This dissertation examines Li Gonglin's (1049-1106) Lotus Society Picture to reveal his Buddhist beliefs in Chan, Huayan, and Pure Land Buddhism. His original paintings of this subject have not survived to our time, so I rely on three copies in the Nanjing, Shanghai, and Liaoning Museums, respectively, to reconstruct the compositions and study their meaning.
In depicting the legend of the Lotus Society, Li Gonglin did not rely on the religious concepts of the Society's purported founder, Huiyuan (366-413), nor did he adhere to the Biographies of the Eighteen Noble Worthies of the Lotus Society compiled by his friend Chen Shunyu. In many cases he sought inspiration beyond Lotus Society legends, incorporating members' biographies and other historical references to formulate his iconographic design. Li Gonglin's conscious eclecticism suggests that the Lotus Society Picture was not a reflection of Huiyuan's religious ideology nor an illustration in the classic sense, but rather an illustration of the painter's own faith.
This dissertation consists of four chapters, a conclusion, and seven appendixes. The first chapter reconstructs the Buddhist environment of the Longmian Mountains region which nurtured Li Gonglin's faith as he came of age. The second chapter examines three copies of the Lotus Society Picture to demonstrate that over more than three decades of repeated depictions of this subject, the artist used a single, constant iconographic design, indicating his unchanging view of the subject. In the third chapter I study the sources of Li Gonglin's Lotus Society Picture and discern two important Mahayana Buddhist concepts, tathagatagarbha and prajnaparamita, as the iconographic foundations of the picture. The fourth chapter focuses on these two concepts and discusses the religious meaning of the Lotus Society Picture, proposing that it is a pictorial diagram of the bodhisattva path modeled on the Tang-dynasty Huayan master Zongmi's three-level scheme for the ten stages of this path. The same concepts are applied to explain the influence of Hongzhou Chan and Chan-Pure Land joint practice in the picture. In the conclusion, I summarize each chapter and propose that Li Gonglin's Lotus Society Picture, while formally inspired by the fifth-century Pure Land organization, is a diagram of the bodhisattva path that reveals his faith in Chan, Huayan, and Pure Land Buddhism.
