Panel 28: Religions on the Premodern Silk Road

Chair: Alexander Hsu, University of Notre Dame

Panelists

Ronghu Zhu, University of Chicago, “Travel and the Cult of the Marīci-deva Sutra in Medieval Dunhuang”

More than twenty copies of the Marīci-deva Sutra (Molizhitian jing 摩利支天經) survive in the Dunhuang manuscripts. What accounts for the popularity of the sutra in medieval Dunhuang? To grapple with this question, I first survey textual practices associated with the sutra by examining the difference between the Dunhuang copies and Bodhiruci’s translated version, of which a set of the copies are short recensions, as well as a miracle tale and colophons appended to the copies. All the evidence, I suggest, indicates that the sutra was worshipped for its specialized protection for travel. The concern with travel safety guided the abridgment of Bodhiruci’s version into the short recensions and was articulated in the miracle tale and colophons. I then proceed to contextualize the cult of the sutra in the political and geographical realities of Dunhuang in order to understand why the sutra’s specialized protection for travel gained appeal. I show that travel safety was a perennial concern in medieval Dunhuang, which is exemplified in the activities of the Dunhuang diplomats who had to traverse territories occupied by ethnic rivals to pay tribute to and secure recognition – and legitimacy – from the Chinese courts. Profuse religious activities (divination for travel, praying to deities for safety, and carrying religiously significant objects such as amulets, talismans, and images) were undertaken to address the perceived insecurities of travel, which, I argue, paved the way for the reception of the sutra specializing in the protection for travel.

Chun Chen, University of Minnesota, “Gifts from Central Asia: A New Explanation for Tomb of the Dancers’ Murals”

Tomb of the Dancers is one of the twelve Koguryo Kingdom (37 B.C.- 668 C.E.) mural tombs first investigated by Japanese archaeologists working under the sponsorship of the Imperial Japanese and Manchukuo governments in the 1930s. It is an earth-mounded stone chamber tomb located at the southern base of Mount Yu, three kilometers away from Ji’an City, Jilin province, China, and named after one of its intriguing murals depicting Koguryo dancing. Most existing Chinese and North Korean studies are still unsettled regarding the tomb’s ownership and date of construction. These studies use nation-centered views of history to interpret the murals on the interior walls of the main chamber. My paper gives a new speculation on the identity of the tomb’s owner based on a careful analysis of the details in the murals and their connection to the extant peninsular written records, for example, Samguk sagi. I argue that the murals in the main chamber depict not a domestic feast but the tomb owner as a Koguryo envoy greeting monks sent by the Former Qin State (350-394) to spread Buddhism. And that these two monks were most likely not Han monks but Central Asian monks. This paper not only proposes a new possibility about the early spread of Buddhism in the peninsula, namely its Central Asian origins, but also engages with conversations about early interactions between Northeast, East, and Inner Asia in the fourth and fifth centuries.