Water-Land Retreat, a late twelfth-century Chinese Buddhist painting crafted for use in large-scale offering rituals, depicts the liminal moment of ghosts' manifestation during a nocturnal liturgy of spectral salvation. Taking inspiration from the sensory dimensions of ritual performance and making use of a sophisticated stratigraphy of pigmentation, the painting leads the viewer-worshipper from consideration of external acts of offering and recitation to contemplation of internal visualizations performed solely in the minds of meditating monks. The viewer-worshipper is thus awakened to the multisensory matrix of ritual that unites liturgical art, text, and performance.
目次
A Pictorial Divide: The Mundane and the Supramundane in Water-Land Retreat 298 Crafting and Inscribing the Five Hundred Arhats 300 The Liturgical Scenario: Spectral Soteriology in Water-Land Retreat 304 A Liturgical Division of Labor and the Ritual Matrix 305 Pigmenting Ontology 308 Sating the Senses to Assemble the Cosmos 311 Visual Ingenuity and the Bridging of External and Internal Ritual 314 Notes 316
