The making of a savior bodhisattva : Dizang in medieval China
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The making of a savior bodhisattva : Dizang in medieval China
(Studies in East Asian Buddhism, 21)
University of Hawai'i Press, c2007
- : hardcover
Available at 7 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
"A Kuroda Institute book."
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In modern Chinese Buddhism, Dizang is especially popular as the sovereign of the underworld. Often represented as a monk wearing a royal crown, Dizang awaits the faithful to help them navigate the complex underworld bureaucracy, avert the sufferings of hells, and arrive at the happy realm of rebirth. The author examines this important Buddhist deity during his formative period - before he settled into his modern role as beneficent ruler of the underworld, when his iconography and hagiography were still rife with possibilities. She begins by problematizing the reigning evolutionary model of Xizang as the gradual sinicization of the Indian Ksitigarbha, a relatively unknown bodhisattva, into Dizang, an underworld deity. Such a model obscures the many-faceted personality and iconography of Dizang. Rejecting it, the author deploys a broad array of materials (scripture, epigraphy, art, ritual texts, and narrative literaure) to recomplexify Dizang and restore what this figure meant to Chinese Buddhists from the fifth to tenth centuries. Rather than privilege any one genre of evidence, the author treats both material artifacts and literary works, canonical and noncanonical sources, to uncover forgotten aspects of the medieval Dizang. Through her analysis, the Dizang cult, far from being an isolated phenomenon, is revealed as integrally woven into the entire fabric of Chinese Buddhism, functioning as a kaleidoscopic lens encompassing a multivalent religio-cultural assimilation and so resists the usual bifurcation of doctrine and practice or ""elite"" and ""popular"" religion. ""The Making of a Savior Bodhisattva"" presents a fascinating wealth of material on the personality, iconography, and lore assicated with the medieval Dizang, while it elucidates the complex dynamics underlying the making of a savior cult in Chinese religion.
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