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Building a Sacred Mountain: The Buddhist Architecture of China's Mount Wutai

By (author) Wei-Cheng Lin

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By the tenth century CE, Mount Wutai had become a major pilgrimage site within the emerging culture of a distinctively Chinese Buddhism. Famous as the abode of the bodhisattva MaÃ±juÅ›rÄ« (known for his habit of riding around the mountain on a lion), the site in northeastern Chinaâ€™s Shanxi Province was transformed from a wild area, long believed by Daoists to be sacred, into an elaborate complex of Buddhist monasteries.In Building a Sacred Mountain, Wei-Cheng Lin traces the confluence of factors that produced this transformation and argues that monastic architecture, more than texts, icons, relics, or pilgrimages, was the key to Mount Wutaiâ€™s emergence as a sacred site. Departing from traditional architectural scholarship, Linâ€™s interdisciplinary approach goes beyond the analysis of forms and structures to show how the built environment can work in tandem with practices and discourses to provide a space for encountering the divine.Art History Publication Initiative. For more information, visit http://arthistorypi.org/books/building-a-sacred-mountain