Building a sacred mountain: Buddhist monastic architecture in Mount Wutai during the Tang dynasty, 618--907 C.E

Located in present-day Shanxi Province in northeast China, Mt. Wutai (Wutaishan) is the home of the oldest surviving timber-frame structures, built during the Tang Dynasty. The first Buddhist sacred mountain established in China since the fifth and sixth centuries, Mt. Wutai is also the destination to which pilgrims travel far to observe the divinity of the mountain lord, known as Manjusri bodhisattva. In our modern inquiry of traditional Chinese architecture, however, the physical structures surviving from the period are gradually neutralized (naturalized) of the particularities tied more to their religious function and history associated with the sacred site than the building history. This dissertation investigates the signification of the monastic architecture built at Mt. Wutai when the sacred mountain cult climaxed, which in turn informs us of layers of history and memories embedded in the site, place, and space inextricably interwoven with the material aspect of the architecture.;The dissertation posits in the establishment of Mt. Wutai as the first Buddhist sacred mountain in China a complex historical process, in which the monastic architecture played a crucial role. Chapter One examines how the monastery could have taken on such a religious function in developing the monastic practice that aspired to a higher realm of transcendence and called for a more imminent sacred presence. Chapter Two argues that it is in the locating of the divine presence that the monastery became a locus where the presence could be localized and reenacted within its physical structure, which in process became part of the mountain's sacrality. Chapter Three demonstrates that the monastery was the means by which the outside interests entered the mountain that concurrently reconfigured and institutionalized the sacred mountain into an abstract entity, comprehensible and meaningful only in such a broadened context. As the natural mountain was totalized in these terms, Chapter Four argues that the conceptualized Mt. Wutai was conducive to narrative and representation, and the visualized narrative of the sacred mountain produced toward the end of our period illustrates Mt. Wutai as the site of not only its monastic architecture but its monastic history and ideals, or a meta-monastery.