The body and the family: Filial piety and Buddhist art in late medieval China

This dissertation addresses the problem of cultural translation by investigating the coexistence of filial piety and Buddhist art in representations of the Sutra on Repaying Kindness at Dunhuang. These include the problems of translating religious images from their textual sources, foreign Buddhist images into native Chinese idioms and complex artistic changes into neat academic arguments. Accordingly, Chapter One rethinks the opposition of filial piety and Buddhism in both historical and modern sources through a critique of sinicization as an interpretive model. By demonstrating that filial piety is neither unique to China nor opposed to Buddhism, I reframe the question of how to interpret cultural interaction with the fundamental question of why use cultural interaction at all to interpretat artistic change. Chapter Two charts the development of Sujati narratives as an important component of Sutra on Repaying Kindness paintings at Dunhuang. Depicting a young prince offering his flesh to his starving parents, this image integrates Confucian and Buddhist attitudes toward the body thought to be contradictory, a discrepancy that I explain through the contemporary practice of "cutting the thigh." Chapter Three investigates the early history of cutting the thigh, a filial practice in which children offer their flesh to ailing parents. By examining Buddhist scriptures, Confucian histories, rhetorical essays and archeological evidence, I show that the medieval Chinese discourse on cutting the thigh complicates conventional understandings of filial piety and bodily values even within monolithic categories such as Confucian and Buddhist. Chapter Four analyzes the four other narratives in Sutra on Repaying Kindness paintings. By arguing that the notion of repaying kindness emphasizes the mother and the moral authority of the child, I question standard assumptions of Chinese filial piety as centered on the father and parental prerogatives. Chapter Five situates Sutra on Repaying Kindness paintings into the Dunhuang family caves that contain them. By examining decorative, figural and epigraphic references to the family in these caves, I argue for the construction of a distinctive "family space" that idealizes private life, ancestral history and contemporary viewing practices.