Imagining sacred geographies in western China

Divine monks like Sengqie (627/8–710) played a vital role as an emissary of Buddhism as well as a manifestation of Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. In the second half of the Tang Dynasty, when the imperial court gradually lost control of its peripheral regions, sculpted and painted images of Sengqie flourished across China. Many of them were found in Dunhuang and sites in Sichuan and exhibit diverse iconographic variations. This paper studies the significance of portraying a liminal figure like Sengqie in these Buddhist communities. By analyzing the iconographic and compositional elements of Sengqie imagery in each region, this paper reveals that each depiction of the monk creatively utilized the visual paradigms of patriarchs, bodhisattvas, or miraculous images from Central Asia and ancient India. These efforts eventually visualize a local version of a sacred network that connected Buddhist communities in the peripheral regions spatially and/or temporally to other Buddhist centres.