Framing and framed: Relics, reliquaries, and relic shrines in Chinese and Korean Buddhist art from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries

This dissertation examines conceptions and material representations of the Buddhist body in China and Korea from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries with a focus on artistic and devotional practices of relic veneration. Variously called "whole body," "remnant body," "true body," "broken body," or "dharma body" in textual and epigraphical sources, relics were produced in great quantity and variety and venerated by being enshrined in pagoda crypts and inner recesses of images through their long history across East Asia. Radical changes in appellations, material forms, production methods, and encasement methods of relics in between the Tang and Song dynasties attest to active thinking about the nature of relics as one form of Buddha's bodies, their relationship with the origin of which they were once parts, and their roles in devotional and mortuary practices. The primary goal of this dissertation is to explore the conception of the Buddhist body in this period through close and comparative analyses of relics as they were framed by reliquaries, inscriptions, and accompanying objects, and were localized inside pagoda crypts or inner recesses of Buddhist images. In tracing out its history from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, I demonstrate that the focus of relic worship expanded to include relics of the Dharma and of the monastic dead, and that the making of relic shrines was fully developed into a visual and material exegesis of the sacred---a practice that parallels with the long-standing commentarial tradition of Buddhist writing.;Each chapter showcases one or two cases of reliquary constructs and discusses how their particular materiality and visual strategies defined what were enshrined in reliquaries as particular bodies of the sacred. Each investigates relics as they were formulated in local contexts and localized in immediate spatial contexts, as specific historical phenomena in terms of their combination with the transmitted form of authority and distribution, their identities as particular type of bodies, their relation to the Pure Land devotion, and their relation to the cult of image. The diversity in media and visual strategies revealed in each case speaks not only to increasingly active role of reliquaries in defining relics, which signals the very nature of relics as constructed entities, but further helps us to historicize the changes in conceptualizing the Buddhist body. By investigating various ways Chinese and Korean devotees constructed relics through visual and material means, this dissertation demonstrates the complexity of representing the Buddhist body and illuminates considerations on the part of reliquary makers in changing religious, cultural, and political contexts. This study of the making of relics, whether they are hidden behind nested reliquaries or integrated into the iconic body, illuminates modes of representing the body invisible in Buddhist cultures in continental East Asia as well as sheds light on diverse forms of reliquary practices that are not visible in the scriptural or literary accounts.