Traditional scholarship has argued that image worship was an intrinsic property and a distinctive practice of Buddhism. It is widely believed that the arrival of Buddhism in China brought about the practice of worshipping Buddha images, which inaugurated the tradition of image worship in China. Recent research findings challenge this belief. In India and Gandhara, it is increasingly recognized that the worship of Buddha images was not widely established until after 200 CE, in other words later than the first appearance of Buddha images in China. Therefore, it becomes reasonable to doubt whether Buddha images were viewed as legitimate icons of worship since their introduction into China, and whether their worship played a central role in the initial Buddhist practice in China. Studies of Buddhist literature furnish clues to this investigation. The earliest Buddhist narratives foregrounded sutras in the transmission of Buddhism, while Buddha figures became a crucial element in such narratives only after the fourth century. Survey of anti- and pro-Buddhist apologetics similarly shows that image worship became represented as a prominent Buddhist practice only after the fifth century. Archaeological evidence further corroborates textual sources, as we observe a turning point around the fifth century, after which the activity of making and worshipping Buddha images suddenly flourished. Joining textual and archaeological evidence, this paper explores the dynamic development of the notion of sacrality for Buddhist statues in early China, and argues that the fifth century was a crucial moment for Buddha images' transformation from the secular to the sacred. The heated discussion of the concept of dharmakaya at the time led to the understanding that Buddha images were worldly materialization of the abstruse body of the dharma. The homology between dharmakaya and Buddha images thus invested divine character to the latter, which supplied the crucial basis for the institutionalized practice of image worship in China.
