Cave 361 at Mo-kao Dun-huang was built in the early Ninth Century.Several characteristics indicate it as a matured floor plan during the Tibetan occupation, such as the lofted inverted squared-funnel shaped ceiling, a double-layered niche which stresses the need for offering, and the sutra tableaux as well as maṇḍalas in a variety of topics. As a whole, the diversified decorations of both esoteric and exoteric Buddhist imageries are centralized around the three-dimensional stūpa and programmed as a temple itself. The decorative and structural elements mentioned above make this cave extremely important in the construction history of Dun-huang caves. In the beginning, this paper analyzes the sacred mountain paintings (focuses on the painting of the Mount Wu-t’ai) along both sides of the niche and infers that it might originate from the Petite Record of the Mount Wu-tai (五臺山小帳) written by Monk Hui-yi(會頤) of the Hui-chang Temple at His-an during the Tang Wen-tsung’s reign. In addition, the accounts that the Japanese Monk Yuan-zan(圓仁) recorded that Indian monks came to China to copy the “Stele of Hagiographies of the Efficacious Incidents of the Mount Wu-t’ai” and that shrmana Yi-yuan(義圓) asked a professional painter to depict the Apparition of the Mount Wu-t’ai and took it to Japan would shed some lights on the study of this cave. The mural stresses the tradition of virtues, supernatural powers, and efficacious elements which
follow Hui-hsiang’s Biography of the Ancient Ching-liang. In addition, the special relationship between Mount Wu-t’ai and Monk Fa-chao of Tang Tai-tsung’s period is also worth noticing. Moreover, different editions of relevant texts and the interactions between the old man and the monk in the picture are cross-referenced to delineate the development of this mythical religious legend. Amoghavajra went to Dun-huang area between the years 742 to 756 to set up a tantric ceremonial place for abhiṣeka and translation workshop. As a result, there were traces of tantric influence on the Buddhism in Dun-huang afterward. The surviving texts found in Dun-huang reveal that the major practice Amoghavajra taught there was the vajradhātu sect. The maṇḍala on the ceiling of cave 361 is a merge of the samaya maṇḍala and the mahāmaṇḍala. On the one hand, it inherited the tradition of the Thousand Buddhas of the directions. On the other hand, it started another convention of Five Buddhas in Dunhuang. This paper traces the spiritual animals on which the four Buddhas ride in both textual and pictorial sources and concludes that it is likely a copy from model sketches of the images in Chang-an. The last section of this article analyzes the Eastern Pure Land sūtra tableau on the side wall, places it into the context of the Bhaiṣajyaguru sūtra tableaux in Dun-huang, and found a new element in it. In the light of the Conscious-Only interpretation of the Bhaiṣajyagūru sūtra in Dun-huang, the author points out possible influences of the Conscious-Only interpretation on the concept of Pure Land and these images. In addition, the architecture group of the world of vaidūra especially the stūpa-centered de
