Temple Painting and Vernacular Narratives

This paper examines the complex connections between religious painting and vernacular narratives during the Ming dynasty through a case study of the Miaoshan story mural in the Vairochana Hall (Piludian 毗盧殿) of Guanyin Monastery (Guanyinsi 觀音寺) in Xinjin 新津, Sichuan (near Chengdu). This mural constitutes the earliest precisely dated surviving example (completed in 1468 and renovated in 1756) of pictorial representations of the Miaoshan story in China, the popular hagiography of Bodhisattva Guanyin that gained wide circulation in Buddhist communities during this period. Although this narrative painting has already attracted scholarly attention, many questions concerning its origins and meaning remain unresolved. Through a comparison with the earliest extant textual variants of the Baojuan of Xiangshan (香山寶卷, reprinted editions of 1772 and 1773), this paper demonstrates the distinctive features of the Xinjin mural. It further situates the mural within the broader history of visual representations of the Miaoshan story from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that survive in Sichuan and Beijing. This case study reveals the significant influence of vernacular narrative traditions on Buddhist art during the Ming dynasty, while also showing that the Xinjin mural represents an independent version of the Miaoshan narrative that was not preserved in later written sources

Bodhisattva · Buddhism · Fifteenth · Mural · Narrative · Painting · Vernacular · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · Chinese history and philosophy · Eurasian Exchange Networks

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