals and groups, frequently utilizing a child to act as a spirit medium. In one particular case, for example, an official by the name of Li Zhongyong 李仲永, ran a twelfth-century “charitable

school” dedicated to the worship of Confucius.42 Seen as a result of the school’s decreasing importance and increasing obscurity within the community, an especially delinquent grandchild of Li becomes ill. Doctors unable to cure the boy, community members called upon a Daoist priest to examine him. Utilizing a different boy as a spirit-medium, the Daoist priest comes into contact with an

angry Confucius (The “Culture King” or Wenxuan Wang 文宣王) along with his

ten disciples. During the communication, the priest ascertains that the child’s illness is connected to the unjust dismantlement of the Confucian temple and the falling into disrepair and obscurity of the estate devoted to the figure. The moral dilemma here bears collective responsibility, and once the community repairs the

41 Looking more closely at the three diverse groups (see footnote 24) and the way that they interrelate, Society and the Supernatural in Song China specifically focuses on three other categories of people found within each of the three groups: Daoist priests (group 1) (daoshi 道士), Daoist Ritual Masters and Tantric exorcists (group 2) (fashi 法師), and spirit-mediums (group 3) (wu 巫) (Davis 8).

42 “The ‘charitable school’ founded by Li Zhongyong is just such an example of an institution serving a community that was largely composed of agnates. In any case, the school seems to have been restricted to Li’s kin, whom he lectured each day on The Book of Changes. The pedagogy of Li’s charitable school was carried out in an atmosphere of religious cult. A temple of Confucius was built on the school grounds and included an effigy of Confucius himself (Wenxiang Wang), the object of Li’s enthusiastic devotion” (Ibid., 164).

temple and land originally devoted to Confucius, the child recovers.43 As Davis states, “the spirit-medium functions here as an embodiment of the voice of moral criticism.”44 This instance of Confucian dependence upon the work of Daoist priest in matters of morality (an area of human conduct and instruction often aligned with Confucianism) underlines Davis’ point that various social and religious interdependencies were at work during the Song period. Equally important here, is Davis’ point that spirit-mediums were not just part of “Popular Religion” or Tantric Buddhism, but were also connected both to Daoism and Confucianism.

Influenced in large part by the work of sinologists such as Kristofer Schipper, who themselves critiqued the superior position given to Neo- Confucianism by many twentieth-century scholars of Song history, Davis is in turn also critiquing Schipper and others, stating that in their criticism of historians of Confucianism, these other scholars are replicating some of the same sorts of paradigms as those advocated in the work of their adversaries, creating linear understandings of Daoism and other areas of Chinese religion.45

Prasenjit Duara’s work on the “cultural nexus” is also instrumental in the theoretical developments in the study of Chinese Religions that Davis’ work

43 Ibid., 165.
44 Ibid.
45 “the sinologist sees himself as the guardian and caretaker of Chinese culture, which has been in decline since the end of the Ming. Like the historians of Confucianism, moreover, he claims, quite explicitly, to represent the ‘real China.’ Over and against ‘le pays officiel’—the state and its Confucianism—he places ‘le pays réel’: ‘la religion’ and, more specifically, ‘the unique, local structures which express themselves in regional cults and nonofficial religion’ (i.e. Daoism). And like the Confucian historian again, the sinologists may find in his real China some of his most cherished Western values: autonomy, liberty, even science and democracy” (Ibid. 6-7).

represents.46 According to Davis, the cultural nexus is, “defined as the set of segmentary hierarchies (lineages, markets), territorial hierarchies (temple, cults), interpersonal networks (patron-client, master-disciple relationships), and voluntary associations (irrigation societies, guilds, spirit-writing cults).”47 Davis is most interested in the manner by which the secular merges with the religious at some level within all of these networks.48

The theory of social overlapping that is present in Davis’ research on religion during the Song period, as well as the presentation in Duara’s work on
how cultural nexuses are constantly at work between different social segments of society, is helpful to any contemporary study on Song religion. In this dissertation, I shall likewise examine the interconnectivity of different religious practices of the Song, attempting to map out how these practices penetrate the space of artistic and visual culture of the same time frame. However, unlike Davis, I do not believe
that any ‘vertical axis’ was necessarily at play in the alignment of these social groups during the Song period. In examining how different groups of people at
this time developed artwork and other images that revolved around the
presentation of the human body in the form of a mountain, I will contend that

46 Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988; Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995; Prasenjit Duara “State and Civil Society in the History of Chinese Modernity,” in Frederik Wakeman, Jr., and Wang Xi, eds., China’s Quest for Modernization. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley, Research Papers and Policy Studies 41, 1997: 300-324.
47 Davis 202.
48 “What is striking about the cultural nexus is that however secular all these hierarchies, networks and associations may appear, they converge and diverge among themselves around temples, altars, and monasteries. The cultural nexus of power is more specifically a religious nexus, and might be so designated if the word ‘religious’ were not thought to be somewhat old-fashioned” (Ibid., 203).

borders between individuals, social groups and ideas during the Song are not always clearly divided along such an axis.

In his descriptions of how the Song religious and philosophical landscape of Daoism was one of variety and change, Robert Hymes’ 2002 book, Way and Byway, is another work of theoretical importance to studies of Chinese religion during the Song.49 In this book, Hymes is fundamentally countering the theories of some who present the Chinese bureaucratic formulation of its gods as a structured system that parallels a similar system of authority found in the Chinese state of the Song period. Hymes’ fundamental argument is against the understanding of a Chinese divine bureaucracy as a system that mirrors Chinese society, an understanding which stems from the thought of Arthur Wolf and Stephen Feuchtwang. Wolf’s article, “Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors,” and Feuchtwang’s article, “Domestic and Communal Worship in Taiwan,” both published in the journal, Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society in 1974, argue for precisely such a bureaucratic model of divinity.50 Wolf’s theory, which is the most influential in the theoretical construction of the bureaucratic model of divinity at play in Chinese religion, first divides Chinese society into three parts and then connects these parts to their divine counterparts. The hierarchical parts and their correlates are as follow: a) the emperor and the empire [state] and gods [religion]; b) family [state] and ancestors [religion]; c) stranger/beggar/bandit/outsider [state]

49 Robert Hymes, Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models of Devinity in Song and Modern China. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002.
50 Ed. Arthur P. Wolf, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press: Wolf (132-82) and Feuchtwang (108-29). Stanford, Calif,: Stanford University Press.

and dangerous and despised ghosts [religion].51 The influential cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz, which tries to describe all cultural events as symbolic of societal structure, results in theoretical conclusions similar to those found in the work of Wolf and Feuchtwang, and Hymes would like greatly to resist any Geertzian understanding of such “unitary systems” as those described within structuralist thought more generally.52 Hymes also claims that Michel Foucault’s theoretical thinking leans towards “the assumption of unitary and all-containing culture or discourse,” stating that his own theory is more aligned with developments in postmodernist thought.53 Emile Durkheim’s understanding of religion as representative of the social is key to both structuralist and post- structuralist theories, and is clearly influential to Hymes’ own work. Hymes makes the strong claim, however, that he is arguing, “not for the ‘projecting’ of social relations and roles into a purely symbolic divine sphere, but for a strong, sometimes unthought but sometimes purposeful tendency to analogize between two spheres treated as equally real: from the human to the divine and back again.”54 Such insistence, he argues, attempts to impress a very mechanical view not only of how the Chinese developed their religions, but of how the Chinese think.55 Hymes agrees that a bureaucratic model of divinity is in play in Chinese

51 Hymes 3.
52 Ibid., 7.
53 Ibid., 6.
54 Ibid., 14.
55 “To assume that the Chinese simply projected into the divine sphere an officialdom just like the real one paints their mental processes as merely mechanical and their gods as pure epiphenomena. To see instead that peasants and others could distill from complex reality and their messily varied

religions of the Song period. But he contends that a different model is also at play: the personal model of divinity. Additionally, he states that other models could be at play too. But he will focus on the second model of divinity’s differentiation from the first model, which he claims, is perhaps especially visible during the Song and Yuan periods—times during which the power of the state was in question and at times eclipsed by the power of different actors who were not part of state power. During the Song and Yuan, the Chinese worshipped gods according to both of these two models of divinity, although the extent to which they followed one model or the other depended upon the state’s power in any given region or time. In offering more than one model of divinity than just the bureaucratic model, Hymes claims that we can understand how the Chinese derived their models of divinity not solely based on their interaction with authoritative figures of the state, but from a variety of relationships occurring in social life.56

The description of Song religion found in Way and Byway provides contemporary scholars of Chinese religion with a new approach to how religions and state ideologies of the Song interacted and competed with one another. Different groups of religious and ideological authority, Hymes’ work suggests, approached the human imagination differently in presenting their individual models of divinity. His theory could be helpful in an attempt to show the various

cultural furniture two distinct models, two spheres of relationship and interaction, grants them an intellectual life that a notion of mere projection denies them” (Ibid., 263).
56 Ibid., 5.

ways in which, in the construction of their religious systems, the groups of this time frame differed in how they utilized representations of mountains to correlate with the human body.

Davis and Hymes are clearly both working from the standpoint of post- structuralism. Their understandings of how humans from different social groups interacted during the Song are informative. However, in their works they too are describing structures of human interaction at work that were based on structures in civil society. Davis himself admits that many other groups within the three larger groups that he has defined along his vertical hierarchy could be studied. These include the emperor (group 1), the doctor (group 2) and the local landowner (group 3). As for Hymes, he describes the imposition of bureaucratic structures on descriptions of celestial bureaucracies as “mechanistic.” But I fail to see what is so mechanistic about a correlation between the immanent world and the transcendent one. In fact, Hymes at times seems to counter himself because he on the one hand describes the bureaucratic model as too transcendent, but in fact the one-on-one interaction that he describes as at play between humans and immortals in the personal model of divinity appears transcendent itself (lack of community at play in between the singular human and the singular immortal). Furthermore, the personal models of divinity could have been based on the structuring of civil society during the Song too. In her excellent work, Academies and Society in Southern Song China (1999), Linda Walton has examined the manner in which localized traditions of government became more prevalent during the Song

because there were too many officials to fill up the official positions available in the capital at the time. Is it just a coincidence that at this same time the personal model of divinity described by Hymes flourished? Ultimately, the “personal model of divinity” that Hymes introduces still seems to be modeling itself on societal relationships, even if those relationships are not bound to the state’s bureaucracy. Thus Arthur Wolf’s overall structural comparison of the celestial realm to the terrestrial one, like Durkheim’s comparison of religion to society, is still valid. In other words, post-structuralist and structuralist approaches to describing religion still almost always appear to relate religion to various social structures. Why does the idea of human descriptions of the transcendent in terms of immanence make the mental processes of these humans “mechanistic”? Hymes’ emphasis on the need for something that leans more towards the “purely transcendent,” which often results in the negation or minimizing of key elements of civil society, seems at times influenced by protestant ideology, as described in the introduction.

Scholars have increasingly pointed to the diversity present not only within Chinese society of a given historical timeframe, including that of the Song period, but also to diversity as it exists within a variety of religious and ideological traditions. Cleveland Hoyt Tillman’s Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi’s Ascendancy (1992) has addressed the issue of diversity as it pertains specifically to

Neo-Confucianism of the Song period.57 As Tillman maps out, harmony was not integral to the history of the Neo-Confucianism’s Daoxue (道學Teaching of the

Way) and Lixue (理學 Teaching of Principle) movements that occurred during the

Song. Tillman traces key figures of these movements, examining much of the internal fighting that went on within while attempting to comprehend the developments that occurred within early Neo-Confucian thought. The interaction of these developments enabled various ideologies and practices attached to Neo- Confucianism to root firmly in Chinese culture during and after the Song period. As Tillman explains, influential Neo-Confucians living during both the Northern and Southern Song periods formed ideologies that differed greatly in their approaches to self and society.58 Much of Neo-Confucian discourse during this time involved highly contentious views regarding: philosophies of learning and teaching, Buddhism, Daoism, public policy, social duties, ethical cultivation, and practices such as meditation and quiet sitting.

Delving into the thought of Neo-Confucianism’s most famous thinker, Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200), Daniel Gardner focuses less on Neo-Confucianism as a

whole, as is the case in Tillman’s work. Instead, he examines closely how the development of ideology as it occurred in Zhu’s thought was bound to other

57 Cleveland Hoyt Tillman, Confucian Discourse and Chu His’s Ascendancy, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992.
58 Some of these include Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032-1085), Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033-1107), Hu Hong 胡宏(1106-61), Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200), Zhang Shi 張栻 (1133-1180), and Lu Zuqian 呂祖謙 (1137-1181).

societal and intellectual developments of the Song.59 In his work, Chu Hsi: Learning to Be a Sage (1990), Gardner underlines, for example, the critical role that the thought of Northern Song scholars such as Sima Guang司馬光 and Wang

Anshi王安石 played in Zhu’s own understanding of the difference between

finding good people and making good people.60 The root of Zhu’s ideology, Gardner’s research suggests, cannot be separated from the ideas of his time that Zhu opposed. Zhu criticized the examinations system, approaches to public policy, and manner of literati lifestyle and learning, all of which were important societal elements of the Song. Also of critical influence to Zhu’s development of his own Neo-Confucian ideology was his interest in offsetting the power of Buddhism in China at the time. And yet as both Tillman and Gardner’s studies show, Zhu strongly utilized elements of Buddhism in the construction of his ideology. Of particular interest to studies in Song religion should be the extent to which Neo- Confucianism adapted or appropriated strands of culture traditionally described as part of Buddhism or Daoism. Here, this interest will be especially apparent as it pertains to how different visual and material cultures of the Song period may have helped to propagate Neo-Confucian ideology of the time. The works of both Tillman and Gardner present data that complicates any normative definition of the term, “Neo-Confucianism.” As one may easily gather from their work, Neo- Confucianism during the Song became interwoven with other religious, societal

59 Daniel K Gardner, Chu Hsi: Learning to Be a Sage – Selections from the “Conversations of Master Chu, Arranged Topically,” Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1990.
60 Ibid., 75.

and ideological developments of the time. It is my intention to examine some of the ways in which the material aspects stemming from Neo-Confucianism ideology also interacted with material aspects and ideologies of other traditions at the time.

Several contemporary scholars in the field of Religious Studies have directly approached definitions or descriptions of certain religious traditions within the field of Religious Studies. Two such scholars are Stephen Bokenkamp and Robert Ford Campany, who offer definitions of the term, “Daoism.”61 Such definitions and the theories behind them are important in assessing religious definition and division during any time frame, including the Song period. In Early Daoist Scriptures (1997), which is devoted to translating writings of the Lingbao tradition (2nd-6th c. CE), Bokenkamp offers a description of Daoism. According to Bokankamp, he believes that early Confucian scholars understood the dao as related to social conduct.62 However, explains Bokenkamp, in the early works of the Laozi 老子 and the Zhuangzi 莊子, the dao also took on an import related to

metaphysics and to individual experience. Bokenkamp describes the “dao” that he is interested in studying, and which is integral to his work on Lingbao, as one that is anthropomorphic in nature—as a constantly transforming entity, which at times is manifest via avatars such as Laozi, and at times found as a panoply of deities residing outside in the cosmos but also within the human body. The concept of a

61 Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997.
62 Ibid.,12.

xian 仙, which is often translated as “immortal,” is an integral part of Bokenkamp’s understanding of Daoism in that the dao can be actualized through

the xian. Bokenkamp, however, does not translate xian 仙 as “immortal,” but

instead as “transcendent.”63 He does this because he believes that the word “immortal” entails a meaning that is fixed and unchanging, and that the word “transcendent” instead implies change or a series of change, and according to Bokenkamp, Daoists go through series of changes and therefore series of transcendence.64 An assessment of these parts to Bokenkamp’s definition of Daoism is important in understanding whether Daoism can indeed be defined. In a moment, I will examine how Bokenkamp’s way of looking at Daoism attempts to describe a normative understanding of this complex tradition.

In his extensive work, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents (2002), Robert Ford Campany translates Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents (shenxianzhuan 神仙傳), a hagiographic work different from Ge’s famous

Baopuzi (抱朴子), the latter of which discusses processes of religious

63 Terry Kleeman also prefers this translation of xian both to “immortal,” which he considers imprecise, and to “sylph”, a term devised by Edward Schafer that Kleeman considers overly abstruse (see Kleeman, A God’s Own Tale: The Book of Transformations of Wenchang, the Divine Lord of Zitong, State University of New York Press, 1994, xiv).

64 The Dao itself, claims Bokenkamp, “is immortal, and the goal of Daoists was to merge with the Dao” (Bokenkamp 22). In merging with the Dao, Daoists go through series of change. Apparently, one change transcends another, “There is thus not a single chasm between mortals and immortals, but a chain of being, extending from nonsentient forms of life that also experience growth and decay to the highest reaches of the empyrean” (Ibid.).

transformation, including alchemical descriptions.65 In his discussion of terminology, Campany admits that he is not comfortable with use of the term, “Daoism,” and instead describes the tradition as a “quest for transcendence.” Like Bokenkamp, Campany seems to agree that the concept of “transcendence” is integral to Daoism. He and Bokenkamp also both translate the word qi 氣 as

pneuma (although Campany places the word in its plural form, pneumas).66 The ingestion of qi, explains Campany, is integral to the transformative process of the Daoist. In his explanation of qi, Bokenkamp is influenced by the early Greek philosophy of the atomists, who understood the universe as a whole comprised of the smallest particles.67 Unlike atomism, however, Bokenkamp contends, “The Chinese…sought not for the smallest stable particle but for the lineaments of the system as a whole, a system they recognized immediately as being characterized first and foremost by change, which they imagined to be regular and cyclical.”68 For Bokenkamp, transformative processes are importantly not only influential in his understanding of Daoism, but in his explanation of how through their traditions, the Chinese have understood the world in terms of cycles and phases.

Bokenkamp’s description of Daoism as that which is anthropomorphic and an ever-changing system of development across time is not particularly problematic in that transformation and change appear to be key concepts in many

65 Campany, Robert Ford. To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: Ge Hong’s “Traditions of Divine Transcendents.” Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002.
66 Ibid.,18.
67 Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 16.

68 “As a result, they [the “lineaments of the system”] came to represent transformations of qi in terms of recurring cycles, marked off in terms of yin, yang, the five phases, or the eight trigrams” (Ibid.).

types of Daoist practice, including as found in contemporary forms of Daoism such as Quanzhen Daoism and Zhengyi Daoism. However, Bokenkamp and Campany’s decision to make the concept of “transcendence” almost synonymous with the practice of Daoism is problematic. In the case of Bokenkamp’s translation of the word, xian, as “transcendent,” the translation moves the concept of Daoism further away from the realm of the human and the immanent world. Although a xian may indeed have transcended the world, it still exists as an entity attached in some way to mortality and processes of mortality. A focus on the concept of “transcendence” in defining the meaning of Daoism could mistakenly present the tradition as one that is geared towards a separation or removal from human experience and the immanent world. Yet as we know from data present in the Daozang and elsewhere, practitioners of the tradition that has come to be called Daoism are very much interested in transforming themselves while in the immanent world and even by immanent means. Scholars such as Joseph Needham have in their work studied the materiality of immortality attained by the xian.69 This same problem comes across clearly in Campany’s work, for although one might agree that it would be difficult to label Ge Hong’s work as “Daoist” or as representative of “Daoism,” Campany’s new utilization of the phrase, “quest for transcendence” is not necessarily more appropriate. Although Campany would apparently like to avoid the metaphysical connotations often attached to the

69 See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. II: History of Scientific Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 1956, 139-54; and Early Chinese Religion, Part Two: The Period of Division (220-589 AD), Eds. John Lagerwey and Lü Pengzhi, Leiden: Brill, 2009, 345.n1.

English word “transcendence,” these connotations are so embedded in the word that they become hard to avoid. Furthermore, throughout the first part of his book, Campany often argues for the immanent, non-transcendental qualities of the adepts who sought transcendence. In fact, much of the work achieved, and honor garnered by the adepts occurred when they were in an “immanent mode” not a transcendental one. In other words, the quest for immortality itself is often seen as intimately bound to mortality. Even the emphasis on “quest for transcendence” as descriptive of the activities described in Ge Hong’s work may present itself as somewhat problematic for these reasons.

Like Bokenkamp and Campany, Livia Kohn has been a highly prolific writer within the fields of Religious Studies and Daoist Studies over the past few decades, and contemporary studies of Chinese religion most often take into account her theoretical positions when considering religious identity in China. In some of her scholarship, Kohn presents Chinese religion as related to a mystical experience that is defined as being individual and not communal in nature. In Early Chinese Mysticism, for example, Kohn examines an indigenous Chinese mystical tradition, which she believes to have stemmed from philosophical Daoism of China’s Warring States period.70 Her discussion on mysticism here has huge implications for her overall presentation of Daoism in some of her later work. For although here Kohn agrees that mysticism took different forms over the course of the history of Daoism and of Chinese religion, she later utilizes a similar

70 Livia Kohn, Early Chinese Mysticism: Philosophy and Soteriology in the Taoist Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, 3.

theoretical framework of describing “Daoism” in other work as is used in this work to describe “mysticism.” Kohn’s research efforts on Chinese religion in this work support an approach that is not focused on definitions of individual traditions in China. Rather, she has chosen one aspect of Chinese religion—mysticism—to which she will devote all of her attention. While Kohn’s focus on an aspect of religion in China is at times helpful, this understanding of mysticism seems to correlate later with her broader understanding of Daoism as a whole and this can be problematic.

Focusing on the time from the Warring States period to the pre-modern Tang period, Kohn in this work understands the emergence of three forms of mysticism in China: the first revolves around commentaries on the Daode jing 道

德經 and the Zhuangzi; the second is connected to beliefs in immortality; and the

third is attached to developments in Buddhism.71 She believes that these three forms went through two significant processes in their development. In the first phase, they all established themselves and began to integrate with one another, ultimately coming together during the fifth century.72 The second phase entailed more development during the late Six Dynasties and Tang of the synthesis that had occurred during the fifth century. Above all, claims Kohn, the root of Chinese mysticism is bound to the Lao-Zhuang tradition.73 The three forms of mysticism

71 Ibid., 3-5. Kohn also emphasizes one text in which the three forms of Chinese mysticism can be understood to have coalesced: the Xisheng jing 西昇經 (“Scripture of Western Ascension”), which was composed as a Daoist text during the fifth-century.
72 Ibid., 3.

73 Ibid.

that form the backbone of Kohn’s discussion can also be seen as chronological developments or shifts in Daoism. The first form, which Kohn describes as the “quietistic, naturalistic tradition” was developed from the thoughts of Laozi and Zhuangzi.74 The second form is ecstatic and shamanic in nature, attached to visions of immortality, and developed from poetry, songs and rhapsodies related embraced by the Shangqing tradition 上清.75 The third form occurs entirely in

correlation with Buddhist meditation and other techniques.
Kohn is primarily interested in how the early formation of mysticism in

China, which she sees as a process that culminated in the Tang, is integral to Chinese religion. After the Tang, Kohn believes that the indigenous form of mysticism in China gave way to new developments in mysticism during the Song.76 However, her tripartite understanding of the structure of early mysticism parallels the structure of Daoism that she presents in her later 2001 work, Daoism and Chinese Culture.77 The fear is, therefore, that the mystical aspects of Chinese religion are at the core of Kohn’s understanding of Daoism as a whole. This is discouraging especially based on the fact that mysticism, the origins of which

74 Ibid., 5. In this particular work, Kohn presents these two as individual philosophers and not as mythical figures.
75 Such materials included “the ecstatic, shamanic visions of immortality that were most clearly expressed in poetic songs, from the Chuci (Songs of the South) to Han rhapsodies and later poetry, and formed the backbone of Shangqing practice” (Ibid., 5).

76 Ibid., 9.
77 Kohn’s Daoism and Chinese Culture is not theoretical in nature. It is, rather, a textbook that attempts to overview Daoism by dividing it thematically into different chronological parts. However, Kohn does provide her reader with some direction as to where she stands theoretically on issues such as the definition of Daoism and Daoist identity, describing three types of organization and practice that make up the identity of Daoists as a whole. These types are: literati, communal, and self-cultivation. Descriptions of the three categories are unmistakably similar to the categories of mysticism found in Early Chinese Mysticism.

according to Kohn strongly connects to the Lao-Zhuang tradition, is presented as something related to the individual and not to the community.78 Kohn’s description of the Dao as something that, “is present in everyone; it appears in human beings in the form of spirit, true inner nature, or virtue” also clearly presents Daoism as part of an individual, rather than communal endeavor.

Kohn’s method of taking one aspect or theme of Chinese religion, in this case mysticism, and attempting to trace its history, is both influential and helpful. A similar study might be conducted to trace the histories of other aspects of Chinese religion (e.g. Daoist symbols, Buddhist iconography, etc.). Furthermore, some of Kohn’s descriptions of how visualization plays a part in the experience of the mystic could be helpful to my own area of research. However, there is a danger that arises with the focus on one aspect of a tradition in that synecdoche may occur, whereby a part (in this case, mysticism) becomes representative of the whole (Daoism).

One of Kohn’s more effective approaches to discussing Chinese religion, and in particular to Daoism, is found in Daoist Identity: History, Lineage and Ritual, a book that Kohn edited with Harold Roth, and which stems from work accomplished during a three-day conference held at Bowdoin College (Maine) in 1998. In their detailed introduction to the book, Kohn and Roth first map out the definition of the word, “identity,” borrowing heavily from the theoretical work of Dutch theologian and anthropologist, Hans Mol (b.1922), and understanding

78 “In opposition to Taoism as an organized and communal religion, the Lao-Zhuang tradition remained independent and oriented toward the individual” (Kohn, Early Chinese Mysticism, 7).

“identity” not as a word that refers to something stable or fixed, but rather as a concept indicative of process and change.79 Mol termed this process of making something sacred as “sacralization.”80 Daoism, Kohn and Roth contend, was developed through, “the continuous interaction of the two forces of differentiation and integration, the move to change in accordance with political and economic developments and to adopt ever new forms and patterns from a variety of different sources versus the urge to create stability and continuity through the establishment of belief systems, lineage lines, rituals, and valid myths.”81 The idea of this development is lifted directly from Mol, who described identity as a balance between differentiation and integration, two forces in constant motion according to four types of patterns: objectivation, commitment, ritual and myth. According to Kohn and Roth, different schools of Daoism emphasized certain patterns while disengaging with or disregarding others. They identify these patterns of identity as having occurred differently within various schools of Daoism, including those of Literati Daoists, Great Peace, Celestial Masters and Daoism of the Tang, Shangqing, Lingbao, and Modern Daoism since the Song. Fundamentally, however, Kohn and Roth would like to construct a model of identity for Daoism

79 Livia Kohn and Harold D. Roth, Eds, Daoist Identity: History, Lineage, and Ritual, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002.
80 As found in Kohn and Roth’s Introduction, from Mol’s 1976 work, Identity and the Sacred, sacralization is “a process by means of which on the level of symbol-systems certain patterns acquire the same taken-for-granted, stable, eternal quality which on the level of instinctive behavior was acquired by the consolidation and stabilization of new genetic materials.” Kohn and Roth further interpret Mol’s definition of sacralization as, “In other words, to create a sense of identity, people make the choice to elevate certain patterns to sacred status, that is, place them in the position of being unchanging and eternally valid. Developing thereby ‘a system of meaning, or a definition of reality that modifies, obstructs or (if necessary) legitimates change’ (Mol, 1976,6), they find feelings of belonging, of rightness, and of wholeness in their world” (Kohn and Roth 3). 81 Kohn and Roth 6.

that is similar but not identical to Mol’s own construct. Yet their model only appears to differ significantly from Mol’s in its presentation of the fourth of the four categories utilized by Mol. In place of myth, the editors instead utilize something to which I shall refer here as early group patterning.82 This is the most vague of their categories, but pertains to the manner in which histories of early movements of Daoism (Great Peace and Celestial Masters) have presented scholars with interesting individual case studies of Daoism’s interaction with popular religion. The other three categories—objectivation, commitment and ritual—are those found in Mol’s model, although described more specifically to fit into a Daoist framework.83 Though the exact structure of their theory is unclear, it appears that Kohn and Roth are utilizing Mol’s model to present a sort of grid or graph that exists between two theoretical points—differentiation and integration— which are constantly in need of balance, and this balance fluctuates back and forth according to the different patterns of identity utilized within the Daoist tradition. In other words, although the editors do not pinpoint an exact location of Daoist identity, they offer a model of how the identity forms.

82 In addition to objectivation, commitment and ritual, “the early movements (Great Peace and Celestial Masters) were found to represent thoroughly fascinating case studies of Daoist identity, since they were such close-knit communities that set themselves up to be intentionally different through beliefs, group cohesion, and rituals yet could not help absorbing and using common
cultural and ethnic patterns and the practices of popular religion” (Kohn and Roth 8)… “although myths per se were not singled out as a category in the contributions or discussions at the conference, their presence through images and symbols is ubiquitous, appearing in all the various venues of Daoist identity” (Ibid., 11).

83 “obectivation occurs in a Daoist context through specific key ideas or concepts that tend to lie at the root of sustaining belief systems” (Ibid., 8); “Commitment in Daoism, next, was found most clearly expressed in a sense of lineage” (Ibid., 9); “Identity created through lineage, next, carries over into the ritual sector when specific groups set up rules for moral purity, rites for initiation and ordination, and other unique ways of life” (Ibid.,10).

In describing the various patterns that are part of identities associated with Daoism, the editors are at times vague. For example, in their discussion of Daoist ritual, and more specifically of Daoist ritual gestures, Kohn and Roth indicate that even though such a gesture, “may have an Indian name and imitate Buddhism, its cosmic meaning and impact on the universe are strictly Daoist.”84 Yet they do not follow up with an explanation of what it means to be “strictly Daoist.” Additionally, and perhaps of more significance, the editors state that “To summarize the volume’s conclusions: there are certain general or typical patterns in Daoist identity formation,” but in the context of the various patterns that they present, the meaning of this statement becomes unclear.85 Although they go on to discuss different patterns relative to different schools of Daoism, the editors never explain this important statement that “there are certain general or typical patterns in Daoist identity formation.” Indeed, what are these “general or typical patterns,” and do such patterns run through all Daoist traditions? In light of the theory they set forth, it appears that there are no patterns.

Even in light of these problems, the understanding of Daoism present in this work, which describes how a given religious tradition can be in a constant process of change, influenced by other movements occurring both inside and outside of the tradition, is helpful. In looking at how Song religious and ideological practices interacted with artworks and imagery produced within various schools of the time, and how these objects in turn influenced or re-

84 Ibid.
85 Ibid., 8.

influenced Song religious and ideological practices, I believe that Kohn and Roth’s theory of the balance between differentiation and integration of any given tradition could be quite important.

Like Kohn, Julia Ching was a scholar interested in the relationship between mysticism and Chinese religion. However, Ching approached Chinese religion more broadly than did Kohn, delving more clearly into western philosophy and sociology, and ultimately offering a somewhat Durkheimian view of how religion functions in China. In his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile Durkheim wrote, “Religion can be defined only in terms of features that are found wherever religion is found.”86 And in her close examination of the histories of religions in China, Mysticism and Kingship in China: The Heart of Chinese Wisdom, Ching attempts to observe the features of China that are definitive of its religions.87 She brings together the focal parts of Chinese culture for the purpose of constructing a definitive whole that she believes to have existed throughout the history of Chinese religion. Ching’s concept of this whole, which is brought together via her understanding of many separate, but blending parts, and in particular, those parts of mysticism, kingship and wisdom as they have existed in China, relies on a particular thread—that of the conceptual relationship between humanity and heaven, which she sees as woven across and throughout China’s history. Her work offers the reader a look at the sage-king paradigm as a

86 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 22. 87 Julia Ching, Mysticism and Kingship in China: The heart of Chinese Wisdom, Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

prominent feature in Chinese religion throughout its history. Ching’s argument rests on the idea that human wisdom is an integral part of all Chinese religions. However, the concept of wisdom in China, as she points out, does not fit easily into the quiet stereotype that has been propagated in both western and eastern contexts over the years. Not static, Chinese wisdom itself relies upon the dense nexus of culture. Aware of how western interpretation is often inaccurate in discussions of China’s tradition, Ching still conducts her research in a cross- cultural fashion, ultimately comparing Chinese wisdom and the sage-king to the Judeo-Christian idea of the messiah.

Ching looks at how Chinese religion may have existed in ancient China during the Shang (1556 -1046 BCE) and Zhou (1045 BCE – 256 BCE) Dynasties. Her theoretical work stands somewhat in opposition to Robert Hymes’ approach to Chinese religion in that she projects the secular nature of China’s kings and emperors into the realm of the sacred. Yet she does so not by seeing a direct correlation between celestial and terrestrial bureaucracies, but by understanding a connection between such bureaucracies via the material writing of the Chinese. As was not the case in Japan or Egypt, contends Ching, where rulers were considered divine, the leaders of China were grounded in the world of the human and not in that of the divine.88 However, while examining the earliest system of writing in

88 “The sacred character of kingship in China is little studied, when compared to the subject of kingship, or the emperor system, in Japan or Egypt, where the divine character of the royal person – whatever that means – has been highlighted. Especially during World War II, the Japanese emperor was known to be considered by his subjects as ‘divine’, or even a ‘god’ (kami) and much has since been written on the subject. The Chinese king or emperor has usually been regarded as a secular ruler, with no claim to divinity” (Ching 1-2).

China, that known as oracle bone writing, Ching determines the origins of Chinese wisdom to have been connected to the human ability to comprehend and utilize writing as a form of divination. Ching traces the history of oracle bone writing, discussing the manner by which the first human groups to have used it as a form of divination appear to have been the Neolithic people of northern China, beginning around the late fourth millennium BCE.89 The scratches and cracks found on animal blades and tortoise shells comprised the foundation of oracle bone writing, and interpretation of these markings became the definitive tool to the process of divination. In the earliest forms of divination, trance was utilized by the diviner as a method by which to understand oracle bone writing. Yet as divination became increasingly ritualized, trance lost its power and the process of divining became systematized and bureaucratized. By the fall of the Shang Dynasty, Ching explains, divination had become bound to the ruling dynastic family. The connection between these two entities is essential to Ching’s argument, for she would ultimately like to assert that the secular and the sacred have, since ancient times, blended in China, and that heaven is, to a certain degree, manifest in the human body. Unfortunately, however, Ching has difficulty in explaining how it was that the ruling party—a human body in itself—became so powerfully united with the Chinese reverence for divination. Yet she does offer an answer, based on the oracle records themselves, that links the ruling party to the “Lord on High

89 Ibid., 5-7. For a detailed description of the origins of oracle bone writing, see also David N. Keightley’s Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

himself,” claiming the two to have been socially understood as having had a direct spiritual communication with one another.90 Similarly, other oracle bone inscriptions provide evidence of links between the activities of kingship and those of shamanism.91 The bones themselves provide a material doctrine of kingship, as well as lineage, became woven with the divine.

In Ching’s discussion of Chinese writing, she links the important elements of the material to the human body and finally to the sacred. The Chinese character for ‘king’, (王 wang) Ching points out, comprises three horizontal lines joined by

one central vertical line. This character represents the conjunction of three orders: the heavenly, the human and the earthly—the vertical line representative of the “institution of kingship” which both joins them and mediates between them.92 Ching outlines the importance of the character as a physical manifestation of the king’s power.93 For the Chinese, claims Ching, the idea of kingship is the idea of the sacred. Here, the concept of the sacred is inseparable from the actual human body. Other Chinese characters, such as tian 天 also point to an observable

connection between the physical, the human body and the sacred. Ching notes how

90 In the oracle records, a word is often placed between the name of the ancestor and the word for king, a word which means ‘guest’ (pin / bin) in modern Chinese. There is speculation that it refers to the king ‘receiving as guest’ a specific ancestor, or the Lord-on-High himself, to a kind of séance in which the two met. How it happened remains unclear” (Ibid. 6).

91 Ibid., 16.
92 Ibid., 35.
93 It also serves to reinforce the notion of the king as collective man, as mediator between Heaven and Earth. So the king is the supreme mediator between Heaven and Earth. He is indeed the ‘one man’, the ‘cosmic man’, who represents all human beings on earth in the presence of a superior Heaven” (Ibid., 35-36).

the horizontal line at the top of tian also signifies “tip of the human head.”94 Once again expressed embedded within the material form of a Chinese character, is the idea that humanity is inseparable from the realm of the sacred.

In her description of Chinese religion, Ching examines the ways in which, throughout Chinese history, divine power derived as human power and vice-versa. The concept of “wisdom,” Ching sets forth, is a concept that Europeans stereotypically assigned to Chinese thought early on in their discovery of Chinese civilization.95 While Ching does not negate the concept of wisdom from an understanding of Chinese religion, she also does not view wisdom as a construct that makes the divine and the human completely indistinguishable. For according to Ching, this would be a gross misunderstanding of wisdom’s relationship to religion.96 Through her examination of kingship and mysticism, Ching traces the concept of wisdom through Chinese history to divination, claiming that the first diviners in China were revered for their abilities, or knowledge of reading oracle bone writings of the Shang Dynasty. Towards the end of the Zhou Dynasty, the wisdom of divination, or the wisdom of a religious belief system, had transformed into a wisdom of the bureaucratic procedures attached to ritual. It was in this shift, Ching’s argument suggests, that the concept of wisdom became attached not to the original religious interests of divination, but to the institutionalized practices of both the nobility and the common in a primarily political sphere.

94 Ibid,, 36.
95 Ibid., “Preface” x. 96 Ibid., xi.

Ching’s study presents some problems, none the least of which is her description of Chinese religion as a “whole” comprised of seemingly clean-cut “parts” such as Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism.97 However, her claim that Chinese characters offer a visual connection between the material world, the human body and the realm of the sacred, as well as her descriptions of oracle bone writing are helpful for those studying how the material elements of culture are bound to the sacred in China.

While Ching’s research on Chinese religion is extremely broad and less specialized, many contemporary scholars in the field of Chinese religions remain more focused on the detailed complexities that abound within any given tradition or short timeframe of a tradition. Criticism of how the history of Chinese religions have been studied and framed for modern readership, as found in the works of contemporary scholars such as Vincent Goossaert and Edward Davis discussed above, are also found as pertains more specifically to Daoism in Russell Kirkland’s 2004 book, Taoism: The Enduring Tradition.98 Kirkland opens his book with an attack on twentieth-century sinological methods of studying Daoism—methods which focused on the seeming “continuities” of other traditions (e.g. Confucianism), and which ultimately came to the conclusion that the variety of data associated with the Daoist tradition implied that such continuities were non-applicable in the context of Daoism. Such a conclusion, contends Kirkland, is itself a cultural construct (one which was propagated in large part not only by

97 Ibid., 265.
98 Russell Kirkland, Taoism: The Enduring Tradition, New York and London: Routledge, 2004.

western Orientalism, but also by both Chinese intellectuals and China’s political establishment during the latter part of the century) that does not represent the reality of the culture and history attached to the Daoist religion.99 Kirkland’s new model might be described as a nexus or a sphere of nexuses, all of which combine to describe how different Daoists across different ages defined themselves. He would like to examine statements that are both contemporary and broadly historical of “a claim to Daoist tradition” that might stem from any of a number of movements that self-define themselves as Daoist.100 Here, Kirkland is working against both modernists (who think that they have pin-pointed an essential definition of Daoism), and post-modernists (who think that Daoism is merely a social construct that is arbitrary and entirely subjective).

One might say that Kirkland is influenced by all of the twentieth-century sinological work on Daoism that he criticizes. In other words, his theory rests on a bedrock of questions: he wishes to investigate and cross-reference data from different Daoist traditions as they existed in their own times and in the contemporary world, and most twentieth-century scholars did not approach Daoism in this manner. Henri Maspero (1882-1945), remarks Kirkland, was the primary forerunner of Western specialists in the field of Daoism and “perpetuated

99 Ibid., xv.
100 “I shall argue that all such claims must be evaluated, not only in terms of each other, but also in terms of all the claims of all of the Taoists of the past” (9) and Kirkland would like for scholars to “have identified a definable group of people who self-consciously went through a certain array of definably Taoist practices” (Ibid., 74).

an array of interpretive errors” in his examinations of traditions, including writings from the Daozang, that were attached to the religion.101

Although Kirkland does not specifically reference the work of Jonathan Z. Smith, the author’s specific move away from essentiality as it exists in the context of Daoism is similar to Smith’s argument that religious traditions are characterized by their internal multiplicities, not by any essentialities. In fact, Kirkland even explains this in the Jewish context, which is one of the primary contexts that Smith focuses on in Imagining Religion.102 Indeed, some of his descriptions about anti- essentiality seem so unarguably influenced by Smith that it is surprising not to find Smith’s name referenced in the bibliography.103

Kirkland’s discussion of how scholars of Daoism should begin placing more emphasis on the practices and rituals of the tradition is influential in how contemporary scholars could approach Daoist and other religious artwork and images of China’s Song period. His work observes how ideas have been privileged in twentieth-century studies of Daoism, countering this premise to state that the practices embedded in Daoist life are just as integral to understanding the tradition as are the ideas associated with it.104 This emphasis supports the

101 Ibid., 135, 173, 183.
102 Ibid., 74.
103 E.g. “ ‘Taoists’ were not a monolithic group, nor people who held to a given set of ‘essential beliefs.’ Rather, they were the people in different ages who contributed their ideas, values, and practices to a diverse and ever-evolving cultural tradition. Yet, to say that it was ‘diverse and ever- changing’ is not to say that we cannot or should not recognize specific continuities and specific contrasts among the various movements and teachings that Taoists generally embraced as part of their heritage” (Ibid., 73).
104 “One problem with modern presentations of Taoism is that they ignore the importance of the practices that Taoists of all ages considered essential to fulfilling the goal of the Taoist life. Those

direction of my own work, which focuses more on art, ritual and their interrelationships with text than it will on text and ideas alone.

Finally, approaching Chinese religion from a completely different direction is James Robson, whose extensive work on the religious history of China’s sacred mountain, Nanyue 南嶽, has shown the way in which studies of geographic places

in China can reveal how sacred sites are not bound to any one religion.105 Focusing his research on the local history of Nanyue, Robson examines how different groups of Daoists and Buddhists, as well as members of the imperial cult, wove webs of interaction and counteraction with one another, all of which acted to transform the different physical and mental shapes that the sacred mountain went through over time. After presenting numerous histories related to the mountain, Robson concludes that Buddhists and Daoists were ultimately “co-present” at the site, and that regardless of how members of these groups attempted to create written records in which they depicted their respective group as dominant over the other in the quest to claim the sacred space of the mountain, both groups were intimately bound to one another in the way that the space actually developed across history.106

Robson’s study encourages other scholars to look at religious history through the eyes of the physical places on which people practiced, wrote about,

presentations often proceeded from modern assumptions, which privilege the holding of certain ideas while devaluing our everyday life” (Ibid. 192).
105 James Robson, Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue 南嶽) in Medieval China, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London: Harvard University Press, 2009. 106 Ibid. 322.

disputed and celebrated their religious traditions. His work points to how a study of sacred space is integral to, and in some cases at the heart of, a fuller understanding of the history of religions.

Towards a Discursive Definition of Chinese Religion

Turning once again to discussion of how Chinese religion was viewed by the Chinese before western intrusion, Goossaert’s thesis maintains itself as a highly important reminder to scholars, who must continue to consider how the categories of Chinese religions set forth during moments of western imperialism may still influence modern definitions of Chinese religions. Goossaert’s description of Chinese religion as a system that is all-encompassing and not exclusive puts into question the contemporary state of religious construction in China, making more transparent that scholarship which continues to divide religious practices in China into various movements or schools. There is a sizeable problem that arises with Goossaert’s type of argumentation, however, which has to do with its emphasis on the way that western domination in China entirely transformed how the Chinese viewed themselves and thereby morphed their culture in such a way that western ideology continues today, permeating it (Chinese view of self) on all levels. Postcolonial studies are necessary to a contemporary understanding of the history of the globalized world. However, it is my belief that their stress on how the western world has dominated the non- western mind in the past, supporting an understanding that this domination

drastically changed that mind, actually acts on a certain level to legitimate a belief that the west is still culturally dominant in the world.

This same problem is apparent in how recent, more politically influenced studies of religion in China have also often approached the issue of China’s supposed acceptance of western religions into the fold of its own cultural landscape during the course of modern history. In 2004, for example, the respected non-profit public policy institution in Washington DC, the Brookings Institution, published an important study devoted to an examination of the current state of religious freedom in China.107 That study, God and Caesar in China: Policy Implications of Church-State Tensions, comprised ten chapters devoted both to the history of Christianity in China, and to the possibility of religious freedom in contemporary China. The volume, comprising contributions from various academic, governmental and human rights advocacy specialists, brought attention to relationships between China’s domestic policies on religious freedom and its international position within the global economy, including China’s December 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). It also acted as a compilation of contemporary viewpoints on the subject of church-state relations in China.

In the work, Carol Lee Hamrin, former senior Chinese affairs specialist at the U.S. Department of State, and author of the final chapter, suggests that the state of religious freedom in China will affect, for better or for worse, U.S.-China

107 God and Caesar in China: Policy Implications of Church-State Tensions, Edited by Jason Kindopp and Carol Lee Hamrin, Brookings Institution Press, 2004.

relations. While informative on a historical level, the study acts politically here, warning not only of a Chinese rejection of religious freedom in general, but more specifically of such rejection and the state of Christianity in China.

With special focus on the history of Christianity in China, the Brookings’ study also examines political intervention in religion as tradition in China. In brief, it claims that state control of religion as it existed during twentieth-century China, and as it continues to exist in China today, is representative of an authority that is not only part of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but that is also just fundamentally Chinese. It is unsurprising that the foreign religion, Christianity, encountered even greater obstacles than indigenous religions, which also challenged official control. Yet the primary reason for the enduring displacement of various missionary strongholds over time, according to the book, lies in a
history of Christian institutional disapproval from abroad. These home institutions failed to invest any substantial religious authority in their Chinese adherents, instead maintaining their own systems of control from afar. This failure culminated in the perpetual disintegration of Chinese Christianity. The long
lasting Rites Controversy, which began in the 1630s and continued well into the eighteenth-century—a conflict during which the Vatican strictly refused the negotiation of Chinese Catholicism with Chinese Confucian ceremonies, exemplifies this underlying problem.108

108 Paul A. Rule, “The Chinese Rites Controversy: A Long Lasting Controversy in Sino-Western Cultural History” in Pacific Rim Report (no. 32: Feburary 2004), San Francisco, California: University of San Francisco Ricci Institute, 1-8.

Examining the landscape of Christianity in China today, God and Caesar points to the manner in which twentieth-century communist power sealed borders to foreign influence following nineteenth-century European imperialism. Paradoxically, this process separated Chinese Christianity from foreign rule of the past, thereby allowing the new religion to domesticate for the first time. Such domestication, the study contends, is at the heart of Christianity’s present success in China, where the country’s Catholic population has grown to more than 12 million adherents while Protestantism has boomed to as many as 45 million followers since 1949.

The problem with such a study’s line of thought is multifold. While the growing numbers of Chinese Christians are impressive, they must be situated within the context of China’s billion plus population. Additionally, a clear understanding of how it is that Chinese Christianity differs from the Christianity of other places, including that of the United States, is missing from the study. Here, the possibility that Chinese Christianity might be more Chinese than Christian, is not adequately explored as are, for example, current studies of “Chineseness” in other domesticated religions, such as Buddhism.109 The study’s reasoning is even less persuasive in its attempt to link its understanding of Christianity as a religion that has succeeded in taking root in China to an assertion that the future of diplomatic relations between China and the United States depends on China’s approach to religious freedom. In her chapter, Hamrin acknowledges religious

109 See Robert H. Sharf, Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002.

freedom as a bilateral issue that has had both positive and negative effects on the relationship between the two countries in the post-cold war period. Yet although she points to an American conservatism as partially responsible for the loud U.S. criticism of China’s social policies during the 1990s, Hamrin’s motive presents itself as having more to do with the importance of change in Chinese social policies, and less with shifting American ideologies attached to communist China.

While some might believe that the Brookings’ study provides readers with a decent survey of Christianity’s Chinese history, the work ultimately offers only a superficial glance at the nature of contemporary Chinese Christianity. One must constantly remind oneself that neither God nor Caesar is a Chinese concept, and it is troublesome to conceive of the possibility that the book, which was sponsored by a North American Christian organization, is one which endorses China’s acceptance of Christianity as a key influential factor in the development of U.S.- China relations.

In both Goossaert’s study and the Brookings’s study, emphasis has been placed, albeit in vastly different manners, on the success of the west to penetrate Chinese religious systems. The findings of the Brookings’ study are particularly questionable because politics and religious affiliation do appear to be motives behind the work. Scholars such as Goossaert who are working strictly within the realm of academia must be aware of how influential institutions such as the Brookings are now approaching the topic of western influences on religions in China, while also reevaluating the ways in which a focus on histories of western

domination within academic circles may in fact act as an intellectual extension of that same system of domination. I believe that scholars need to be mindful of how themes of western impact and domination also seep into academic work—it could be the case that in discussing the west’s impact in China, scholars sometimes actually highlight that impact and overemphasize it. In a globalized world, it is inevitable that various systems of religion and ideology around the world will interact and transform one another. In light of China’s complex system of religion and the history behind it, the country’s contemporary coping mechanisms when it comes to these global transformations do not appear to fit into a simple mold related to western domination.

In a similar vein, although the continued examination of historical divisions of religion is both interesting and highly valid, there should also exist a way for scholars to describe differences and utilize words to identify those differences without having their work disregarded as propagation of western imperialist ideology. Goossaert and others do are making attempts at rebalancing the discussion of Chinese religion through bringing to light a long neglected but very important facet of Chinese religion; the vast though by no means unchanging substrate of Chinese culture. Although religion during China’s Song period is a complex matter, for example, there did exist different organized factions of belief and ideology at the time. These factions countered one another in competition for various resources available to them. While these groups overlapped, as is clear from extensive research such as that found in the works of Edward Davis and

Robert Hymes, at times their manners of overlapping were based on differences of class or affiliation, not on social similarities.

In his 1972 work, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault posits the idea that although he believes a concise grand scheme of history not to exist, he does believe that an examination of history’s “discursive formations,” or the discontinuities dispersed like threads or strands across any given time frames of human existence, can provide fruitful results in attempting to understand the past.110 Likewise, although the construction of a grand scheme of history in China may be difficult, entirely impossible or invalid to compile, closer studies of differences or discontinuities between groups, movements and individuals across time may provide crucial data on China’s past. A look at points of rupture— discursive formations—that occurred during any given historical period, could offer new insight into how people of the past lived. Although Foucault gave no specific role to individual agents, I intend to demonstrate how a variety of agents during the Song period constructed, developed and presented visual representations to others of the time, often countering or influencing one another, and ultimately having an impact on the historical developments of religion, ideology, material culture and their interdependence in China.

110 Unity could not be based on a “full, tightly packed, continuous geographically well-defined field of objects because what appeared to me were rather series full of gaps, intertwined with one another, interplays of differences, distances, substitutions, transformations”: Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972, 37.

Chapter Two

Envisioning the Mountain as Man:
State Ideology and the Appropriation of Sacred Space during the Song Period

During China’s Song period (960-1279 CE), scholars, artists, statesmen and other thinkers utilized art, architecture, design and literature to envision the natural world as representative of the human world. Some scholars understood aspects of the natural world as symbols of moral certitude or political disaffection, while others incorporated sacred geography into the philosophical and academic realms of Neo-Confucianism, a tradition that seeded in the Northern Song (960- 1127), although it did not bloom until the Southern Song (1127-1279). During the first part of the Song, artists whose paintings hung in the Hanlin Academy, (Hanlin xueshi yuan 翰林學士院), located in the imperial city of Kaifeng 開封,

began depicting mountains in monumental landscape paintings as representational sites of imperial power. Later, during the Southern Song, actual mountains previously sacred only within Buddhist and Daoist traditions, such as the Daoist mountain of Maoshan 茅山 and the Buddhist Mountain of Lushan 廬山, also

became strongly associated with political power and the state as influential Neo- Confucians dotted them with academies to which they had attached their own human lineages. At least since China’s Warring States period 戰國時代 (475-221

BCE), representations of mountains had appeared in Chinese art.111 And culturally,

111 Patricia Ebrey, “Some Elements in the Intellectual and Religious Context of Chinese Art” (36- 49) in China 5,000 Years: Innovation and Transformation in the Arts, edited by Sherman Lee, New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; and Beijing: Art Exhibitions China, 1998, 41.

the greatness of mountains has also symbolized the greatness of China’s rulers throughout much of Chinese history.112 Yet it was not until the Song period that this symbolic union became as pronounced as it did in the material form of artistic representation, thus merging the historical interest in depicting mountains in art with the cultural interest in symbolizing them as rulers. In this chapter, I will examine Song scholarly and ideological interests in the natural world. I will explore whether paintings of the court, completed during the Northern Song, were influential parts through which those working for the state were able to anthropomorphize sacred mountain space such that they envisioned the emperor’s powers as interfused with that space. I will also explore how Neo-Confucians such as Zhu Xi (朱熹 1130-1200) successfully utilized architecture and design to

appropriate sacred mountain space during the Southern Song. Spatially speaking, these developments point to how different spaces, including those of religion, ideology, art, society and physical geography, not only interacted with one another, but also helped to produce one another. One of my primary interests here is to

look closer at the way that some artists and thinkers chose to merge body and mountain in depicting sites of political power. I believe that a look into this development of artistic or material representation might influence how it is that we

112 “Mountains share some of the aura of kings…Mountains were also like rulers, rich in Yang power, towering above the ordinary, linking the lowly to the heavens. The death of a ruler was euphemistically called the collapse of a mountain. ‘Great and lofty is the mountain/ With its might reaching to Heaven,” read the first two lines in a poem in the Classic of Poetry 詩經 (poem 259)’ ” Ebrey, Ibid.

perceive of the way various spaces—be they related to ideology, religion, nature, art or the body—interacted or were produced during the Song period.

An important text and well-known manual on pedagogical rules of Northern Song painting from the Song, the Linquan gaozhi 林泉高致 (“Lofty

Record of Forest and Streams”), provides modern scholars with evidence that artists were specifically instructed and taught both to visualize and to depict the mountain as body.113 Thus the merging of these two entities in Song painting is not an understanding based only on interpretation. I shall argue that some monumental landscape paintings of the Song period were utilized as political instruments, while also acting as tools of ideology through which could be promoted the idea that the human world and its social hierarchies encompassed the natural world. This type of connection between mountain and body is clear from the writings found in the Linquan gaozhi, which advises artists to paint the mountain anthropomorphically as if it were the human body of the emperor himself. The author of the work’s sayings, Guo Xi 郭熙 (c.1020-1090), was a

member of the literati class, and highly esteemed within the bureaucratic hierarchy of statesmen under Emperor Shenzong 神宗 (1048-1085).114 Guo Xi’s ideas and

artwork will be discussed here. Also of interest, however, is the concurrent academy movement of the Song period, which demonstrates how Neo-Confucians

113 Guo Xi 郭熙, Linquan Gaozhi 林泉高致 “Essay on Landscape Painting.” Translated by Shio Sakanishi. Frome and London: Butler & Tanner Ltd., 1935.
114 Guo Si 郭思 (ca. 1050—after 1130), Guo Xi’s son, is believed to have been the author who recorded his father’s ideas.

began actively appropriating the space of various sacred mountains, attempting to transfer the power of the natural world into the human folds of politics and ideology. These developments point to how individuals and groups of the Song period utilized art and architecture as a political means while also becoming increasingly interested in the utilization of sacred space as a tool through which they could promote religion and ideology. As part of this chapter, I will also seriously examine how a theory of space, and in particular that of the tripartite division of space found in the work of French thinker Henri Lefebvre, might help to articulate some of the ways in which people, ideologies, art and the natural world interacted spatially during the Song.

Literati Interest in the Material World:
Natural Objects as Representations of Humans and their Experiences

During the Song period, a group of educated men connected to government service, the literati, developed a tradition of understanding paintings, artworks and other material objects as capable of embedding symbolic qualities of moral certitude within representational objects. Sometimes, they also created literary motifs that could be used symbolically as a manner of expressing dissatisfaction with government or the state of affairs, and they then transformed these same motifs such that they became material, appearing in the form of painting. In this section, I will examine contemporary scholarship devoted to the literary practices and literati culture of the Song period, which has shown the important manner in

which the literati of this time became increasingly interested in the material world, including in the representation of their ideas through the medium of painting.

Since the end of the early imperial period in China (Han Dynasty 漢朝

(206 BCE – 220 CE), the literati had represented a group of scholar-officials whose employment as government workers was based upon the intellectual qualities they had attained through formal education in writing and literature, and which involved a rigorous examination process founded on knowledge of the Confucian classics. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, prominent western scholars within the field of Chinese Studies have begun to explore the ways in which the literati expressed their ideas not only in writing, but also in painting. In her seminal work, The Chinese Literati on Painting, art historian Susan Bush, for example, is devoted to this connection between ideas and art as found in the artworks and literati identities of the Song period.115 Examining the fundamental role that the theories of famous Song literati scholar, Su Shi 蘇軾

(1037-1101), played within the development of literati ideals in Chinese painting, Bush describes how Su’s writing promoted the idea of a literati art that was inseparable from the literati artist, and of a canon of art that served to bond a particular group of men, the literati, through their communal understanding of how the individualities of men may be embedded in their work. According to this line of thinking, an integral part of literati painting tradition that developed during the Song pertained neither to the brush nor to the ink style of the work, but to the

115 Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London England: Harvard University Press, 1971.

social element—to the literati artist and his place in society. Bush explains how, regardless of the subject matter depicted on a given painting, that depiction was always, as held by Su Shi and his circle of friends, representative of the human being who made it.116 Examining this, Bush points to how Su famously extolled his friend Wen Tong’s (文同 1018-1079) bamboo paintings [Fig. 3]. Su revered

Wen not only because he believed him to have captured the essence of the bamboo on the scroll, but also because Su envisioned his friend’s own essence or being as manifest in the form of the painted bamboo,

The ink gentleman [bamboo] on the wall cannot speak, But just seeing them can dissipate one’s myriad griefs;

And further, as for my friend’s resembling these gentlemen, The severity of his simple virtue defies the frosty autumn.117 simple virtue defies the frosty autumn.118

Su Shi believed that Wen Tong’s paintings of bamboo were, to a large extent, self- portraits. One clearly notes how, within the theoretical framework that Su’s writing provides, a painting of an object in nature becomes a symbolic portrait of a man. The human subject in this case appropriates an aspect of the natural object,

116 “He [Su] was concerned with the “scholarly spirit” of a work, not with matters of style: still there are indications that he and his friends practiced a new type of painting. According to Su, painting was an art, like poetry, that served as an expressive outlet, and it was to be done in one’s leisure time. When this attitude appeared in Northern Song writings, it signaled that painting had been adopted by the scholar class and had thus achieved the status of a polite art, such as poetry…Like poetry, the painting of literary men was often produced for intimates in social gatherings…scholars’ painting was a form of expression in which the personality of the maker was revealed, but the work of art was often created in the company of friends at a drinking party” Bush 6-7.

117 Su Shi, Collected Poems, IX.20.17b-18a (from Bush 35). 118 Ibid.

Fig. 3 Wen Tong 文同 (1018-1079)
Ink Monochrome Bamboo 墨竹圖 (eleventh-century) National Palace Museum, Taipei

and it is in Su Shi’s connection of nature to the human aspect of character that Bush also discusses his ideas as “Confucian,”

In this fundamentally Confucian view, the character of a man is more important than his work, the traces he leaves behind…Only a superior man like Wen can fuse his nature with that of bamboo and be enlightened enough to discern the way things should be. In the end, as a Confucian scholar, Su is mainly concerned with the character of the artist.119

119 Bush 12, 43.

According to Bush, the attempts of both the Northern Song literati, including Su Shi, and of later scholar-painters, such as those of the Yuan period (1279-1368 CE), to look to humans and their social relationships as the fundamental basis for an ethical code by which to live, clearly falls under the general philosophical guidance of Confucianism.120

More recently, however, scholars have looked beyond issues of morality and Confucianism in their examination of how Song literati envisioned material objects, suggesting that such objects were symbolic, representative or connected to the human experience as a whole. Ronald Egan, scholar of Chinese literature and aesthetics, has mapped out some of the complex ways that objects were perceived among literati during the Northern Song. The topic of material objects and their relationships to literati identity of this timeframe is integral to Egan’s 2006 book, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuit in Northern Song Dynasty China.121 In a close examination of the massive compilation of rubbings from stele inscriptions, the Jigu Lu 集古錄 , which was brought together by eleventh-

century statesman and literati scholar, Ouyang Xiu (歐陽脩1007-1072) , Egan describes the novel activity of collecting, which became intimately bound to how

Song literati viewed the material world around them. Ouyang’s collection differed

120 Assertions of this sort were more prevalent during Bush’s time of writing during the twentieth century. Today, most historians of Chinese traditions have begun to question simple classifications such as “Confucian” and “Daoist.” In his extensive work on Daoism, Daoism: The Enduring Tradition (Routledge 2004), Russell Kirkland explains the problems of such bifurcation at length. Similarly, in her study and explanation of the Chinese Classics, The Five “Confucian” Classics (Yale University Press, 2001), Michael Nylan emphasizes the importance of understanding the problems that arise in terminological classification when studying Chinese history.

121 Ronald Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London: Harvard University Press, 2006.

greatly from previous collections, such as the tenth-century calligraphic collection compiled by Emperor Taizong (太宗 939-997). For whereas Taizong focused on

the calligraphy of eminent persons, Ouyang was in his collection more interested in preserving the material diversity of calligraphic style that he found in virtually any inscriptions he could get his hands on.122 Although Ouyang in his collection respected and included the works of such eminent figures as the Tang scholar official, Yan Zhenqing (顏真卿 707-783), he was also interested in collecting

works of the unknown, as well as fragments of works—fragments that pointed to the fragility and tenuousness of the inscriptions themselves.123 Many of the steles that Ouyang was interested in had been abandoned across the land, forgotten pieces protruding from the earth, the writings that adorned them also deserted and left behind to weather the elements of the natural world. Ouyang’s collection, which included about one-thousand rubbings gathered over a twenty-year time frame, also included his own commentaries on the rubbings and their contents.124 He wrote these commentaries over a ten-year period of his life.125 However, discusses Egan, Ouyang did not appear to have been interested in representing a grand “universal history” in the piecing together of his collection of rubbings and commentaries. Rather, his writings when placed together presented an overall concern with representing and describing a history of the past as it related to

122 Ibid., 15.
123 Ibid., 34-47. 124 Ibid., 8.
125 Ibid., 10.

aesthetics. Ouyang created such a history by including a wide variety of calligraphic styles in his collection.126

There does appear to be an existential issue at hand in considering how Ouyang compiled such an extensive collection of rubbings. For Ouyang’s collection also seems to have represented the scholar’s interest in connecting himself to the past, and in understanding the manner in which time acts not only to destroy the material objects that humans make, but also to annihilate the memories embedded in those objects.127 Indeed, Ouyang did not collect copies of the inscriptions, for he believed that such copies might include errors of the brush. Instead, he wanted to collect the rubbings of the inscriptions themselves, which he believed to have best represented the original integrity of the inscription. Seeing the Song as a rupture from the past, Ouyang wished to preserve material objects that were attached to memories of the past—memories at risk of being forgotten during his time.128

This emotional attachment to material objects during the Song, represented in the collections of well-known literati such as Ouyang Xiu, indicates the

126 “His (Ouyang’s) interest is not to represent history generally or to recapture through engraved texts as much as he can that has been lost or corrupted in the textual tradition (despite what he himself often claims). His goal is to represent one artistic pursuit more thoroughly than it has ever been done before. His focus is on an aestheticized aspect of the past rather than on the past universally” Ibid., 50.

127 “In a sense, Ouyang is in a race against time that threatens each stele out there in the landscape. Even as he acquires each piece and mounts the rubbing carefully in one of his massive albums, he reflects on how the collection itself will not last long. He knows it will be broken apart eventually and scattered, as it ultimately was” Ibid., 53.

128 Ouyang, however, appears at times to have understood that he was part of history’s process of annihilation, and in one of his commentaries he connects himself to six others who have climbed one of the same mountains that he climbed. At the time that he wrote the commentary, the other climbers had all died, and Ouyang’s reminiscence advises his own readers that Ouyang too will be gone one day (Ibid., 52-53).

increasing significance that material objects had for thinkers of the Song. Furthermore, literati interest in the material world also often correlated with an interest in non-manmade materials of the natural world. More specifically, literati of the Song increasingly viewed natural objects as symbolically embedded with human character, and they subsequently appreciated representations of these symbolic unions as could be found in painting.

Looking at one object of the natural world in particular, for example, contemporary art historian Maggie Bickford has addressed how paintings of the plum and the plum flower created during the Song became important representations of the literati themselves.129 Bickford traces the plum’s thematic representations as they have occurred across the history and culture of China, addressing the issue of how literati identity transformed through the appreciation of the material world during the Song. Bickford’s work is particularly relevant to a discussion of how human and natural worlds merged in Song representation because she demonstrates how thinkers of the Song were envisioning objects of the natural world as representations of ideology. This connection between natural object and ideology, which began in literati writing, became further emphasized through its representations in painting. In the case of the plum images that Bickford discusses, poems about the flower had earlier in time garnered similar meaning, but it was not until the Song that such meaning attached itself also to paintings of the flower. The plum has been used symbolically in writing for much

129 Maggie Bickford, Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painting Genre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

of China’s history, first present as a symbol in the poetry of the Southern Dynasties during the fifth and sixth centuries CE. When China fell into disunion at the end of the Han Dynasty, the image of the plum became attached in poetry to the notion of heartiness in the face of hardship, a connection drawn from the fact that the plum buds appeared in the coldness of winter. It was not until the Song, however, that this same notion of the tough but beautiful plum attached itself to human character as found in physical representations of the flower as they occurred in painting.

As in the case of the way that bamboo and plum blossoms became symbolic first in writing and then in painting, the intellectual climate of the Song provided a new space in which natural object, ideology, art and human individual came together. It was at this time, when the literati were becoming increasingly interested in how elements of the natural and material worlds could come to symbolically represent their personae through the art of painting, that the scholar- official and famous landscape painter, Guo Xi, rose within the Northern Song court as a highly revered painter.

Anthropomorphism and the Appropriation of Space in the Writing and Painting of Guo Xi 郭熙

In Kaifeng, enormous scrolls exemplary of the Northern Song artistic development known as monumental landscape paintings adorned palace walls and government offices. These paintings, the largest landscapes found in China at the time, depicted some of the most majestic features of the earth: mountains. Yet

while the enormous sizes of the scrolls acted in part to revere the land, such proportion also served symbolic purposes of promoting interests of the state. Taking into account the potential political power embedded in monumental landscape painting, while also understanding the Northern Song literati belief in how artistic renditions of nature often represented the human spirit, one perceives of an intellectual development that was taking place during the Song. In this development, artistic creation became understood as a tool through which humans could appropriate the power of the natural world. To understand this process of appropriation, and the subsequent amalgamation of natural, ideological, bodily and artistic spaces as they occurred in the Song, it becomes fruitful to refer to the landscape paintings themselves, as well as to investigate any writings indicative of this type of spatial appropriation.

Guo Xi 郭熙 (c.1020-1090), a Northern Song painter who worked under

the reign of Emperor Shenzong, was a central figure in the development of monumental landscape painting. In 1072, Guo completed his great painting, Early Spring (Zaochun tu 早春圖) [Fig. 4]. Several years after he painted Early Spring,

the artist also completed the sayings of a pedagogical text, the Linquan gaozhi 林

泉高致 (“Lofty Record of Forests and Streams”), which detailed the artistic

methods he believed necessary to the production of landscape painting. It is believed that Guo’s son, Guo Si 郭思 (ca. 1050—after 1130), compiled and edited

the manual of his father’s sayings, while also writing his own Huaji 畫記 (“Notes

on Guo Xi’s Paintings”).130 Instructing artists to paint the mountain anthropomorphically as if it were the human body of the emperor himself, Guo Xi’s Linquan gaozhi mapped out some of the most influential pedagogical rules for Northern Song monumental landscape painting.131 As is often perceived of his most well known work, Early Spring, which is extant and is today part of the National Palace Museum’s collection in Taipei, mountain and man coalesce, emerging on Guo’s scroll as the all-powerful form of the emperor.

Although Shenzong had made significant reforms within his bureaucracy that pertained to the status of artisan-officials, Guo Xi enjoyed a high rank not only as an artist, but also as official, ultimately becoming the first painter awarded civil rank within the history of the Northern Song Painting Academy.132 Appointed Scholar of Arts (yixue 藝學) and granted the position of Chief Daizhao 待詔 in the

Hanlin Academy during his life, Guo Xi was after his death also granted the status of Grand Master for Proper Consultation (Hanlin daizhao zhizhang zeng Zhengyi daifu 翰林待詔直長贈正議大夫郭熙淳夫).133 As Foong Leong Ping explains in

his 2006 dissertation, Monumental and Intimate Landscape by Guo Xi, the feat of attaining such civil status was unheard of among artisan-officials.134 The fact that Guo Xi reached such high official rank while also mapping out the artistic rules for

130 Shio Sakanishi, preface to Linquan Gaozhi 林泉高致 (“Essay on Landscape Painting”) by Guo Xi 郭熙, translated by Shio Sakanishi, Frome and London: Butler & Tanner Ltd., 1935, 19; also

Foong Leong Ping, Monumental and Intimate Landscape by Guo Xi, Ph.D. Diss., Princeton University, 2006, 119.
131 Sakanishi 37.
132 Foong Leong Ping, Monumental and Intimate Landscape by Guo Xi, Ph.D. Diss., Princeton University, 2006, 119.

133 Ibid., 118. 134 Ibid.

monumental landscape in writing—rules through which the natural bodies of mountains could become representational vehicles through which to visualize the powers of emperor and state—points to how at least four spheres of space were interacting in the Northern Song art of Guo Xi. These spaces were those of: art, nature, the human body and ideology. Looking first to the pedagogical instructions that Guo Xi promoted, as found in his son’s writings, I will then examine the manner in which Guo Xi’s production of painting interacted with nature, the human body and ideology, and how this interaction was part of a larger development taking place during the Song period through which proponents of ideology, some attached to the state, were actively involved in appropriating the sacred space of mountains.

The methods of painting found in the writings attributed to Guo Xi pertain in large part to his idea of how to represent properly the mountain in painting. In looking at Guo’s Linquan gaozhi, one observes how the artist’s manner of fusing man and mountain sought to fuse the human body with the natural world,

Water-courses are the arteries of a mountain; grass and trees its hair; mist and haze its complexion. Therefore with water a mountain becomes alive; with grass and trees beautiful; with mist and haze charming and elegant. Water has the mountains as its face; arbors and terraces as its eyes and eyebrows; fishing and angling give it animation. Therefore with mountains, water becomes charming; with arbors and terraces bright and pleasing; fishing and angling give it animation.135

Here, Guo anthropomorphizes the mountain, paralleling its individual natural elements, such as grass and water, to features of the human body, hair and arteries.

135 Guo Xi in Sakanishi (Section: Shanshui xun 山水訓 [Comments on Landscape Painting]) 45. 80

Guo Xi envisions the mountain as body. More significantly, however, is the fact that Guo creates a material space through which to represent that which he envisions. In this section of writing, Guo goes on with this anthropomorphizing, describing the body parts and bones of the mountain,

Some mountains are high, while others are low. A high mountain has its arteries low. Its shoulders and thighs are broad and spreading; its foundations are thick and strong; and its peaks and cliffs stand close, supplemented by each other and connected in a continuous chain… A low mountain has its arteries higher up. Its peaks droop slightly; its neck and shoulders are closely connected; its root and base are broad and ponderous; its mounds are full and rounded… Stones are the bones of heaven and earth. Bones are valuable when they are buried deep and do not appear on the surface. Water is the blood of heaven and earth. Blood is valuable when it circulates and not when it congeals.136

Guo Xi’s descriptions of the mountain here could be understood as mere expressions of how the artist feels about the mountain. But Guo is actually instructing other artists to go about painting features of the mountain in the same manner that they might paint a human’s features. The artist would like for his poetic ideas on mountains to be made material through the activities of his brush. Furthermore, Guo Xi does not envision the mountain as a generic human body. He has a particular body in mind when he thinks of the mountain and paints the mountain, and that is the body of the emperor,

A great mountain is so stately that it becomes the master of multitudinous others arranged about it in order. It becomes the great master of the hills and slopes, forests and valleys, far and near, small and large. Its appearance is that of an emperor sitting majestically in all his glory,

136 Ibid., 47.

Fig. 4 Guo Xi 郭熙 (c. 1020-1090), Early Spring 早春圖 (1072), National Palace Museum, Taipei

accepting the service of and giving audience to his subjects, without sign of arrogance or haughtiness.137

The mountain exists as the central subject of monumental landscape painting, and Guo’s guidelines pertaining to the depiction of this central subject instruct the artist to envision the mountain as body of the emperor and depict it with that in mind. In effect, Guo utilizes the mountain as an anthropomorphic tool through which to represent an entity of power: the emperor. As described, Guo Xi’s painting of Early Spring depicts a majestic mountain with broad shoulders and a powerful pine-covered peak. Mist cloaks areas of the mountain’s body, and waters course abundantly through the mountain’s veins. Sturdy boulders and stately pine trees support the weight of the mountain towards the bottom portion of the scroll.

In his Huajue 畫訣 section (“Rules for Painting”) of the Linquan gaozhi,

Guo Xi further accentuates the hierarchical relationship between emperor and people that he believes should be envisioned when representing the mountain artistically in landscape painting,

In painting a landscape attention must first be given to the large mountain which be called the master peak. When this is decided upon, other details come next: the perspective and proportion should be worked out in relation to the master peak, which will dominate the whole region—that is why it is called the master peak. Figuratively speaking, its relation to the others should be that of an emperor to his subjects, a master to his servants.138

137 Guo Xi in Sakanishi (Section: Shanshui xun 山水訓 [Comments on Landscape Painting]) 37. 138 Guo Xi in Sakanishi (Section: Hujue 畫訣 [Rules for Painting]) 53-54.

Turning to the features of the mountain, Guo believes also that features such as the mountain’s trees should be painted as representative of the features of human society,

A tall pine tree is so stately that it becomes a leader amongst the other trees. It stretches out accordingly over vines and creepers, grass and trees, a
leader for those who are unable to support themselves. Its state is like that of a prince who wins the approval of his age and receives the services of lesser people, without sign of anxiety or vexation.139

Important to note here is that for Guo Xi, the mountain is visualized not simply as any human body, but as the emperor’s body. And the mountain’s traits are the emperor’s people and his domain.140 But it is here in his descriptions of the mountain as emperor that Guo’s primary purpose appears to be that of using representation as a means of fusing symbolically through painting the powerful or majestic aspects of nature with a human, imperial power. In his categorizing of natural objects such as mountain, pines, grass, etc., Guo Xi treats nature in a hierarchical manner that parallels the hierarchy of human society. Pine trees are superior to grass, asserts Guo, in the same manner that princes are superior to

139 Guo Xi in Sakanishi (Section: Shanshui xun 山水訓 [Comments on Landscape Painting]) 37. 140 Elsewhere in his writing, Guo delights in the pleasure that the mere representation of nature may bring to the artist, although he returns to the theme that civic duty, “Why does a virtuous man take delight in landscapes? It is for these reasons: that in a rustic retreat he may nourish his nature; that amid the carefree play of streams and rocks, he may take delight; that he may constantly meet in the country fisherman, woodcutters, and hermits, and see the soaring of the cranes and hear the crying of the monkeys. The din of the dusty world and the locked-in-ness of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors; while, on the contrary, haze, mist, and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what human nature seeks, and yet can rarely find. When, however, in the hey- day of great peace and prosperity, the minds, both of a man’s sovereign and of his parents, are full of high expectations of his services, should he still stand aloof, neglecting the responsibilities of honour and righteousness? In the face of such duties the benevolent man cannot seclude himself and shun the world” Guo Xi in Sakanishi (Ibid., 30).

commoners.141 The power of the painted mountains described by Guo Xi appears to manifest not in how it represents a quality innate to the natural body of the mountain. Rather, this power is perceived when the mountain becomes attached through representation to the emperor and his empire.

Recruited as a court painter in 1068, Guo Xi worked in the court for at least most of the duration of Emperor Shenzong’s reign (1067-1085).142 Some have suggested that Guo Xi very likely painted Early Spring as a response to reforms that took place following Shenzong’s 1068 performance at Round Altar 圜丘,

located on the periphery of the capital’s southern edge, of the Southern Suburb sacrifice (Nanjiao jisi 南郊祭祀).143 This sacrifice was the most important state

ritual of the Northern Song whereby the Emperor performed the feng-shan 封禪

sacrifices, or sacrifices to Heaven and Earth by which he maintained his imperial authority and ancestral connections. Following the Southern Sacrifice of 1068, statesmen and powerful reformers of the Song period, Shen Gua 沈括 (1031-1095)

and Shenzong’s Grand Councilor, Wang Anshi 王安石 (1021-1086), criticized celebrations surrounding the ritual as extravagant and not in line with the spirit of

reform of Shenzong’s reign, best articulated through Wang Anshi’s New Policies,

141 Guo Xi expounds on the symbolic importance of pine trees in representing social hierarchy, “In painting stones and trees, the first consideration should be given to a large pine tree, which may be called the aged master. The aged master having been decided upon, an artist may proceed to the other details. For example, curious nests, small plants, little flowers, parasitic plants, and split stones all provide subsidiary details in the painting of a mountain. Hence the pine tree is called the aged master, and its relation to the others is that of a personage of high virtue to lesser man” Guo Xi in Sakanishi (Section: Huajue 畫訣 [Rules for Painting]) 54.

142 Foong 155. 143 Ibid., 68-69.

which in 1069 were first instituted although they did not reach their final form until 1083.144 The Southern Suburb sacrifice took place on a triennial basis and so following the political criticism that had occurred after the performance of the 1068 ritual, celebratory details of the performance of the 1071 ritual were drastically reduced to the point that the Emperor was not even required to preside over the event.145 And it was in the wake of these criticisms and subsequent reforms that Guo Xi presented Early Spring to the emperor in the spring that followed the ritual performance of 1071.146 As explains Foong, indeed the painting could have been presented as a symbolic representation both of the emperor’s power and of the success of Wang Anshi’s New Policies,

The following spring, Guo Xi presented Early Spring to the Emperor…given the enormous importance of this ritual of right rule—especially significant during times of reform—it was probably the main reason behind his choice of topic. Early Spring must have made an impact as a double symbol of renewal: it not only represented natural order, where the Emperor presided as a dragon-like mountain over his contented subjects, but also political order, where this “New Policy” met with success.147

By the mid-1070s, Guo Xi had most likely already secured his rank as Scholar of Arts under Shenzong. Therefore, one might surmise that Early Spring could have been influential in the advancement of Guo’s rank as such.148 Several years later,

144 Ibid., 57 and 69. 145 Ibid., 70.
146 Ibid.
147 Ibid.

148 “Suzuki Kei suggests a date of the mid-1070s for when Guo Xi received the rank of Scholar of Arts, based on a guess that the Zichen Palace Hall screen (and the Chuigong Palace Hall screen by Cui Bo, et al.) was part of the city building project that Song Yongchen was in charge of” (Foong 159) and “Given the dates suggested above for when Guo Xi joined the Calligraphy Academy and when he became Scholar of Arts, then the magnificent Early Spring of 1072 in the National Palace Museum, Taipei must have been a painting which helped him gain his title and win the attention of the Emperor” (Foong 165).

around 1080, Guo Xi completed the Linquan gaozhi, although the work may not have been published until as late as 1120 by his son, Guo Si, and along with Guo Si’s Huaji.149 The production of Guo Xi’s painting, Early Spring, and his ideas about painting, as found in the Linquan gaozhi, were intimately bound to Emperor Shenzong and Shenzong’s activities. Furthermore, the representation of the mountain itself, as found in Early Spring and based on Guo’s ideas about painting the mountain in the form of the emperor, as found in the Linquan gaozhi, could have themselves acted as a symbolic representations of the emperor and the emperor’s powers.

China’s imperial interest in the social functioning of mountain space had typically revolved not around something sacred but instead upon the state’s emphasis of endorsing the mountain as a symbol of the emperor and the emperor’s ritual place, as well as in transforming the sacred into the educational. This bridge between mountain space and imperial space is often associated with state-endorsed rituals connected to Confucianism. Linda Walton devotes some discussion to this matter in her work, Academies and Society in Southern Song China,

Confucianism has not usually been related to sacred geography, although the viability of the imperial state and the sanctity of the throne were closely connected to the performance of the feng and shan sacrifices on Mount Tai, described by Sima Qian 司馬遷 in the Shiji 史記. Few Emperors dared to perform these rites, since they were an expression of the moral perfection of imperial rule, but the symbolism of the mountain linking the emperor’s ritual place with cosmic order nonetheless remained powerful.150

149 Foong 131-138.
150 Linda Walton, Academies and Society in Southern Song China, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999, 92-93.

As Walton explains, imperial reverence for mountains in China had not been historically bound to an understanding of the mountain as sacred in itself. Rather, the emperor’s activities on the mountain were that which made the place important. Similarly, one can understand the mountain described in Guo Xi’s writings as having become especially revered not only in how it represented a sacred place,
but in the way that it represented the body of the emperor, its features representative of a hierarchy associated with the emperor’s dominion. Guo’s description of the mountain as anthropomorphically connected to the emperor’s body creates a fusion, both ideological and artistic, between the power of man and the power of mountain, or between human power and the power of the natural world.

From Anthropomorphism to Physical Appropriation: Neo-Confucian Academy Building and The Spatial Power of Human Lineage

Whereas Northern Song thought associated with the state and as found in the work of Guo Xi anthropomorphized the mountain, Southern Song Neo- Confucianism physically appropriated its space. Linda Walton’s work primarily addresses questions concerning how and why an academy movement cropped up
in late twelfth-century China. In the course of her research, however, she also examines the Neo-Confucian appropriation of sacred space during the Song period, which she links intimately to the building and restoration of academies. In its historical tracing of the restoration of academies located at places such as Marchmount Hill (yuelu 嶽麓), Stone Drum (shiku 石鼓) and White Deer Grotto

(bailudong 白鹿洞), Walton’s research also points to the manner in which efforts

to conjoin sacred space with Neo-Confucianism developed alongside the academy movement.

The restoration process had begun with the original construction of academies during the Northern Song, although the movement did not truly flourish until the building of many new academies later, during the thirteenth-century. The academy movement correlated with a broad shift in the cultural and social identities of literati elite (shi 士) that took place during the Southern Song. In

large part, the drastic increase in the number of students taking examinations and seeking government employment led to the rapid development of academies across the land. With not enough official government positions available to accommodate the surplus of students taking the exams, the shi community sought to legitimize itself by developing academies, which would in turn create new roles of power to be fulfilled by unemployed people of official status.151 Family academies also developed during this time, benefiting both the families and the state by providing a means through which sons could get ahead even if they did not necessarily succeed in the examinations, while also offering a way through which officials could confirm the authority of the state by connecting themselves to the more localized system of academies.152

151 Walton 14 and 150. 152 Ibid., 147.

The academy movement correlated with the rise of daoxue 道學, literally “teaching of the Dao.” It was a school of thought most commonly associated with

the ideas and writings of the thirteenth-century philosopher, Zhu Xi (朱熹 1130-

1200) and Neo-Confucianism.153 Daoxue sought to transform different aspects of intellectual life during the Southern Song. On one level, the agenda of the school’s proponents could be described as philosophical or intellectual in nature, geared primarily towards the promotion of an educational change in the orthodoxy of doctrines used in government schools. However, Zhu Xi and other daoxue thinkers were also motivated by concerns perhaps better described as political in their focus on the qualities of just leadership. It was as part of this political branch of interest that a spatial interest related to state institutions and their territories also appears to have unfolded. For while the spread of new academies on the one hand offered the shi community a greater chance at localized employment, it also acted as a successful means by which Neo-Confucians could expand into physical territory previously dominated by societies linked to Buddhism and Daoism. A Neo-Confucian desire to penetrate the powerful spaces of those Buddhist and Daoist institutions therefore appears to emerge from the Neo-Confucian appropriation of those spaces. Although in her study Walton does not maintain that this intention was of primary concern to Zhu Xi and his followers, her study provides compelling evidence that it was. She closely examines, for example, the

153 We know, however, that many other important intellects of the time played primary roles in the development of daoxue, including Lu Zuqian (呂祖謙 1137-1181), Lu Jiuyuan (陸九淵, 1139- 1193) and Zhang Shi (張栻 1133-1180).

Neo-Confucian rebuilding of White Deer Grotto, located on Mount Lu, a mountain strongly associated with Buddhism; and the Neo-Confucian building of Mount Mao Academy, a mountain equally as strongly associated with Daoism. In these cases, Walton claims, “Confucians attempted to reshape the landscape according to their own vision, while appropriating its power.”154 Neo-Confucians utilized the physical forms of Buddhist and Daoist monasteries, copying them when constructing their academies. Such characteristics included architecture, names of academies, physical layout, regulations, buildings and their functions, terminology used, shrine halls (images of patriarchs enshrined in both Chan monasteries and in academies), and systems of pilgrimage networks. With the exception of the feng and shan sacrifices—rituals discussed earlier as associated with Confucianism and the imperial state—that were performed on the Five Marchmounts 五嶽 (East

Marchmount of Taishan 泰山, West Marchmount of Huashan 華山, South Marchmount of Hengshan 衡山, North Marchmount of Hengshan 恆山, Central Marchmount of Songshan 嵩山), sacred geography was not an integral part of

Confucian ideology prior to the Southern Song.155 Yet Zhu Xi and his followers actively appropriated these sacred spaces, developing them for Neo-Confucian purposes while Daoists and Buddhists continued to appropriate the same spaces for their own purposes.156

154 Walton 100. 155 Ibid., 93.
156 Ibid., 104-105.

While Neo-Confucians appropriated sacred land of Daoists and Buddhists during the Song, they viewed the land not as sacred in itself. Rather, it was in the land’s connection to its human lineage of revered, often politically-connected men that they ultimately perceived it as sacred. In her work on Daoist histories of the Wuyi Mountains 武夷山, for example, Delphine Ziegler mentions how disciples

of Zhu Xi made pilgrimages to the mountains for the purpose of worshipping their master at the Ziyang Academy 紫阳書院.157 The Wuyi mountains had since the

Han period been connected to the memory of Han Wudi 漢武帝 (156-87 BCE),

one of China’s most famous emperors who aggressively utilized his military forces to expand China’s territories while also establishing Confucianism as imperial orthodoxy.158 Near to Hancheng 漢城, a city strategically located in Fujian, which

was at the time external to China’s dominion, the Wuyi mountains served Han Wudi’s imperial interests as a military base through which the emperor’s army could pacify Fujian.159 In Fujian at the time, an ancient kingdom called Minyue 閩

越 existed and was ruled by the Bai Yue 百越, a group of people ethnic to

Southern China. According to Ziegler, Han Wudi conquered Hancheng by first appealing to a local understanding of the Wuyi mountains as a sacred place,

The Wuyi Mountains were located on the way to Hancheng, and the Lord of Wuyi, who may have been an ancient tribal chief or a god of the aboriginal Min Yue people, attracted the attention of Han Wudi for other

157 Ziegler, Delphine. “The Cult of the Wuyi Mountains and its Cultivation of the Past: A Topo- Cultural Perspective”(255-286) in Cahiers d’Extreme-Asie, Vol. 10 (1998), 281.
158 Holcombe, Charles. A History of East Asia: From the Origins of Civilization to the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge (England): Cambridge University Press, 2010, 53
159 Ziegler 271.

reasons than those attributed by Han historians to his quest for immortality in Han histories! Once Hancheng was under his control, the Wuyi Mountains could become a strategic base for the pacificiation of Fujian. The appropriation of these mountains by Han rule and religion, ostensibly as a residence for immortals, could in itself become a powerful means to suppress the Min Yue threat. It was to lead, probably not long after the fall of Hancheng, to Han Wudi’s performace of the Feng 封 and Shan 禪 sacrifices at the Wuyi Mountains, a gesture that marked the official introduction of the latter into the geo-political and religious sphere of the Han and justified their fame as the “Mountains of Han Sacrifice.”160

By the Song period, Han Wudi’s conquest of Fujian had come to mark the historical beginning of the Wuyi mountains, and Zhu Xi even wrote about the Lord of Wuyi, appropriating him as a figure of Han legacy, attached as the lord was to Han Wudi’s sacrificial activities.161

Walton explains that it was in this transformed understanding of sacred space, in which an important person’s presence and connection to a place became the factor in determining the sacredness of that place, that Neo-Confucians developed their own ideology of sacred space.162 This ideology is found in the writing of Song scholars, and Walton points to that of Lu Tian 陸佃 (1042-1102),

who in his inscription on Daoshan xiuzhu 陶山脩竹 Mount Tao Tall Bamboo Academy claimed, “this land is not of itself superior; it is excellent because of men.

Men are able to make the land excellent, to make it excellent with the Way.”163

160 Ibid.
161 Ibid. 271-272.
162 “The Way is understood to be embedded in the texts of a succession of masters, transmitted through their disciples and in their writings. There is no significance attached to the landscape, despite its sanctity as a site of imperial ritual” (Walton 95); and “Heaven only operates through men, and thus men can be worshipped as manifestations of, and agents of, Heaven’s will” (Ibid., 168).
163 Lin Jingxi 林景熙 (ca. 1275), Jishan xiansheng ji 霽山先生集 (Collected works of Lin Jingxi) (Ibid., 116 and 287).

Utilizing Daoist and Buddhist models, Southern Song Neo-Confucians also installed shrines in their academies. However, these shrines were erected in commemoration of officials and their actions—actions most often related to administrative or military leadership. Thus in academies, humans were deified for their civic life. By building shrines in their academies, proponents of daoxue were at the same time appropriating spaces that could be used to counter proponents of other governmental systems not associated with such religious spaces. The act of appropriating such symbols transformed shrines from religious objects to objects attached to a lineage of important men. For the Neo-Confucians, the mountain’s sacredness rested in its attachment to men often known for their official or civic duties. The shrine for them acted as a physical means through which they could fuse these men with the geographic space of the mountain.

It should be important to note at this time that although the academy movement succeeded in creating a new Neo-Confucian sphere of the sacred on China’s mountains of the time, this movement did not necessarily dominate or annihilate other religious practices during its process of appropriating the space.
In the case of Mount Lu, for example, Buddhist groups continued to thrive, as did Daoist groups on the same mountain. Thus during the Song, these different groups interacted with on another to a significant extent in the production of the mountain’s sacred space. Discussed briefly in Chapter One, James Robson examines this same issue of the production of sacred mountain space in his own extensive research on the religious history of Nanyue 南嶽, China’s Southern

Sacred Peak. Robson concludes that it is impossible to separate completely the historical activities of Daoists and Buddhists on Nanyue, and this is certainly similarly the case for many of the mountains deemed sacred by Neo-Confucians during their academy movement of the Song period.164

The academy movement of the Song encapsulates one historical instance of how sacred space can be appropriated or produced. Over the past few decades, theories of space have become increasingly popular in influencing how scholars from various fields in the humanities examine the ways by which spaces change or form. Turning to spatial analysis, I will look at how a network of interactions in space may have influenced the Song interest discussed in this chapter of fusing bodies and mountains in art and architecture.

Ideology as Tool in the Appropriation of Space: A Lefebvrian Approach

Historically, spaces and their properties have been explored from within the sciences—primarily from the perspectives of both mathematics and physics. Philosophers have then theorized how scientific approaches to space impact

164 In describing the interactions between Daoists and Buddhists on Nanyue, Robson explains the complex nature of those interactions, “The polyphonic bass line of the Power of Place was provided by the Collected Highlights (Nanyue zongsheng ji 南嶽總勝集), a richly complicated historical source included in both the Buddhist and Daoist canon. Given its presence in both collections, it was not surprising to find that Nanyue was a significant site for both Buddhists and Daoists and that there were interactions (both friendly and hostile) between the two traditions. The nature of the relationship between those traditions was complex and irreducible to a single model. We saw signs of outright antagonism on the one hand…and evidence of harmonious religious mixing on the other…Yet, I argue that, rather than interpret these examples of mutual contact merely as heresies going against the norm of separate and discrete religious entities, it is best to see them as indicative of the complex and varied relationships that existed between medieval Buddhists and Daoists. Some religious figures blurred the boundaries of those traditions; others were clearly intent on defending the boundaries of their lineages and traditions with pious diligence” (Robson 324).

arguments pertaining to the existence of God and human experience. Reacting in part against some of these philosophical attempts at understanding how space and humans interact, contemporary theorists in the humanities have tried to reintroduce space as a concept that needs to be treated differently when it pertains to human experience, at least as the concept occurs within the humanities. Although these reactions are at times problematic, some of these theories have resulted in new ways of perceiving how humans interact spatially with both one another and the objects of the world. Scholars working within a variety of fields today contend that theories of space have the potential of enhancing our understandings of how complex spatial interactions between society, culture and the actual geographic places in which people and groups come together have shaped history. An approach such as this is appropriate to a study like my own because, to begin with, mountains are typically thought of as places that make up part of the natural world, and I am primarily interested in the way that different people and groups of the Song represented anthropomorphically the space of the natural world, especially its mountains. Yet in examining several aspects of Song thought on the natural world, I have found that imagined mountains found in representations are just as relevant as are the actual mountains themselves.165 Once within the space of the

165 On this point, it is difficult not to problemetize the difference between “actual” and “imaginary.” By “actual”, I do not necessarily imply one, unified physical reality. Physical unity is something in the eye (mind) of the perceiver, and this is clear in the case of mountains, which are entities that often do not appear to end where another begins. All aspects of the mountain itself, its herbs, trees, rocks, animal life and minerals are part of the mountain’s reality. Thus “actual” often merges with the “imaginary.” However, by “actual mountains,” I am referring to mountains and all of their parts as they are found in nature, as opposed to “imagined mountains,” which I refer to as those mountains found and described specifically in artistic representation.

imaginary, art and writing about mountains become important to the study of these natural forms. In the meantime, practices related to a wide variety of social actors from the Song, including those of statesmen, artists, scholars, philosophers, religious leaders and emperors, emerge as formative, interconnecting historical strands linked to the thoughts and representations that revolved around the objects of mountain and body during this timeframe. Indeed, there is a focus on the space of the mountain that presents itself as integral to these developments. And yet this particular space is so intertwined with other spatial activities that a look at spatial analysis seems warranted. Guo Xi’s artistic rules on depicting an anthropomorphized mountain, for example, can be understood to have compartmentalized not only the space of the mountain, but the spaces of human body and society as well. In large part, space or the history of spaces, and not a linear history of either geography or events, appears to be that which connected these cultural strands of the Song to one another. I will now briefly overview spatial theory as it is found in the work of French philosopher and sociologist, Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991). I will then attempt to apply this theory to the production of space as it occurred between natural world, human body and representations attached to state ideology of the Song period.

In his work on spatial analysis, Henri Lefebvre created a theoretical structure through which he hoped the complex physical and social spatial interactions making up human history could be better understood. Scholars

working today within various fields of the humanities, including religious studies, have begun to utilize Lefebvre’s theory of space while conducting their own work on the interaction between cultural geography, society and history. Heavily influenced by Lefebvre’s spatial analysis, for example, British religious studies scholar, Kim Knott, has recently developed a spatial methodology formulated primarily from the work of Lefebvre’s tripartite structure of space, writing an entire book devoted to an examination of the location of religion as it has occurred across cultures in the body space of the left hand and its representations.166 In particular, she examines the way that social spaces involving a variety of objects, ideas and processes have revolved around the way that certain religious practices have developed in their treatment of the left hand.167 For Knott and other scholars like her, Lefebvre’s methodological approach to space is attractive because there is an analytical component to it that actually simplifies the matrix of interactions making up spatial analysis.168 I too believe that an analytical approach to space is helpful, and will therefore exert some efforts here in examining Lefebvre’s theory and how it might add to my own study of how art, nature, body, ideology and religion interacted with one another during China’s Song period.

166 Kim Knott, The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis of the Left Hand, London: Equinox Publishing, 2005. See also “Spatial Theory and Spatial Methodology, Their Relationship and Application: A Transatlantic Engagement” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Vol 77 no. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 (413-424).

167 Knott 170.
168 “What Lefebvre offers is more than a conjoining of methods from different disciplines, however. He proposes a theoretical reunification of the physical, mental, and social dimensions of our lived experience. The scholar of religions is thus offered a potentially useful analytical approach to the material, ideological, and social forms of religion and their embeddedness in a broader network of social and cultural relations.” Knott, The Location of Religion 12.

Henri Lefebvre’s most well known work on spatial analysis is The Production of Space.169 In this work, Lefebvre wished to theorize a concept of space in a manner that departed from the tradition of understanding spaces as empty voids that contain objects, commonly thought of as places. Instead of bifurcating space, Lefebvre trifurcates it. His method introduces a “perceived- conceived-lived triad” of space, which is in his own spatial terms composed of spatial practice, representations of space and representational space.170 This triad, however, does not constitute a distinct whole. Rather, it supports or embodies a trialectical relationship that moves between its three parts.

As the title of his book suggests, Lefebvre is not only interested in space but is also concerned with how space can come about or be produced. He looks at several geographical examples to show how human activity and the natural world interact with one another to produce new spaces and perceptions of space. Production and its relationship to space are, according to Lefebvre, intimately bound to social practice, and these juxtapositions therefore clearly align Lefebvre’s theory with Marxism. Lefebvre, however, does not understand Marxism as an absolute theory but as an instant in the historical development of theory.171 Furthermore, Lefebvre seems primarily interested in the ideas found at the conclusion of Marx’s Das Kapital—those which (as in the case of Lefebvre’s own theorizing) also act together to construct a “trinity formula”—one that is made up

169 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Maldon, Massachusetts; Oxford, UK; Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 1991 (French 1974). 170 Lefebvre 40.
171 Ibid., 321.

of Earth, capital and labor (or rent, profit and wages).172 Lefebvre examines the Earth of Marx’s trinity as it pertains to geography, but also as it responds dialectically to capital and labor, developing an unlimited multiplicity of social spaces which have the capacity of interpenetration and superimposition.173 Space, according to Lefebvre, is not “empty” nor does it act simply as a container, distinct from its contents.174 The objects traditionally seen to “fill up” space are, as part of the Lefebvrian model, integral to space’s mesh. Ultimately, Lefebvre is interested in the ways that material production influences human activity especially as the interaction relates to space. Although Lefebvre is just as interested as Marx is in exchange, Marx’s focus is on how exchange interacts with goods, whereas Lefebvre’s focus is on exchange and social activity.

The tripartite structure of Lefebvre’s theory is found throughout the book. In accord with this theoretical foundation, Lefebvre appeals not only to Marx, but to both Hegel and Nietzsche. With these three in mind, he appears to desire a preservation of Hegel’s view of space as “product and residue of historical time” (22), with which he will bind Marxist time –“that is, historicity driven forward by the forces of production and adequately…oriented by industrial, proletarian and revolutionary rationality” (22-23), while still sustaining Nietzsche’s primordiality of space, or “the repetitiveness, the circularity, the simultaneity of that which seems diverse in the temporal context and which arises at different times” (22).

172 Marx’s structure of the trinity also moves his theory away from the binary structures of capital vs. wages and bourgeoisie vs. working class, the divisions of which Marx emphasizes throughout the earlier sections of Das Kapital. Ibid., 325.
173 Ibid., 86.

174 Ibid., 87, 170.

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Elsewhere, Lefebvre refers to the interrelationships and interpenetrating philosophies of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche that he observes as formative of his own metaphilosophy, which he claims is a rejection but not an abolishment of all traditional philosophy.175 Although Lefebvre’s work refers to and utilizes the ideas of other philosophers and thinkers throughout, the dialectical relationship between certain elements of Hegelian, Marxist and Nietzschean thought appears to set forth the dominant paradigm to which Lefebvre will often return.

Early on in his text, Lefebvre begins to discuss the importance of maintaining Hegel’s concrete universal (at least as it pertains to space), and another Lefebvrian triad soon develops alongside Hegel’s own triad of the particular, the general and the singular, which Hegel elaborates in his Science of Logic.176 In an attempt to uphold both the Hegelian triad and its relationship to the production of space, Lefebvre states the necessity of an understanding of a dialectic at work between physical space (or the “extreme formal abstraction of logico-mathematical space) and the people living in that physical space (or the “practico-sensory realm of social space”).177 Looking at space in any other manner, he continues, would be to break down or fragment Hegel’s concrete universal into the original Hegelian moments of:

175 Here, he also explains his metaphilosophy as an exploration of how Hegel’s radical critique branches both into Marx’s exploration of social practice and Nietzsche’s emphasis on art, poetry, music and drama. Ibid., 405-406.
176 Ibid., 15.

177 Ibid.

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..the particular (in this case descriptions or cross-sections of social space); the general (logical and mathematical); and the singular (i.e. ‘places’ considered as natural, in their merely physical or sensory reality).”178

Lefebvre is like Marx in that both thinkers have moved away from the Hegelian assertion that ideas are the formative thread in human society. Both Marx and Lefebvre are instead focused on the material. Yet whereas Marx clearly divides the material world from the ideal world, as did Hegel, Lefebvre’s presentation of “space” as a category unto itself helps to move away from the strict dichotomy between objects and ideas, and it is this move away from such worn out subject- object divides that I find particularly fruitful.

Taking note of how Lefebvre presents his dialectic, or trialectic, one also observes Lefebvre’s perception of modern mathematics and the influential philosophy of Leibniz in the construction of his own theory of space. Moving away from the thought and philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza, Newton and Kant, all of whom looked at absolute space as “a given, along with whatever it might contain,” Leibniz, explains Lefebvre, viewed space as something ‘in itself’ and as “neither ‘nothing nor ‘something’ – and even less the totality of things or the form

178 See Lefebvre 15-16. Here it is unclear exactly to what Lefebvre is referring in his discussion of Hegel’s concept of the general, which should not be understood as synonymous with Hegel’s concept of the universal. Hegel would differentiate the general from the universal. The general more pertains to attributes, whereas the universal pertains to relationships. Similarly, in Hegel, particulars refer to actual activities—activities that mediate between the universal and individuals and Lefebvre’s reference to the particular here appears fuzzy. Thirdly, Lefebvre’s reference to the singular is confusing since Hegel instead emphasizes the individual, which refers to individual human beings—but not just human beings in themselves (which would be more like members), but for themselves (subjects) [See Hegel’s “The Doctrine of the Notion Section One: Subjectivity” (the “Particular Notion”, the “Universal Notion” and the “Individual Notion”) § 1318 – § 1345 in Hegel’s Science of Logic]. In Hegel, a subject is not something that has attributes. A more thorough study of how the Hegelian triad here relates to the Lefebvrian triad of spatial practice, representations of space and representational space [perceived-conceived-lived triad] would be of great interest.

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of their sum” (169). Lefebvre basically agrees with Leibniz that space is indiscernible in his own assertion that space is infinite, but he also perceives Leibniz’s understanding of the indiscernible as connected to an understanding of space as container, and it is with this latter sense that Lefebvre does not agree.179 Of particular interest to my work here, Lefebvre argues that the body, which can both act in space and produce space itself, is the key element to a recognition of space as neither empty nor static.180

It should be helpful at this point to give brief definitions of these three crucial parts to Lefebvre’s entire theoretical mechanism, which I will then study within the context of Song Chinese representations discussed in this chapter. Lefebvre’s first part, his concept of spatial practice, refers to the daily reality of individuals and how this reality is connected to the environment in which they live. Lefebvre describes this reality more specifically as it pertains to spatial practice under neocapitalism,

It embodies a close association, within perceived space, between daily reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work, ‘private’ life and leisure).181

Lefebvre’s understanding of representations of space refers to spaces that are planned out by humans. Although these spaces often become intertwined with lived spaces, they begin as plans and as human conceptions.

(these are) conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers, as of a certain type of artist

179 Lefebvre 68, 168. 180 Ibid., 170.
181 Ibid., 38.

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with a scientific bent—all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived.182

Lefebvre understands representations of space as those spaces that tend to dominate society. His book gives many examples of these types of spaces, most of which refer to the manners in which humans map out, conceive or plan space. Some famous examples Lefebvre includes are those of urban projects such as that used by Georges-Eugène Haussmann in his modern renovation of Paris’ city space during the nineteenth-century, and the use of perspective to present space as mathematical during the Italian Renaissance.

Lefebvre’s concept of representational space is perhaps the most complex of the three categories he introduces,

(It is) space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe, this is the dominated—and hence passively experienced—space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. Thus representational spaces may be said, though again with certain exceptions, to tend towards more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs.183

Unpacking Lefebvre’s definition here, representational space is a space of change that occurs as it relates to the daily social activities (spatial practice) and governing principles which attempt to direct how those social activities will be performed in a constructed space (representations of space). Non-conceptual movements or developments in society often take place in representational space.

182 Ibid.
183 Ibid., 39.

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Lefebvre’s second theoretical category, representation of space, corresponds with a concept of space. These concepts plan out space and present a foundation or schema of how space should function. Although not isolated from social activity, representations of space often present themselves as if they are separated from such activity, acting authoritatively to assert a construction of space.184 Lefebvre insists that artworks are not isolated works,185 and he insists that representations of space play important parts in relating to social and political practice,

Representations of space are certainly abstract, but they also play a part in social and political practice: established relations between objects and people in represented space are subordinate to a logic which will sooner or later break them up because of their lack of consistency (Lefebvre 41).

Most contemporary scholars would agree with Lefebvre’s rejection of the notion that art can exist in a vacuum, untouched by the social factors that surround its creation, appreciation, influence, value, destruction, etc. Yet of interest is the manner in which influential art, understood in Lefebvre as a “representation of space” can occasionally interact with a variety of factors, including social and geographic factors, and enact a change or appropriation of space. It is in this conglomeration of objects, events, persons and natural world that Lefebvre’s “representational spaces” come alive. In Song China, humans and mountains

184 Lefebvre understands the necessity for representations of space, but he does not think that they should be authoritative, “Identifying the foundations upon which the space of each particular society is built, the underpinnings of that space’s gradual development is only the beginning of any exploration of a reality that to begin with seems transparently clear. Thus representations of space, which confuse matters precisely because they offer an already clarified picture, must be dispelled” (Ibid., 188-189).

185 Ibid., 304.

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interacted with one another to the point that they came to represent one another in art and ideology. Without observing how the spaces of body and mountain were represented, anthropomorphized and appropriated by individuals and groups during the Song, a more complete understanding of the mountain-body fusion seems difficult to obtain.

The Representational Space of Mountain-Body Fusions in Song China

As in the case of the second Lefebvrian category of space, representations of space, both Guo Xi’s treatise, Linquan gaozhi and his painting, Early Spring, acted in similar fashion to represent the emperor’s body abstractly, while also clearly binding themselves to political developments, groups of people and a variety of events that were present during the reign of Emperor Shenzong. In Lefebvrian terms, these developments could be described as the spatial practices, Lefebvre’s first category of space, which in this case comprises the reality in which artists of the Song court lived. Lefebvre’s third category of space, representational space, is the portion of Lefebvre’s theoretical model that is most significant, however, in a discussion of how proponents of different ideologies successfully appropriated the space of the mountain and the natural world during the Song.

By symbolizing the emperor’s body as mountain in both his thoughts, as expressed in his son’s writings, and in his painting, Guo Xi created an envisioning of imperial power as capable of encompassing the space of the mountain. Guo Xi

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ordered the space of the mountain hierarchically, compartmentalizing elements of nature so that they could be reread as descriptions of social status. Ideologically speaking, Guo Xi utilized painting and writing about painting to appropriate space of the natural world symbolically, such that the emperor and his imperial order were empowered. Many factors of Guo’s time, including the changing policies surrounding the Southern Suburb sacrifice, and perhaps the artist’s desire to rise in rank as a court painter, could have had to do with his completion of his artwork and his treatise for painters. Yet this does not diminish the abstract presence of an ideology related to how imperial power is manifest in the natural world, represented in Early Spring and promoted in the Linquan gaozhi. As in Lefebvre’s discussion of representational space, there is an overlaying of physical space that occurs in the work of Guo Xi, for his paintings and writings have created a new symbolic means by which the physical space of the mountain is envisioned.

During the Southern Song, Neo-Confucians further appropriated the space of the mountain, and in the rapid expansion of their academies, they too envisioned a power attached to a state-related human lineage as encompassing the natural world. Marking mountain academies as sacred based on their physical connection to humans—often important political figures—who had previously acted or made a presence on the mountain and not on their connection to an inherent sacredness in the mountain itself, Zhu Xi and his followers asserted a Neo-Confucian human power over the sacred powers that other religious groups had previously assigned to the same space. Neo-Confucians were able to actualize many physical changes

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on the same mountains previously revered only within Daoist and Buddhist communities. The physical space of the mountain was central to the developments of the Song academy movement, yet a network of other factors cannot be overlooked in an assessment of how the space of the mountain became revered within Neo-Confucian circles. The interior spaces of the academic shrines themselves, a space that replicated the physical as opposed to the ideological space of monastic architecture, can be counted as a spatial factor that ultimately determined for Neo-Confucians the significance of the mountain’s natural, physical space. The space of the Song academy movement became representational in that a group of people was able to overlay the physical world with its ideology, using architecture and design as a devices through which its network could spread into mountain space, thereby asserting the Neo-Confucian understanding that humans important to their ideology and their lineage were the deciding factors in making the space of the natural world significant.

In this chapter, I have discussed the manner in which different groups of people used ideology and art during Song China to fuse nature and the human body in representational and ideological fashion. Many social factors contributed to the way in which representations were capable of merging mountain space ideologically with that of the human body. These factors also contributed to the successful anthropomorphism of ideological space in the work of Guo Xi, and to the successful production and appropriation of mountain space in the academy movement endorsed by Song Neo-Confucians. Ultimately, spatial analysis has

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been helpful in mapping out how representations of body-mountain fusions in Song China related to contesting sites of religious, ideological or political power connected to the natural world.

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Chapter Three

Representations of Internal Alchemy in Song Daoism: Envisioning the Body as Vessel of World and Cosmos

In the last chapter, I explored how artistic rules related to the representation of humans as macrocosm of the natural world found their way into state-endorsed art of the Song period. In the painting of Guo Xi, for example, the emperor was envisioned in the form of the mountain. Here, I shall examine how during this same historical period, Daoist groups were also developing and utilizing an important type of representation—the map or chart (tu 圖) of the body—in which

they depicted the human body microcosmically and containing of an inner landscape. As opposed to representing the body of mountain as a symbol of man, these charts rather depict the body of man as regulated by an elaborate system of internal processes that resonated with the natural world. I shall also look at how the development of these Chinese alchemical representations occurred in close parallel with the rise of internal alchemy, or neidan 內丹, which was flourishing as

a discipline used to cultivate the body within Song Daoism.186 Internal alchemy revolutionized Daoist practices of cultivation, signaling an end to the golden age of external alchemy, or waidan 外丹 , through which Daoists produced alchemical

elixirs from natural world materials, ingesting them in the attempt at attaining immortality. Both the practice of internal alchemy and the representation of

186 Neidan budded in the Tang period (618-907 CE) but its practice was not widespread until the Song.

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Daoist body charts rose and flourished in the environment of Song Daoism. Yet while the two developments are woven together historically, such a correlation also indicates that just as internalization in the form of internal alchemy was becoming a focal component of Daoism, externalization in the form of alchemical representation was also rising as a tool through which this process of internalizing the religious experience could be actualized. The role that body charts have played in the religious experiences of Daoist practitioners since the Song period also points to the spatial importance that sacred microcosms have had within the traditions of Chinese Daoism. Envisioning the internal space of the human body as both a natural and a cosmic landscape became integral to visualization practices of Daoism. And material representation of that landscape functioned spatially, connecting the spheres of body, natural world, cosmos, imagery and mental world through visualization. Within the broader field of spatial analysis, an understanding of the human body as its own spatial entity, as is found in Daoism, contradicts those traditional theories of space that describe space as an all- encompassing vastness that is external to, or not enmeshed with, individual bodies. The main form of Daoism discussed in this chapter will be that of Quanzhen 全真

道 (“Complete Perfection”), a Daoist sect which flourished during the Song period and is still practiced in China today.

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Yangsheng 養生in the History of Daoism

An understanding of Daoism must take into consideration the rich variety of traditions that make up that which we call “Daoism.” Finding an “essential element” to Daoism is quite complex, but an integral part of Daoism that seems to cross traditions has to do with bio-spiritual cultivation or nurturing of the body (yangsheng養生). Although this chapter will mainly pertain to the history and

practices of Quanzhen Daoism, including Quanzhen’s interest in bio-spiritual cultivation, this important aspect of Daoism is also found throughout much of the rest of Daoist history. I will in this section look briefly at this history of yangsheng as it occurred in earlier historical sects of Daoism, including that of Zhengyi 正一 (“Orthodox Unity” or “Correct Unity”), which aside from Quanzhen

is the other main form of Daoism practiced in China today.
Looking briefly at this history, we find that a focus on bio-spiritual

cultivation was already an important issue discussed in early proto-Daoist works. The classical text of the Neiye 內業 (“Inner Cultivation” ca. 4th c. BCE), for

example, is almost exclusively devoted to transformation of the body through the techniques related to the circulation and utilization of qi.187 The preservation of qi through various breathing techniques is bound to a nurturing of the body and bio- spiritual cultivation. As discussed in the Chapter One of this dissertation, contemporary scholars such as Stephen Bokenkamp and Robert Campany

187 For a translation of the Neiye, See Harold D. Roth, Original Dao: Inward Training and the Foundations of Chinese Mysticism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

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emphasize the importance that the ingestion or circulation of qi has played in Daoist practices. In Chapter Eleven of the classic metaphysical text of the Zhuangzi, one could regard the story of how Hundun 混沌, the emperor of the

center, met with the emperors of the south and north, to be symbolic of bio- spiritual cultivation and the preservation and integrity of form. In this story, Hundun has no face and no orifices. The emperors of the north and south pierce seven holes in him in the creation of these orifices. As the story goes, Hundun dies.188 Could this story not possibly be symbolic of how the integrity of form has to do with the nurturing of this form and of its essences? In Daoist traditions, an awareness of how to prevent the leakage (lou 漏) of bodily essences and qi is

prevalent. Indeed, it appears as if part of Daoism and Daoist identity has historically related to a preservation of the body, transforming it in most cases into a sacred vessel.

Daoism was officially instituted as a state religion during the period of the Celestial Masters movement (Tianshi Dao 天師道, 2nd c. to 6th c. CE).189 An

important development that took place within this movement was a transfer of ritualistic authority from specialists known as fangshi 方士 or “masters of

methods,” who had between the late Warring States period and early imperial period of China provided knowledge of the immortals and paths to transcendence

188 When we eat a wanton 餛飩, the Cantonese cognate for hundun, we indeed might think of this story! For an English translation of Zhuangzi, see Burton Watson, Zhuangzi: Basic Writings, New

York: Columbia University Press, 2003, 96.
189 Robinet, Growth of a Religion, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997, 75.

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for practitioners seeking spiritual transcendence.190 In Tianshi, this authority went to a single priest who acted like a bureaucrat within a Daoist pantheon and mediated between adepts and spirits.191 The Tianshi movement began with the story of Zhang Daoling 張道陵, a small landowner to whom the mythico-historical

figure of Laozi 老子 allegedly appeared on a mountainside in Sichuan in 142

CE.192 Although several scholars have pointed to discrepancies related to understandings of Zhang Daoling as the founder of institutionalized Daoism, Zhang still remains a central figure in the history of Daoism.193 Yet although characteristics such as the deified Laozi, the story of Zhang Daoling, and a celestial bureaucracy of Daoist gods formed the foundational backbone of Tianshi, also integral to the movement were the religious practices in which the adepts of Tianshi partook. It is both in these practices and in the texts used by the Celestial Masters that the focus of Tianshi on bio-spiritual cultivation also emerges. Such practices include embryonic breathing (taixi 胎息), in which the adept appears to

190 Ibid.; and “fangshi” in The Encyclopedia of Daoism 406-409.
191 Ibid.
192 Ibid. 55.
193 Stephen Bokenkamp, who believes that there is no way for scholars to know exactly when Daoism as a religion began, although he does think that the religion was taking firm shape by the Latter Han, discusses these discrepancies, “Michel Strickmann, in his impressive but ultimately futile attempt to limit the term “Daoism” to the Daoist religion, defines as Daoist those who (1) “recognize the historical position of Zhang Daoling”; (2) “worship the pure emanations of the Dao rather than the vulgar gods of the people at large”; (3) “safeguard and perpetuate their own lore and practices through esoteric rites of transmission.” Although almost no one has stopped speaking of pre-Han “Daoism” in connection with the Laozi and the Zhuangzi, the first part of Strickmann’s definition has also been questioned. Isabelle Robinet has rightly pointed out that Zhang Daoling is not accorded reverence at all in the Shangqing scriptures, and Anna Seidel has discovered one Daoist group that worshipped Lord Lao as the embodiment of the Dao before the appearance of the Celestial Masters, as well as evidence of other, similar sects. Thus although our definition owes much to Strickmann’s insights, we can no longer confidently state that all Daoists recognized Zhang Daoling as founder of their religion, nor can we hold that the Daoist religion has a precise beginning in 142” (Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures 14).

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replace breath through the nose with breath through the naval and the pores of the skin, envisioning the manner in which an embryo would breathe.194 In addition to breathing techniques, all of which became a crucial part to the Tianshi approach to yangsheng, these Daoists also cultivated themselves bio-spiritually by abstaining from cereals, utilizing medicinal plants, acupuncture and moxibustion, various visualization techniques, and even practicing music as a form of bio-spiritual therapy.195 Over time, an important geographical division took place within the Tianshi tradition, separating the Southern Celestial Masters who practiced in the Southeastern region of Jiangnan, from the Northern Celestial Masters, who practiced in Sichuan.196 But both sects continued to engage in physical longevity techniques involving meditation, visualization, breathe practices and the circulation of qi.

Many of the techniques utilized by Tianshi Daoists are described in one of the most important texts to early external alchemical practices, the Taiqingjing 太

清經 (Scripture of Great Clarity), the primary scripture of external alchemy in the

Taiqing tradition.197 This tradition never comprised a formal school of Daoism but was instead a scriptural tradition that had its earliest roots in descriptions of Great Clarity occurring in texts such as the Zhuangzi and the Huainanzi 淮南子

194 Robinet, Growth of a Religion 59; and “taixi” in The Encyclopedia of Daoism 953-954.
195 Ibid. 59 and 73-74. Robinet briefly explains these aspects, including that for music therapy, “music has a therapeutic value, with each of the notes connected with a bodily organ that it could keep in good shape in line with the correspondences established by the Five Agents” (73).
196 See Peter Nickerson, “Chapter Ten: The Southern Celestial Masters” (256-282) in Daoism Handbook (vol. 1), and Livia Kohn, “Chapter Eleven: The Northern Celestial Masters” (283-308) in Daoism Handbook (vol. 1).
197 Robinet, Growth of a Religion 70-74.

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(Writings of the Prince of Huainan [DZ 1184], ca. 139 BCE), in which it represented a primordial condition of the Dao, reachable by the adept through meditation.198 During the Han period, Taiqing came to represent a specific celestial zone governed by an administration of spirits, although descriptions of qi refinement were later influential in the work of Ge Hong 葛洪 (283-343 CE).199

Ge’s own writing, and especially that of his main text, the Baopuzi 抱朴子(Book of the Master Who Embraces Simplicity) provided one of the main stepping stones

in the development of the Lingbao 靈寶 or Numinous Treasure sect. In the

Baopuzi, Ge presents descriptions of many talismanic techniques, including written spells used to protect against harmful demons, as well as methods of finding and using powerful immortality medicines.200 External alchemy involving the use of alchemical elixirs as a path towards bio-spiritual transcendence acted as key components within the developmental framework of Lingbao.

Also during the fourth century, the spirit medium Yang Xi 楊羲 (330-386 CE), who underwent a series of revelations that led to the beginning of Shangqing

上清 (Supreme Purity, or Highest Clarity) Daoism, evaluated the celestial zone of

Grand Purity. Accordingly, he divided the zone into three vertical celestial layers, one of which was devoted to the zone of Shangqing.201 Within this framework, Grand Purity became the bottom-tiered domain of the Celestial Master tradition

198 Campany 33.
199 Ibid. 34.
200 Yamada Toshiaki, “Chapter Nine: The Lingbao School” (225-255) in Daoism Handbook (vol. I), edited by Livia Kohn, Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2004, 228-229.
201 Campany 34-35.

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and included older macrobiotic and alchemical traditions.202 Later members of the Celestial Masters community ultimately re-devised the ranking of celestial zones, placing that of Grand Purity once again at the top.203

Shangqing Daoism, sometimes referred to as Maoshan 茅山 Daoism due to

the location of one of Shangqing’s frequently discussed spiritual centers on Mount Mao in Southeast China’s Nanjing, became one of the key connective movements between external alchemy and internal alchemy.204 Synthesizing some traditions of the Celestial Masters with older traditions practiced by immortality seekers and the fangshi (dating as far back as the late Zhou 周朝 1046-256 BCE and Han

periods), Shangqing practitioners relied strongly on meditation and mental images, and less on the type of communal activity present in the Tianshi tradition in their quest for self-cultivation.205 Its central text, the Dadong zhenjing 大洞真經

(Perfect Scripture of Great Profundity, ca. 360 CE), contains stanzas devoted to describing the visualization of body gods connected to the sphere of the celestial divinities.206 Other important Shangqing texts, such as the Lingshu ziwen 靈書紫

文 (Purple Texts Inscribed by the Spirits, composed of four different texts

composed, dates unknown although could be early in 365 CE) contain detailed descriptions of alchemical concoctions, as well as meditations by which the practitioner absorbed lunar and solar essences to create the embryos of

202 Ibid. 35.
203 Ibid. 35-36.
204 Robinet, “Chapter Eight: Shangqing—Highest Clarity” (196-224) in Daoism Handbook (vol. I), Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2004, 197.
205 Ibid. 196-197; 216-217.
206 Ibid. 201.

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perfection.207 The absorption of cosmic florescences and use of various alchemical drugs were all integral to the manner in which adepts of Shangqing practiced yangsheng and cultivated themselves bio-spiritually.208

Since the beginning of the fourteenth-century, when Yuan emperor, Yuan Chengzong 元成宗 (1265-1307), ordered the 38th generation Celestial Master,

Zhang Yucai 張與材 (d.1316), to lead all Daoist sects of China, the traditions of

the Southern and Northern Celestial Masters, Shangqing and Lingbao have all been referred to as Zhengyi Daoism.209 Many of the yangsheng traditions practiced within the earlier sects of Daoism are today maintained within the Zhengyi tradition. Zhengyi and Quanzhen comprise the two schools of Daoism practiced in China today. As one shall note, bio-spiritual cultivation became integral to the practices of Quanzhen, represented materially in the tu body charts.

The Rise of Alchemical Maps of the Body as Religious Expression in the Song Period

Ideas of body and cosmos found in the writings of early Chinese texts are noteworthy in understanding how representations of the body formed later within the context of Song Daoist body charts. In the second century BCE text, the Huainanzi, which as described above was particularly influential within early

207 Bokenkamp 7. Stephen Bokenkamp provides a full translation of this text (Early Daoist 307- 366); Komjathy, Daoist Texts in Translation 23. For dating of the Purple Texts, see also Bokenkamp 303n1.
208 Robinet, “Chapter Eight—Shangqing” 218, 221.

209 Wang Yi’e, Daoism in China, translated by Zeng Chuanhui and edited by Adam Chanzit, Beijing: China Intercontinental Press, 2004, 47; and Stephen Little, “Chapter Twenty-Four: Daoist Art” in Daoism Handbook vol.1 (709-746), edited by Livia Kohn, Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2004, 734.

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traditions of Daoism, such as the scriptural tradition of the Tianshi movement, descriptions detailing how the human body and its internal workings resemble those of the cosmos were already present,

The roundness of the head is an image of heaven, the square-ness of the feet is the pattern of earth. Heaven has four seasons, five phases, nine directions, and 360 days. Human beings have four limbs, five organs, nine orifices, and 360 joints. Heaven has wind, rain, cold, and heat. Human beings have the actions of giving, taking, joy, and anger. The gall bladder corresponds to the clouds, the lungs to the breath, the liver to the wind, the kidneys to the rain, and the spleen to the thunder.210

Other early texts containing similar descriptions of the body include the Chunqiu fanlu 春秋繁露 (Miscellaneous Notes on the Spring and Autumn Annals) by Dong

Zhongshu 董仲舒 (d. 104 BCE), and the Huangting jing 黃庭經 (Scripture of the

Yellow Court, ca. 288 CE).211 Rich descriptions of the body as found in these texts no doubt influenced the eventual development of Daoist internal alchemical body charts created during and after the Song period.

Contemporary French scholar, Catherine Despeux, has worked extensively over the past twenty years in researching the histories of Chinese representations of the body. Examining such representations as they occurred historically in China between the Song and Qing periods, she has recently divided them into three categories: those that represent the whole body, the inside of the body (including its organs and skeleton), and that which she calls the “symbolic body,” within

210 From Huainanzi chapter 7 in Catherine Despeux and Livia Kohn, Women in Daoism, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Three Pines Press, 2003, 179-180 and 180n2.
211 Despeux and Kohn 180n2.

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which various transformative processes are contained.212 Often created within the contexts of medicine and dissection, representations found in the first two of Despeux’ categories tend towards the anatomical in their depictions of the human body. The material in the third of these categories, however, which is devoted to body charts created within the context of Chinese Daoism, eschews realism and instead depicts the body in symbolic fashion.213 Despeux suggests that these symbolic body charts were most likely created as maps, guiding practitioners in their understandings of the human body’s internal sacred spaces,

In Daoist ceremonies and individual practices, the body figures as a sacred space, often visualized as a mountain or cave-womb complete with labyrinths, spirits and mansions. It is therefore essential that the adept should understand its true form and possess diagrams to guide him or her through it. Daoist representations of the body give information on the names of the principal spirits, key locations, processes and itineraries. The physical body gradually becomes the duplicate, or rather the Shadow, of the inner body, which constitutes the real or true (zhen 真) being as revealed in these diagrams.214

According to Despeux, the images of the body charts should be read or interpreted, just as one would read text or words.215 All of the charts and images that Despeux examines are fused with Chinese characters, thus word and image intertwine, and

212 See Catherine Despeux, “Visual Representations of the Body in Chinese Medical and Daoist Texts from the Song to the Qing (Tenth to Nineteenth Century),” translated by Penelope Barrett, in Asian Medicine 1 (9-52): 2005, 38-47.
213 “What is immediately apparent from the images presented her is that they do not set out to reproduce visible reality. They are not pictures but diagrams or emblems, in which figurative concerns are subordinate to an ordered schematic arrangement, steering us towards an interpretation—a reading.” Despeux, “Visual Representations of the Body,” 47.
214 Ibid., 42.
215 “For these coded representations, composed of conventional signifying elements, are meant to be read, in the same way that one reads a Chinese character, In fact, all the examples that we have explored include some form of lettering, and there is no clear demarcation between graphics and graphs.” Ibid., 47.

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understanding of the charts’ meanings hinges upon readings of both forms of communication.

The Baiyun guan 白雲觀 (White Cloud Abbey), one of Beijing’s most

important sites of Chinese Daoism today, holds among its collection two of the most well-known body charts in China, both of which have been studied by Despeux and other contemporary scholars. Found in the form of two nineteenth- century stone steles, both charts depict sacred alchemical maps of the human body. These steles are the Neijing tu 內經圖 (Chart of Inner Landscape) [Fig. 5],

originally erected at Baiyun guan in 1886, and the Xiuzhen tu 修真圖 (Chart for

the Cultivation of Perfection) [Fig. 6], placed at the temple in 1890.216 Created during China’s Qing period (1644-1911), both charts vividly amalgamate the human body with the forms of mountain and landscape, acting even today as important records of how representation and visualization have interacted in Daoism. In the case of the Neijing tu, the head of the body in the work is representative of Mount Kunlun, China’s mythical sacred mountain which is described in ancient writings of the Shanhaijing (山海經).217 The body is divided

into various elixir fields and characterized by resident deities. The Neijing tu, which was engraved and placed within the Baiyunguan, could have been used for purposes of instructing Quanzhen adherents as to how they might envision their

216 Louis Komjathy, “Mapping the Daoist Body:Part One – The Neijing tu in History” in the Journal of Daoist Studies 1 (2008), 67-92, 76.
217 Vincent Goossaert, The Taoists of Peking, 1800-1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics (Harvard East Asian Monographs), Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007.

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Fig. 5 Neijing tu 內經圖 Chart of Inner Landscape Erected at Baiyunguan 白雲觀 in 1886

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Fig. 6 Xiuzhen tu 修真圖 Chart for the Cultivation of Perfection Erected at Baiyunguan in 1890

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own internal landscapes. In his recent research on the Neijing tu, Louis Komjathy describes the historical relationship that the chart has likely had with Daoist practice,

Within its topographical landscape, one finds a specific vision of the Daoist body, a body actualized through Daoist alchemical praxis. As such, the Neijing tu and its various rubbings were more than likely intended as visual aids for Daoist religions training.218

Like Despeux, Komjathy concludes that body charts have most likely served as visual guidance for the Daoist practitioner. In a similar vein, Dr. Sung-Hae Kim of Sogang University in Seoul, has discussed this connection between visualization and representation in the context of Quanzhen, although her focus is on prayer and ritual. In her 2003 conference paper, Studies on Daoist Morning and Evening Services of the Quanzhen Order玄門日誦早晩功課經 , Kim gives one example of

the interaction between visualization and representation in the case of Quanzhen as it is found at Baiyun guan.219 At this and other monasteries around China, claims Kim, ritual and prayer manuals are juxtaposed with images of immortals and other mythical figures from China’s ancient past. Kim states that these small
illustrations may refer to mythological figures which refer to classic stories found within the annals of China’s literary history, and which are understood as conduits through which one may attain immortality. With a similar voice to those of Despeux and Komjathy, Kim has argued that images do not simply act to represent, and when juxtaposed with prayer, the images that she has studied are not merely

218 Komjathy, “Mapping the Daoist Body: Part One,” 67-68.
219 Paper presented at the International Daoist Conference, Boston University.

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representing the mythical stories that they depict. Instead, the representations interact with the Quanzhen Daoist practitioner’s own use of prayers, triggering a visualization of the process by which he or she will attain his or her own immortality.

In the case of the Daoist body chart, these representations have helped practitioners as they envision the body’s inner landscape, alchemically cultivating the self towards perfection. In his examinations of the Neijing tu, Komjathy points to connections between this Qing body chart and earlier lineages of internal alchemy and late imperial internal alchemy found during the period between the tenth and thirteenth centuries.220 He does not, however, delve into the lineage of the textual imagery, nor does he discuss why it is that such imagery might have arisen during the Song period.221 Despeux has extensively researched Qing charts, devoting an entire work to the Xiuzhen tu, for example.222 However, she also provides some discussion of similar charts from the Song period, and furthermore notes that representations of the body similar to those extant from the Song could have existed at one time even if evidence of their presence no longer exists today. She contends that the need for such charts probably existed as early as the Han period (206 BCE – 220 CE), even if no physical evidence remains to confirm this assumption.223 Susan Huang has also recently emphasized the fact that although

220 Komjathy, “Mapping the Daoist Body”, 71 6n.
221 Ibid.
222 Catherine Despeux, Taoïsme et corps humain: Le Xiuzhen tu, Paris: Guy Trédaniel, 1994.
223 “As I emphasized at the outset of this paper, although there are few extant images of the body predating the Song period, this does not mean that others never existed, but simply that they have

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early Daoist ritual spaces did not typically include representations, images related to both body and cosmos were from early on connected to Daoist meditation through internal visualizations of them.224 Interestingly, however, although her research has covered charts and representations of the body that span different timeframes of Chinese history, Despeux still maintains that the Song period appears to have marked a special moment along the historical timeline in which Daoist representations of the body began to flourish in China,

Nonetheless, the Song period clearly marks a turning point in the graphic representation of the body as in graphic representation (tu) in general. From this time onward, visual imagery comes to play a more significant role, not only as a record of knowledge, but also as a teaching aid, a mode of transmission, a mnemonic device, a visual translation of a text and a representation of a certain reality.225

Despeux is contending that visual imagery became more intimately connected to Daoist religious practice, experience and community from the Song onward. In the case of the Neijing tu and the Xiuzhen tu, both of these diagrams were created within the context of Quanzhen Daoism of the Qing period. It is relevant to note that during the same timeframe in which body charts were developing during the Song period, Quanzhen Daoism was also in its formative phase. A look into the relationship that these specific types of charts could have had with Quanzhen, or

not survived into the present. People had begun to feel the need for such images by the Han period at least” Despeux, “Visual Representations of the Body,” 47.
224 Shih-Shan Susan Huang, “Daoist Imagery of Body and Cosmos, Part 1: Body Gods and Starry Travel” in the Journal of Daoist Studies 3 (2010), 57-90. “Often referred to as cunsi 存思, this practice means ‘keeping (something in mind) and contemplating (it),’ in other words actualizing or visualizing an internal object. Daoism thus made use of images in ‘the intermediary world’ of visual meditation to ‘transform psychic contents,’ thereby to establish a perception of a new spiritual body” 59.

225 Despeux, “Visual Representations of the Body,” 47. 126

certain characteristics that were integral to Quanzhen and other forms of Daoism during this time, is therefore relevant.

Quanzhen is an alchemical tradition that focuses on cultivation, refinement, and transformation of the self. Only when the Daoist adept has completed these processes has he or she become perfected. In his work, Cultivating Perfection: Mysticism and Self-transformation in Early Quanzhen Daoism (2007), Louis Komjathy examines the formation of this process towards the perfected self in Quanzhen, carefully tracing the early developments of the movement, which began in China during the twelfth-century, took root and flourished.226 Komjathy’s approach to Quanzhen is in accord with Jonathan Z. Smith’s method of viewing

226 In Cultivating Perfection, Komjathy helpfully divides the history of the Quanzhen movement into six distinct phases, of which he is primarily interested in the first two: 1) Formative: Wang
Zhe 王嚞 (Chongyang 重陽) lives an ascetic life, apparently experiences the mystical, moves to Shandong in 1167 and creates his meditation hut, the Quanzhen an 全真庵 (Hermitage of
Complete Perfection), and begins to engage in ascetic and alchemical training with early Quanzhen adepts (33, 36-45). 2) Incipient Organized: Between 1167 and 1169, Wang acquires seven
principal disciples in Shandong and the group begins to establish meeting places and commence missionary activities in Shandong. The disciples are: Ma Yu 馬鈺 (1123-1184); Tan Chuduan 譚處端 (1123-1185); Qiu Chuji 丘處機(1148-1227); Liu Chuxuan 劉處玄 (1147-1203); Wang Chuyi 王處一 (1142-1217); Hao Datong 郝大通 (1140-1213); Sun Buer 孫不二 (1119-1183). (33, 48-52). 3) Organized: After Wang Zhe’s death in 1170, leadership passes to Ma Danyang, Wang’s senior disciple. The other six first-generation disciples attract many followers, establishing communities and associations beyond Shandong and throughout northern China, “from Shaanxi in the west to Shandong in the east, and as far north as Hebei” (53). The organized phase of Quanzhen has made its mark by the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries (53), yet ascetic communities are still semi-autonomous and a form of proto-monasticism is in place (34). 4) Expansive: By the middle to later part of the thirteenth century, the Quanzhen order had spread, growing to over four thousand sacred sites, with around 20,000 clergy, a feat which according to Komjathy and Vincent Goossaert, was unprecedented in the history of Daoism (60). At this point, the religion has transformed into

an institutionalized form of monasticism (34). 5) Resurgent: the power of the Quanzhen movement was replaced by that of Zhengyi 正一 (Orthodox Unity) Daoism in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). But Quanzhen resurges during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) under the leadership of Wang Changyue 王常月(1622-1680), who establishes the Longmen 龍門 (Dragon Gate) branch of Quanzhen (35). 6) Modern: Quanzhen manages to weather the Ten Years of Chaos (1966-1976) of the Cultural Revolution, Longmen resurfacing as an official form of Daoism, recognized by the Chinese Communist government (35).

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religions as polythetic and not monothetic.227 Turning briefly to one of Smith’s principal arguments as found in his Imagining Religion (1982), one understands Smith’s point to be that scholars of religion often make the taxonomic mistake of dividing religions up by forcing religions into categories. Smith contends that classification of religion often follows a monothetic structure, but that the system of divisions used in such classification—divisions that follow a binary design—are generally rendered useless in the context of religions, which are often characterized by their internal multifariousness as opposed to some concrete essentialities.228 Smith believes that any one religion can take on many different forms, characterized in many different manners.229 Likewise, Komjathy believes that many different models of Daoism have existed over time, some of which coexist and some that do not.230

Looking specifically at Quanzhen Daoism, Komjathy’s book also contains a complete annotated translation to the Chongyang zhenren jinguan yusuo jue 重陽

真人金關玉鎖訣 (Perfected Chongyang’s Instructions on the Gold Pass and Jade Lock; Daozang 1156), attributed to Wang Zhe 王嚞 (Chongyang 重陽[Redoubled

227 Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion – From Babylon to Jonestown, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982, 4.
228 Smith, Imagining Religion, 6-7.
229 Although material which could be described as “religious” has existed across time, states Smith, “religion” as a category was a creation of the scholar’s study (xi) and should therefore be evaluated as to whether it is a legitimate category of study. Smith finds many problems with the creation of this category, especially in terms of how scholars decide upon taxonomic categorization in describing the religions of their studies.

230 Komjathy, Cultivating Perfection, 19-20.
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Yang]; 1113-1170), under whose leadership Quanzhen began.231 The bulk of Komjathy’s work otherwise describes in detail how Wang Chongyang and his early Quanzhen adepts formulated the fundamental training regimens that later Quanzhen followers would utilize. Key to the discussion here, however, is Komjathy’s examination of how the early Quanzhen community utilized classical Chinese medicine, which treated the body as microcosm to the macrocosm of the universe and world. In doing so, the community developed specific Daoist psychosomatic training.232 Following this training, the Quanzhen adept sought to transform alchemically the vital substances of the body, and in doing so, he or she adopted much of the same terminology used in external alchemy when utilizing internal alchemy for purposes of self-cultivation.233 The eleventh-century work of Zhang Boduan 張伯端 (984-1082), including his Wuzhen Pian 悟真篇

(Awakening to Reality), crucially influenced the adoption of external alchemical terminology and ideas in the construction of internal alchemical principles found within the context of Daoism, including Quanzhen Daoism.234 The Wuzhen Pian

231 Komjathy immediately sets out to counter scholarly assertions that the meaning of the term, “Quanzhen” refers to a “Completion of Authenticity,” as Pierre Marsone and other scholars have claimed (Ibid., 10). Such a translation, argues Komjathy, implies that one has “original authenticity,” but if one had such authenticity, then why would rigorous training, including ascetic, alchemical and mystical experiences—all core aspects of early Quanzhen—be deemed necessary? Although the reader could understand Komjathy’s main point here as one related primarily to translation, the author is more importantly making an ontological point about Quanzhen. Until perfection has been attained, primarily via alchemical transformation, Quanzhen is more a process of becoming than it is a state of being.

232 Ibid., 114-120.
233 Ibid., 123, 142.
234 Fabrizio Pregadio, Awakening to Reality: The “Regulated Verses” of the Wuzhen pian, a Taoist Classic of Internal Alchemy, Golden Elixir Press (www.goldenelixir.com), 2009, 2; Komjathy, Cultivating Perfection, 173. Other influential work that Zhang wrote included his Wuzhen pian shiyi 悟真篇拾遺 (Supplement to Awakening to Reality), the Yuqing jinsi Qinghua biwen jinbao

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is also in fact the primary text at the heart of Nanzong 南宗, the Southern Lineage

of internal alchemy which differs from Quanzhen Daoism, and Zhang is considered a central figure of that lineage.235 However, Zhang’s work, which predated the formative phases of Beizong 北宗, the Northern Lineage of internal

alchemy of which Quanzhen is a part, was principal in the formation of this lineage’s textual tradition. Although Zhang’s writings are sometimes looked upon as related to external alchemy of the laboratory, they are in fact integral to the physiological practices that developed within internal alchemy.236 Noteworthy also is that fact that within the tradition of internal alchemy, Liu Haichan 劉海蟾

(active 1031) allegedly taught Zhang Boduan, and Liu himself was a student of Lü Dongbin呂洞賓 (b.798), one of the most important figures in the history of

Daoism’s internal alchemical tradition.237
Although perhaps the most famous Daoist alchemical body charts to this

day—those of the Neijing tu and the Xiuzhen tu—were created within the context of Quanzhen Daoism, there are also important examples of these types of representations found in other forms of Daoism. And in fact, current research on the Neijing tu has concluded that visualization practices in Quanzhen find

neilian danjue 玉清金笥青華秘文金寶內鍊丹訣 (Alchemical Instructions on the Inner Refinement of the Golden Treasure, a Secret Text from the Golden Casket of the Jade Clarity Transmitted by the Immortal of Green Florescence), and the Jindan sibaizi 金丹四百字 (Four Hundred Characters on the Gold Elixir).

235 Ibid., 2.
236 Judith Boltz, “Daoist Literature Part II: Five Dynasties to the Ming” in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, Ed. William H. Nienhauser, Jr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, 166.
237 Paul Crowe, 2000, “Chapters on Awakening to the Real: A Song Dynasty Classic of Inner Alchemy Attributed to Zhang Boduan” in B.C. Asian Review 12:1-40, 2000, 6.

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historical precedents in Shangqing 上清 (Supreme Clarity) Daoism.238 An

important Daoist body chart, for example, was formed within the context of Shangqing of the Song period. This fact is important because it demonstrates that it was not so much the development of a new school of Daoism, namely Quanzhen, that influenced the use of these body charts. Rather, a more general aspect of Daoism—that of internal alchemy—appears to have been more influential.
Looking briefly at the history of that chart, one notes the integral way in which body and landscape became alchemically melded in yet a different Daoist alchemical context, emerging from the Song period.

A Meeting of Song Representation and Visualization: Map of Rise and Fall of Yin and Yang in the Human Body Tixiang yinyang shengjiang tu 體象陰陽升降圖

In 1226 CE, Xiao Yingsou 蕭應叟, a ritual master of China’s Southern

Song period (1127-1279 CE) presented Emperor Lizong 蕭應叟 (1205-1264) with

an important Lingbao 靈寶 (Numinous Treasure) scripture advocating Daoist

methods of the inner cultivation of the body.239 This document, containing Xiao’s own commentary, is conserved in the Ming dynasty Daozang 道藏. Known as the

Yuanshi wuliang duren shangpin miaojing neiyi 元始無量度人上品妙經內義

238 Louis Komjathy, “Mapping the Daoist Body, Part Two: The Text of the Neijing tu” in the Journal of Daoist Studies 2 (2009), 64-108.
239 DZ 90; Despeux, Taoïsme et corps humain, 40.52n; Judith Boltz, A Survey of Taoist Literature – Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries, Berkeley: University of California, 1987, 206; Fabrizio Pregadio, ed., The Encyclopedia of Taoism, vol. II, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, s.v. “Xiao Yingsou.”

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(Inner Cultivation of the Wondrous Scripture of the Upper Chapters on Limitless Salvation), the document advocates the practice of neidan 內丹 (inner alchemy), a

theoretical and practical system of Daoism that became widespread during the Song period.240 Catherine Despeux originally translated into French text from the Duren jing neiyi in her 1994 work, Taoïsme et corps humain: Le Xiuzhen tu. In Chapter Eight of their 2003 book, Women in Daoism, Despeux and Kohn also translate the text into English,

The body contains heaven and earth, the furnace and the stove. Its central place is the alchemical cauldron, while it is the great void. Its Qian [heaven trigram] Palace is the sea of marrow; its Kun [earth trigram] Palace is the chamber of essence; its Divine Chamber is the alchemical cauldron. These are called the Three Palaces.

Qian and Kun are the warp and woof of heaven and earth with yin and yang circulating through their midst. Heaven and earth are the great forge, yin and yang are the pivots of transformation, and the unified qi is the great medicine. To refine the elixir, use your inner male and female, yang and yin qi and circulate them all around the inner stars until they form the alchemical vessel. The Metal Mother resides right there and through wondrous transformations stimulates the qi of life.

As yin and yang move in response with each other, we speak of refinement. As the yang essence expands daily and perfect spirit transforms, we speak of the holy womb. As yin gradually dissolves and yang comes to reside in utmost purity, we speak of the immortal embryo. This is the Great One embracing perfection, in harmony with emptiness and nonbeing, fully returning to the nonultimate state. (pref., 8b-9a).241

The words used in this text act to envision the body as microcosmic container of heaven and earth, a container that performs the alchemical powers capable of

240 According to John Lagerwey, this text is the Esoteric Interpretation of the Book of Salvation (see: Kristofer Schipper and Franciscus Verellen , The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang vol. 2 – The Modern Period, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004, 716).

241 Despeux and Kohn 186-187. For the French, see also Despeux, Taoïsme et corps humain, 40. 132

processing and transforming qi. Embedded within the document of the Duren jing neiyi, however, lies another object of particular interest here. This is a small and unique illustration of a mountain.242 The work is different in part because it is an image and not text. Yet the illustration stands out not only for this reason but also because its primary purpose is not to render mountain as a simple landform of the natural world. To this day, the image is the oldest extant alchemical representation of the body in the form of a mountain.243 As suggested in its title, Map of Rise and Fall of Yin and Yang in the Human Body Tixiang yinyang shengjiang tu 體象陰陽

升降圖 [Fig. 7], the picture of the mountain acts as a representational system that

corresponds to the physiological workings of the human body. The illustrated forms of the mountain depicted in the Tixiang tu serve as didactic tools, offering the viewer a representation through which these principles might better be visualized. Contained within the illustrated forms of the mountain, including its rocks, ledges, waters, edifices and skies, small Chinese characters join images to become part of the landscape, providing visualization of the human body through the form of the mountain. The meanings of the characters act doubly; first as signifiers of the various alchemical principles described within the scripture itself, then and perhaps more importantly, as didactic tools, which show how the vital essences of the body circulate within—corresponding in fashion to how the waters and air circulate around a mountain. Towards the central lower portion of the

242 DZ 90, 8.
243 Catherine Despeux, Immortelles de la Chine Ancienne: Taoïsme et alchimie féminine, Puseaux: Pardès,1990, 195.

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Fig. 7 Map of Rise and Fall of Yin and Yang in the Human Body tixiang yinyang shengjiang tu 體象陰陽升降圖 (ca. 1226) presented to Emperor Lizong by Xiao Yingsou Ming Zhengtong Daozang 90

picture, for example, the characters, 命門 mingmen, “Gate of the Vital Force,” rest above a stream that flows from an opening in the mountain. In Chinese medical

literature, as well as within the context of neidan, the term mingmen refers also to 134

key points of the human body, including the naval, the spleen, the space between the kidneys or as a denotation for the right kidney.244 As found in such classical Daoist texts as the Baopuzi 抱朴子 (The Master Who Embraces Simplicity),

written by the southern official, Ge Hong 葛洪 (284–364 CE), during the fourth-

century CE, the right kidney is directly associated with the Great Yin, or the original physical source of embryonic breathing and of life itself.245 The streams illustrated in the picture therefore act not only to represent an abstract gate within the body, but also to serve the practitioner, aiding him or her in the visualization of a central and specific point of alchemical flow within the body.

As in the cases of the Neijing tu and the Xiuzhen tu, the Tixiang tu represents a vision of the Daoist body made physical, in this case in the form of a mountain. The fact that the Tixiang tu exists provides evidence that charts in which body and landscape merged were already present in Daoism of the Song, for this relationship is apparent in the small and less detailed chart given to Emperor Lizong. Furthermore, this particular chart was not attached to Quanzhen Daoism, but instead to the Shangqing school of Daoism, which had absorbed practices of Lingbao after the Tang period. Thus several schools of Daoism are connected to the use of these types of body chart. The common element in the use of the charts therefore appears not to have been the form of Daoism from which they originated.

244 Isabelle Robinet, Taoist Mediation: The Mao-Shan Tradition of Great Purity, Translated by Julian F. Pas and Norman J. Girardot, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, 79-80; The Encyclopedia of Taoism, vol. II, s.v. “mingmen.”
245 Isabelle Robinet, Taoism: Growth of a Religion, Translated by Phyllis Brooks, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997, 108.

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During the same time frame that they developed, another phenomenon in Daoism was on the rise, and this phenomenon became increasingly important to the experiences and practices of Daoism’s future. The phenomenon—internal alchemy—was a growing practice embraced by practitioners of both Quanzhen and Shangqing Daoism. Just as an ideological shift took place when practices related to internal alchemy replaced those of external alchemy during Song China, a material shift appears also to have taken place in the way that practitioners utilized body charts—pieces of the material world—in relation to their religious experiences.

Alchemical Representation and the Externalization of Internal Alchemy

Neidan 內丹, or internal alchemy, was a revolutionary development that

budded in the Tang Period, but matured and flourished in Daoism from the twelfth century CE and onward, at which point adepts had codified different esoteric documents from which internal alchemical practices had been culled.246 Alchemical representations of mountains as microcosmically present within the human body appear to have developed around the same time and within the same context of internal alchemy. Looking briefly at the history of how internal alchemy branched away from external alchemy, a shift that bloomed during the Song, one notes the way that the Daoist focus on utilizing elements of the natural world in a process of self-cultivation changed drastically. As practitioners

246 Fabrizio Pregadio and Lowell Skar “Inner Alchemy (Neidan)” (464-497) in Daoism Handbook, edited by Livia Kohn. Leiden, Boston, Koln: Brill, 2000, 464.

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removed physical objects of the material world from the processes of their religious experiences, however, they still utilized them symbolically, envisioning them as cultivated internally, from within the vessel of the human body.

Alchemy, a science involving the transformation of metals into gold in an attempt to discover an elixir of life, has been practiced in various cultures around the world throughout history, and it was practiced widely among Daoists in China during its Early Medieval period.247 Alchemy in Daoism, however, focused not only on the transformation of metals, but on the physical, mechanical and biochemical structure of the human body. It is therefore often referred to as physiological alchemy. A strong interest in longevity, health and immortality occurred in the roots of Daoist thought, which emerged in early Daoist writings of China’s Classical Period (700-220 BCE). However, it was the fangshi of the Qin (221-206 BCE) and early, or Western Han (206 BCE-8 CE) dynasties, who first experimented with laboratory alchemy.248 This group, which as discussed earlier above was also highly influential in the transformation of Daoism into an organized religion during the later Han, practiced various alchemical techniques in its pursuit of immortality.249 In the fourth century CE, members of Shangqing

247 The timeframe in China between the end of the Eastern, or later Han dynasty (25-220 CE) and the Tang dynasty (618-906 CE).
248 Robert Ford Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents, Daoist Classics 2, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 31. Livia Kohn translates fangshi as “recipe masters” in her recent work, Chinese Healing Exercises: The Tradition of Daoyin, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008, 33.

249 As found in Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 (145-90 BCE) Records of the Historian (Shiji 史記), the earliest clear instances of alchemical practice date to the figure of Li Shaojun 李少君 (ca. 133 BCE), a fangshi who was connected to the court of Han Wudi 漢武帝 156-87 BCE) [Campany 31-

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branch of Daoism embraced the alchemical tradition.250 At this time, Daoists began to understand alchemy not only as a means to physical longevity, but also as one through which spiritual refinement and transcendence could be accessed.251

A central figure in the history of alchemy’s relationship to Daoism was Ge Hong. In addition to its talismanic descriptions, Ge’s important work, the Baopuzi, detailed methods of preparing and ingesting elixirs.252 Ge emphasized alchemy as a manner through which the bodies of humans could transform into those of immortals.253 Isabelle Robinet describes the manner in which interiorization, or an interest beyond alchemy as a laboratory procedure, began after the time of Ge Hong, towards the end of the fourth-century with the advent of the Shangqing movement of Daoism.254 These Daoists clearly utilized a combination of laboratory alchemy, astral practices and internal alchemy in their quest for immortality.255 Alchemical recipes recorded earlier by Ge Hong, however, were influential in the unique combination of practices that ultimately appeared in Shangqing.

Later, during the Tang period (618-906 CE), alchemy in China broke off more firmly into two different forms: waidan 外丹, or external alchemy, and

32]. Isabelle Robinet, Taoism – Growth of a Religion, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, 43.
250 Russell Kirkland, Taoism – The Enduring Tradition, New York and London: Routledge, 2004, 86.

251 Ibid., 87.
252 Campany 2002; and Livia Kohn, Daoism and Chinese Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Three Pines Press, 2001, 84-85.
253 Kohn Daoism and Chinese Culture 85. Campany translates xian not as “immortal” but as “transcendent.”
254 Robinet, Growth of a Religion 147-148.
255 Ibid., 147-148.

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neidan, the internal form of alchemy. Both types of alchemy, seen at least since the Shangqing movement as existing in some sense as one method through which immortality could be obtained, were in the Tang period understood as separate methods through which practitioners could cultivate their bodies. As states Robinet, it was at this time that the first clear textual passages suggesting features of internal alchemy appear in the work of the Daoist poet, Wu Yun 吳筠 (d.

778).256 External alchemy, which flourished throughout the Tang, is typically seen as having preceded internal alchemy, which became highly developed later on, during the Song.257

External alchemy focused on the examination of elements external and foreign to the human body, and the finding of ways through which these elements could be used for purposes of longevity, immortality and self-cultivation. In this form of alchemy, the alchemist typically ingested pills or elixirs that had been transformed from various mineral and herb ingredients. Alchemists prepared these ingredients according to recipes that referred to the cosmological principles of yang (creation) and yin (dissolution and return), viewed as the two primal forces of the universe in Daoism. Daoists understood combinations of yang 陽 and yin 陰

as regulated by the five elements of the world: wood, fire, earth, metal and water.258 Fire, the physical manifestation of yang, and water, the physical manifestation of yin, both played crucial parts in the work of the alchemist, who

256 Ibid., 221.
257 Fabrizio Pregadio, The Encyclopedia of Taoism, vol. II, s.v. “Waidan”, 1003. 258 Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. v, part iv, 251.

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heated and cooled the various ingredients used in the alchemical creation of pills and elixirs. During China’s Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589 CE), Tao Hongjing 陶弘景, (456-536 CE) a great thinker and leader of Shangqing Daoism,

was the principle figure to have compiled and authenticated the Shangqing texts that included rules and practices related to alchemy.259 His work contained detailed descriptions of various pills and drugs used in alchemy.260

Unlike proponents of external alchemy, those of internal alchemy professed the existence of all ingredients necessary in the obtainment of immortality as present within the human body. A theoretical and practical system of Daoism, internal alchemy did not focus on the utilization of substances external to the human body in its search for an elixir of life. Through dietary and meditative exercises, practitioners of this type of alchemy instead focused their attention on the cultivation of the yin and yang energies believed to dwell within the human body. Documents advocating the internal system of alchemy began spreading within Daoist communities of the Song period. As discussed above, the work of Song thinker, Zhang Boduan, was quite influential in this process. Highly formative in the manner through which alchemical principles became visualized as internal processes was the way that Zhang paralleled his description of these internal processes with the descriptions he found within treatises on external

259 Fabrizio Pregadio, “Tao Hongjing” in http://www.goldenelixir.com/taoism/tao_hongjing.html. 260 Ibid.

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alchemy. Thus Zhang’s adoption of external alchemical terminology and ideas was integral to the construction of internal alchemical principles.261

Within this transformation from waidan to neidan, Daoist practitioners of internal alchemy also advocated a cultivation of mind and body, incorporating elements of both Confucianism and Buddhism into Daoist practices. Daoists began to utilize, for example, forms of Buddhist meditation within their own practices. Examining various visualization practices of Quanzhen Daoism, however, Louis Komjathy has approached key differences or shifts in practice that he has observed between Buddhist meditation and Daoist meditation of the time. In particular, he examines the visual aspect that is crucial to the Daoist practice of inner observation (neiguan 內觀).262 Practitioners of Buddhist insight meditation,

states Komjathy, focus on internal stillness and quieting.263 This is part of Daoist insight meditation as well. In its Daoist context, however, this meditation also involves an acute concentration on the internal landscape, a virtual microcosm of the external cosmos that is manifest in the Daoist body. Although the adept must not become attached to the images produced by the meditative process, stresses Komjathy, he or she must still experience these visions, understanding them to be the internal landscape of the body.264 Important to note is that many of these

261 Judith Boltz, “Taoist Literature: Part II. Five Dynasties to the Ming” in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, Ed. William H. Nienhauser, Jr. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, 166-167; Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol.5 part 4, Cambridge; New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1980, 319; Komjathy, Cultivating Perfection, 173.

262 Komjathy, Cultivating Perfection 188-189. 263 Ibid. 188.
264 Ibid., 191.

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visions are described as colorful, lavish and extraordinary, and while they are not to be taken as “real,” they are to be utilized and understood as a stage of alchemical refinement which leads to spirit immortality and mundane transcendence.265 Visualization of the internal alchemical processes, explained in detail by Komjathy, is a critical part of transforming the Daoist self and body.

Although many Song Daoists moved away from external alchemy, internalizing the alchemical process, they also embraced physical representations of the internal process as found in body charts. Utilizing the terminology of external alchemy, Song Daoists, including those of Quanzhen Daoism—a form of Daoism especially characterized by its meditative elements and focus on internal alchemy—embraced body charts as a tool, ultimately developing elaborate imagery. As found in Qing charts such as the Neijing tu and Xiuzhen tu, these representations depicted landscapes as microcosmically contained within the human body. Expressing mental visualizations in the form of physical representations, such charts thus acted in part to make the internal an external

265 Ibid., 190-191: As expressed in the tenth-century Chuandao ji 傳導集 (Anthology of the Transmission of the Dao), Zhongli Quan 鍾離權, an influential human-immortal figure in Quanzhen Daoism, states in dialogue with Lü Dongbin 呂洞賓, “Storied terraces, blue-green pearls,

female pleasures, reed pipes, precious delicacies, extraordinary luxuries, wondrous herbs, strange flowers, lumninous beings, flowing radiances—each arouses the eyes like a painting does. Humans who have not awakened will take these to be a real, a sign that they have reached the Celestial Palace. They do not know that it is only the Inner Courtyard of one’s own body” (from Chuandao ji 傳導集, chapter entitled “Neiguan” 內觀, in Komjathy 190). Komjathy further explains this concept, “Through inner observation, here associated with the cultivation of clarity and stillness, the adept eventually becomes quiet enough to see the Daoist subtle body, a body of energetic waterways and internal landscapes. However, one must realize that for what they are: indications of successful completion of a certain stage of alchemical refinement and nothing more. If one becomes overly attached to them, or if one mistakenly identifies them as the culmination of alchemical practice, one will regress. That is, the internal landscape revealed through the practice of inner observation is still preliminary and provisional. The ultimate goal is spirit immortality, the actualization of a divine being capable of transcending the mundane world” Ibid., 191.

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phenomenon once again. And the development of Chinese alchemical representations that depicted the human body in the form of mountains or natural landscapes appears to have correlated with the rise of internal alchemy in Daoism. As internalization became intimately bound with Daoism, externalization in the form of mountain-body representations rose as a way through which the process of internalization could be expressed and utilized.

Daoist Bodies and Material Representation within a General Theory of Space

In various contexts of Daoism, Daoist practitioners have treated the human body as a sacred microcosm, within which external elements—both earthly and celestial—are contained. Spatially speaking, the transformation of the Daoist body through the use of internal alchemy has entailed a synthesis of the world’s noumena and phenomena, a synthesis that becomes actualized when the human body is visualized as a sacred microcosm. For the Daoist practitioner who understands body as keeper of both the world and the celestial, a clear division between the spheres of physical and mental becomes irrelevant. Looking closer at how a theory of space might treat the human body as microcosm in Daoism, one observes that traditional space-place bifurcations are irrelevant in the case of body spaces. Since the late twentieth-century, some scholars have begun to investigate the manner in which the human body more specifically influences the way that we perceive of space and place. In studying a variety of human interactions with space, these scholars have incorporated a treatment of the human body into a

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general theory of space. In the case of the Daoist body, microcosmic space as found in representations and visualizations of the body similarly encourages further investigation into how the human body interacts with space.

In his work, The World in Miniature: Container Gardens and Dwellings in Far Eastern Religious Thought (1990), Rolf Stein looks at an array of cultural materials indicative of the relationship between microcosms and macrocosms in Asia.266 In particular, he explores how container gardens and miniaturized objects have over time not only served decorative purposes in Asia, but have provided a sacred microcosmic space of religious import. Stein makes the fundamental argument that the construction of these objects is primarily related neither to the aesthetic nor to the philosophical, even though the gardens were regarded mostly for their aesthetic appeal by the time of the seventeenth-century.267 Rather, the gardens are part of a material culture that is intimately bound to religion and ancient folklore.268 Backing his research with extensive field data, Stein closely examines the relationships that exist between the micro and the macro in the context of Asian thought, religion and materiality (including the material of the body). In the case of his own study, this theme includes the microcosm: an understanding of the unending resources found in smallness, as exemplified in the

266 Rolf Stein, The World in Miniature: Container Gardens and Dwellings in Far Eastern Religious Thought, Trans. Phyllis Brooks, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
267 Much of Stein’s work in this book is influenced by the work of Marcel Granet (1884-1940). Some of what Stein is doing—compiling descriptive examples of what certain objects mean to peoples of certain regions, and how these regional works are shared cross-regionally—present themselves as sociological in nature. One also notes a bit of Durkheimian bifurcation in Stein’s division of the sacred from the profane. This emerges in his discussion of sacred trees, which are described in the Vietnamese context as trees that are twisted, full of knots and therefore useless. Useful trees, claims Stein, are profane trees (Stein, 104).

268 Ibid., 112.

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small gourd as an inexhaustible source of drink, or of the Kunlun 崑崙, seen as the

Chinese center or axis of the world, miniaturized in works of architecture and in representations of the human body; and the macrocosm of the cave as representative of the womb, its stalactites acting as milk-producing teats.269 In small-scale projects, such as the boshanlu博山爐, which date back to the Han

period, or of the presentation in painting of Sumeru as a human body, and in large- scale projects such as those of Qin Shihuang 秦始皇, an intrigue in how

microcosms and macrocosms relate to human experience in East Asia becomes evident.270 Stein’s research effectively presents the relationship between objects and ideas as one that is dialectical in nature. This dialectical relationship is clear, for example, in the case of Stein’s discussion of the evolution of dwellings in prehistoric China, in which case early Chinese homes began as underground dwellings accessible via holes, and people then deemed caves and cave-like structures (as well as other enclosed structures with elevated openings) as sacred in later Chinese thought. Objects are capable of informing how ideas and spaces arise just as easily as ideas and spaces are capable of informing how objects will be made.271 Stein also examines a human fascination with myth, which in China is often intertwined with stories of immortality. Furthermore, Stein’s thorough study of material objects advises the reader that myth and images of the material world

269 Ibid., 69, 93-96, 225, 248. 270 Ibid., 42, 237-238, 248. 271 Ibid., 122-162.

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are interwoven.272 Much of Stein’s book is devoted to the spaces connected to cavity-like structures in the human body, natural world and man-made world. The female principle of yin dominates all of these structures.273 Stein is interested in retreat from the world and its relationship to immortality, and this retreat is often found in the form of the cave or in the representation of that form (e.g. the gourd). Turning to the case of Daoist body charts, one observes that macrocosms are in this context visualized as present microcosmically within the human body. Although Stein’s research does not consider these body charts, he finds the macrocosmic manifestation of the body as present in images at Dunhuang. One such image discussed by Stein is a representation of Sumeru, the central sacred mountain of Buddhism [Fig. 8]. Found in a manuscript, the picture of Sumeru is characterized by layers of mountains, seas, temples. Gods reside within the different layers. The entire depiction, however, also looks like a spinal chord. Thus the representation acts as macrocosm of the human body, of which miniature deities are a part. Whereas terrestrial and celestial are represented microcosmically within the human body in Daoist body charts such as the Neijing tu, depicting mountain, landscape and cosmos as internal to the human body, they become macrocosmically melded in the space of the Dunhuang image. In both such representations, however, the depicted bodies are presented as coalescing with the natural world, fostering a visualization and understanding of sacred space

272 This is seen in the story of Zhangfang who would watch each day as an old man became small and jumped into a hanging hu vessel. The man was an immortal (Ibid., 66-67).
273 Ibid., 62.

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Fig. 8 Sumeru (830 CE)
Image from manuscript at Dunhuang 敦煌274

274 Image from Stein 249.

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that is either macrocosmically manifest in, or microcosmically encapsulated within, the human body.275 Working within the field of Geography, Yi-Fu Tuan has in his work, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977), looked closely at how the human body as spatial entity interacts with the natural world.276 Tuan’s work, which contributes to a general theory of space, includes some references to space-place relationships as they occur in Chinese culture, even including at one point a reference to the mountain-body. Tuan’s work is primarily helpful, however, in how it has aided in transforming the study of geography from a field that primarily focuses on describing the earth’s features to one that also seriously considers the relationships between human experience and those features. Tuan’s work is influential in later scholarship that promotes an understanding of human beings and their bodies as capable of mediating between traditional understandings of space and place.

Humans, explains Tuan, live for a brief period of their lives in a non- dualistic world when they are babies, unable to separate themselves from the external world.277 As babies grow and their senses develop, they begin to experience space and place as different parts of reality. The first “place” that the

275 Working within the field of Religious Studies, Catherine Bell has also examined how Stein’s discussion of space also influences our understanding of ritual, “…the creation of a miniature garden is a ritual-like action that uses a vast system of correspondences to establish a bounded space that invokes the interrelationship of the microcosm and the macrocosm, enabling one either to ponder their intrinsic identity or to attempt to affect the balance of one by manipulating the balance of the other” Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 158.

276 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
277 Ibid., 20.

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baby actually sees is the body of his or her mother, wherein the mother is recognized as a stable and permanent object.278 In this, mother becomes macrocosm of the world for the baby. According to Tuan, the human sense of place eventually becomes related to objects, whereas its sense of space relates to a vast emptiness in which objects rest. For humans, space in this manner symbolizes freedom while place symbolizes attachment.279 As such, it is after infancy that humans begin to live dialectically between these two parts of the earth’s geography, and the physical environments in which they live inevitably influence their senses of space and place. The way that humans interact with the natural terrain informs their senses. People who live on islands, contends Tuan, experience space and place differently from the way that people who live on large continents do, for example.280 Similarly, people also experience these two spheres of geographic reality differently depending upon the cultures in which they live. Cultural differences that influence human perception of space and place are not only found between countries, but even within countries and across different time frames. Furthermore, attached to the placement of human bodies at a given time, there is a spatio-temporal aspect of the world in which time itself may be dictated by space. Tuan gives an example of this as found in the Hopi tradition. Even in the case of an event happening in a distant place at the same time as occurs a different event in a Hopi village, the Hopi will view the former event as having

278 Ibid., 29.
279 Ibid., 54.
280 Ibid., 54-55.

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occurred “long ago” because the event will have only been known in their place after a lapse of time.281 Tuan’s theory implies that in historical reflection, time and space are conjoined, and whereas time and space are seen as movement, place is seen as permanence and pause.

The bifurcation of space and place, contends Tuan, is dependent upon human subjectivity. Demonstrating this is the human’s learning of a maze. Once the human subject has made multiple mistakes and finally learned the maze, that which began as an undifferentiated space becomes, as Tuan terms it, a “single object-situation,” or a place.282 As such, spaces transform into places once humans have experienced them. When humans turn space into place, they are effectively attaching meaning to the natural world.283 During the course of their lives, humans transform spaces into places through their experiential knowledge of them, and space as something abstract attains both meaning and concreteness during this transformative process.284

It is in his discussion of how myth is also attached to space, however, that Tuan examines this attachment in the context of Chinese culture. The first kind of mythical space is mythical geography, which pertains to how regions of the world unknown to one group of people acquire mythical contexts for the group.285 The second type of mythical space is mythical cosmology, which relates humans more

281 Ibid., 120-122.
282 Ibid., 72.
283 “Nature may be hostile and enigmatic, yet man learns to make sense of it—to extract meaning from it—when such is necessary to his survival” Ibid., 79.
284 Ibid., 136, 199.
285 Ibid., 86-88.

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cosmically to the earth and universe. Here, Tuan sees a meeting of body and nature in the cosmology of Chinese myth,

In China popular lore has it that the earth is a cosmic being: mountains are its body, rocks its bones, water the blood that runs through its veins, trees and grass its hair, clouds and mists the vapors of its breath—the cosmic or cloud breath that is life’s essence made visible.286

In the case of Chinese myths, suggests Tuan, the Chinese have envisioned and described the natural world as a macrocosmic entity that appears in the form of a body. As such, the space of the body became integral to an understanding of the natural world. In Tuan’s work, it is without consideration of how the human body spatially interacts with and influences the world around it that the concepts of space and place appear incomplete.

Important also to an understanding of how the human body might influence a theory of space is the work of Jonathan Z. Smith, whose To Take Place fundamentally theorizes a relationship between ritual and place, the body as social enactor of ritual.287 Although Smith never fully endorses the theories of the humanistic geographers that he mentions (e.g. Yi-Fu Tuan), much of his own theory about how ritual relates to place depends upon these theories. Humanistic geographers, states Smith, argue against those classical notions of place that typically state, “it is place that creates man and his culture as well as his character, rather than the other way round.”288 Instead, these geographers believe that humans shape their environments. Smith too suggests that place is closely bound

286 Ibid., 88-90.
287 Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.
288 Ibid., 30.

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to the social, arguing against the idea that place is a construct that can exist external to social structure.289 Pointing to Emile Durkheim’s theory as found in his 1912 work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Smith agrees that individuals place themselves according to the societies in which they live, stating that this theory had the effect of turning Immanuel Kant upside down.290 “Place,” contends Smith, “is not best conceived as a particular location within an idiosyncratic physiognomy or as a uniquely individualistic node of sentiment, but rather as a social position within a hierarchical system.”291 Smith underlines the importance of Durkheim’s assertion that individualism itself is a social product, a point that counters the Enlightenment thought of thinkers such as Kant and Jean- Jacques Rousseau, in whose work the notion that pure individualism could exist is not understood as impossible. The importance and definition of place is contextually determined according to Smith’s theory, which perhaps becomes most apparent in his discussion of Ezekiel, whereby the temple may be viewed

289 Here it should be stated that the term, “place” in Smith’s work is often presented in a contextually confusing manner to the reader, who cannot always identify whether the author is using the word as a noun or as a verb. For example, in gauging Smith’s assessment of how Immanuel Kant theorized place, one first must understand that Smith is apparently viewing the word in this particular context as it exists in its verbal form (Smith 27). Smith is concerned with how Kant understood an individual’s ability “to place” him or herself (Ibid., 27-35). Yet Smith also uses “place” as a noun, as occurs in his description of how John Locke sees memory as a “mental place” (Ibid., 26). It is only on page 45 that Smith refers to the problems arising between verbal and nominal usages.
290 Also of particular influence here is Durkheim’s collaborative work with Marcel Mauss, who in 1903 published “On Some Primitive Forms of Classification: A contribution to the Study of Collective Representations.” In his examination of the dichotomy of sacred and profane set forth by Durkheim, as well as the systems of classification and hierarchy set forth by Durkheim and Mauss, Smith turns to the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss (“Do Dual Organizations Exist?” 1976), Georges Dumézil (L’ideologie tripartite des Indo-Européens 1958), Clifford Geertz (Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali 1980), and Paul Wheatley (The Pivot of the Four Quarters 1971)
291 Smith To Take Place 45.

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according to different maps each of which defines the place of the temple according to its surroundings, the people who access the temple and the perspective from which the temple is viewed. According to these different temple maps, various hierarchies of power and status become represented via the placement of human bodies. In other words, the place of the temple changes according to the people who encounter it, as well as it does according to the time in which it is utilized (the meaning of place changes over time). Louis Dumont’s work Homo Hierarchicus (1966) is highly influential to Smith’s own findings.292 In accord with Dumont, Smith points to how societal views of hierarchy are relative, dependent upon the respective roles of members in society.293 Likewise, the manner in which society views place is dependent upon both the viewer’s own social status, the performance of actions and events in the given place, and the perspective from which the physical structure is viewed (the temple in Ezekiel).294

Looking closer at the human body in his development of a theory in which place morphs with time, thereby acquiring new or different meanings, Smith introduces the topic of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to his readers. According to Smith, Constantine inserted new meaning into place when he became the chief patron of the church in the 4th century CE. Furthermore, the place of the Holy Sepulchre was both replicated and exported during medieval times, wherein European practice involved transporting pieces of rock and wood from the original

292 Ibid., 54-56. 293 Ibid., 55-57. 294 Ibid., 56-73.

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site, and installing them abroad; and the reproduction of the shrine in the form of large models placed within different churches.295 And yet it was ritual, or the activity of human bodies in their environment, which had to be transported along with pieces of the place in order for there to be a social sense that the place itself had been transported. The specific ritual transported came in the form of pilgrimage between places, and in particular the Pilgrimage of Egeria, which in turn influenced the stational character of liturgical action in Christian churches through which worship became pilgrimage.296

An understanding of bodies as physical entities through which material representations interact with mental visualizations influences a more general theory of space in that the concept of body as such a meeting or melding ground between the material and the mental makes problematic any bifurcations between space and place as they occur within traditional spatial analyses. Daoist body charts provide some material evidence of how Daoists have envisioned spaces of body, natural world and cosmos as interfused. The use of microcosms and macrocosms in visualizations and representations of the body have been highly influential in the way that Daoists have historically perceived of various spaces, including those of the body and of the external world. In examining the sacred microcosm as it relates to Daoist body charts, an understanding of the way that spaces in Daoism are perceived microcosmically unfolds as integral more generally to a perception of a complex response system between the physiological

295 Ibid., 87.
296 Ibid., 88-92.

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body, the visualization of that body, the visualization of that body’s connection to the external world and cosmos, and that body’s external physical form as found in its representation. The human body in Daoism is therefore not understood as a particular point or place that is segregated from the external world. Nor is it seen as a simple mediator between internal and external. Instead, the body resonates an array of spaces, including visual, mental, bodily, cosmic and earthly such that they become inseparable. The concept of human body as spatial resonator more broadly enriches our understanding of how the body is capable of empowering space, such that space is no longer understood as void or segregated from place. Furthermore, Daoist body charts and maps have provided their viewers with representations that offer a clear physical conduit through which systems of microcosmic and macrocosmic correspondences might resonate in the visualization process.

The rise of body charts in the context of Chinese religions, and its connection to a highly influential movement devoted to internalizing religious experience in China, offers a compelling example within the field of Religious Studies of how art and representation continue to act as important means through which scholars of religion can understand how humans experience and express religion, even in cases of religious internalization. Even though internalization of the religious experience may appear to dominate in some religions, material culture is often an integral part of the internalization process, thus pointing to problems in the view of “religion” as a non-material concept.

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Chapter Four
Expressions of Domesticated Buddhism in Southern Song Art:

Mountain-Body Fusions in the Paintings of Liang Kai 梁楷

In Chapters Two and Three, I examined how state-endorsed artistic representations of mountains, fusions of the natural world and human character through literati art, Neo-Confucian architectural developments on mountains, and Daoist body charts of internal landscapes all acted ideologically during China’s Song period to present human bodies and natural landscapes as representative of one another. I will turn in this chapter to painting of the Southern Song (1127- 1279 CE), during which time artistic focus on the mountain as a monumental entity diminished, and human bodies painted within popular court art gained pictorial space, becoming more focal to the artwork’s primary composition. This contrasts especially to the theme of the mountain-body amalgamation in art as it pertained to monumental landscape painting of the Northern Song, discussed in Chapter Two. The Southern Song focus on the human body differs from that found in the earlier art form of monumental landscape painting, as exemplified by Guo Xi’s Early Spring, in which images of people are typically tiny, engulfed and shadowed by impressive mountain scenes. Although present, humans in monumental landscapes are often difficult to locate within the scroll, their small bodies mere sketches that can be carefully made out amongst the trees, rocks, mist and peaks of the mountains. As opposed to diminishing human presence and painting of the mountain itself in anthropomorphic fashion, Southern Song artists

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of the court often painted human figures as individual persons who stood out vividly from their natural world settings. Then, towards the end of the Song, a new branch of painting began to flourish, one that was removed from the court and attached instead to the activities of the monastic world. In these later Song works, the artist began using broad strokes of his brush to paint human figures that took up entire surfaces of the artwork while also allowing the landscape to disappear entirely. It was with this disappearance of landscape, however, that the human bodies painted in these works began at the same time to take on stylistic qualities of the mountains themselves. Methods used to render these bodies matched those previously used to paint mountains.

Whereas Chapter Two examined the theme of landscape as figure both in the work of Guo Xi and in the Neo-Confucian appropriation of sacred mountain space, this chapter will explore a two-part progression: figure in landscape and finally figure as landscape, both themes of which occur in the artwork of Liang Kai 梁楷 (ca.1200 CE), a reclusive painter of the Southern Song period.

Pictorially, Liang’s later works appear to fuse mountain and body, yet in a manner quite apart from earlier methods described in Guo Xi’s Northern Song treatise, the Linquan Gaozhi, in which social hierarchy was utilized pictorially to appropriate the space of the mountain.

This study will examine the drastic shift that took place between Liang Kai’s early academic style, and his later individualistic style, focusing both on the way that nature and body fused artistically in the artist’s work, and on how a

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domesticated form of Buddhism in Southern Song China influenced this fusion. There is a tension that exists between the artist’s different creative modes, and perhaps the tension is just as, if not more crucial, to any assessment of the philosophical and religious significance of the artist’s later work. Liang Kai’s later works are so unique in their untrammeled style that they almost seem to have been created during some other time period.297 It is interesting to note the shift Liang made from the much more orthodox style of painting found in his earlier works.

In this chapter, I will finally also examine how artistic changes in Liang Kai’s work might have related to the shifting religious climate of China in and around its Southern Song capital city of Hangzhou 杭州. It is possible that

religion, and in particular the domestication of Buddhism in China, influenced artistic representations of nature and body during the Southern Song, and that some of this influence is present in the brushwork of Liang Kai. Although biographical information of Liang Kai is wanting, he is traditionally seen as an academic court painter turned recluse, and the few historical details of his life, as well as his extant paintings, present evidence of a life that moved between the artistic realm of the Southern Song Imperial Painting Academy (Nan Song hua yuan 南宋畫院) and the religious life of the Buddhist monasteries surrounding

Hangzhou. An examination of the drastic artistic changes that took place in Liang’s later paintings suggests that the social and religious environment of his

297 In her detailed work on Liang Kai’s painting of an immortal, Pomo xianren 潑墨仙人, Yan Yamei has examined how Liang’s work cannot be dated simply based on style because the style is so unique (Yan Yamei 嚴雅美, Pomo Xianren tu yanjiu 潑墨仙人圖研究, Taibei: Fagu Wenhua Shiye Gufen Youxian Gongsi, 2000Pomo Xianren, 77).

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time may have encouraged him to renounce orthodox principles governing court paintings of the Southern Song. Chan Buddhism 禪宗, which clearly influenced

Liang’s choice of subject matter in his later works, may also have impacted Liang’s style of painting. Ultimately, this chapter shall seek to recognize how Liang’s work, which created fusions between the human body and nature in Chinese art, acted artistically as a form of domesticating Buddhism in both Chinese and Japanese circles.

Liang Kai as Daizhao 待詔 and
Figures in Landscape in Southern Song Court Painting

The earliest biographical information making any reference to Liang Kai occurs within the preface of the Huaji Buyi 畫繼補遺, written by Zhuang Su 莊肅,

a Junior Scribe in the Imperial Library of the Southern Song period.298 Dated to 1298, Zhuang’s biographical information on Liang is wanting. Yet he pays particular attention to recording a description of the special liberty found in Liang’s way of using the brush,

Liang Kai, the top pupil of Jia Shigu 賈師古, was also attached to the Painting Academy. The line of his drawing was gracefully free and he surpassed his teacher like blue surpasses indigo. People of that time for the most part appreciated him.299

298 Zhuang Su 莊肅, Huaji Buyi 畫繼補遺 in Howard Rogers, “The Reluctant Messiah: Sakyamuni Emerging From The Mountains” in Sophia International Review, vol. 5, 1983, 16-33, 27; Also discussed in Zhou Mi 周密, Yunyan guoyan lu 雲烟過眼録 Record of Clouds and Mist Passing Before One’s Eyes, Annotated Translation by Ankeney Weitz, Leiden; Boston; Köln: Brill, 2002, 135.

299 Zhuang Su, Huaji Buyi in Rogers, “The Reluctant Messiah” 27. 159

Zhuang imparts the idea that although Liang was attached to the Painting Academy, the artist’s manner of painting was an untrammeled one.

The Tuhui Baojian 圖繪寶鑑 Precious Mirror of Painting, an important Yuan period compendia listing biographies of painters, written in 1365 by the art

historian, Xia Wenyan 夏文彥 (14th century), is probably the most clear historical

document to make note of chronological details surrounding Liang Kai’s life.300 Listed in the Tuhui Baojian as a painter of various subjects, including figures, landscapes, Daoist and Buddhist images, as well as unusual, or supernatural beings, Liang was appointed daizhao 待詔, or painter-in-attendance from 1201-1204,

during Emperor Ningzong’s 寧宗 (1168-1224) reign in the Southern Song.301 Later, during the Qing period (1644-1911), Liang is also recorded in the writings

of Li E 厲鶚 (1692-1752), a poet and leader of an important school of poetry

during the Qing known as the Zhexi ci School 浙西詞派.302 In Li E’s Nan Song

yuan hua lu 南宋院畫錄, Liang Kai is described as having lived and worked in

and around the Southern Song capital of Hangzhou, and having received special honor from the academy in 1204, when he was awarded the Golden Belt (jindai 金

300 Xia Wenyan 夏文彥, Tuhui baojian 圖繪寶鑑 (1365) recorded in the Huashi congshu 畫史叢書 (Compendium of Painting Histories), Comp. Yu Anlan, Shanghai: renmin meishu chubian she,

1959, vol. 2 104; Ichimatsu Tanaka, Liang Kai, Supervised by The Institute of Art Research, Tokyo, Kyoto, Japan: Benrido Co., Ltd., 1957, i; Max Loehr, The Great Painters of China, Oxford: Phaidon, 1980, 215.
301 Loehr 215.

302 See Li E 厲鶚, Nan Song yuan hua lu 南宋院畫錄 in Meishu congshu 美術叢書 (Compilation of Books on Fine Art), Taipei: Yiwen Yinshuguan, 1964, vol. 17 (4/4), 166 (referenced in Susan E.

Nelson, “Catching Sight of South Mountain: Tao Yuanming, Mount Lu, and the Iconographies of Escape” in Archives of Asian Art, vol. 52, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000/2001, 31n20

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帶), a prize essentially considered an imperial decoration.303 However, also

according to the Nan Song yuan hua lu, Liang allegedly abandoned the award hanging in the Academy, abruptly ceasing his work for the court, and retreating thereafter to various Chan temples in the vicinity of Hangzhou.304 Liang was not a Chan monk himself. Yet the untrammeled brush style of his later works eventually found special reverence within Chan circles, and later within the Chan/Zen circles of Japan, the final destination for many of Liang’s extant works after Japanese Zen monks transported them from China, primarily during the Yoshino and Muromachi Periods (late fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries).305 Based on the existence of inscriptions by Chan monks on some of Liang’s paintings, it is also probable that Liang lived and painted in Chan monasteries in and around Hangzhou, including the Lingyin Temple 靈隐寺 in northwest

Hangzhou. Dachuan Puji 大川普濟 (1179-1253), for example, an important Song monk who in 1252 compiled for the Chan sect a seminal text called the Wudeng

Huiyuan 五燈會元 (Compendium of Five Lamps), inscribed some of Liang’s work

while serving as thirty-seventh abbot of the Lingyin Temple.306 Sprinkled elsewhere, mainly in poetic contexts of the Song and Yuan Dynasties, Liang’s name also materializes on occasion, some of which will be discussed

303 Nelson 31n20; Loehr 215.
304 Loehr 215, William Watson 62; Fontein and Hickman 35; Lee, 20-21.
305 Tanaka i.
306 Yan Yamei, 201; Valérie Malenfer Ortiz, Dreaming the Southern Song Landscape: The Power of Illusion in Chinese Painting, Leiden; Boston; Köln: Brill, 1999, 51; Andrew E. Ferguson, Zen’s Chinese Heritage: The Masters and Their Teachings, Somerville, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 2000, xix; and Shimada 11.

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momentarily.307 Turning now to Liang Kai’s work, I will first examine the early court style of painting for which he initially became revered during the Southern Song.

Scholars have often agreed, based on a recognition of significant orthodox features found within Liang Kai’s undated extant painting, The Scholar of the Eastern Fence (Dongli gaoshi tu 東籬高士圖) [Fig 9], that the work is exemplary

of the artist’s earlier, academic style.308 In his own examination of Liang’s work, for example, twentieth-century art historian, Max Loehr (1903-1988), professed this belief while describing some of the orthodox elements found in Liang’s early style,

The question of Liang’s early style is settled, in my opinion, by the barely known scroll depicting the poet Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 (Tao Qian 陶潜 365-427) in the Palace Museum in Taipei. Entitled The Scholar of the Eastern Fence, this scroll possesses the marks of an early work of Liang Kai…The type forms agree with academic conventions not far removed from the Ma Xia style; the execution is elaborate and descriptive, wanting the strongly personal touch that distinguishes the later work; and the figure of Tao Yuanming in particular is drawn in an orthodox manner, with an appropriate Six Dynasties flavour in costume and design. An imposing, tall pine tree of almost Northern Song complexity, silhouetted against the misty open space, is the largest element in the composition and determines its character to a large extent.309

Liang’s Scholar of the Eastern Fence is the oldest extant painting depicting Tao Yuanming holding chrysanthemums, the flower-motif closely associated with the

307 Loehr 215; Ortiz 51.
308 Art Historian James Cahill, for example, affirms that the work is genuine and most likely representative of Liang’s early style of his academy period (An Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings: Tang, Song and Yuan, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980, 129).
309 Loehr 215-216.

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figure of Tao as it occurs in later Chinese art.310 Yet reliable sources indicate that earlier such paintings of Tao Yuanming had existed at one time, especially within literati culture of the Northern Song.311 Liang’s choice of subject matter in this particular work does not stray far from that which was recognized and understood in academic culture of the time. Furthermore, the fine details of the work, as well as the focus on the solitary figure of Tao Yuanming dressed in flowing robes and staring across the water (Fig. 10 Detail) are characteristics comparable to those found in the painting of Ma Yuan 馬遠 (active 1190-1230), one of the most

famous and cherished court painters of the Southern Song period, and a foundational figure in the academic conventions of painting at the time.312 British sinologist and art historian, William Watson (1917-2007), described Ma’s popularity while also explaining the frequency of a solitary, contemplative figure, which occurs as a theme in Ma’s work,

The name of Ma Yuan, who appears to have been the most besought and prolific of the Ma group, is tied almost exclusively to the theme of the cultivated man gazing into vacuity across a near terrace-edge or shore, the psychological moment not further particularized; or a lonely fisherman, scholar-philosopher or peasant, symbolizing quietude, is isolated on a broad expanse of water.313

310 Susan E. Nelson, “Revisiting the Eastern Fence: Tao Qian’s Chrysanthemums” in The Art Bulletin, Vol. 83, no. 3 (Sept 2001) 437-460, 437.
311 One such painting was Yuanming at the Eastern Fence by Northern Song artist, Li Gonglin 李公麟 (ca. 1041-1106), inscribed with a poem by the Song literatus, Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037-1101) [Nelson 441-442].
312 “Ma Yuan was a fourth-generation descendant of a veritable dynasty of Academy painters from Ho-chung (shensi)…active under the emperors Kuang Tsung (reigned 1190-4) and Ning Tsung (reigned 1195-1224), [he] may possibly rank as the foremost Southern Sung painter—not despite but rather because of a certain limitation of his pictorial world, a limitation that somehow seems to make his works so readily identifiable”(Loehr 199-200).
313 Watson 57.

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Fig. 9 Liang Kai 梁楷 (late 12th-century – early 13th century)
Gentleman of the Eastern Fence Dongli Gaoshi 東籬高士圖 (late 12th century) National Palace Museum, Taipei

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Fig. 10 Detail (Gentleman of the Eastern Fence Dongli Gaoshi 東籬高士圖)

Fig. 10 Ma Yuan 馬遠 (c.1200)
On a Mountain Path in Spring 山徑春行 (13th-century) National Palace Museum, Taipei

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Although the small figure of a servant is also present in Ma Yuan’s work, like Liang’s Scholar of the Eastern Fence, in On a Mountain Path in Spring (Shan jing chun xing 山徑春行) [Fig. 11], Ma depicts a central, scholarly figure who stands

in nature, framed by a tree and looking off into the distance. In addition to the depiction of a solitary figure, details in Liang’s work such as the large tree, painted with several crooked branches, delicately touched with spokes of pine needles, as well as Liang’s placement of sharp painted boulders skirting the vicinity of the trunk, also accord with quintessential features of Ma Yuan’s style,

A monotony in his (Ma Yuan’s) compositions is created by their air of assembling a selection of prepared detail, in tree branches and roots, rocks, the scholarly figures themselves…Often the greater part of the composition is given over to space. The human focus may be enlarged, placed off- centre but not always to the lower right. The person is then framed with close-placed trees, fences, rocks, all painted in painstaking detail and in rich color.314

The style and subject matter of Liang’s Scholar of the Eastern Fence exhibit how the artist’s earlier work accorded with the conventional style of painting of the time. As in the work of Ma Yuan, there is a focus on the individual human, standing in nature.

Although the dating of some of Liang Kai’s works such as The Scholar of the Eastern Fence remains uncertain, a stylistic comparison between some of his work and that of Ma Yuan certainly helps to ascertain which of his pieces may represent his earlier work. Aside from Ma’s influences, however, there are other indications that point strongly to probable academic dating of particular pieces.

314 Watson 57.

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Looking beyond the subject matter and style of the paintings, for example, there exists a more material clue in Liang’s work that suggests the artist produced his work for an academic audience. Namely, in some cases Liang chose to utilize the format of ink on silk fans or album leaves, a format that directly correlates with those formats desired and demanded by the court of the Southern Song at the time.315 In light of the popularity of these painting formats, it is most plausible that Liang used these two particular surfaces so favored by the court so as to cater to it.316 As one shall note later, Liang’s most unorthodox works, those clearly created after his time as court painter, ultimately diverged from academic taste not only in the stylistic manner in which the artist produced them, but also in their rejection of utilizing silk fan and album leaves as the surface upon which he placed his ink.317 The shift of Liang’s stylistic development, which involved the artist’s move from the realm of the delicate (fine lines and color in ink) to that of the rough (splashed ink), therefore seems to have occurred in accord with the his materialistic development of using paper instead of silk fans. Although dates are not always available for his works, this plausible connection between stylistic and

315 Hui-shu Lee has researched the flourishing of small-scale paintings on both silk fans and album leaves during the Southern Song (Exquisite Moments: West Lake and Southern Song Art, New York: China Institute, 2001).
316 In her discussion of the reverence held by Southern Song officials for fan paintings, Lee discusses this factor, “This contemporary comment on what is now considered one of the most representative of Southern Song art forms–small-scale paintings on silk fans (and album leaves)– provides an important clue to a method of approaching these charming, jewel-like remnants of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries” (Lee, 19).

317 Art historian Richard Barnhart has described Liang’s more radical style to have emanated from the artist’s later work, produced outside of the court and related to monastic life, (Richard Barnhart, James Cahill, Nie Chongzheng, Wu Hung, Lang Shaojun, and Yang Yin Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press ;Beijing, China : Foreign Languages Press, June 1997, 136).

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material developments lends more credibility to the idea that Liang created his fans and album leaves early on in his career.

Two such fan and album leaf paintings include Liang’s Winter Birds (Dong niao 冬鳥) [Fig. 12] and Strolling on a Marshy Bank (Zeyan xingyin tu 澤畔行吟

圖) [Fig. 13]. As stated, the fact that these small paintings were completed in the

artistic format of fans and album leaves accords with artistic preference of the court at the time, thereby advocating the idea that the artist produced them in Hangzhou at the academy, prior to relinquishing the court and setting off for the mountains in 1204. Interestingly enough, however, although the format of silk fan accords with the academic taste, the style of the painting departs somewhat from the Ma Yuan style seen in the Scholar of the Eastern Fence. Beyond the fact of fan as chosen art form, academic obedience that Liang may have previously adhered to begins to splinter once one takes into consideration the way that the artist utilizes the ink, and the manner in which the subject matter shifts. Quietly departing from the court’s taste, perhaps Liang’s fans foreshadow the more drastic changes in technique that ensue in the artist’s later work.

While the paintings on all of Liang’s fans exhibit certain conformity to the technical realm of detailed representation so revered during the Southern Song, the ink used to create subtle oddities on them also bolsters the view that Liang had begun to deviate from representing his world in a manner prized within the Academy. In Winter Birds, for example, the artist’s ink fills the silk with thick, accurate strokes depicting a slanted tree that juts out into the water from land,

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Fig. 12 Liang Kai
Winter Birds Dong niao 冬鳥 (early 13th century) Fogg Museum, Harvard University

several plump birds settled around it. Yet portions of the land, air and water actually mingle completely with one another at several particularly thick and blurred points of ink on the silk. Having the tendency to roll together on the fan, these points stand out almost abstractly on the surface, presenting themselves to the observer’s eye as if in the form of huge billows of cloud, or sheets of distant mountains cloaked in mist. This particular effect primarily occurs towards the center of the fan, where streaks smudge in such manner so as to make land, water and air indistinguishable from one another. The streaks ultimately proceed towards the horizon line, rising in two steep, dark spots, both of which are diagonally crossed by the sharp image of a tree in the foreground. In the upper

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left-hand corner of the fan, a scarcely visible crane floats, almost translucently, hovering in the depicted sky. All of these details serve to demonstrate how Liang has transformed the purely representational items found on the fan (e.g. branches, birds, etc.) with clear elements of expressiveness and strangeness.

Similar to Liang’s Winter Birds, his Strolling on a Marshy Bank weaves representation with the abstract. Here, a solitary figure stands on a protrusion of land beside a smooth body of water and behind which a mountain peak protrudes visibly towards the top of the fan. Depicting a heavy layer of thick clouds rolling forward, Liang creates an unconventional atmospheric quality of sky that, once

Fig. 13 Liang Kai
Strolling on a Marshy Bank Zeyan xingyin tu 澤畔行吟圖 (early 13th century) The Metropolitcan Museum of Art, New York

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again, blurs with water and land making their delineation difficult. The atmospheric amalgamation presents itself rather like a foreboding mass of rock.318 Suddenly, instead of a cloud, the landscape image on the fan seems to turn into that of a slanted ridge that towers over the small figure. Such abstract occurrences in Liang’s work, especially in regards to the unconventional tones found in the atmospheric qualities of these two particular paintings, imply stylistic changes in Liang’s work that led to the artist’s divergence from the academic style of the Southern Song court. Modern interpretations of the solitary, unknown figure in Liang’s Strolling on a Marshy Bank have also suggested that it could be representative of a meditative Chan figure.319 Although there is no proof of this, Liang’s artistic style and subject matter had at this point begun to shift away from that of the Ma Yuan style, bridging themselves closer to that of his later work.

Liang Kai’s Sakyamuni Buddha: Emerging from the Mountains

Evidence that Liang Kai’s artistic deviation from conventional styles of the court pertained on an important level (be it an artistic or personal level) to religion is also embodied in one of his most famous paintings, which he completed while still in service of the court. So strongly divergent is this painting in both the technique used and the chosen subject matter at this point in Liang’s career, in fact,

318 Loehr discusses the bleakness emanating from the depiction on this fan. He also discusses the work’s pedigree, “The picture is signed, but there are no ancient seals providing a pedigree. Proof of its existence by the fourteenth century is provided, however, by a copy of sorts made by no less a painter than Fang Ts’ung-i of the late Yuan to early Ming period” Loehr 217.

319 Ortiz 51.

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that some scholars view the work not only as a moment of artistic transformation for the artist, but also as a sign of philosophical transformation in his life.320 The painting is a large scroll entitled Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountains (出山

释迦圖 Chushan shijia tu ) [Fig. 14]. 1204, the date that Liang allegedly vanished

from the Imperial Academy, matches the date signed on the work. The painting depicts the Buddha leaving the mountains, which according to Chan legend correlates with the Buddha’s successful attainment of enlightenment. In addition to the date recorded on the work, the piece also bears the signature of the imperial painting academy, Yuqian tuhua Liang Kai 御前圖畫梁楷 (Liang Kai of His

Majesty’s Painting Academy).321 Beyond the importance that the work holds as a piece of historical fascination in Liang’s choice of subject matter and manner of representation, prominent academic investigators have generally agreed with one another that the work represents a critical turning point in the style of Liang’s work. Assessments of the painting’s stylistic qualities, however, have differed. Based on the authenticity of date and signature, most art historians and other prominent scholars of Chinese art accept Liang’s Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountains to have been a work completed for the Southern Song court. Yet it is at this point that the focus on dates and signatures peters out and scholarly

320 Scholarly comments on the possibility of this occurrence are abundant, beginning with Loehr, “Although the phrasing of the signature indicates that this noble and doubtless authentic work antedates Liang’s abrupt withdrawal from the Academy, there is no reason to assume that this happened in his early years; the rank of tai-chao presupposes maturity, as borne out by the painting itself” (215).

321 Yan Yamei 71-72; Ortiz 51; Thorp and Vinograd 275; Roderick Whitfield, “Review: Zen. Zürich” in The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 135, No. 1083 (424-426), London: The Burlingame Magazine Publications, Ltd. (June 1993), 424.

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viewpoints begin to diverge in response to the style of the painting. Over the past century, scholarly thoughts revolving around the piece have bounced back and forth in their claims as to whether it represents a continuation or a rejection of orthodoxy in Liang’s style. In a comprehensive analysis of Liang’s work in 1957, for example, scholars at the Institute of Art Research in Tokyo decidedly assessed the artist’s Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountains as orthodox in nature.322

Fig. 14 Liang Kai
Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountains Chushan shijia tu 出山释迦圖 (1204 CE) Tokyo National Museum

322 Tanaka, i-ii.

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These scholars remained content to conclude that the piece was representative of Liang’s earlier work, as opposed to the later, more unusual, jianbi 簡筆

(abbreviated brushstroke) style of the artist.323 Robert Thorp, scholar of Chinese art and architecture, however, has contended that Liang executed his piece in a, “suave, courtly style,” but is a bit less certain in assessing the work as entirely orthodox, concluding instead only that the overall tone of the painting is “uniformly bleak.”324 Based on the validity of its signature, on the other hand, Richard Barnhart, while agreeing that the piece was painted for the court, strongly asserts that the piece cannot be described as academic in nature.325

Max Loehr agrees that the facts of signature and date on the painting demonstrate the work to have predated Liang’s departure from the court, but he also believes that the style itself is suggestive both of the artist’s maturity and method.326 Sinologist William Watson (1917-2007) states that, of all the artist’s works, the piece is “the most original use of landscape,” and one that “defies academic formula,” suggesting also the image of the subject depicted, Sakyamuni, “confounds all expectations.”327 Although these approaches to the painting differ on some level, they all act in accord to emphasize that the painting’s creation was a point of contention or transformation in the artist’s life. Although little evidence

323 Ibid.
324 Thorp and Vinograd 275.
325 Barnhart in Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting 136.
326 “Although the phrasing of the signature indicates that this noble and doubtless authentic work antedates Liang’s abrupt withdrawal from the Academy, there is no reason to assume that this happened in his early years; the rank of daizhao presupposes maturity, as borne out of the painting itself” (Loehr 215).
327 Watson 62-63.

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exists to explain Liang’s decision to depart from the Southern Song court and paint in monasteries around Hangzhou, this work does exist as a tangible instance or material memory of the gray area that could have encompassed Liang’s artistic and personal transformation at the beginning of the thirteenth-century. The artwork succeeds in this because while its subject matter and style seem devoted to a uniquely Buddhist representation, its dating and artist’s signature are firmly attached to the court. Scholarly disagreement surrounding the piece actually provides agreement in its understanding that the style of the painting is one of transformation, and change and diversity. The painting itself could be a non- textual indication that Liang’s career was at its turning point.

Turning to formal analysis of the painting, one notes that Liang’s Sakyamuni appears more conventional when viewed alongside the untrammeled and abbreviated brushstroke style of his later work, the style of. However, the nature of the painting’s style still does not seem adequately described as “courtly.” It is true that traits of academic style are visible in the painting. The representational technique so honored in Southern Song academic painting surfaces in the form of Liang’s detailing. Realistic elements found in both sakyamuni’s face and in the solid waves of his robe, as well as in the lines and shades of the tall tree that rises at his side, all work to portray the elements both of the Buddha’s life, and of the tradition stemming from him. Indeed, such detail and structure are reminiscent of the Southern Song’s courtly devotion to meticulousness and method in its artistic preferences. Although undeniable, these

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elements of exactitude, found in the painting when viewed with the piece as a whole, almost further accentuate the more abstract elements of the work. For the tone of the painting, presents itself in a conceptual, and less illustrational manner than would that of a work devoted purely to representation, a topic of which will
be discussed later in this chapter. Sakyamuni, for example, appears to descend from the mountain as if through a slit—a slit that rises from two airy, yet still foreboding, sheets of rock painted onto the silk scroll. Unlike the unquestionably gentle aura that surrounds most other figures of Southern Song court painting, Liang’s Buddha emerges centered on the lower half of the scroll. As a solitary, unaccompanied human, he is wrapped in what looks to be a tattered robe that
hangs weathered and red around his body. Stark rocks, painted like a steep curtain, move diagonally behind the figure, and the sharp twigs of a solitary tree, frame

him bleakly. The stripped tree, which is rendered in accurate delineation, also exudes an extra wintry element of rawness to the piece. Unlike the warm tone and golden glow typical of a Ma Yuan painting, the hues of Liang’s ink, generally grayish and dark, work in such manner as if to impress the cold mountain shiver— the same shiver that embraces Sakyamuni—upon the observer. Such elements also evince themselves in the celestial mass suspended around the Buddha. Also departing from the carefully planned compositions found in popular Southern Song paintings, Liang’s Sakyamuni stands in awkward solitude on the vertical stretch of the hanging scroll, as if just pressed out of the creased gap in the mountain hovering behind him. His large, naked feet, awkwardly flat, tolerate the

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barren earth below. The painting’s observer immediately recognizes the strong features, and contemplative, withdrawn expression of Sakyamuni’s face.328 While it is perhaps the case that Liang’s pictorial style here remains adequately faithful to the dominant representational figure-in-landscape paintings popular in the court, the piece as a whole, moving towards abstraction and awkwardness, certainly seems to suggest at the drastic transformation that occurs in the artist’s later work.329 The religious story depicted visually on Liang’s Sakyamuni scroll devotes itself completely to the figure that it portrays. For while it sufficiently uses ink to illustrate the picture of the Buddha leaving the mountains, in the numinous quality of its depicted atmosphere, the piece also grasps the intangible elements of the cold and loneliness that Sakyamuni allegedly endured.

Gautama Sakyamuni, the Indian prince of Buddhism’s origins lived in the sixth and fifth centuries, BCE.330 Relinquishing his easeful life as prince, Sakyamuni allegedly abandoned his home at the foot of the Himalayas, heading for the mountains to seek enlightenment, which he achieved according to legend, becoming the Buddha at age thirty-five.331 Art Historian Howard Rogers has explained the critical way that the Chan story of how Sakyamuni emerged from the

328 Thorp 275.
329 Ibid.
330 Kenneth Chen, Buddhism in China, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1964, 3. The traditional story of the Buddha’s life as found in the 2nd c. CE epic Sanskrit poem, the Buddhacarita, may found in E.B. Cowell’s 19th century translation, Buddhist Mahayana texts. Part 1. The Buddhacarita of Asvaghosha, translated from the Sanskrit, in the Sacred Books of the East, vol. 49. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894. http://www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/English- Texts/Buddhacarita/index.htm.
online http://www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/English-Texts/Buddhacarita/index.htm.
331 Thorp 275.

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mountains serves as one example of how China’s Buddhism departed from that of India. Rogers suggests that initial formal analysis of paintings of the event would indicate the Buddha’s failure at enlightenment,

Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountains, a theme which originated in China and which apparently is unique to Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen Buddhist art…[is an] event [that] must have occurred after he had abandoned his fast but before he began his meditation beneath the Bodhi- tree; the paintings of this subject would thus seem to represent Gotama in a pre-Enlightened stage of profound disillusionment and at the verge of physical and psychological collapse. According to this interpretation, Gotama’s down-turned mouth and shrinking gesture would manifest his bitter disappointment at having failed to derive spiritual benefit commensurate with his efforts. 332

Yet in his examination of how Chan practitioners have utilized paintings of this particular event for functional purposes, Rogers describes the Chinese version of the Buddha’s emergence from the mountains as a corruption of sorts, ultimately suggesting that paintings such as Liang’s could in fact be understood as representations of the Buddha’s enlightenment,

On the morning of la-pa, the eighth day of the twelfth month—the day according to Chan Buddhists on which Sakyamuni attained enlightenment on seeing the morning star—a painting of Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountains is hung and functions as focal point for ceremonies celebrating the culmination of Sakyamuni’s spiritual quest. The functional usage of such pictures would thus suggest an alternative interpretation of its meaning: that Sakyamuni had in fact attained Enlightenment already within the mountains before his departure for Bodhgaya…Given the clear evidence of the canonical texts…scholarly treatments of the theme have tended to favor the former interpretation—that of an un-Enlightened Sakyamuni. Yet the Chan sect of Buddhism has always claimed a ‘transmission outside the scriptures’ and postulated an unbroken succession

332 Rogers 17.

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of patriarchs by which their doctrine has been handed down mind to mind from Sakyamuni himself.333

Furthermore, Rogers’ examination sets forth points for the importance that the mountain plays in paintings of this event as they occur within the Chinese context,

The mountainous setting of Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountains, or at least the special emphasis placed on that setting, would thus seem to be a specifically Chinese interpolation into Gotama’s biography.334

Rogers’ interpretation underlines how Chinese artwork devoted to this subject were utilized in Chan practiced and could have participated as forms of transmitting or documenting the ideological shifts that were taking place in Chinese Buddhism during the time in which Liang Kai was painting. In canonical works such as the Buddhacarita (Life of the Buddha), a Sanskrit poem of the second century, the Buddha is described as entering into a grove within a forest. There are references to forests but no emphasis on the presence of the mountain. The emphasis on the mountain seems to be of a Chinese origin.

The three events of the story of Sakyamuni’s search for enlightenment in the mountains, Liang’s painting of Sakyamuni, and Liang’s own rejection of the court and subsequent departure for the mountains around Hangzhou, all accord with claims of parallelism between the artist’s painting of Sakyamuni and his own decision to leave the court. Such an interpretation suggests that although textual history of Liang’s life is lacking, the painting could exist now as a physical implication of how Buddhist reflection rested at the root of Liang’s renunciation of

333 Rogers 17. 334 Ibid.

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the academy. In his discussion of the artist’s Sakyamuni, Richard Barnhart examines these parallels,

Liang Kai here obviously wanted to impart a sense of the ineffable, unconquerable inner spirit of the Buddha, who emerges from long ascetic meditation wasted and gaunt but holding within himself now the seed of knowledge of the meaning of existence that would soon emerge at Vulture Peak as the dharma law. Like Sakyamuni, Liang Kai is said to have renounced his secular positions, resigning his position in the academy, and it is thought to have spent the latter part of his life in the environs of the monastic communities around West Lake.335

Whether Liang painted Sakyamuni Emerging from the Mountains before or after his own departure into Hangzhou’s environs is somewhat unclear, although its dating suggests that the work is of an academic production. The likelihood, however, of the piece’s importance as a transitional point in both the artist’s artwork and life, seems clear. Such a conclusion would also agree that the year 1204 was the year in which Liang both signed this painting and left his post as painter for the Southern Song academy.

Religio-Cultural Hybridization and
Developments in Ink Painting during the Northern Song Period

Chinese religions had not only become syncretized, or “hybridized,” during the Song period, but had also intertwined with the material and intellectual cultures of the time. Contemporary scholars such as Robert Sharf, have questioned the value of using the word “syncretism” as a way of explaining the complex transformations that religions undergo over time—primarily because the word in

335 Barnhart in Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, 136. 180

itself already presumes the existence of concrete religious categories. As Sharf explains, Chinese Buddhism, like other religions attached as branches of an umbrella religion, is at risk of losing its own unique characteristics when categorized as “syncretic” in nature,

In looking at the variety of phenomena subsumed under the rubric of Buddhism, it is tempting to invoke the notion of ‘syncretism.’ Buddhism would then be construed as an autonomous religious system that originated in India and assimilated (or was assimilated by) a variety of regional traditions and cults as it traveled across Asia…The problem is that the category of syncretism presupposes the existence of distinct religious entities that predate the syncretic amalgam precisely what is absent, or at least unrecoverable, in the case of Buddhism” 336

With Sharf’s precautions regarding terminology in mind, an examination of how not only religions hybridized during the Song, but also how other threads of culture merged with religion in China during the Song is helpful in an examination of how Chan art may have developed.

Looking first at religious hybridization as it occurred within the context of Song imperial life, and then at the interaction between Chan Buddhists and literati scholars in the development of a monochrome ink painting genre, a view of the religio-cultural environment in which Liang Kai developed his painting better emerges. In my examination of this merging between religion and culture during the Song period, I will in this section also comment on the possibility of a merging between artistic style and religious practice as manifest in the works of Liang Kai.

336 Robert Scharf, Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism, Buddhism (Studies in East Asian Buddhism 14), Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press – A Kuroda Institute Book 2002, 15-16.

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In her study of Southern Song art of Hangzhou and West Lake, art historian Hui-shu Lee discusses the Song imperial family’s adaptation of a hybridized manner of living—one that followed a religious and cultural amalgamation of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism. Providing description of the religious developments that flourished under the authority of Southern Song imperial interests, Lee’s discussion of the religious and philosophical fusions that took place during this time also provide the reader with an account of the court’s ideological influences under which artists such as Liang Kai painted,

The Southern Song imperial family promoted the idea of adopting elements of Buddhism and Daoism as supplements to Confucianism. This is justified in an essay by Emperor Xiaozong titled “Discourse on the Three Doctrines,” in which Xiaozong proclaims that if only one could synthesize the essence of the three doctrines and apply “Buddhism to cultivate one’s mind, Daoism to nurture one’s body, and Confucianism to govern the world,” one would then attain sagacity.”337

Lee outlines the variety of Daoist and Buddhist religious rituals and celebrations in which the imperial family partook. During the Southern Song, the imperial house promoted the propagation of certain ritual practices. Some temples flourished, even reaching historical levels of interest and support from both the court and the people in and around Hangzhou.338

The court also observed various ceremonies provided by both Daoist and Buddhist priests, Xiaozong reveals the eclectic nature of the Southern Song imperial house’s attitude towards and practice of religion. Generally speaking, their involvement is manifest in three areas: the practical, the artistic, and the intellectual…we can see how from birth to death members

337 Hui-shu Lee, 41.
338 Lee describes one of these temples, “The imperial family patronized the building of gongde fen, “blessing-tomb temples,” for the repose of the spirits of dead relatives; the phenomenon reached a peak during this time and led to the appearance of numerous temples around West Lake and in the capital” (Lee 42).

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of the imperial family relied on religion for both spiritual comfort and practical service, and this helps to explain their active patronage of Daoist and Buddhist institutions.339

Lee briefly describes some of the artistic practices associated with religion of the Southern Song. She mentions the imperial house’s offerings of artistic gifts in the forms of writings and paintings to the hundreds of temples in and around Hangzhou.340 She also concurs that interests surrounding general Daoist themes, such as “Discussing the Dao,” become apparent in the subject matter of many extant Southern Song paintings.341

As discussed briefly in Chapter One above, historian Edward Davis has also examined the phenomenon of hybridization as it occurred within the sphere of religious practice during the Song period.342 Davis does not believe that scholars today can look back and clearly categorize religions of the Song since the period marked a historical moment in which many individual practices became intertwined with one another. Instead, Davis describes the period as characterized by a hierarchical layering of religious practice in which a wide variety of social actors partook. As discussed in Chapter One, this layering included three social tiers in which the emperor, the court and other bureaucratic and religious entities (including civil and military officials, as well as Daoist and Buddhist religious authorities) comprised the first tier; other religious figures and ritual experts (e.g.

339 Ibid., 41-42.
340 Ibid., 42.
341 The subject of “Discussing the Dao” was an especially popular theme in the works of Academic painters of the court (Ibid., 43).
342 See Edward L. Davis, Society and the Supernatural in Song China, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001.

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Daoist Ritual Masters known as fashi) comprised the second tier; and less specialized individuals such as village spirit-mediums and local landowners comprised the third tier.343

In Davis’ creation of a theoretical vertical axis along which religions during the Song became woven together, any division not only of religions, but also of other social threads, becomes difficult. Davis spends some time researching how different religious and ideological groups, for example, merged during the Song, pointing in particular to how members of certain social and religious factions joined together in their attempts at resolving moral dilemmas. Such collaboration resulted in the overlapping strati of various religious and social practices. In one case, Davis examines the roles held by Daoist priests and spirit- mediums during the Song, recognizing the intellectual connection people made between individual illness and group morality.344

In elaborating upon this discussion of religio-cultural hybridization as it took place during the Song period, I turn to an event of important social interaction related specifically to monochrome ink painting that took place in the art history of the Northern Song. Collaborative efforts between different social groups at this time came to have a direct impact on the way that Chan painting would develop during the Southern Song. To be exact, intellectual activity between Chan Buddhism and the literati community of the Northern Song resulted in a literati reverence for the use of ink monochrome in paintings of particular objects from

343 Ibid., 7.
344 Davis Chapter Seven (153-170).

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the natural world. I will now look at one example of this phenomenon, which occurred when Chan monks and literati scholars worked together to utilize ink monochrome in the production of plum blossom paintings known as “ink plum,” or momei 墨梅.

Prior to the development of ink plum, Northern Song scholars had increasingly interested themselves in the use of ink wash to represent objects of the natural world, well exemplified in the ink paintings of bamboo (mozhu 墨竹)

created by the literati scholar, Wen Tong 文同 (1018-1079). 345 The interest had grown in part due to the strong influence that the Tang period poet, painter and

scholar-official, Wang Wei 王維 (699-759), who had himself begun a literati

tradition of using black and white ink wash in painting, had upon the Song literati.346 In addition to Wang’s development of ink wash in painting, the poet also had many connections with Chan Buddhist monks and other Chan practitioners during the Tang. The extent to which Wang’s painting or poetry was a result of his belief in Chan or his interactions with the Chan community, however, is debatable.347 In the case of the beginning of the ink plum painting in the Song, however, the genre represents a clear moment in which monks and

345 Ronald Egan, “The Emperor and the Ink Plum: Tracing a Lost Connection between Literati and Huizong’s Court” in Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture: China, Europe and Japan, Eds. David R. Knechtges and Eugene Vance, University of Washington Press, 2005, 117- 148, 119.

346 Kwong Lum and Jia Chen, “The Recovery of the Tang Dynasty Painting: Master Wang Wei’s Ink-Wash Creation ‘On the Wangchuan River’” in International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 11, No.3, Netherlands: Springer, (Spring 1998), 439-449, 441.
347 See Jingqing Yang, The Chan Interpretations of Wang Wei’s Poetry: A Critical Review, Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007.

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scholars were actively working together in their use of ink wash as a way of jointly representing the natural world. Ink productions of the plum flower were then envisioned as expressions of ideals promoted in the writings of the literati. Ultimately, these ink paintings of the natural world would directly impact the aesthetics and artistic practices of later artists. Looking briefly to the history of the development, various Song hybridizations within culture, including as they pertained to religion, become clear.

During the Northern Song, Chan Buddhist monks and literati scholars worked together in the creation of momei (ink plum). However, traditionally, the eleventh-century Chan monk Zhongren 仲仁, better known as Huaguang 華光 (ca.

1051-1123), is considered the true inventor of momei.348 Although Zhongren was probably not the first person to have painted plum blossoms in ink, it has been through stories of this Chan monk and his painting that historians have come to understand the Chinese literati as having recognized the importance of ink plum as an expression of literati ideology. Later on in the Northern Song, this reverence for these ink wash renderings of the plum blossom flourished further within literati circles, subsequently immortalized in the ink plum poetry of another Northern Song scholar, Chen Yuyi 陳與義 (1090-1139). And it was through Chen’s literati

writing that the poetic image attached to the ink plum ultimately traveled all the

348 Maggie Bickford, Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painting Genre, Cambridge, Massachusetts, New York, New York and Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 115 (for more information on this topic see also Maggie Bickford, Momei (Ink Plum): The Emergence, Formation, And Development of a Chinese Scholar-Painting Genre, Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms International Dissertation Services, 1987.

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way up to the emperor himself, revered by Emperor Huizong 徽宗 (1082-1135)

towards the end of the Northern Song period.349
Returning to history of the genre’s initial creation, however, it begins with

the death of the famous Northern Song literatus, Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037-1101), who passed away before Zhongren had painted his ink plum.350 Exiled friend, scholar

and student of Su, Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045-1105), one day encountered Zhongren in the forest, and in 1104 the two collaborated in the creation of the first

momei.351 In mourning both the death of Su Shih and of Su’s friend, Qin Guan 秦觀 (1049-1100), Zhongren created a painting and Huang composed a poem to

match Qin’s rhymes.352 The verse and the painting represented plum blossoms, but not in the botanical sense described by the Chinese in their word for the plum blossom, meihua 梅花. Instead, the collaboration resulted in the production of

momei, a painting in which plum (mei 梅) was its sole motif and ink (mo 墨) acted

alone as its medium. Although Zhongren’s painting is no longer extant, these descriptions of his method record the painting as having veered away from realism, instead using ink in a shadowy wet-wash manner to depict the plum blossom.

According to this story, the catalyst for the creation of Zhongren’s momei was the mournful reaction that he shared with Huang Tingjian in the wake of Su Shi’s death. No records exist of Su having painted ink plums during his lifetime,

349 Egan, “The Emperor and the Ink Plum” 117. 350 Bickford 115.
351 Ibid.
352 Ibid.

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although his thoughts on painting natural objects may have influenced the creation of the genre.353 Furthermore, as Maggie Bickford has noted in her work on the formation of ink plum in China, the appearance of the term, “momei,” first occurred in conjunction with Zhongren’s painting, after Su’s death.354 The point here is to stress the importance of Zhongren’s role in the creation of ink plum. Zhongren’s painting, when combined with Huang Tingjian’s poetry carried ink plum away from mere representation of the plum blossom. Yet it was not only within this juxtaposition of painting and poetry that the new genre arose. On a symbolic level, momei had also become associated with the character of Zhongren, the mountain monk known to have met with the exiled in natural landscape settings near to his Buddhist monastery, the Huaguang Monastery.355 This new association, therefore, connected ink plum to the role of the Chan Buddhist monk:

Zhongren and his momei held special meaning for the exiled. More than a source of solace and serenity in a sad and troubled time, the monk and his momei stood as exemplar and emblem of the eremitic alternative, an ideal that held pointed relevance for the men who just then were paying the price of a life enmeshed in worldly affairs and a fate tied to factional politics.356

Thus in the creation of momei during the Northern Song, one finds the incorporation of a new recluse-ideal attached to Chan Buddhism. When the literati

353 Susan Bush makes note of this, examining Su’s on Collected Poems: “In Su Shi’s time, ink flowers seem to have been a novelty, to judge from his comments on one such painting: ‘People have often done landscapes, bamboo and rocks, and figures in ink, but they have never painted flowers in ink’” Bush, 1971, 100.

354 Bickford 115.
355 “He (Zhongren) became known by the name of Huaguang because of his association with the Huaguang Monastery. He remained there for the rest of his life, except, perhaps, for travels in Guangdong” Bickford, 1996, 115.
356 Bickford 116.

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embraced momei, they also embraced the idea of reclusion connected to the image of the Buddhist monk.

Maggie Bickford has claimed in her extensive research on the history of the ink plum in China that by the end of the Song period, ink plum paintings had become appropriated by literati culture while culturally disassociated with Chan Buddhism,

Thus as ink plum passed from the hands of Zhongren out into the wider world beyond his mountain monastery, its image and ideas were transformed to meet the requirements of its new constituency of scholar- practitioners. By the late Song that transformation was complete. The ideal momei master no longer was a Chan monk-painter but had become a scholar-poet-calligrapher-painter, and Zhongren’s amorphous ink blossoms yielded to the lucid linearity of Yang Wujiu’s momei as the genre found its classical model.357

In their anthropomorphizing of the plum blossom through its representations in ink, the literati painters had also infused the natural object with symbolism related to human hardship. As such, the flower for them became representative of man. In this Northern Song merging of literati scholarship, Chan Buddhism, and the

artistic use of ink painting, an object from the natural world—the plum blossom— made a symbolic metamorphosis between natural and human worlds.

357 Bickford, 1996, 130. Yang Wujiu 揚無咎 (1097-1169) was a lyricist, calligrapher and painter of the Southern Song period (Bickford, 1996 131). Bickford goes on to explain how ink plums

maintained its connection to Chan in Japan, “As momei rises in popularity among scholar- practitioners, it gradually becomes distanced from its original intimate associations with Chan practice and ideas as they are represented by the founder’s activities and by the writings of his early admirers. Transmitted to Japan by monks, bokubai (momei) remained closely tied to Zen (Chan) painting. In China, however, by the fourteenth century, appreciations of momei and momei masters far more frequently invoke Confucian values, followed in frequency by Daoist and then by Chan associations” (Ibid., 129).

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Artistic Visualization of Man as Mountain and Chan Buddhism in the Later Paintings of Liang Kai

During the Song period, Chan Buddhism had reached perhaps its most sophisticated moment of expressing its genealogy, yet it differed little from other sects of Buddhism in its rituals, routines, and other elements of monastic life.358 However, its artwork, which was deeply connected to its unique lineage tradition, contrasted strongly with the artwork produced within the context of other sects. Before discussing Chan art and in particular Chan art in the work of Liang Kai, I shall first examine the nature of Buddhist art as it appeared more broadly within the context of Mahayana Buddhism in China. Visual representations associated with Chan differ significantly in style from those found in other forms of Chinese Buddhist art.

One of the most influential cultural items ever to have traversed the Silk Road was the religious art of Buddhism, which migrated north from India, traveling across the Central Plains and arriving in China at the beginning of the first century CE.359 Just as Buddhism transformed over time and across new geography, the religion’s artworks likewise spread in a variety of forms as they crossed the thousands of miles of land comprising the Silk Road.360

358 “Over the last several decades scholars of East Asian religious history have argued convincingly that the Chan/Zen dharma genealogy did not achieve its most elaborate and mature expression until the Song dynasty (960-1279)” Yukio Lippit, “Awakenings: The Development of the Zen Figural Pantheon” in Awakenings: Zen Figure Paintings in Medieval Japan, Eds., Gregory Levine and Yukio Lippit, New York: Japan Society Gallery in Association with Yale University Press, www.japansociety.org, 2007, 1-2.

359Annette L. Juliano and Judith A. Lerner, eds. Monks and Merchants: Silk Road Treasures from Northwest China. New York: Harry N. Abrams and The Asia Society, 2001, 119.
360 Xinru Liu. Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges AD 1-600, Delhi; Bombay; Calcutta; Madras: Oxford University Press, 1988, 5.

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The largest concentration of any temple complex to exist along the Silk Road is to be found in China’s Gansu Province.361 Of these temples, the most famous is the Thousand Buddha Caves complex, also known as the Mogao Caves, which is located in the small town of Dunhuang, a critical junction along the Silk Road and also a part of Gansu’s gateway to China’s imperial cities of Changan (present-day Xian) and Luoyang.362 Dunhuang contains China’s most magnificent repository of Buddhist art.363 Inside the caves, which still exist today, many polychrome murals, thousands of clay statues and sculptures, and numerous other art objects have been found.364 Additionally, excavations have also revealed Buddhist scriptures in many languages, relics and objects of daily life representative of how the many people who practiced at, resided or passed through the sacred site, including nuns, monks, patrons, pilgrims and artisans, lived their lives.365 Painted murals of Buddhas, Boddhisattvas and other flying figures grace the cave walls. The different artistic styles found within the many murals reflect historical and cultural changes of artistic and religious import. The Buddhist sculptures and paintings at Dunhuang, many of which the dry desert climate of the Gobi helped to preserve, have provided scholars and visitors with one of the richest and most unique opportunities to view Buddhist art and life along the Silk Road.

361 Juliano 119 and Jian Li, ed. The Glory of the Silk Road: Art from Ancient China, The Dayton Art Institute: Dayton, Ohio, 2003, 25.
362 Juliano 119 and Lerner 15.
363 Juliano 119; Susan Whitfield and Ursula Sims-Williams, eds. The Silk Route: Trade, Travel, War and Faith. London: British Library, 2004 228.

364 Li 25.
365 Juliano 122.

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Buddhist art is found in many other important locations along the Silk Road, and diverse artistic styles, from Greek to East Asian, influenced each other over time. At least as early as the fourth-century CE, Chinese artists began transforming some styles of Buddhist art found elsewhere along the Silk Road, often utilizing bronze, a Chinese creation, in their statuary representations of the Buddha.366

Recent studies in the area of Chinese material culture have shown how artists in China and abroad traditionally created objects of an ornate nature when working within the context of Mahayana Buddhist art. John Kieschnick, who specializes in various areas of Religious Studies, Buddhism and Chinese history, including the history of Chinese material culture, for example, has described the Buddhist utility of using such grandiosity in its art objects,

Objects offered in service to the Buddha were not restricted in the ways that objects associated with individual monks and nuns were. Simplicity and restraint were seldom important ideals in Buddhist art; Buddhist images and devotional objects were instead intended to provoke awe and devotion through spectacular displays of grandeur.367

Represented as spectacular images, artworks related to the Buddha became material tools through which the idea of the Buddha could become associated with a sense of grandeur for those who viewed them. Along these lines, artistic simplicity was not encouraged in the creation of this Buddhist art. Although associated in its ideology with a renouncing of the material world in favor of a

366 Luce Boulnois, The Silk Road. Trans. Dennis Chamberlain, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1966, 99.
367 John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003, 7.

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devotion for the immaterial and the austere, traditional Buddhism, explains Kieschnick, revered and promoted qualities of magnificence in its art objects, and this reverence is recorded not only in the artwork itself but in text related to its production,

When Chinese Buddhist texts describe Buddhist art and architecture, they do so with the vocabulary of opulence and not with the vocabulary of austerity and restraint…stupas are described as “resplendent” (huali) and as “ornamented with gold to make them dazzling.” They are marked by their beauty and “splendor.”

In exploring The Song Version of the Biographies of Eminent Monks (Song gaoseng zhuan 宋高僧傳, dated 988), Kieschnick finds within the biography of a

seventh-century monk the promotion of such grandiosity in Buddhist art objects, explained in the text by laymen as “meritorious things made in service to the Buddha must be spectacular.”368 In accord with these same principles of producing Buddhist material culture, contends Kieschnick, even the rooms in which monks lived were often created with a reverence for the ornate in mind.369 It was within this context that monastic tradition often called upon its artists to create the most dazzling images of the richest materials.

Unlike art associated more with traditional Buddhist material culture, however, painting connected to Chan Buddhism in China and Zen in Japan differs greatly both in its principles of production and in the type of object that results from it. Whereas sinologists such as Dutch art historian, H.A. Van Oort, have

368 Zanning 贊寧, Song gaoseng zhuan 宋高僧傳 in Kieschnick 11 369 Kieschnick 11.

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argued that “Chan art” is not defined by the artistic technique used to create it, but rather only by its subject matter, others have claimed that subject matter and technique cannot be separated so easily in this context.370 In their extensive study of paintings associated with Chan/Zen Buddhism, for example, art historians Helmut Brinker, Hiroshi Kanazawa and Andreas Leisinger discuss the difficulties of defining Chan art.371 According to these scholars, much of this difficulty lies in the complex ways in which different practices related to religion, art, literature, politics and culture had become extremely intertwined in China by the time of the Song period.372

Art historian Yukio Lippit has recently discussed the crucial role that figure painting played in Chan/Zen in both promoting and acting as a means of transmitting the lineage of the Chan school through visualization,

As a historical phenomenon, the emergence of figure painting as a preferred vehicle for the visualization of the school’s own lineage is not far removed from the emergence of a sustained and systematic rhetoric asserting the uniqueness of that very lineage. The argument set forth here is that these two phenomena are closely related—that painting functioned as a resonant and highly effective medium for the representation of the lineal prerogatives of Chan/Zen communities.373

370 “The question of whether a painting is a Chan painting or not is not decided by the koind of technique but only and exclusively by the subject matter” in H.A. Van Oort, “The Iconography of Chinese Buddhism in Traditional China” in Iconography of Religions, XII, 5, II, Leiden: Brill, 1986, 2.

371 Helmut Brinker, Hiroshi Kanazawa and Andreas Leisinger, “Zen Masters of Meditation in Images and Writing” in Artibus Asiae Supplementum, Vol. 40, Zurich, Switzerland: Artibus Asiae Publishers, 1996, 3-384.
372 Brinker, Kanazawa and Leisinger 17, 37.
373 Lippit, Awakenings 1.

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Although Chan/Zen also used text and other forms of communication in the transmission of its lineage, the material form of painting became a potent tool in this same process.374

Turning now to the painting of Liang Kai, one discovers that the artist’s devotion to painting the lineage history of Chan is clear. One also notes, however, that in painting as such, Liang also incorporated visualizations of the human body embedded in nature. This connection between body and nature through the means of painting is seen in Liang’s long undated handscroll, Painting of the Eight Monks (Bagaoseng gushi tu 八高僧故事圖).

In Painting of the Eight Monks, completed in ink and color on silk, Liang Kai’s brushstrokes use a combination of detailed lines with some of the more flowing strokes found in his later works. The subject matter of the scroll is devoted to the Chan theme of various encounters between Chan masters and students. In the third section of the scroll, Liang depicts the Chan monk, Niaoke 鳥窠 (“Bird’s Nest”), and the monk’s encounter with the Tang period poet and

scholar-official, Bai Zhuyi 白居昜 (772-846) (Fig. 15).375 This encounter is recorded in Niaoke’s biography as found in the fourth chapter of the Record of the

Transmission of the Lamp (Jingde Chuandeng lu 景德傳燈錄), the main textual

374 “Pictorial representation was certainly not the only arena in which genealogical premises were articulated and disseminated; the systematic promulgation of structured speech and texts in many different uniquely pictorial forms of persuasion, painting proved to be a particularly potent means of Chan/Zen self-defining” Ibid.

375 Charles Lachman, “Arhats in the Treetops” in Artibus Asiae, Vol. 51 no.3/4, Zurich, Switzerland: Artibus Asiae, 1991, 234-256, 234-235.

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source for the history of Chan Buddhism.376 According to the story, Bai Zhuyi, who has gone to pay his respects to Niaoke, remarks that the monk’s seat up in the tree could be a dangerous one.377 To this, Niaoke responds that Bai Zhuyi’s role in government is even more dangerous, after which he and the scholar-official discuss the Buddha-Dharma.378

Fig. 15 Liang Kai
Section 3: Niaoke 鳥窠 (“Bird’s Nest”) and Bai Zhuyi 白居昜 (early 13th century) (Detail from Painting of the Eight Monks Bagaoseng gushi tu 八高僧故事圖) The Shanghai Museum of Art, Shanghai

Although the brushwork of the handscroll shares some of the finer qualities, including the use of color, as found in Liang’s early style, some of the brushwork is also completed in a heavy ink wash style. The use of ink wash is the most prevalent feature of Liang’s later work. Furthermore, the subject matter of the handscroll is devoted entirely to a Chan lineage theme. These factors suggest that

376 Jingde Chuandeng lu, compiled in 1004, translated in Lachman 254-255. 377 Lachman 255.
378 Ibid.

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Liang most likely completed the work after his time as court painter in the Imperial Academy.

Liang’s representation of Niaoke is the first known depiction of the “bird’s nest” monk.379 Using long flowing lines to depict the folds of the monk’s robe, Liang has painted his monk as if a protrusion of the tree, partially embedding him in its trunk. In this manner, the monk’s body becomes a part of the tree and the surrounding nature, perched above a bowing Bai Zhuyi below. The artist’s signatures on all sections of the handscroll are also often difficult to find, scattered within the natural landscapes depicted on each segment of the scroll. On the segment devoted to Niaoke, Liang’s signature is found as scratched into the rock at the bottom of the tree. In this particular segment, therefore, the artist has not only used his ink to embed the painted figure in nature, but he has also embedded his own signature within. This is an important point because artists’ signatures have historically held special meaning within the context of Chinese art and aesthetics. In his work on Chan and Zen art, Helmut Brinker examine traditional Chinese art theory pertaining to the signature and its meaning, exploring the possibility that the signature itself may provide observers with an aesthetic channel through which the viewer might connect to the objects of the paintings—religious masters and meditations—as well as to the artist himself,

Already traditional Chinese art theories call signatures on ancient masterpieces of writing or painting “seals of the mind,” xinyin 心印. These theories emphasize the possibility to enter into virtually mystic contact not only with the work, but with its creator, by meditative empathy and the

379 Ibid., 234.

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aesthetic act of recreating, rushen 入神, “to penetrate the spirit” in such a way that the viewer and the viewed object would fuse into one. This intense experience of “complete absorption” was also called shenhui 神會 “spiritual communion”, by the literati of the eleventh and twelfth centuries….Above all in Zen circles, painting and writing were approached in this way; the viewer was drawn into an astonishingly complete experience cycle exceeding the actual work of art and directly involving the artist himself.380

It is unclear in his discussion of “traditional art theories” to whom exactly Brinker is referring. Based on his subsequent discussion of the Song literatus, Huang Tingjian, however, he appears to be referring primarily to literati thinkers who
were interested in understanding objects as meditative through their practices of Chan and painting. In commenting on connoisseurship, for example, Huang writes,

At first I could not appreciate painting, but then by practicing meditation (chan) I came to understand the efficacy of effortlessness, and by studying Tao I realized that perfected Tao is simple. Then when I looked at paintings I could completely understand their degrees of skillfulness and quality, grasping their details and penetrating their subtleties. But how can one discuss this with those who have seen little and heard less?381

In Chan terminology, xinyin actually refers to a “mental impression” that is not connected to words, be they written or spoken.382 Yet Huang Tingjian was clearly interested in how writing is connected to mental impressions, expressing this in his advice to others on how to practice calligraphy,

In studying calligraphy, copying can frequently catch formal likeness, but in general one takes pieces of earlier calligraphy and by looking at them

380 Brinker, Kanazawa and Leisinger 38, their discussion of shenhui taken from Susan Bush 50.
381 Huang Tingjian in Susan Bush 49 (from Huang Tingjian, Yuzhang huang xiansheng wenji 豫章黃先生文集 Collective Works by Huang Tingjian in the Sibu Congkan 四部叢刊 The Collected Publications from the Four Categories, Shanghai: Shangwu, 1928, VIII.27.5b-6a, 88).
382 “心印 Mental impression; intuitive certainty; the mind is the Buddha-mind in all, which can seal or assure the truth; the term indicates the intuitive method of the Chan (Zen) school, which was independent of the spoken or written word” (William Edward Soothill and Lewis Hodous, A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms, Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1937, 150).

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closely reaches a state of complete absorption (rushen). When one comes to the excellent places, one’s attention should not be divided; this is the essential route to complete absorption…When the ancients studied calligraphy, they did not copy exactly. They spread out the writing of a predecessor on the wall and looked at it in complete absorption. Then, when they put brush to paper, it was in accordance with the writer’s ideas.”383

Elsewhere, Huang writes about monk painting, discussing the way that mental impressions are integral to the successful representation of objects found in the painting. Specifically, Huang refers to the monk painting of Dao Zhen 道真 (11th

century), whose ink bamboo paintings he considered inferior to those of Wen Tong 文同 (1019-1079),

The reason why Master Wu (Wu Daozi 吳道子 680-740) surpassed his teacher was that he learned from the mind, so that whatever he did was excellent. When Administrator-in-chief Zhang (Zhang Xu 張旭 8th century) did not cultivate other skills, the use of his talents was undivided, so that he was able to become completely absorbed (ru yu shen 入于神). For if the mind is able not to be distracted by external things, then one’s original nature is preserved intact, and all things appear in abundance as if in a mirror. Why should this depend on [the painter’s] licking ink, sucking the brush, and squatting down before creating? So I say if Zhen wishes to obtain excellence in brushwork, he should obtain excellence of the mind”

384

This interest in connecting the mental to the physical, however, was not only a matter considered within the realm of literati thought. There is some evidence that Chan monks connected to literati culture (wenren chan 文人禪) were also engaged

in understandings of how objects, including paintings, could be connected to the

383 Huang Tingjian in Bush 50 (from Huang Tingjian, Collective Works, VIII.29.14b-15a, 92).
384 Here, Huang Tingjian So I say if Zhen wishes to obtain excellence in brushwork, he should obtain excellence of the mind” (Huang Tingjian in Bush 51 from Huang Tingjian, Collective Works, IV.16.28a-b, 94). This quote is also discussed in David Palumbo-Liu’s The Poetics of Appropriation: The Literary Theory and Practice of Huang Tingjian, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993, 70.

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human person. In the work of the Chan monk, Huihong Juefan 惠洪覺笵 (1071- 1128), for example, the monk remarks,

I am home on Mount Xiang 湘山, and daily am one with the trees and rocks. How is it that Huaguang 華光 (zhongren 仲仁) painted the trees and rocks and did not paint me?”385

Although Chan meditation manuals provide no proof that Chan monks used objects for meditative purposes, writings such as these demonstrate that monks were interested in the way that natural and artistic objects connected to people.

Returning to the discussion of xinyin, or “seals of the mind,” within the framework of this discussion of Chinese art theory, Liang’s painting of his eight monks acts not only to represent the eight eminent monks, but to offer a connection to a genre of Chan sages to his viewer. Pictorially, Liang’s monks stand out from the natural world while still enmeshed within it. Liang’s painting therefore offers its viewer not only the possibility of visually experiencing a connection to these sages, but of envisioning the sages as embedded in nature.

In commenting on Liang’s later undated works, scholars frequently assume based on the cursive style and Buddhist subject matter of many of these paintings, that they were created after the artist’s time as court painter in the Southern Song Academy. As noted above, some scholars have described the works also as representative of a shift away from the more secular setting of the court to the

385 Bush 50.n62 (Huihong Juefan, Shimen wenzi chan 石門文字禪 Shimen Chan Words in the Sibu Congkan 四部叢刊 The Collected Publications from the Four Categories, Shanghai: Shangwu, 1928, VII.26.17a, 93).

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religious environment of the monastery.386 Also noted earlier, however, a sharp divergence from academic taste occurs not only in how Liang used his ink to produce these later works (ink wash), but also in his rejection of silk in preference of paper as the material base for his paintings. In his description of the Southern Song’s final developmental phase in painting, art historian William Watson describes the striking phenomenon of Liang’s revolutionary use of brush and ink,

A final stage of Southern Song style is signaled by one of the most remarkable transformations to be found in the entire history: a revision to monochrome ink painting, though of an unprecedented kind, in which the virtues of line and broad ink effects are combined. The evidence for such radical change is preserved, among academicians, chiefly in the work of Liang Kai, a painter from Shandong…the medium was to be pure ink, applied on paper or silk in long strokes of varying width for landscape and the main lines of figures, with finer linearity only in the detail of portraits.387

The changes Watson describes are apparent in several of Liang’s later works, the subject matter of which, like the artist’s Eight Eminent Monks, is devoted to Chan themes. In his well-known painting, The Sixth Chan Patriarch Huineng Chopping Bamboo (Liuzu pizhutu 六祖劈竹圖) [Fig. 16], for example, Liang depicts the

famous Chan patriarch, Huineng 惠能 in black ink on paper. The painting’s

subject matter pertains to narration of Huineng’s enlightenment, which according to Chan legend occurred upon hearing the chopping of bamboo.388 In this undated painting, Liang’s brushwork is highly abbreviated, with quick strokes forming the

386 Barnart in Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting 136.
387 Watson 62.
388 Helmut Brinker, Zen in the Art of Painting, New York: Arkana (Routledge and Kegan Paul Inc.), 1987, 103.

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crouching profile of Huineng’s body. The patriarch is represented in the act of chopping a single shaft of bamboo, a wiry tree curving away from him towards the left-hand side of the paper.

Fig. 16 Liang Kai
The Sixth Chan Patriarch Huineng Chopping Bamboo Liuzu pizhutu 六祖劈竹圖 (early 13th c.) Tokyo National Museum

As noted earlier, the cursive style found in Liang’s painting of Huineng is not typical of Buddhist art. No ornamentation decorates the patriarch’s figure.

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Therefore, while the subject matter of the painting pertains to the patriarch’s sudden enlightenment (dunwu 頓悟), Liang’s spontaneous brushwork is also

sudden, as if to accord itself with the theme of the work. This untrammeled style of depicting Chan themes became more and more popular in China after the Southern Song, and it also dominated Zen art in Japan. Therefore, Liang’s “sudden strokes” were in a sense working towards the domestication of a Buddhist art in China. Of interest is the possibility that, not only in the object produced, but also within the physical act of painting, religious signification, if not sudden enlightenment itself, could manifest in Chan practice.

Through the abbreviated brushwork of Liang’s later paintings, perhaps it is the case that one is witnessing just such an occurrence. It will most likely always be unclear as to whether Liang’s use of an untrammeled style in his art signified a religious practice for him. Yet just as paintings of Chan sages became part of a visualization of a Chan sage genre, one cannot help to wonder whether the use of abbreviated brushstrokes was a material way through which the theme of Chan suddenness could be both expressed by the artist and experienced by the viewer.

Looking finally to Liang Kai’s undated painting of an anonymous immortal, Splashed Ink Immortal (Pomo xianren tu 潑墨仙人圖) [Fig. 17], one notes the

artist’s entire rejection of the Ma Xia school (馬夏畫派) style described above as

exemplified in his earlier, academic work, Scholar of the Eastern Fence. In favor of something brand new, Liang has ceased using delicate brushstrokes, avoiding the details of flowing robes and intricate tree branches—those brushstrokes

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Fig. 17 Liang Kai
Splashed Ink Immortal Pomo xianren tu 潑墨仙人圖 (early thirteenth-century) National Palace Museum, Taipei

associated so keenly with Ma Yuan’s popular court style of the Southern Song. In this painting of an immortal, Liang has instead used the yipin 逸品, or

“untrammeled” style of brushwork in which the artist’s ink flows freely, avoiding the detailed linear strokes found in his earlier work.389 The technique of this spontaneous brushwork is also referred to as jianbi 簡筆, or “diminishing

389 Yan Yamei 119.

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brushwork.”390 Taiwanese art historian, Li Lincan has commented that Liang Kai was the pivotal figure in the transformation of painting styles from detailed brushwork to the new style of ink monochrome painting (shuimo 水墨), which

especially flourished later on in the artwork of the Yuan Dynasty masters of painting (1271-1368) following the fall of the Southern Song period.391 The thirteenth century poem written by Chan master, Beijian Jujian 北礀居簡 (1164-

1246), describes the untrammeled quality to Liang’s paintings,

Liang Kai uses his ink but sparingly, as if it were gold; but when he is getting inebriated, the ink gets ever more condensed into dripping wet [ink traces], no matter if he adds his own sounds to this celestial music or if he remains silent.392

In the case of Liang’s Immortal, coarse splashes of ink depict the body of the immortal as a rough form on paper. The entire painting exudes a sense of dynamism, and although the immortal has a human body, the image does not appear figural. In discussing Liang’s Immortal, scholar Kristofer Schipper has described the immortal’s body as a mountain and not as a man,

The painting reproduced here, by Liang Kai, shows an anonymous Immortal whom I would identify as Laozi himself. The artist has painted him “as if he were a huge mossy mountain, enshrouded in rags of mist.” This brush technique used by the artist is that used in landscape painting, never for portraits. It is a wonderful example of the human being seen as a mountain.393

390 Brinker 126.
391 Li Lincan 李霖燦, “Renwu hua de shuimo danqing” 人物畫的水墨丹青 in Zhongguo meishu shigao 中國美術史稿 Taibei: Xiongshi tushu gongsi 台北: 雄師圖書公司, 1990, 214.
392 Brinker 126: from the anthology of Chan master Beijian Jujian.
393 Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body (1982). Trans. Karen C. Duval. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1993, 108.

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According to Schipper, Liang’s Immortal is not a representation of man, but that of a mountain. Indeed, the broad washes of ink that form the immortal’s body bring to mind the image of sheets of rock. And just as rock does not always cleave perfectly or smoothly, comprising instead a multitude of protrusions, flats, holes, bulges and dips when it breaks, so too does Liang’s ink work to create the uneven slabs of the immortal’s body. Schipper contends that Liang’s image of the Immortal could represent the Daoist figure of Laozi. The more recent, detailed scholarship of Yan Yamei has found similarities between the Immortal and similar figures of Chan monks.394 Although it would be difficult to confirm with absolute certainty whether Liang intended a Buddhist or Daoist nature to manifest in this representation of the immortal, it is clear through inscriptions available to us from Chan monks such as Dachuan Puji and Beijian Jujian that Liang was in contact with Chan monks, and that these monks were actively interested in the artist’s paintings. Brinker, Kanazawa and Leisinger addresses the issue of Liang’s relationship with Chan monks in and around Hangzhou,

Among the monks of the Chan monasteries in and near Hangzhou, he had many congenial friends who would write inscriptions for his paintings, such as the 37th abbot of Jingcisi, Beijian Jujian (1164-1246), and Yanqi Guangwen (1189-1263), abbot of a number of other important Chan institutions in that region.395

In light of the drastic shift that Liang’s style took once he departed from his position in the court, it is likely that his connections to the monastic community in

394 Yan Yamei 10, 38. 395 Brinker 200.

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and around Hangzhou influenced the subject matter he chose. An interesting possibility is that these same connections and Chan experiences in Liang’s life also influenced the style he used for his later paintings.

A focus on rushan 入山, or “entering the mountains,” is apparent in Chan histories and discourse records. In his work on Dongshan Liangjie 東山良价

(807-869), one of the most prominent Chan teachers of the Tang period, William Powell discusses the Chan focus on entering the mountain.396 As Powell explains, this human penetration into the mountains was on the one hand associated with pilgrimage practices attached to the temples in which Chan masters resided. Yet according to Powell, rushan does not only refer to the physical act of entering the mountain,

Journeys into the mountains seem to have been more than this. In terse anecdotes of the discourse records, where the context is often left unstated, it is significant that mountain wandering, when it occurs, is mentioned explicitly. Furthermore, mountain wandering is often presented as a separate practice, an end in itself, with no mention of visiting teachers.397

Powell explains that the practice of entering the mountain, prevalent in Chan Buddhism, could be attached to other traditions in China, Liang Kai’s Immortal

But there are certain spiritual traditions in China, such as Maoshan Daoism 茅山道, where the aspirant is believed literally to go inside a mountain in order to undergo spiritual transformation. However one entered the mountains, the implications of the journey invariably seemed to be spiritual.398

396 William Powell, The Record of Dongshan, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986. 397 Powell 16.
398 Ibid.

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is a man who enters the mountain by merging physically with the landscape via the ink of the artist’s brush. If the painting is indeed related to Chan Buddhism, it could be a physical manifestation of rushan.

Regarding the connection between Liang’s work and Chan Buddhism, William Watson discusses the phenomenon of the powerful effect that Liang’s work had on Japan, where it was ultimately best preserved within the Zen community. Watson accentuates the powerful artistic break that Liang’s work made from the Southern Song Academy, stressing the timeframe of Liang’s development in relationship to similar development that occurred much later in the ink and brush of the Yuan masters, although Yuan artists are often mistakenly attributed with having been the founders of this artform,

In Japan, where his work is now mainly preserved, Liang Kai’s departure from official orthodoxy has been described as breaking a deadlock arising from ossifying technique and academic mannerism, although this sudden shift of style is more often attributed to the liberating effect of the advent of Yuan power in 1279, two decades at least after Liang’s death.399

The impact of Liang’s painting style had a lasting effect not only in China but in Japan, and this untrammeled way of painting the human body became an integral part of a domesticated form of Buddhist art in China and Japan.

As discussed earlier in this chapter, the merging that took place between ink painting, literati scholarship and Chan Buddhism during the Northern Song period, resulted in ink paintings of natural world objects (e.g. the plum blossom) ideologically representative of human character. One could interpret a reverse of

399 Watson 62.

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this anthropomorphism to be at work in the art of Liang Kai. Returning to Kristofer Schipper’s description of Liang Kai’s painting of an immortal, Schipper points to an interesting phenomenon as occurring between subject matter and style in the artist’s representation. The human form of the immortal does not look human, but instead looks like the natural form of a mountain. It is interesting also that, unlike other similar ink on paper paintings by Liang (e.g. The Sixth Chan Patriarch Huineng Chopping Bamboo), the figure here is represented alone on the scroll with no background landscape details. Instead, the figure becomes its own landscape.

The style of painting that Liang uses to depict the body of the immortal had previously been used in painting circles devoted to the representation of mountains and natural landscapes. Stylistically, therefore, Liang in his Splashed Ink Immortal paints the form of a human body in the same manner that a traditional Chinese landscape artist depicts a mountain. Yet Liang’s fusion of body and landscape differs greatly from those mentioned earlier as found in the artwork of the Northern Song and perhaps best exemplified in Guo Xi’s monumental landscape painting, Early Spring. Unlike Guo Xi’s masterpiece, Liang Kai’s paintings of bodies in human form do not represent social hierarchy in pictorial fashion. And the body in Liang’s work acted neither artistically nor ideologically to appropriate the space of the mountain. If anything, the mountain is rather that which pictorially appears to appropriate the human body, enabling the immortal’s body to metamorphosize into a landscape of the natural world.

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Conclusion

Song Art and Religion: the Materiality of Religious Experience

This dissertation proposes that art and representation are often as influential to some religious developments and experiences as are texts and rituals, and during China’s Song period, the fusion of religions and material culture became integral to the concept of religion. Protestant biases within the field of religious studies have resulted in a failure at acknowledging material culture’s key role within the study of religion. The research here has provided data to counter these biases, supporting a renewed approach to the study of religion in which art and material culture are of central importance to the study as a whole.

As the research has contended, the artworks and other material items examined did not act not as representational objects during China’s Song period. Rather, they were integral and often pivotal both to religious developments and to the hybridization of religions that took place at that time. In these instances, a material object not only became an active part of the way that a religion was practiced or an ideology expressed, but also participated on a transformative level within the religion or ideology. In Chapter Two, the research examined this fusion of representation and ideology in the context of Song literati culture. As discussed, literati scholars envisioned natural objects such as bamboo and plum blossoms as symbolic representations of human character, describing these unions in their writings and representing them in a new literati painting tradition devoted to the use of ink monochrome. Strongly part of their ideological experience, the literati

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intellectualized the natural object through its painted form. Meanwhile, in the imperial context of the Northern Song, the court artist, Guo Xi, also visualized nature both in his writing and painting, utilizing his art as a means through which mountain and nature could be envisioned as man and society. Merging the spheres of human body and natural world in the material form of painting, Guo Xi expressed political ideology, powerfully benefiting the imperial state. Later, during the Southern Song period, it was the material means of Neo-Confucian academy building that played the critical role in the creation of a physical mountain space through which Neo-Confucian ideology could be expressed. Modeling their academies after Daoist and Buddhist temples, Neo-Confucians successfully utilized the space of the mountain to deify humans for their civic life, transforming shrines from Buddhist and Daoist objects to objects emblematic of the state’s power.

In its discussion of how Daoist alchemical body charts developed during the Song period, Chapter Three showed evidence of a fusion between representation and religion. In this case, the material development of the charts correlated with the rise of internal alchemy. Thus, just as Daoists were in the process of internalizing their religious experiences, they were simultaneously externalizing them through the material means of alchemical representation. During the Song, mental visualization and physical representation became intimately bound to the Daoist religious experience, and Daoists today still utilize representation to empower their visualization practices.

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As an example of the synthesis between art and religion, Chapter Four examined how the Southern Song painter, Liang Kai, used ink and brush to coalesce images of nature and body in his artwork. The stylistic quality of Liang’s paintings is associated with Chan Buddhist art in China and Zen Buddhist art in Japan. But as the dissertation has contended, Liang’s technique of painting is also closely identified with the religious experiences connected to Chan and Zen. Thus in this case, painting became an integral part of how a domesticated Buddhism evolved in China and Japan. A cultural-historical-religious significance of mountains in Chinese culture, sometimes manifest in artistic and literary references to these natural landscapes, is also evident in the domestication of Buddhism in China.

In each of these chapters, the religious and ideological transformations described pertained to how human bodies were depicted materially in relationship to the natural world. The mental and the physical were synthesized as part of a momentous religious or ideological process, and the interaction between the non- material activity of visualization and the material output of representation was therefore paramount, as opposed to accessory, to the ways that different groups of people experienced and expressed religion and ideology during the Song.

The research has also shown how in their utilization of material objects to empower their ideologies, Song religious groups were functioning in an interdependent manner and not an independent one. As discussed in the literary review of Chapter One, contemporary research on Chinese religions focuses on the

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interrelationship of Chinese religions. This dissertation has used material evidence to show how religious and ideological groups of the Song not only acted interdependently, however, but how they also relied upon a variety of actors from other arenas of society, such as art and politics. This interdependency becomes clear, for example, in the way that Chan monks and Song literati fused their activities in the creation of the scholar-painting genre of ink plum (momei); or in how influential individuals connected to Daoism (the thirteenth-century ritual master, Xiao Yingsou) or to state ideology (the eleventh-century artist and member of the literati class, Guo Xi), attracted the emperor’s eye through the material form of art. All of these actors played important roles in how art and other representations came to be perceived within the different religious and ideological contexts of the time. Thus, the dissertation contends that Chinese religions of the Song period were not only fused and hybridized with one another, but were also more broadly woven together with other social developments of the time, and proof for this lies in the different representations left behind.

Lastly, the research has demonstrated how material representations played an active role in perceptions of sacred space during Song China. Through art and representation, the Chinese of this time visualized space as both microcosmically and macrocosmically connected to the human body. And while individuals of some religious groups were in the process of exploring a mountain-body connection within the sphere of Song art and representation, proponents of different schools of thought were also actively discovering, assimilating and

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appropriating sacred space, effectively juxtaposing actual physical territory with their ideologies. Various theories of space are helpful in understanding the spatial ways in which art and religion fused during the Song. Within Henri Lefebvre’s trialectic theory of space, through which spatial practice, representations of space and representational space move between one another to produce space, the human body plays a crucial role. The body not only occupies space. It also produces space. As has been shown in the case of Song art and religion, this production of space through the body, which became physically manifest in the form of art, related to the social activity of individuals and groups. Religious authorities, religious practitioners, artists, government officials, and literati thinkers, among others, all interacted with mountains and material culture in many different ways so as to produce the space of the mountain. The individual body, explains Lefebvre, held a responsible role in the demarcation of space and creation of new networks and spatial links—physical, religious, artistic and intellectual—all as they related to the mountain.

In its demonstration of how the production of space occurs in the context of the religious matrix found in China during the Song period, this dissertation has offered an example of how spatial analysis is relevant to the field of religious studies.

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Towards Metaphysical Unity in a Contemporary Theory of Religion

Theories of religion are often associated with scholarly perceptions of a metaphysical duality at work between two realms: the material and the ideological. Modern western philosophies have been influential in the construction of these perceptions. Findings of this dissertation, however, show that in the context of Song religions, there is no clear duality between these realms. Instead, form and idea are interwoven so closely within the Song religious experience that to divide them into parts would be impossible.

Findings in this dissertation accord closely with the findings of scholars such as Jonathan Z. Smith, Colleen McDannell and John Kieschnick, who describe a Protestant bias as having marked the field of religious studies, including as found in some of the most important and foundational texts, many of which are still used in the teaching of students of religion. As such, artworks and other forms of material culture that are “linguistically impoverished” have been relegated to a lower position on the totem pole of religious studies scholarship. This Protestant bias is connected to the way that the focus on both transcendence and a theoretical dual relationship between the transcendent and the immanent has made its way into the philosophy of religion, stemming from popular transcendental philosophies such as those of Georg Wilhelm Hegel.

Although much progress has been made over the past few decades in how scholars of religion utilize sources of material culture in recovering the history of religions, the bias of elevating text and idea over the material, is still often a

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pervasive factor not only in how scholars approach religious history, but in how students are taught to approach their subject matter. This thesis has maintained that visualization, typically associated with mental activity, and representation—a physical activity—are actually inseparably bound in the way that religions are experienced, and that material objects should figure more prominently as a research focus within the field of religious studies.

In the context of the Chinese religions discussed here, much more could be researched and theorized as to how art and other material life of the Song were critical to its religious developments. With a lack of textual sources descriptive of Liang Kai’s life and work, for example, the artist has received little attention from art historians and other scholars, and yet the paintings themselves may provide fertile ground for future interdisciplinary research. An examination of Liang Kai’s paintings and how they relate to the history of Chan/Zen religious practices could penetrate much deeper into this issue of how painting relates to the history of Buddhism in East Asia. Similarly, Daoist iconography is a field rich for exploring the relationships between material culture and religious experiences of the Song period. The Yongle Palace 永樂宮, for example, is one of China’s most famous

temples, built in honor of Lü Dongbin 呂洞賓, an important figure in the history

of Daoism who is recognized as an immortal ancestor of the Quanzhen Order of Daoism.400 Temple construction began towards the end of the Song period and was completed in the middle of the fourteenth-century at the end of the Yuan

400 Liao Ping, Ed., The Yongle Palace Murals 永樂宮壁畫, Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1985. 6-8.

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period, and the palace now acts as one of the greatest repositories of Daoist art in the world, containing more than eight-hundred square meters of Daoist murals along its walls.401 In addition to a few invaluable studies in which members of the various Daoist pantheons of the palace are identified and the history of the palace iconography is described, there is one recent exploration of how Daoist ritual influenced Daoist representation at the site. However, there is still little exploration into how the images themselves may have influenced the religious practices at the temple. A future study of this religious site could explore how images may have influenced Daoist practice at the palace, as well as how these images, which depict Daoist immortals and other figures of Daoism’s celestial bureaucracy, correlate to images found in temple art, ritual manuals, prayer books and other materials used at other temples of China.

Future studies such as these will provide more evidence of how important material movements not only occur alongside religions, but are also enmeshed with the way that those religions develop. Studies of the material thus provide a more complete view of the ideological. As this dissertation has examined in the case of Song China, objects acted as crucial physical means through which Chinese people sought to empower their religions. Inescapably part of the immanent world, all religions throughout history have likewise relied to varying degrees upon the material to express their ideologies.

401 Liao Ping 6-8.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my advisor, William Powell, who many years ago encouraged my curiosity about Chinese paintings of men, which to me looked more like paintings of mountains than of men. While providing me with the freedom necessary to pursue this topic, he also developed my very rough and naïve understanding of Chinese culture and religion, patiently assisting me with a steady flow of research guidance over the years, always marveling me with his broad knowledge and open-minded approach to the world. Professor Ronald Egan introduced me to the beauty of the Chinese language and the rich complexity of Song literati culture. In such a rare and wonderful way, his brilliance as teacher and scholar never overshadowed his kindness and humility as a person. Through our weekly meetings, Professor Richard Hecht fundamentally taught me how to read and write about books in a new way. His method of teaching and engaging with students is something that I will carry with me always, and I am also grateful for the excitement he brought to my understanding of the relationship between art and religion. I would also like to thank Professor Peter Sturman, who first introduced me to Chinese art. Professor Charles Benn opened my mind to the possibilities of art and religion in the context of China when I visited him in Hawaii back in 2004. I am also indebted to Patrice Fava, who helped me in the gathering of research materials from China, and whose explanations on Daoist art and visualization stimulated my own research on the same subject. Artist and friend, Jamie Chiahui Gao, aided me in the reading and interpretation of several key Chinese texts.

On a personal level, I thank my parents, William and Marilyn, for having exposed me to Chinese culture when I was a young girl, and for their appreciation of art, music, literature and knowledge. I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to the late Professor William Sibley, who knew me since my childhood and supported me immensely in the early stages of my dissertation writing. Sadly, he passed away in 2009 and I never had the chance to thank him for his dissertation help nor for the loving friendship we had when he was alive. My close friend, Bruce Viles, has also been of immeasurable encouragement to me in this project and especially after the birth of my son in 2009, during which time I needed all of the support I could get. Similarly, the friends and families of our community here in San Francisco have been important to me in the completion of my work since the birth of my son. Finally, I thank my dear husband, Antoni Batchelli Estrada, our son, Kieran, and our unborn child, “Beanie,” who is due in a few weeks. Without their love and constant understanding, this dissertation would never have come to fruition.

I dedicate this dissertation to my husband Toni.

EDUCA TION

VITA OF ANNA MADELYN HENNESSEY APRIL 2011

2011 (June) Ph.D. (expected) Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara 2008 (June) Ph.D. Candidate, Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara 2005 (September) M.A., Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara
1997 (May) B.A., Philosophy and Romance Language, New York University, New York

PHD QUALIFYING EXAMS

2008 (June) 2008 (June) 2008 (June)

Approaches to the History of Daoism, Daoist Identity and Theories of Space

Dr. William Powell (Pass with Distinction)

History of Religions and Theories of Art

Dr. Richard Hecht (Pass with Distinction)

Religious and Philosophical Influence in Literati Thought of the Song Period

Dr. Ronald Egan (Pass with Distinction)

LANGUAGES Classical: Chinese
Modern: Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish

FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS

2010 Pacific Rim Research Program Mini-grant
2008-2009 University of California Regents Humanities Special Fellowship 2007-2008 Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship
2007 Stephen Hay Graduate Fellowship
2006-2007 University of California Regents Humanities Special Fellowship 2005-2006 Ministry of Education (MOE) Taiwan Scholarship
2004-2005 University of California Regents Humanities Special Fellowship
2004 Graduate Council Travel Grant
2003-2004 University of California Regents Humanities Special Fellowship 2002-2003 University of California Regents Humanities Special Fellowship
2002 Dean’s Fellowship in the Humanities, University of California
1997 Founders Day Award, New York University
1997 French Book Award, Department of French, New York University 1996 College of Arts and Sciences Travel Grant (Italy), New York University

PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT

2002 (Fall) Academic Reader, Dutch Art in the Age of Rembrandt – University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Art History
2003 (Fall) Teaching Assistant, Art Survey I: Ancient – Medieval Art – University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Art History

2003 (Spring), Exhibition Assistant, Double Beauty: Qing Dynasty Couplets from the Lechangzai Xuan Collection – University of California, Santa Barbara, University Arts Museum and Department of Art History
2004 (Winter) Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Art – University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Art History

2004 (Spring) Teaching Assistant, Art Survey III: Modern – Contemporary Art – University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Art History
2005 (Winter-Spring) Research Assistant, Research Asian American Pastors Leading Multiethnic Congregations (Project Director: Professor Kathleen Garces-Foley, California State University, Northridge)

2005-2006 Editorial Assistant, Epoché: The University of California Journal for the Study of Religion, University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Religious Studies
2005-2007 Research Assistant, French Translation and Research on Religious Experience and Psychology in 19th-century France (Project Director: Professor Ann Taves, University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Religious Studies)

2006 (Fall) Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Native American Religious Studies – University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Religious Studies
2007 (Winter) Teaching Assistant, Introduction to the Study of Religion – University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Religious Studies

2007 (Spring) Teaching Assistant, Religious Approaches to Death – University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Religious Studies
2008 (Winter) Academic Reader, Quest Narrative: Xiyouji 西遊記 – University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of East Asian Studies

PUBLICA TIONS

ARTICLES AND BOOK REVIEWS

“The Troublesomeness of Metaphysicians: Subjectivity, Objectivity and Aesthetic Relativism.” Philosophy, Art, History, Future. Ed. Vladimir Marchenkov and The School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University (forthcoming).

Review of Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, by Ann Braude. Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review. Stevens Point, Wisconsin: Academic Publishing (Spring 2011).

“Spinoza, Substance and Subjectivity in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture. Villanova University: vol. 5-2 (Fall 2007).

“Substance and Subjectivity in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.” International Journal of Philosophy. Taiwan: Fu Jen Catholic University (July 2006) 79-97.

“The Troublesomeness of Metaphysicians: Subjectivity, Objectivity and Aesthetic Relativism.” Unpublished thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2005. 76 pp.

Review of God and Caesar in China: Policy Implications of Church-State Tensions, edited by Jason Kindopp and Carol Lee Hamrin. Epoché: The University of California Journal for the Study of Religion. Santa Barbara: University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Religious Studies (Spring 2005).

ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES

“Art.” Encyclopedia of Global Religion. Mark Juergensmeyer and Wade Clark Roof, Eds. Sage Publications, 2011.

“Buddhist Art on the Silk Road.” World History Encylcopedia (Era 4: 300-1000 CE), vols. 7 & 8. Wilfred Bisson, Ed. ABC-CLIO, 2011.

“China Imagines the Outer Barbarians.” World History Encyclopedia (Era 6: 1450 – 1770), vols. 12, 13 & 14, Dane Morrison, Ed. ABC-CLIO, 2011.

“Early Medieval Chinese Alchemy.” World History Encyclopedia (Era 4: 300-1000 CE), vols. 7 & 8. Wilfred Bisson, Ed. ABC-CLIO, 2011.

“Early Medieval Chinese Painting.” World History Encylcopedia (Era 4: 300-1000 CE), vols. 7 & 8. Wilfred Bisson, Ed. ABC-CLIO, 2011.

“Ethnic Classification and Hierarchy during the Yuan Era.” World History Encyclopedia (Era 5: 1000-1500 CE), vols. 9, 10, & 11. Al Andrea, Ed. ABC-CLIO, 2011.

“Festivals and Holidays in Chinese America.” Encyclopedia of Asian Pacific American Folklore. Jonathan H.X. Lee and Kathleen Nadeau, Eds. Greenwood Press, 2010.

“Religion in Chinese American Communities.” Encyclopedia of Asian Pacific American Folklore. Jonathan H.X. Lee and Kathleen Nadeau, Eds. Greenwood Press, 2010.

“Representations of the World and Cosmos in Chinese Tomb Décor.” World History Encyclopedia (Era 3: 300 BCE – 300CE ), vols. 5 & 6. William E. Mierse, Ed. ABC-CLIO, 2011.

“Rites of Passage.” Encyclopedia of Asian Pacific American Folklore. Jonathan H.X. Lee and Kathleen Nadeau, Eds. Greenwood Press, 2010.

“Yin and Yang.” Encyclopedia of Asian Pacific American Folklore. Jonathan H.X. Lee and Kathleen Nadeau, Eds. Greenwood Press, 2010.

CONFERENCE PAPERS

2004 (July) “The Lights Going On and Off.” (Re)Discovering Aesthetics. University College Cork, Ireland.

2004 (January) “Yongwu and Momei in the life of Wu Zhen.” Second Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities. Honolulu, Hawaii.

PROFESSIONAL SOCIETIES

2004-Present 2007-Present 2006-Present 2009-Present 2005-Present

American Academy of Religion
American Oriental Society
Association for Asian Studies
College Art Association
International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy

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INDEPENDENT PROJECTS

2010-Present: http://visualizingbirth.org/ Blog devoted to exploring the interaction between art images and birth as a rite of passage.
2004, 2007-2008 Violinist, Middle East Ensemble, University of California, Santa Barbara 2002-2004 Internet development project with the University of Michigan’s SmartGirl.org website. Project is for children, especially for girls, and relates to their own reflections on art: http://smartgirl.org/writing/reflections/index.html

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Chinese Images of Body and Landscape: Visualization and Representation in the Religious Experience of Medieval China

Anna Madelyn Hennessey

Chinese Images of Body and Landscape:
Visualization and Representation in the Religious Experience of Medieval China