Mountains as writing supports – cliffs, pillars, steles - in Medieval China
Résumé
Mountains as writing supports – cliffs, pillars, steles - in Medieval China: (1) "Landmarks" (rock formations, infrastructural and architectural projections) in the four landscapes inscribed by Zheng Daozhao (455–516) -- Lia WEI This talk focuses on one aspects of a larger project funded by the French National Research Association (ANR), titled Altergraphy* (2023–2028), on medieval Daoist and Buddhist cliff inscriptions and their reception. It explores the means and motives of Zheng Daozhao (455–516 CE), a local official, who appropriated four mountainous landscapes in present day Shandong province by inscribing them. While the project generally considers the inscriptions in all their materiality, at several scales, this talk zooms out to the structure of the four mountains and the typology of inscribed landmarks. The mountains are close to the towns where Zheng was stationed, and their summits are partly intervisible. He inscribed remarkable rock formations (cave, platform, rocky outcrop or pillar, mountain peak, valley entrance to or exit from the valley), by engraving directly the rough, unpolished rock, with characters of varying size and depth. For the most part, the inscriptions are short. They name the physical stone surface they are engraved on, evoke surrounding "landmarks", depict ritual activities, and stage figures of immortals or fantastic creatures in these selected locations. The longer texts are eulogies to the memory of his father, descriptions of visions situated in the four mountains, and consolidating the historical and religious pedigree of these landscapes. Here, the funerary spheres (narrating the history of one's clan and locating one's father in a mountain considered a cenotaph or afterlife itinerary) and religious (meeting the deities, meditating on their teachings in a cave or sitting on the mountain sitting on the mountain top) intersect in literary activity and epigraphic markings. * https://altergraphy.hypotheses.org/ (2) From Epigraphic Traces to Perception and Practice—the case of medieval Buddhis cliff inscriptions -- Manuel Sassmann Only decades after the Daoist cliff inscription discussed in the previous talk, Buddhists also appropriated the mountains of Shandong province. The Stone Sutras project* has documented more than twenty sites in Shandong, where monumental epigraphy with Buddhist sutra texts turned the rugged landscape into a land of the Buddha. Like the Daoist counterparts, they were carved under the open sky into the living rock. Mostly sutra excerpts of varying lengths, and verses, but also Buddha names constitute the bulk of the corpus. Although they are occasionally accompanied by donor inscriptions, not much is known about the persons and the religious background of the traces. Unlike in the case of Zheng Daozhao, who is well-attested in historical sources, scholars of the Buddhist inscriptions have to rely mainly on the bare evidence left on the stone. The inscribed sutra passages do not give much context. Traditional scholarship has mainly focused on cataloging the inscriptions and appreciating the calligraphy. Only in the last decades scholars attempted to understand the religious practices in which the inscriptions were embedded. This talk analyses several cases of how scholars tried to grapple with the problem of the sparse historical context and attempts to formulate the analytical framework that identifies the elements—such spatial arrangement, forms of writing supports (such as virtual steles), text genres—that are conducive to reconstructing perception and religious practices from epigraphic traces. *https://www.stonesutras.org
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Est complété par 10.58079/12yoz Article Lia Wei and Manuel Sassmann. (2024). Altergraphy at ‘Daoism in Cliffs, Caves, and Inscriptions’, Arizona State University December 6-8, 2024. https://doi.org/10.58079/12YOZ