Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.21 (890 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0295986859 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 536 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-11-17 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Exploration of these issues and themes would be enough to make this book a worthwhile study, but the real attraction here is the rich interpretive perspectives that Wang applies to medieval Chinese transformation tableaux. And that is no small achievement."Art Bulletin"Shaping the Lotus Sutra provides novel perspectives for deciphering the medieval Buddhist representation."Religious Studies Review"Eugene Wang has written a challenging, clever, dense and provocative book that is bursting at the seams with insights and ideas. All in all, the book is an extraordinary
A fascinating work by a very thoughtful scholar. The Chenchen A fascinating work by a very thoughtful scholar. The book analyzes and uncovers the underlying desire and demands hidden behind the Buddhist artworks in their historical context, thus providing the readers convincing answers to why and how these artworks were made.
These pictures inspired meditative journeys through sophisticated formal devices such as mirroring, mapping, and spatial programming - analytical categories newly identified by Wang.The book examines murals in cave shrines at Binglingsi and Dunhuang in northwestern China and relief sculptures in the grottoes of Yungang in Shanxi, on stelae from Sichuan, and on the Dragon-and-Tiger pagoda in Shandong, among other sites. Rather than focus on individual murals as isolated compositions, Wang views the entire body of pictures adorning a cave shrine or a pagoda as a visual mapping of an imaginary topography that encompasses different temporal and spatial domains. The book is ultimately a history of the Chinese imagination.. Shaping the Lotus Sutra explores this visual world.Challenging long-held assumptions about Buddhist art, Eugene Wang treats it as a window to an animated and spirited world. Yet the cosmos revealed in these tableaux is strikingly different from that found in the text of the sutra. The miracles and parables in the "king of sutras" inspired a variety of images in China, in particular the sweeping compositions known as transformation tableaux that de