Art historians studying Buddhist cave sites have for some time shown an interest in going beyond the examination of the thematic, pictorial, or iconographic significance of these caves' rich visual imagery, to reconstruct the practices once carried out in these spaces. On the one hand, this extension of traditional art-historical concerns reflects a wider reorientation of the discipline towards the study of material culture broadly conceived, such that works of art and other material objects are approached not merely in terms of their formal properties, but as windows into the lives and subjective experiences of those who created, encountered, and used them. For scholars of Buddhism, who have traditionally focused on texts, the use of archeological and art-historical sources to reconstruct living Buddhist practice is also an appealing prospect. Indeed, as most would now aver, the Buddhist textual record is often normative and prescriptive rather than historically descriptive. Material remains, on the other hand, can at least occasionally show if and when given practices were actually, rather than ideally, carried out, and can further provide evidence for practices that the textual record overlooks or mentions only in passing.
目次
Introduction 265 The Cave 267 The Use of the Cave 268 Picturing Impurity 273 The Ritual Context 285 Conclusion 292 Acknowledgements 293 Texts 293 Glossary 294
