Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

Drawing from frontispieces printed in Hangzhou as the main primary sources, this chapter will examine the production, patronage, cross-regional circulation, and outside stimulation of Hangzhou Buddhist frontispieces from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. The chapter begins with a visual examination of different versions of the illustrated dharani scrolls mass produced by the King of Wu Yue in the tenth century. A copy of the Wu Yue Buddhist frontispiece made in eleventh-century Korea suggests that the transmission of the Wu Yue Buddhist printing went well beyond the Hangzhou locale. The second and third parts of this chapter explore the frontispieces of the Lotus Sutra, one of the most popular Buddhist texts reproduced in East Asia. Produced by commercial publishers and local itinerant carvers who worked as a team, these frontispieces were composed of standardized templates and modular motifs that could be modified, repurposed, and reassembled. That a considerable number of such specimens were discovered inside Buddhist statues originally displayed in temples in Kamakura, Japan, adds a cross-cultural context accounting for the reception of Buddhist books. Shifting from the neighbors in East Asia to northwest China, in the fourth part, I highlight Song Hangzhou’s connection to the neighboring Xi Xia Kingdom ruled by the Tangut in northwest China, using frontispieces excavated in Khara Khoto 黑水城 as main sources. Buddhist printed scrolls mass produced by the Tangut emperor and empress demonstrate stylistic connections to those made in Song Hangzhou. The legacy of Xi Xia Buddhist printing strikes home in Yuan Hangzhou in the early fourteenth century, as I will show, in the fifth part of this chapter, in which I examine the multicultural elements of Buddhist woodcuts produced under Mongol rule. The presence of figural designs in Mongolian hat fashion marks another visual novelty of the art of Buddhist books in the Mongol age.