UC Berkeley

The sacred mountain range of Wutai Shan (known in Tibetan as Riwo Tsegna) on the northern frontier of China offers a unique site for examining the religious culture of the Qing empire. Not only did it become one of the most important pilgrimage sites for Tibetans and Mongolians, it is also the location where Tibetan and Chinese Buddhist cosmographies converged. While surviving texts and images of Wutai Shan from medieval China have attracted considerable scholarly attention, artistic and literary representations of the mountain range in the later periods have rarely been studied. Drawing on a panoply of textual, pictorial, and architectural sources from Qing dynasty (1644-1912) onward, this dissertation explores the shifting dynamics of this holy site as a geographical, visual, and visionary destination in Tibetan Buddhism. Primary objects of my analysis include pilgrims' maps, mural programs that include Wutai Shan, praise poems, travel narratives and guidebooks, as well as sculptural and architectural replicas of the mountain range by Tibetan Buddhists in Tibet, Mongolia, the Manchu court in Beijing, and at Wutai Shan itself.

Each chapter coheres around individual(s) responsible for producing knowledge about Wutai Shan. Taken together, these case studies reveal the building blocks of Wutai Shan's visionary landscape: the discourse of visionary encounters, memories of previous masters, rituals, travel, and cosmography. I show that representations of these seemingly ephemeral or intangible histories, concepts, and experiences constitute the core of the mountain's religious identity, defining the ways Wutai Shan came to be viewed in the Tibetan Buddhist world with a potency and persistence that outstrips its physical topography and material structure or holdings. I argue that these ideas and visions of the mountain range significantly reconfigured sacred cosmography and political identities of the Qing empire and beyond.