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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 7.2 (2024): 1–40; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.07.02.02
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ritual and Materiality in Buddhism and Asian Religions)
Arhat Cave Beliefs as Seen in Four Stele Inscriptions and the Daitoku ji Five Hundred Arhats Paintings
Shufen LIU 劉淑芬
Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica
Translated by Echo WENG
Princeton University
Abstract: This paper draws on the Daitoku ji 大德寺 Five Hundred Arhats Paintings, a collection of one hundred paintings of arhats sponsored by devotees from the Hui’an yuan 惠安院 in Mingzhou 明州 (present-day Ningbo, Zhejiang) during the Southern Song dynasty, to enhance our understanding of beliefs and practices regarding arhats in Chinese Buddhism. These paintings show caves serving as sacred dwellings for arhats, which are also associated with rocks and forests. Moreover, from at least the Five Dynasties images of arhats in numbers of sixteen, eighteen, and five hundred began to be worshipped in natural caves that were called ‘arhat caves’. In some cases, monasteries were built inside caves or next to caves where Buddhist images (including images of arhats) were enshrined. These sites were known as ‘arhat cave monasteries’ (luohandong siyuan 羅漢洞寺院). In other cases, people created small artificial mountains and man-made replicas of arhat caves (fang luohan dong 仿羅漢洞), forming another type of arhat sacred site.
Keywords: Daitoku ji 大德寺, Five Hundred Arhats Paintings, arhats, arhat caves, cave beliefs, stele inscriptions, monasteries, artificial mountains
About the Author: Shu-fen Liu received her Ph.D. in History at National Taiwan University. She has conducted research on the history of medieval China and the social history of Buddhism from the third to the thirteenth century, which resulted in the monographs Cities and Societies in the Six Dynasties (Nanjing University Press, 2021), Compassion and Purity: Buddhism and Medieval Social Life (Revised Second Edition, Sanmin Publishing House, 2019), Expunging Sin and Saving the Deceased: A Study of the Buddha Uṣṇīṣa Vijayā Dhāraṇī Sūtra Pillars (Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 2008). Her recent research focuses on Xuanzang and Arhat worship.
About the Translator: Echo Weng is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. Her research focuses on the conceptions of the body and disability in medieval Chinese Buddhism. In particular, her dissertation examines how medieval Chinese people understood diverse forms of embodiment, including illness, deformity, and disability, as well as the practices they employed to address various bodily afflictions.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
