Broken Bodies: The Death of Buddhist Icons and Their Changing Ontology in 10th-12th Century China

This presentation investigates a widespread practice of burying broken statues in a greater territory of China during the 10th through 12th centuries. As has been suggested, a broken “icon” could have been considered as a form of “relic,” thus to be buried, particularly, inside the pagoda crypt. If this were the case, it would entail some conceptual adjustments: the icon would need to first be considered alive so it could turn into a relic after death, that is, after it loses its physical integrity. Yet the incomplete icon did not die completely and, as will be argued, the breakage during the time of our consideration was only to prompt an ontological shift of the icon thereafter.

 

Wei-Cheng Lin is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2006 and has since published on both Buddhist and funeral art and architecture of medieval China. His first book, Building a Sacred Mountain: Buddhist Architecture of China’s Mount Wutai, was published in 2014 with the University of Washington Press. Currently he is working on a project that explores performativity of Chinese architecture by examining a series of case studies through history. It will probe the agency of Chinese architecture in structuring, affecting, evoking, or shaping the user’s spatial senses and imagination.