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"Picturing Protection and Guidance at the Threshold: The Ontology of Itineracy in Peripatetic Monk Paintings from Mogao Cave 17, present-day Gansu Province, China"

Davin Luce (Â鶹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾)

What instills a representation of an itinerant monk with protective efficacy when the practice itself was considered rather normative and orthodox? This paper examines this question through a set of ten paintings on paper depicting itinerant monks discovered in Mogao Cave 17.
My paper first discusses the formal elements of the paintings that suggest their original format was paired hanging scrolls. It then draws on contemporaneous mural paintings from Mogao Cave 45 to argue that the paintings on paper were intended to be hung at threshold areas; zones that signified a separation between the mundane world and the elsewhere.
Second, I focus on iconography by discussing the name of the Baosheng Buddha (‘Jewel-born’; Skt.: Ratnasambhava), which is inscribed on roughly half of the paintings. Through an examination of relevant historical Buddhist texts, I demonstrate how this Buddha relates to notions of death and protection from an adverse rebirth.
To conclude, I examine the miraculous potential of itineracy by discussing several biographies of historical monks who traveled between China and India via the land and maritime Silk Routes. These biographies highlight how some itinerant monks—especially those who traveled great distances—possessed the miraculous ability to save themselves and others from harm by chanting the name of different Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The paintings of itinerant monks from Cave 17 depict one such chanting monk, pointing to his miraculous nature.
By bringing together format and spatial context of display, iconography, and the biographies of historical itinerant monks, my talk will demonstrate how itineracy was one factor that imbued the monks in the Cave 17 paintings with a protective capacity, guiding the viewer on their journey to the elsewhere.

Light refreshments served.