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Access provided by Princeton University (2 May 2016 14:37 GMT)
Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism
and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
Wen-shing Chou
Hunter College
Abstract
This essay reconsiders the Qing imperial appropriation of the sacred mountain range of Wutai Shan through a study of
three Manchu monasteries, Baodi Si, Baoxiang Si, and Shuxiang Si, built at the court of the Qianlong emperor between
1750 and 1775. Qianlong’s consuming interest in the vision cult of Wutai Shan’s resident deity Mañjuśrī is displayed in
the building of the three monasteries, which were all modelled after famed temples at Wutai Shan. An investigation of
the ritual, architectural, and artistic productions surrounding the three monasteries reveals the crafting of a distinct
Manchu Imperial Buddhist identity centered on Qianlong himself as the apparition of Mañjuśrī at Wutai Shan.
keywords: Manchu Buddhism, the Qianlong emperor, Wutai Shan, Baodi Si, Baoxiang Si, Xiang Shan, Shuxiang Si,
Chengde, Mañjuśrī, Tibetan Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism, divine kingship.
Q
uite unlike the development of any other Chinese
Buddhist sacred site, the holy mountain range of
Wutai Shan 五臺山 (the Mountain of Five Terraces)
(Fig. 1) in northeast China has, from the inception of its
fame during the Tang dynasty, captivated the imaginations of ruling elites in China. During the last millennium and a half, numerous rulers of reigning dynasties,
with the help of their religious advisers, enlisted Wutai
Shan’s resident deity Mañjuśrī, as the protector of their
nation, and sought to reinforce legitimacy for their rule
through an alignment with Mañjuśrī’s earthly abode.1
The religious and worldly sagacity of Mañjuśrī, regarded as the Chinese bodhisattva par excellence and
most often associated with qualities of wisdom, also became linked with Indian Buddhist models of religious
kingship in both Chinese and Tibetan traditions.2 Sovereigns who identiied themselves or became identiied as
the wheel-turning king (Skt. cakravartin) or the ruler of
law (Skt. dharmarāja) also evoked ties to Mañjuśrī,
sanctifying their secular role with a spiritual mission
and condition. The Qing Manchu emperors added a
new level of signiication to this millennial tradition of
Buddhist kingship at Wutai Shan when they merged
their own identities with that of Mañjuśrī—promoting
themselves as emanations of Mañjuśrī through the
uniquely Tibetan Buddhist notion of bodhisattva reincarnation.3 The Qianlong 乾隆 emperor (1711–1799),
in particular, employed unprecedented visual, material,
ritual, and rhetorical means to assert, over and over again,
his identity as the wheel-turning Mañjuśrī-incarnate.
This essay examines the Qianlong’s creative impersonation of Mañjuśrī through the construction of three
temples around Beijing that were built to imitate (Ch.
fang 仿) important monasteries at Wutai Shan. These
three temples—Baodi Si 寶諦寺 (Temple of Precious
Truth) and Baoxiang Si 寶相寺 (Temple of Precious
Form) in Xiangshan 香山 (Fragrant Hills), the imperial
park at the foot of the Western Hills just west of Beijing,
and Shuxiang Si 殊像寺 (Temple of Mañjuśrī’s Image) in
present-day Chengde 承德, the imperial summer retreat
located 140 miles northwest of Beijing—were commissioned by the Qianlong emperor between 1750 and
1775 and were established as the irst of what eventually amounted to more than a dozen Manchu Buddhist
monasteries. Although Qianlong’s forebears had supported Buddhism practiced by the multilingual constituents of his empire, and promoted the Gelukpa sect of
Tibetan Buddhism (the sect of the Dalai Lamas) among
them, it was Qianlong who initiated the translation
of the scriptures into the Manchu language, mandated
their ritual recitations, founded monasteries that were
exclusively staffed by Manchu lamas with the help of
his guru and state preceptor the Monguor4 reincarnate
lama Chankya Rölpé Dorjé (1717–1786), and eventually undertook the monumental project of compiling the
Manchu Buddhist canon. Why did Qianlong seek to create exclusively Manchu monasteries? Where was the
place of Buddhism for a people who were initially forbidden to become lamas, and whose own religious tradition was preserved in imperial shamanist rituals that
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Fig. 1. View from Central Peak, Wutai Shan, Shanxi Province, China. Photograph by the author.
Qianlong himself had ordered to codify? Why and in
what ways were three of the chief Manchu Buddhist
monasteries derived from models of those at Wutai Shan?
The term “Manchu,” though appearing to denote a
unitary group of nomadic people who came to rule China
through conquest, was coined in 1636 by Hong Taiji
(1592–1643), Qianlong’s great-great-grandfather, in an
effort to unite different Jurchen tribes on China’s northeastern frontier.5 By Qianlong’s time, this constructed
ethnic marker had become an ancestral tradition that he
sought to uphold in governing a largely Chinese empire through the preservation of shamanistic rituals and
the use of the Manchu language.6 Since the status of ethnic Manchus as bannermen made it almost impossible
for them to become monastics, Manchu lamas were selected instead from the booi (Ch. Baoyi 包衣) class of the
Imperial Household Department (Neiwu Fu 內務府),
rather than from the Eight Banners. Booi, which literally
means “household persons,” were dependent servants
who manned the Imperial Household Department, which
managed the emperors’ personal affairs.7 Booi were
therefore considered the emperor’s personal property.8 By
the Qianlong period, they were mostly descendants of
Han, Korean, Mongol, Jurchen, and even Russian groups
who were previously captives of the Manchus and condemned by them to servitude.9 The so-called Manchu
Lamas were thus Manchu-speaking people belonging to
the court who were rarely ethnic Manchus. These monasteries did not extend beyond the court to include regular
Manchu bannermen, and would have been seen only by
resident lamas and close members of the imperial family.
As institutions built and staffed by the Imperial Household Department, they should therefore be more accurately called Manchu Imperial Household Monasteries.
My investigation into the making of these monasteries—based on extant archival, visual, architectural,
sculptural, epigraphic, travel, and cartographic sources—
demonstrates Qianlong’s singular preoccupation with the
complex and continuously evolving projects of re-creating
replicas of Wutai Shan’s temples over a twenty-ive-year
span, with the goal of reenacting a particular vision cult
of Mañjuśrī at Wutai Shan that had diverse followings
WEN-SHING CHOU
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Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
throughout Central Asia, East Asia, and the Himalayas.
By restaging an apparition of Mañjuśrī10 through ritual, literary, and artistic means, Qianlong sought to
craft and advance a distinct Manchu Imperial Buddhist
identity centered upon himself as the Mañjuśrī of Wutai
Shan. His appropriation of models and material manifestations of Mañjuśrī’s millennium-old vision cult from
Chinese, Tibetan, and Mongolian sources and traditions
further perfected, from the point of view of the emperor, a uniquely Manchu Imperial Wutai Shan in the
original mountain range.
This is not an attempt to perpetuate ixed notions of
the ethnonyms “Manchu,” “Mongol,” “Tibetan,” and
“Han,” nor to reify the categories of “Chinese” and “Tibetan” Buddhism in the eighteenth century. Indeed, recent scholarship has shown the extent to which these
constructed categories were utilized by Qianlong at a
time when the very deinition of “Manchuness” was being challenged.11 Instead of providing a static understanding of cultural and ethnic entities, this essay shows
how luid the boundaries were between the perceived
traditions of Chinese and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, and
how much Qianlong was responsible for the creation of
a pan-Mahayana Buddhist narrative incorporating various Buddhist traditions. Qianlong’s engagement in prodigious cultural, political, and artistic enterprises, of
which his Buddhist practice and activities were only a
part, relected the dynamic and hybrid conditions of his
empire that, despite his own heavy-handed effort to
promote ixed notions of ethnicity, could not be reduced
to cultural or ethnic terms. They also delineated an imperial project of cosmological recentering that places all
under the emperor’s domain.
The construction of the three temples at Xiangshan
and Chengde lies at the nexus of imperial activities on
several fronts: irst, the Qing imperial promotion of
Wutai Shan—including frequent pilgrimages to the
mountain range, sponsorship of its monasteries, engagement with rituals and initiations while at Wutai Shan,
and the production of its gazetteers; second, Qianlong’s
famously inventive “replicas” of great Tibetan monasteries and the pervasive culture of replication during his
reign; third, the host of other visual and rhetorical assertions of “emperor-as-bodhisattva”; and inally, the making of the Manchu Buddhist canon, an immense task of
translation that was structurally analogous to the building of Wutai Shan replicas. This essay, by situating the
creation of Manchu imperial monasteries within the various all-consuming agendas and material productions of
the Qing court that peaked during the Qianlong reign,
brings to the fore the conceptual, geographical, and cosmological importance of Wutai Shan in the creation of
141
the Qing imperial Buddhist persona. A variety of source
materials points synergistically toward Wutai Shan as
an indispensable ground for Qianlong’s imperial selffashioning.
Patricia Berger’s seminal work Empire of Emptiness
(2003) remains the only art historical study to pay attention to Qianlong’s appropriation of the vision cult of
Wutai Shan. In her study of Qianlong’s and his court artist Ding Guanpeng’s (丁觀鵬 [active 1708–1771]) copies
of true images, which included a brief account of the miraculous icon at Wutai Shan, Berger reveals the transformative power of Qianlong’s copies for both the copy and
the original.12 What remains to be elucidated in a thorough study here is Qianlong’s use of the potent signiications of the mountain and cult of Mañjuśrī to establish
Manchu imperial Buddhism, as well as Qianlong’s comprehensive reconceptualization of Buddhist cosmology
and historiography through these building projects. Following Berger’s use of the terms “copy” and “replica” to
denote a range of emulative acts in the Qing court that
interpret more than they duplicate,13 and in keeping with
recent art historical scholarship that emphasizes the generative14 and revelatory nature15 of the copy, this essay
investigates the logic and physical processes by which
the past is made anew through the act of replication.
Baodi Si: Founding a New Manchu Monastic
Culture
In 1750, immediately after Qianlong returned from a
pilgrimage to Wutai Shan with his mother and his guru,
the Monguor lama Rölpé Dorjé, he told the latter about
his aspirations to build an exclusively Manchu Tibetan
Buddhist monastery.16 (Rölpé Dorjé also accompanied
Qianlong to Wutai Shan on his subsequent visits until
his own death in 1786, and spent nearly all his summers
from 1750 to 1786 in retreat there, frequently giving
teachings and initiations.)17 Even though there had been
Manchus who had become monks, an exclusive Manchu monastery would be the irst of its kind. To fulill
his wish, Qianlong commissioned the building of a temple at the imperial park of Xiangshan west of Beijing
that would be an imitation of Pusa Ding 菩薩頂 (Monastery of the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī’s Peak) at Wutai
Shan, a monastery that was built in the ifth century and
originally named Wenshu Yuan 文殊院 (Cloister of
Mañjuśrī), but renamed Pusa Ding early in the ifteenth
century. Qianlong asked Rölpé Dorjé to be in charge of
the new temple’s design, and named it Baodi Si.18 The
monastery was completed in 1751, although by the end
of 1750 two hundred Manchu lamas had already been
chosen to study Buddhist scriptures in the Manchu
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language at Baodi Si.19 Baodi Si subsequently became
the headquarters for all twelve of the Manchu monasteries in and around Beijing that were built throughout
Qianlong’s reign; a court-appointed oficial residing at
Baodi Si oversaw all Manchu Buddhist affairs.20
What did Qianlong mean by an imitation? What aspects of Pusa Ding were copied, and what were his aims
of such a material transfer? Even though no buildings
from Baodi Si are extant, and no stele inscriptions survive or have been recorded, early maps, gazetteers, and
court documents from the Imperial Household Department offer glimpses into the building process. They reveal a detailed attempt to re-create, and also to revise,
the ritual setting of Pusa Ding. This concern for exactitude and speciicity of the ritual setting paved the way
for what became the irst in a series of projects for
the establishment of Manchu monasteries. The ways in
which certain ritualized spaces and bodies became a medium through which imperial identity was articulated
would become apparent in subsequent buildings of Baoxiang Si at Xiangshan and Shuxiang Si at Chengde.
They would also clarify Qianlong’s choice and appropriation of Pusa Ding. Among Wutai Shan’s more than
one hundred monasteries, Pusa Ding (Fig. 2) has been a
locus of pilgrimage and imperial sponsorship since at
least the Tang dynasty. Located on the summit of Lingjiu
Shan 靈鹫山 (Vulture Peak Mountain, named after the
Indian site where the Buddha gave many sermons), it is
the highest point in the town of Taihuai 臺懷, the valley
town between the ive terraces of Wutai Shan. As the
name of the mountain Lingjiu Shan suggests, it is itself a
Chinese transplantation of the Indian original, the
source of Wutai Shan’s religious legitimacy in the irst
place. According to the Expanded Record of the Clear and
Cool Mountains, compiled around 1061,21 the irst temple
at the summit of Lingjiu Shan was Wenshu Yuan, built by
the Northern Wei emperor Xiaowen 孝文 (r. 471–499).
The same record indicates that, although apparitions of
Mañjuśrī were reported to have appeared on this peak
frequently, it was not until the time of the Tang emperor
Ruizong 睿宗 (662–716) that the temple featured a
sculpted image of Mañjuśrī.
This history is related in a well-known tale of the
reclusive sculptor Ansheng 安生, of unknown origin,
who, after many failed attempts to complete a sculpture
of Mañjuśrī without cracks, appealed to the bodhisattva
and then succeeded in making a perfect image by modelling it after seventy-two manifestations of Mañjuśrī
that accompanied him as he completed his work.22 This
temple, known thereafter as Zhenrong Yuan 真容院
(Cloister of the True Appearance), became a primary
locus of pilgrimage and a conspicuous recipient of do-
nations by emperors of successive dynasties. In maps of
Wutai Shan from Dunhuang, for example, Zhenrong
Yuan most often occupies the center of the composition.
Even as the original icon had disappeared, and the temple’s name was changed to Pusa Ding during the Ming
Yongle 永樂 period (1403–1424), stories of the miraculous image continued to be published in every imperial
and nonimperial guidebook. In fact, the absence of the
original image had in all likelihood served to enhance
its allure, and contributed to the increasingly more
elaborate narrative of its miraculous origin. By the early
Qing dynasty at the latest, Pusa Ding became the chief
Gelukpa monastery.23 The Geluk sect monopolized the
mountain range after the founding of the Qing dynasty,
when many of the temples were said to have been “converted” to Tibetan Buddhism.24 After the Fifth Dalai Lama’s visit to Beijing in 1652, the Qing Shunzhi emperor
established the appointment of “jasagh lamas” (of Mongolian, Tibetan, and Han origins) to preside over religious affairs at Wutai Shan and installed monks from
Tibet and Mongolia at Wutai Shan’s various monasteries.25 Although the position of jasagh lamas was also
created at the capital in Beijing, Mukden, Hohhot, Jehol, and Dolonor, the successive jasagh lamas at Wutai
Shan became especially tied to Tibet, as later regulations
speciied that they should be drawn from a pool of lamas in Tibet.26 In order to house the jasagh lamas at
Wutai Shan, Shunzhi renovated Pusa Ding extensively
into an oficial imperial establishment (with yellowglazed tiles). Pusa Ding thus became the oficial residence of the jasaghs who oversaw all religious activities
on a mountain range of some one hundred temples
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.27 It also
housed the imperial travelling palace (xinggong 行宮),
where the Kangxi 康熙 (r. 1662–1722), Qianlong (r. 1736–
1795), and Jiaqing 嘉慶 (r. 1796–1820) emperors all
stayed during their numerous visits to Wutai Shan. By
the reign of Qianlong, Pusa Ding housed approximately
one-third of the three thousand lamas (of Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, and Han ethnic markers) who were residing at Wutai Shan.
Because Pusa Ding was the undisputed center of
worship and imperial sponsorship since the Tang dynasty, its re-creation at Xiangshan not only served as a
substitute for the original monastery but also evoked
the entire mountain range of Wutai Shan.28 This was relected in the couplet that Qianlong inscribed on a pair
of placards hung at Baodi Si, proclaiming what the site
was: a surrogate of Wutai Shan, which was a surrogate
of India (by way of Lingjiu Shan) but much closer to his
court than India or Wutai Shan.29 Qianlong’s choice of
initiating a Manchu Buddhist monastery and housing it
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Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
143
Fig. 2. Pusa Ding Monastery, Wutai Shan. From Daijō Tokiwa and Tadashi Sekino, Shina bunka shiseki vol. 1 (Tōkyō: Hōzōkan,
Shōwa 14–16, 1939–1941), plate 92.
in a surrogate of Wutai Shan’s most conspicuously imperial as well as Gelukpa Buddhist temple, deined by
the memory of a miraculous icon, seems more than appropriate. As a sacred mountain range in China with
deep roots in Tibetan Buddhism, and as the ield of enlightened activities for the deity of whom the Manchu
emperors were considered incarnations, Wutai Shan
was an excellent source and model for the inauguration
of a new imperial Manchu monastic culture. Appropriately, as Pusa Ding was home to the jasagh lamas who
oversaw all Buddhist affairs at Wutai Shan, Baodi Si,
too, became the chief Manchu monastery that oversaw
all Manchu Buddhist affairs.
Baodi Si’s enormous scale and importance have long
been obscured by its lost ediices and inscriptions. But
thanks to extant maps and court records, we can reconstruct some of the precise ways in which the conceptual
transfer was realized in material terms. First of all, the
imitation seems to be at least partially relected in the
design of the exterior architecture. A map of the imperial summer garden Yihe Yuan 頤和園 and the surrounding area (Fig. 3), which has been dated to after
1888, depicts a monastery with a stone gate at the entrance and steps leading up to it (Fig. 4). Photographs
from the beginning of the twentieth century show a surviving stone gate of the same design (Fig. 5).30 This was
presumed to be an imitation of the set of steps and the
gate in front of Pusa Ding (Fig. 6), commissioned and
inscribed by Qianlong’s grandfather, the Kangxi emperor. However, it is closer kin to the contemporaneously erected stone gate at Biyun Si 碧雲寺 (Azure
Cloud Monastery) in Xiangshan, a Yuan-dynasty temple where Qianlong replicated a Tibetan-style Mahābodhi Temple in 1748 (Fig. 7)31—that is, although the
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Fig. 3. Yiheyuan Baqi Bingying tu (Map of Eight Banners Brigade barracks and the Yiheyuan Summer Palace). Pen and ink and
watercolor, 97 × 172 cm. After 1888. Original map and image are in the public domain; digital image provided by the Geography and
Map Division, Library of Congress.
steps clearly refer to Pusa Ding’s iconic set of 108 steps,
no effort seems to have been made in its design to replicate the architectural style of Pusa Ding’s built environment. The gate is made out of stone rather than wood;
moreover, the decorative details and the proportions of
the architectural elements are entirely different from
those on the gate at Pusa Ding. The scale of Baodi Si is
conveyed only in a court document in the inancial accounts of the Imperial Household Department (Neiwu
fu Zouxiao dang 內務府奏效檔) regarding its restoration beginning in 1770: a survey of Baodi Si conducted
by that department, which recorded its ive-bay main
hall, ive-bay rear tower, six-bay side hall, nine-bay dugang 都剛 (a large assembly hall), six-bay side hall near
the front of the complex, three-bay hall of heavenly
kings, three-bay mountain gate, bell and drum towers,
eighteen-bay side dormitory hall, twenty-four-bay corner dormitory hall, and six-bay guard building, which
makes a total of eighty-seven bays.32 The map of Yihe
Yuan depicts only a single ive-bay central hall as Baodi
Si’s main building, whereas the original complex at Pusa
Ding would have featured four halls on the central axis,
three of which had only three bays.33
Although we have limited knowledge of Baodi Si’s
architectural exterior, records from the Palace Workshops of the Imperial Household Department (Neiwu fu
Zaoban chu Jishi lu 內務府造辦處記事錄) reveal details
about the complicated process through which Baodi Si’s
interior was furnished. On April 6, 1750 (the thirteenth
day of the second month of the ifteenth year of Qianlong’s reign), Qianlong issued a decree to obtain the dimensions of Pusa Ding’s Mañjuśrī dugang as well as
model drawings of all its Buddhist images and ritual implements (jiang Pusa Ding Wenshu dugang dian dipan
chicun foxiang [fa?]qi dengxiang ju huayang 將菩薩頂
文殊都剛殿地盤尺寸佛像 [法?]器等項俱畫樣). This was
undoubtedly preparatory work required for the building of Baodi Si. The term dugang is a Chinese transliteration of the Tibetan word ’du khang, a large assembly
hall within a monastery where monks gather for prayer
recitations. In the eighteenth-century Chinese imperial
gazetteer, only one other monastery at Wutai Shan was
listed as having a dugang.34 It is not clear how dugang
halls at Wutai Shan actually followed the design of a
Tibetan ’du khang, but they certainly refer to halls that
can accommodate large monastic assembly in the Tibetan
WEN-SHING CHOU
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Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
145
Fig. 4. Detail of Fig. 3.
tradition. Since Manchu Buddhism was in large part the
practice of Buddhism in the Manchu language following
the Gelukpa tradition, according to Rölpé Dorjé, Qianlong’s guru and state preceptor, the modelling of a Manchu monastery on a Tibetan assembly hall would have
made perfect sense. During the same week, however,
Qianlong also ordered the measurement and construction of a model of another hall at another monastery at
Wutai Shan, Xiantong Si’s Beamless Hall (wuliang dian
無梁殿), presumably also intended as a potential model
for the monastery of Baodi Si.35 The so-called beamless
hall refers to a vaulted masonry hall that does not require the beams of traditional post-and-beam construction. The term “beamless” in Chinese (wuliang 無梁) is
a homophone for “immeasurable (wuliang 無量),” and
these are the Chinese translations of the names for the
Buddha of Immeasurable Light and the Buddha of Immeasurable Life (Skt. Amitābha and Amitāyus).36 For
this reason, beamless halls, which only numbered about
a dozen in China and were considered to have non-Chinese origins, usually carry the connotation for longevity
and were therefore often used for birthday celebrations.
Together, these records suggest that Qianlong was initially looking toward different temples as potential
models for his replica.
Qianlong’s decree of April 6, 1750, provided no further details about what Buddhist images and ritual implements were to be modelled, but records of the weeks
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Fig. 5. Stone Gate at Baodi Si, Xiangshan (1750), 1906–09. Photograph. From Ernst Boerschmann, Chinesische Architektur (Berlin: E.
Wasmuth, 1926), plate 267.
to follow suggest that the copying was carried out in
earnest. They also relect that the principal concern in
building Baodi Si was the proper setting for rituals
rather than the imitation of any particular architectural
features. On April 12 (the sixth day of the third month),
Qianlong ordered that the sets of Seven Treasures (qibao
Fig. 6. Gate at entrance to Pusa Ding, Wutai Shan. Photograph
by Ani Lodro Palmo, ca.1985.
七寶) and Seven Royal Treasures (qizhen 七珍) from
Wutai Shan be repaired, and ive days later, he ordered
two sets of replicas of the Five Treasures (wubao 五寶),
Seven Treasures, and Eight Treasures (babao 八寶) together with offering tables, all of which were brought
from Wutai Shan.37 The hall or monastery of origin was
not speciied in this record, although it is clear that
they would have come from a Tibetan Buddhist temple, presumably Pusa Ding’s Mañjuśrī dugang, the only
one of the two dugangs at Wutai Shan mentioned in
the records. As with the rest of the ritual paraphernalia
Qianlong subsequently commissioned, the two sets of
replicas were probably intended for speciic locations—one for Baodi Si, and the other to be sent back
to Wutai Shan.
The various sets of ritual offerings, which would
have been placed in front of the main icons, are standard
offerings within Tibetan traditions that are absent in
their Han-Chinese counterparts, which would have featured only a much simpler set of Five Offerings (wugong
五供). Found throughout Qing imperial temples, these
offerings were either produced at the court or given as
gifts by high-ranking lamas visiting from Tibet and
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Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
147
Fig. 7. Stone Gate at Biyun Si, Xiangshan, 1748. Photograph by the author, 2009.
Mongolia.38 Equally important as their cultural and religious association to Tibetan Buddhism were their imperial connotations; for example, the possession of the
set of Seven Royal Treasures, which originated in preBuddhist India, was one of the deining features of a
wheel-turning worldly sovereign (cakravartin).39 Even
though in Buddhist traditions, the set of Seven Royal
Treasures later became ritual offerings to the Buddha,
they still carried with them imperial connotations and
were regularly used to furnish imperial chapels, especially during the Qing dynasty. Such offerings—some of
which are still in their original locations, and many
more of which were looted and sold, and are today scattered in museum collections around the world—have by
now become visual hallmarks of Buddhism in the Qianlong reign (e.g., Fig. 8). Thanks to records from the Imperial Household Department that describe details
about the material, color, pattern, and precise type of
enamel, and so forth of the offerings and the frames and
stands that were made for them, we know that the sets
that were produced for Baodi Si and repaired and possibly remade for Pusa Ding would have looked very much
like extant examples. The insistence on repairing and reproducing a Tibetan Buddhist ritual setting is consistent
with an all-consuming effort at rectifying and standardizing ritual and iconography at Qianlong’s court, in
each case of which an Indo-Tibetan, rather than a HanChinese model, was followed.40 A similar attempt to
standardize and reintroduce Indo-Tibetan ritual and
iconography can be observed here.
Still, despite the fact that these offerings were so
ubiquitous and nearly synonymous with Qianlong-era
Buddhism, what we can glean from the records is an
insistence on replicating and repairing the particular
sets of ritual offerings at Pusa Ding. Again on April 26,
Qianlong ordered two sets of replicas of Pusa Ding’s
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Fig. 8. Offerings of Seven Royal Treasures (top register) and Eight Treasures on display at Treasure Gallery, Palace Museum, Beijing.
Photograph by the author, 2008.
mandala offerings, and various offering tables and offering bowls, together with elaborately designed sets of
Five Sense Offerings (wuyugong 五欲供), and Eight Offerings (bagong 八供); and one each of these complete
sets, when inished, was to be placed at Baodi Si and the
other brought back to Wutai Shan’s Pusa Ding.41 Qianlong’s concern for the precision of the ritual setting can
also be seen in his frequent instructions that the sets be
veriied and authenticated by Rölpé Dorjé. Together, the
numerous records of production undertaken within a
period of three weeks indicate that not only were the
temple architecture and its interior furnishings, cloth
hangings, streamers, images, offerings, and ritual implements to be replicated wholesale, but also that this
replication process was an occasion to make the original more perfect, and the two sites more precisely and
perfectly congruent. As Patricia Berger astutely noted
with regard to Qianlong’s replicas of Inner Asian temples as well as his copying of previous paintings and
icons, every act of copying reinterprets and revises the
original, such that “the original was also forced to live
up to the expectations of the copy.”42 As the irst Manchu monastery to be built from the ground up, Baodi Si
relied on the precise transferring and perfecting of Pusa
Ding’s ritual setting to create a familiar albeit dis-
tinctly imperial Buddhist identity centered on the deity
Mañjuśrī. Available sources did not spell out Qianlong’s
appropriation of Wutai Shan beyond ritual eficacy, but
the persistent centrality of Mañjuśrī’s vision cult becomes apparent in his subsequent projects.
Baoxiang Si: Staging an Apparition
After Qianlong’s pilgrimage to Wutai Shan in 1761, the
twenty-sixth year of his reign, his attention shifted from
the realm of ritual and architecture to the appropriation
of a famed icon: an image of Mañjuśrī on a lion. This
trip—Qianlong’s third visit to Wutai Shan, and the second time he went there with his mother—coincided
with the empress dowager’s seventieth birthday and
Qianlong’s own iftieth birthday.43 The pilgrims were
greeted with appropriate fanfare, including the performance of a six-part drama presented in honor of the
double birthday celebration.44 At Shuxiang Si, the Temple of Mañjuśrī’s Image (Fig. 9), Qianlong was awestruck with the temple’s widely revered namesake image
of Mañjuśrī on a lion, a sculpted igure that especially
attracted pilgrims from Tibet and Mongolia and that
still survives today in its repainted and restored form
(Fig. 10). Qianlong was moved to make at least two
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Fig. 9. Hall of Mañjuśrī, Shuxiang Si, Wutai Shan. Photograph
by the author, 2009.
Fig. 10. Mañjuśrī on a lion, Hall of Mañjuśrī, Shuxiang Si,
Wutai Shan. Photograph by the author, 2015.
sketches of the image plus a lengthy inscription while en
route back to Beijing.45 This was a rare gesture for an
emperor who wrote voluminously but was hardly
known for his own paintings.46 Consider, for example,
that during Qianlong’s previous trips to Wutai Shan, he
had ordered court oficials Zhang Ruo’ai and Zhang
Ruocheng to compose traditional landscape paintings
of a snowy scene, on which he wrote lengthy colophons
(Figs. 11 and 12). They represent a conspicuous identii-
149
cation with the Chinese classical tradition of gentlemanly cultivation. By contrast, here his attention was
turned toward the single icon and to capturing its true
trace with his own hand. According to records from the
Imperial Workshop for Carvings and Paintings, known
as Ruyi guan 如意舘 (Wish-Fulilling Studio), one of the
sketches entered the imperial art collection and was subsequently remounted several times over the next several
years. While the sketch does not appear to have survived,
it subsequently became the basis for the building of an
even larger temple next to Baodi Si. Qianlong’s original
sketch was, according to his instructions in the colophon
of the sketch, enlarged and transferred onto a stone stele.47
In 1762, Qianlong ordered a sculpted replica of the image
based on the engraving from the stele, and asked Rölpé
Dorjé to design a temple to house this image.48 The temple, which he named Baoxiang Si, was built immediately
adjacent to Baodi Si on its western side (see Fig. 13). It
was completed in 1767, and the stone stele bearing the
engraving was placed next to it, although it and other
steles were already fallen by the early twentieth century
(Fig. 14).49 Court documents suggest that as soon as construction was under way, Manchu lamas were selected
from the booi class and placed there. As early as 1763,
only one year after the building project began, the
monastery had expanded to include the addition of
sixty lamas.50
What about this image so captivated Qianlong? The
icon at Shuxiang Si featuring the image of Mañjuśrī on
a lion has a complex genealogy. Shuxiang Si is located
on the edge of the Taihuai village where major temples,
including Pusa Ding, are clustered. It was rebuilt in
1496 after structures from preceding dynasties were
burned to the ground. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, it became a large, imperially sponsored monastery
and underwent major renovations. Already a prominent
pilgrimage destination and a recipient of imperial sponsorship, Shuxiang Si was frequently visited by the Kangxi
emperor, who wrote numerous poems about the remarkable characteristics of the image (faxiang zuiyi 法相最異)
and made very generous donations for its restoration.51
Even though the monastery had always been Chinese
Buddhist in afiliation, rather than Tibetan Buddhist, it
became so revered among the Tibetan and Mongolian
population that the Tümed Mongol prince Yéshé Döndrup (Ye shes don grub bstan pa’i rgyal mtshan, 1792–
1855) authored a text on the history and environs of
Shuxiang Si with the help of the eminent Tibetan Buddhist grammarian Ngawang Tendar of the Alasha banner (A lag sha Ngag dbang bstan dar, 1759–1831).52
This Mongolian language guidebook about the exalted
image at Shuxiang Si was published and translated into
Fig. 11. Zhang Ruo’ai, Zhenhai Si, 1746. Colors
on paper, 127.6 × 62.8 cm. Photograph provided by
the Palace Museum, Taipei.
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Fig. 14. Main Hall of Baoxiang Si. Photograph. From Ernst
Boerschmann, Chinesische Architektur (Berlin: E. Wasmuth,
1926).
Fig. 12. Zhang Ruocheng, Zhenhai Si, 1750. Colors on paper,
103.4 × 56.9 cm. Photograph provided by the Palace Museum,
Taipei.
Fig. 13. Detail of Fig. 3, Boaxiang Si, Yihe Yuan Baqi
Bingying tu.
Tibetan around 1813, attesting to the image’s popularity among Mongol and Tibetan pilgrims. It is recorded
in Rölpé Dorjé’s biography that before he passed away
at Wutai Shan in 1786, he led an assembly of prayers in
front of a magniicent image of Mañjuśrī in a great hall,
and was joined by the emperor. It is quite likely that the
icon at Shuxiang Si was the very image mentioned.53
When the Russian diplomat Dmitri Pokotilov visited
Shuxiang Si in 1903, he credited the monastery’s survival well into the twentieth century to the nonstop low
of donations from Mongol pilgrims at a time when donations for all other monasteries at Wutai Shan were
dwindling, even though Shuxiang Si was never a Tibetan
Buddhist monastery.54
This image of Mañjuśrī at Shuxiang Si (Fig. 10) can
be dated to 1496, less than a decade after the main hall
was erected (1489). In fact, what is referred to as an image here and in the imperial records (the Chinese word
is xiang 像) probably has existed for most of its history,
and exists in the current version, as a sculptural group,
composed of a central igure of Mañjuśrī seated atop a
lion dais, lanked by the igure of the Khotanese king as
a lion-tamer (leading the lion by a leash), the youth pilgrim Sudhana from the Gaṇḍavyūha chapter of the
Avataṃsaka Sūtra, and several other attendant igures.55
The iconography of Mañjuśrī riding on a lion and accompanied by a lion-tamer can be traced back to the lost
sacred icon at Pusa Ding/Zhenrong Yuan, the temple that
later became the model for Qianlong’s Baodi Si.56 Even
though the original image from the Tang dynasty is no
longer extant, iconographic assemblies similar to what
is found at Shuxiang Si were popular in Dunhuang, Japan, and at Wutai Shan itself from as early as the tenth
century, and even made its way to the ifteenth-century
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iconographic pantheon of Gyantse Kumbum in central
Tibet (Fig. 15).57 Surviving images from Dunhuang, Japan, and central Tibet show that they share more or less
the same iconography, with Mañjuśrī on a lion as the
central deity, a Khotanese king as lion-tamer, and the
youth Sudhana as an attendant disciple. Even though the
iconographic origin of this sculptural group is still a matter of scholarly dispute, we know for certain that it became associated with the cult of Wutai Shan; when and
wherever it appeared, these Mañjuśrī igures harked back
to and served as a synecdoche for Wutai Shan. Not unlike
the competition for relics in medieval Christian churches,
monasteries within and beyond Wutai Shan competed for
ownership of Mañjuśrī’s true presence as manifested in
the sculptural group in order to assert their centrality in
the pilgrimage circuit. It appears that Shuxiang Si succeeded in its claim for the true presence of the bodhisattva and maintained it from the Ming dynasty onward.
The sculptural group at Shuxiang Si acquired more
than its iconography from Pusa Ding/Zhenrong Yuan.
According to the widely recounted origin tale of Shux-
iang Si, Mañjuśrī appeared in perfect form in the sky to a
frustrated sculptor experiencing artist’s block.58 Apparitions, whose elusive guise is given tangible form only
through miracle tales, have inherently complicated and
extended genealogies. Mongolian and Tibetan recensions
of the story provide more speciics for this particular image. In one account, when the deity instructed the sculptor
to make an image in his likeness, the sculptor improvised
by grabbing the nearest available dough in the monastery’s kitchen (it was nearly lunchtime) and molding it
into the shape of the apparition’s head.59 The sculptor in
another account, while holding up a piece of barley bread
as an offering for the majestic apparition in the sky, received blessings from Mañjuśrī in the form of the bodhisattva’s perfectly shaped countenance in the bread, and
subsequently completed the rest of the body to create a
statue of exceptional beauty.60 Today, this image is still referred to as the “Buckwheat-dough-headed Mañjuśrī” in
Tibetan and Mongolian sources (Tb. ’Jam dbyangs rtsam
mgo, Mong. Gulir terigütü manzusiri).61 Sure enough,
during the 1983 restoration, it was discovered that the
Fig. 15. Mañjuśrī on a Lion with Five Attendants, main sculptural image in the ifteenth chapel, second loor of Gyantse Kumbum,
Gyantse, Central Tibet, 15th century. Photograph by the author.
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head was really made from buckwheat, with clay illings
for holes created by resident mice.62 It is particularly interesting that this popular legend with “a grain of truth”
is preserved in Mongolian and Tibetan languages, but is
not included in Chinese-language texts, further attesting
to the fact that the predominant populations venerating
the image were Mongols and Tibetans during the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Even though the image’s perfect form, which artists
can only create through divine intervention, is a common trope for sacred images or for any work of high
artistic merit, variations of the tale resonate most closely
with that of the Tang dynasty Mañjuśrī on a lion made
by the sculptor Ansheng, modelled after an apparition at
Zhenrong Yuan. In both tales of miraculous images
from Zhenrong Yuan and from Shuxiang Si, the bodhisattva comes to rescue the troubled artisan by manifesting his true form. Although the sculptural group at
Shuxiang Si has a distinct local lavor relecting the Tibetan Buddhist population at Wutai Shan during the later
period, it can be considered a true substitute for the miraculous image from the Zhenrong Yuan story, made at a
time when the image from Zhenrong Yuan had long disappeared. In fact, it was erected right around the time the
Tang dynasty Mañjuśrī disappeared from Zhenrong
Yuan, during the Ming dynasty (no later than 1482), and
soon earned its renown as the only “true image” of
Mañjuśrī in the Taihuai valley of Wutai Shan.63
For pilgrims, the sculptural group at Shuxiang Si
therefore became a sort of replacement of the original one
at Pusa Ding, satisfying a thousand-year-old zeal for the
bodhisattva’s true countenance. In the most authoritative
Tibetan-language guidebook since the late-eighteenth
century, compiled by Rölpé Dorjé and his disciples, many
stories from Chinese-language gazetteers were abbreviated, whereas stories of the miraculous images of
Mañjuśrī at Pusa Ding and Shuxiang Si were reiterated
in greater detail than available in the Chinese source
texts, attesting to their historical signiicance for the Tibetan and Mongolian populations, despite the fact that
Shuxiang Si was not itself afiliated with Tibetan Buddhism. Qianlong’s court was no doubt aware of the distinction at the practiced level as well; in 1768, it was the
Chinese ritual setting of Five Offerings, not the elaborate
setting of a Sino-Tibetan Buddhist altar as recorded in
the building of Baodi Si, that were placed in the main
hall of the main altar at Baoxiang Si.64
Rituals of Transformation
Beyond his spontaneous experience of awe before the
image of Mañjuśrī, Qianlong was no doubt deeply
153
aware of the power of that image and its miraculous origins. Even though the stele at Baoxiang Si and the
sculptural group based on Qianlong’s original sketch
are either no longer extant or inaccessible (as the hall
housing the sculptural group is currently in a veterans’
rehabilitation center contained within the walls of a
military compound off-limits to the public), two surviving paintings and one textile from the same series of
replicas shed light on his interest in and manipulation of
the apparition’s many lives. As soon as he returned to
Beijing in 1761, Qianlong ordered court painter Ding
Guanpeng to make a large painting based on his original sketch. Documents from the Imperial Workshop record several paintings ordered multiple times through
the year 1761.65 Two of the paintings, along with one of
Qianlong’s own sketches, as well as a closely related
textile gifted by the mother of Qianlong’s trusted oficial, entered Midian Zhulin 秘殿珠林, Qianlong’s catalogue of religious art. The two paintings and the textile
are now in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei.66 Matching the inscription on one of
them to documents from the Imperial Workshop, the
two paintings can be dated to the fourth and twelfth
months of the twenty-sixth year of Qianlong (i.e., 1761),
respectively (Figs. 16 and 17).67 The earlier painting is
made up of many small pieces of paper, suggesting that it
might have acted as a kind of large preparatory painting
for the second painting, which, as Ding notes in his colophon, took seven months to complete.
The three monumental images are of similar dimensions, each measuring about ten feet in height and ive feet
in width. Except for some seals along the edges, the entire
length of each composition is occupied by a single bodhisattva on a lion in a highly unusual backgroundless void.
Gone too are Mañjuśrī’s illustrious attendants, such as
Sudhana and the Khotanese King, who had been an
integral part of the miraculous image in replicas from
Tibet to Japan. A detailed comparison of the two paintings reveals the many subtle, calculated adjustments
that were made between the painting done in the
fourth month and the painting completed in the twelfth
month, suggesting that the second painting was indeed
a correction or modiied version of the irst. To make
the matters more intriguing, a third monumental image (Fig. 18), rendered in the medium of embroidery
by the mother, wife, and granddaughters of the court
oficial Qiu Yuexiu 裘曰脩 (1712–1773) as a gift to
the emperor, entered the imperial collection (for the
catalogue of which Qiu was one of the compilers), and
was based closely on the earlier of the two paintings,
save perhaps for the feminization of the bodhisattva’s
face.68
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Fig. 16. Ding Guanpeng, First painting of Shuxiang Si’s
Mañjuśrī on a lion. 1761. Hanging scrolls. Ink and colors on
paper, 297.3 × 159.1 cm. Photograph provided by the Palace
Museum, Taipei.
Through these small but profound changes in the
portrayal of Mañjuśrī’s physiognomy and attire, Qianlong’s manipulation of a thousand-year-old lineage of
iconic production becomes clear. A consistent transformation of the igure from an idealized Chinese bodhisattva to a “humanized” tantric initiate subtly forges a
link between Wutai Shan’s famous icon with the emperor himself. While the earlier version (Fig. 19) bears
the rather round face and softly rounded chin of a
bodhisattva igure in Ming-dynasty Chinese Buddhist
Fig. 17. Ding Guanpeng, Second painting of Shuxiang Si’s
Mañjuśrī on a lion. 1761. Hanging scrolls. Ink and colors on
paper, 297.3 × 159.1 cm. Photograph provided by the Palace
Museum, Taipei.
paintings, the later painting (Fig. 20) shows Mañjuśrī
with a somewhat angular, more elongated face, making
him look more human; and the parallel curves just
below the bodhisattva’s chin are replaced by a single
curve of a leaner face with a protruding chin. Whereas
Mañjuśrī’s eyelids in the earlier painting are more closed,
ever-so-slightly, gently downcast with pupils undistinguished from the irises, conveying the compassionate
gaze for all sentient beings that can often be seen in earlier depictions of Chinese bodhisattvas, the eyelids in
the later painting appear to be opened wider through
the heightened contrast between the dark pupils and the
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155
Fig. 19. Detail of Fig. 16.
Fig. 20. Detail of Fig. 17.
Fig. 18. Mother of court oficial Qiu Yuexiu, Shuxiang Si’s
Mañjuśrī on a lion. Hanging scroll, embroidery, 354 × 150.3 cm.
Photograph provided by the Palace Museum, Taipei.
lighter irises as well as the slight thickening of the upper
eyelids. These modiications create the impression of an
active human gaze, set off by a noticeably wider nose
and thicker, more natural, and less shaped eyebrows. In
the earlier painting, bizarre snakes of hair fan out symmetrically to either side of Mañjuśrī’s neck, while largebeaded earrings and strings of small pearls hanging
down from his crown lare outward and lank a circle of
stiff folds in the collar with equally unconvincing animation. This highly implausible but dramatic upper portion
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Five Buddha crown in the irst image looks like a crown
worn by a deity or a priestly igure, often seen in depictions of Mañjuśrī from the Ming dynasty onward, and
is likely a more accurate depiction of the Shuxiang Si
image at the time. In contrast, the crown in the second
image is formed of distinct lat panels receding back as
it encircles the bodhisattva’s head, more in keeping with
a crown worn by ritual specialists or practitioners during a Tibetan Buddhist tantric rite. (A ritual crown worn
by none other than the Qianlong emperor himself when
he underwent tantric initiations in 1780 displays a similar design, Fig. 21.) Atop the crown in the second image,
Mañjuśrī’s previously unadorned topknot is now
adorned with a small gold image of a seated Amitabha
Buddha and encircled by colorful gems set within gold
“lames.” Embroidered images of a seated Buddha
Śākyamuni adorn two pendants that hang down from
either side of the crown and over Mañjuśrī’s shoulders.
The heavily cloaked bodhisattva in the irst image undergoes a change of season in the second image by
wearing what appears to be a diaphanous collar above
an elaborate chest plate decorated with netted beads,
precious stones, and small gold plaques featuring Buddha images. Whereas the beaded chest plate of the irst
bodhisattva features a single image of what appears to
be Buddha Śākyamuni in an earth-touching gesture, the
beaded chest plate of the second features twelve Buddhas, most visibly a cosmic Buddha Vairocana (with
hands held in the dharmacakra mudra position) at the
center of his netted chest plate (Fig. 22). The modiied
Mañjuśrī is bedecked with Buddha images from head to
toe—numerous golden Nirvana Buddhas in the crown,
Fig. 21. Gilded gold ritual crown with Five Directional
Buddhas used by Qianlong in 1780. From Du Jianye, Yonghegong: Palace of Harmony (Hong Kong: Yazhou yishu-Art
Blooming Publ., 1995), 220.
of the painting is reduced to stillness and simplicity in
the second painting, where the strings of pearls curving
outward are replaced by straight-hanging pendants of
embroidered cloth, and the bodhisattva’s hair is now
neatly tucked away behind an identical but smaller pair
of earrings that also hang downward, in accordance with
the law of gravity and the decorum of royalty.
Other features also mark a clear shift from an idealized bodhisattva igure to a more “humanized” one. The
Fig. 22. Detail of Fig. 17.
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157
Fig. 23. Ceremonial costume for an imperial lama: Beaded collar and apron. From Du Jianye, Yonghegong: Palace of Harmony (Hong
Kong: Yazhou yishu-Art Blooming Publ., 1995), 221.
in the jeweled net, and on the petals of the lotus throne.
Mañjuśrī’s lion, now positioned nearly sideways to reveal the length of its body, sports a matching collar and
apron made of equally ine netted beads, jewels, and
bells, though (appropriately) without Buddha images.
Like the depiction of the ritual crown, these nets of beads
and plaques resemble those that would have been worn
by those undergoing important Tibetan Buddhist tantric
rites. The depiction is nearly identical to a contemporaneous set preserved at the Yonghe Gong (Palace of Peace
and Harmony) in Beijing (Fig. 23).69 The pervasive appearance of multiple Buddhas on the second bodhisattva,
just as on Tantric Buddhist crowns and chest plates, visu-
ally reinforces the transformative capacity of tantric rituals to unite a human being with his Buddhahood.
Yet other representational and iconographical changes
from the irst to the second painting bring the bodhisattva from an otherworldly space to that of the viewer,
further enhancing the human-like quality of Ding’s second painting. Judging from the posture of the igure
and the sculpture’s current appearance, it is most likely
that Mañjuśrī balanced a ruyi scepter between his
hands in the original sculpture, as he does now (Fig. 10).
Mañjuśrī’s hands in Ding’s irst painting are depicted
in the same position, with ingers curved slightly inward, albeit without holding any implement. In Ding’s
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second painting, however, Mañjuśrī’s right arm and
palm open up completely to abhaya mudra (gesture of
fearlessness/protection), and his left arm is placed on his
knee as though in a gesture of royal ease. The clariied
mudra of the right hand as well as the palpable weight
of the left hand resting on the knee convey a presence
and immediacy that is accentuated by the change in the
lion’s position. Again, possibly following the sculpted
image at Shuxiang Si, the lion in Ding’s irst painting
stands with its head turned upward and to the left. In
contrast to the dynamic upper part of the painting
around the bodhisattva’s head and upper body discussed
above, here the lion’s mane appears in orderly patterns,
neatly combed on his back. His head is turned away
from the viewer, and his legs stand on free-loating lotus
blossoms, which demarcate a self-enclosed, otherworldly
space. But in Ding’s second painting, the lion faces forward, its head and body are rotated clockwise to reveal
a semi-proile view, and its paws are planted squarely
on the ground. This perspective (combining frontal and
semi-proile views), implausible for a three-dimensional
form, asserts a pictorial independence from its sculptural
origin. Unlike Ding’s irst painting, in which the upper
portion features more movement than the lower portion,
the lower portion of his second painting becomes the active center of the composition: the bodhisattva’s foot,
with the ankle now exposed, presses against a tilted lotus
blossom on a vibrantly ornate saddle, while illusionistic
ribbons, bells, feather-ornament, hair, and lames all lutter in gusts of wind that do not affect the upper portion
of the painting. Here, the lion’s frontal, animated, and
grounded stance puts the bodhisattva’s calm but human
and almost confrontational presence in the here-and-now
right into the space of the viewer.
All together, these modiications mark a substantial
ontological shift—from the portrayal of the miraculous
sculptural image of Mañjuśrī, with all of the earthly
trappings and emotive transcendence of a Mahayana
Chinese bodhisattva igure, to the intimation of divinity
in a human body through ritual transformation. The
idea that a person can be ritually transformed into a receptacle of the divine is a hallmark of Tibetan tantric Buddhism;70 that the person carries the trappings of royalty
further marks the igure of a tantric cakravartin (a universal, enlightened ruler, whose reign brings peace and
justice). In the modiications of the original icon, Ding’s
second painting therefore superimposes the esoteric,
and speciically Tibetan, tradition of ritual transformation
and an Indian ideal of Buddhist kingship onto a Chinese
Buddhist icon with a popular Mongolian cult following,
visually and metaphorically reenacting the bodhisattva’s hybrid identity through Indo-Tibetan, Mongolian,
and Chinese iconography and history. In light of the fact
that Qianlong himself had undergone tantric initiation
rituals (the implements from some of which are still visible, see Fig. 21, for example), plus the wealth of textual
and visual materials produced at the Qing court that
asserted his status as the cakravartin-bodhisattva incarnate, it would not be too far-fetched to see Ding’s second painting as a portrayal of Qianlong himself.71
The vitality of ritual in Qing rulership has been at
the center of recent scholarship. Angela Zito, in her
study of the grand sacriice—the most signiicant ceremonial occasion for the Qing emperors—showed how
the performance of ritual texts “make manifest” the
power of the heavens in human affairs and the power of
the past in the present, and argued that the emperor, by
donning a variety of ceremonial robes, “embodied” his
constituencies.72 James Hevia analyzed Qing guest ceremonies and found that rituals of inclusion (guest / host
rituals) and transformation (initiation rituals) were ways
to “encompass and include others in their own cosmologies.”73 The painting of a revered sculptural icon in the
guise of an imperial tantric initiate reiterates the primacy of the ritual reenactment as a category in the physical and metaphysical articulation of Qianlong’s imperial
identity, as does the wholesale replica of Pusa Ding’s
ritual space in the building of Baodi Si.
But what about Ding’s second painting, which explicitly and exclusively establishes Qianlong’s identity?
After all, the face of the igure in the painting does not
look anything like that of Qianlong’s, as we have come
to know so well from a plethora of Castiglionesque
paintings of him. Considering Ding’s painted “copies”
in light of their multiple origins going back to the Tangdynasty sculpture at Zhenrong Yuan, and memories of
the miraculous original(s) that are kept alive in countless textual, visual, and oral iterations in the Chinese,
Tibetan, and Mongolian languages, the self-referentiality of Qianlong’s interventions becomes clear: if in this
particular reenactment Ding Guanpeng played the role
of the skilled artisan who helped make manifest the
earthly form of Mañjuśrī, then Qianlong’s sketch is the
mediating force—that is, the divine intervention of
Mañjuśrī that prompted and guided the image-making
process.74 In Ding Guanpeng’s paintings, Mañjuśrī is
therefore not only the subject but also the agent of the
depiction, and that agent is none other than Qianlong
himself. Ding’s paintings thus take the appositional relationship between the emperor and the bodhisattva to a
level of unprecedented speciicity. Acting as a referent in
the double sense of the word (one who refers and one
who is referred), Qianlong implied a connection with
Mañjuśrī beyond resemblance. The staging of himself
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as a new “apparition” of Shuxiang Si’s miraculous
image, and a refashioning of the image as a royal tantric initiate—as in the case of Ding’s second painting—
allowed Qianlong to embody the bodhisattva of Wutai
Shan, and thereby also perfect it. Much like the reparation and replication of ritual offerings at Pusa Ding, the
copying of works modeled after Qianlong’s sketch was a
reclaiming of the ownership of Wutai Shan; however, unlike the wholesale replica of a temple interior, this was a
far more succinct assertion, one that reached the diverse
pious constituencies of Shuxiang Si’s miraculous image.
Forestalling any possibility that this nuanced substitution might go undetected, Ding’s unusually lengthy inscription on the second painting makes explicit that by
“relying on the heavenly brush [of the emperor],” he
was able to complete Mañjuśrī’s golden countenance.
Ding then compares himself to the artisans who carved
the sandalwood Buddha commissioned by the Indian
King Udayana, but attributes the inadequacy of the inal
result to his own lack of insight.75 That Qianlong’s divine intervention is analogous to the famed miraculous
image of the sandalwood Buddha further sealed the
identity of a Buddhist king.76 This identiication may
also explain why Mañjuśrī’s entourage was eliminated in
Qianlong’s copies: in this new guise of emperor as bodhisattva, these mytho-historical igures from another
time and place are no longer relevant. Furthermore, if in
the eighth century Zhenrong Yuan became a locus of
pilgrimage on account of a miraculous icon of Mañjuśrī,
it stayed as the center of pilgrimage in the Qing despite
the loss of its namesake icon. What need is there for an
icon when it is the very abode of the personal embodiment of the bodhisattva, the Mañjughosa emperors?
Qianlong’s series of enactments reveals not a simple assertion of his identity as Mañjuśrī vis-à-vis his Tibetan
and Mongolian constituents, but his role as a benevolent, universal Buddhist ruler over the vast domains of
the image’s sway. By appropriating Wutai Shan’s most
emblematic icon, Qianlong inserted himself in the place
of both the apparition and the icon.
Even if we understand the implications of this
transformation from an idealized bodhisattva to a humanized one, who was responsible for it? Under whose
command were all the subtle adjustments evident in
Ding’s second painting completed? Was it based on a directive issued by Qianlong himself, or was it Ding’s own
decision to depart from Qianlong’s sketch? While we
may never know the answer, records from the Imperial
Workshop reveal that Ding was asked to use several
sources for his second painting, which took seven months
to complete: two sketches by Qianlong, Ding’s earlier
painting, and, most directly, a wax model of Mañjuśrī.77
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In fact, it must be concluded, in light of the fact that several extant two-dimensional and three-dimensional replicas more closely conformed to one another, that Ding’s
second painting was an even more striking departure,
one that is exclusively asserted through the two-dimensional medium of the painting.
Ding’s inscription described Mañjuśrī’s countenance
with phrases that evoke the imagistic metaphors of
Chan Buddhism—“radiant with the subtle glow of wisdom, [the relection of] the moon that seals the river”
(yuanguang moshi, ruyue yinchuan 圓光默識。如月印
川)—suggesting that the true countenance of Mañjuśrī
exists beyond the ordinary external physical appearance. It follows that to make a true copy of the divine,
one must not only painstakingly copy the external features but must also discern the hidden qualities. In other
words, true likeness in the Buddhist context has to go
beyond the ordinary external appearance. If Ding’s own
confession of inadequacy in his inscription is more than
the false modesty of an imperial subject, perhaps it is an
acknowledgment of his struggle to reconcile these two
levels of resemblance, which would help explain the
strange, unsettling quality of Ding’s second painting.
If, indeed, Ding’s second painting speciically portrays Qianlong, the impersonated divinity complicates
what was originally an “imitation (fang 仿),” as it was
called, of the sculptural image of Mañjuśrī at Shuxiang
Si, and places it into the rank of Qianlong-as-bodhisattva paintings (Fig. 24).78 Among the best-known visual examples of Qianlong’s claims to bodhisattvahood,
these paintings present the formal likeness of Qianlong’s
Fig. 24. The Qianlong Emperor as Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī,
Thangka, colors on cloth. The Freer Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C. Photograph provided by the Freer Gallery of Art.
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face (based on a subdued modelling technique of the Jesuit painters) against a depiction of him in the Tibetan
Buddhist iconographic guise of the Mañjughoṣa emperor at the center of a host of deities and teachers in a
mandalic formation.79 Instead of this stark juxtaposition of two modes of representation, Ding’s painting
conveys the emperor-as-bodhisattva identity through
the subtle manipulation of a sacred icon.80
But the signiicance of classifying Ding’s second
painting as a portrayal of Qianlong-as-bodhisattva lies
beyond its employment of a different pictorial strategy:
its very existence poses a challenge to the commonly
perceived notion that Qianlong’s identiication with the
Mañjuśrī was a project of self-fashioning that he performed primarily within the Indo-Tibetan esoteric Buddhist context.81 At least eight extant Tibetan thangkas
featuring the likeness of Qianlong’s face that are found
in Tibetan Buddhist inner sanctuaries of the court and
at the court of the Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas in
Tibet, together with references and addresses to Qianlong as the wheel-turning Mañjughoṣa emperor in
Tibetan and Mongolian sources, have led scholars to regard the eficacy of Qianlong’s self-fashioning within a
Tibetan Buddhist (and speciically Gelukpa) sectarian
and courtly context.82 But this is subject to circular reasoning, as the assumption that Qianlong only accepted
and promoted his bodhisattva-incarnate identity toward
Mongols and Tibetans was built on a selective use of
Tibetan Buddhist materials.83 The multiplicity of sources
in Qianlong’s appropriation of Wutai Shan’s numinous
icon, and its purpose in the establishment of a Manchu
monastery, however, reveals a much more complex picture that goes beyond the appeasement of the empire’s
particular ethnic constituencies: indeed, Qianlong’s selffashioning of himself as the Mañjuśrī of Wutai Shan was
based on a seamless bringing together of multiple visual
and devotional traditions, including Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Mongolian, under a single imperial domain
around the emperor himself.
If Ding’s revised second painting portrays Qianlong
in the guise of a Tantric initiate, fashioned after Qianlong’s sketch of Wutai Shan’s celebrated Chinese Buddhist icon of Mañjuśrī, how was this translated onto the
sculptural form? Even though we no longer have any
evidence today as to what the Baoxiang Si sculptural
group looked like, the exterior of the ruins of the main
hall of Baoxiang Si (Fig. 14) offers further insights into
the possible ritual or symbolic dimensions suggested
above. The main hall itself, called Xuhua zhi ge 旭華
之閣, was constructed as a beamless hall, featuring a
square plan with ive arched openings on each of the
four sides in the exterior, and probably a circular plan
with a vaulted dome in the interior.84 Its majestic double
friezes of glazed green-and-yellow tiles below the eaves,
which can be seen from afar, still imparts a clear sense of
architectural distinction. According to records from the
Palace Workshops of the Imperial Household Department from 1750 that requested the dimensions of Wutai
Shan’s own beamless hall, the brick barrel-arch construction of Baoxiang Si was inspired by none other than the
aforementioned hall in Xiantong Si, though with one important difference: a square plan instead of the narrow
rectangular one at Xiantong Si. Was Baoxiang Si a fuller
realization of Baodi Si, in that it fulilled Qianlong’s
wishes to re-create a beamless hall from Wutai Shan?
How was this an improvement upon the original?
As mentioned earlier, the Chinese term for “beamless” is a homophone of the word “immeasurable.”
Beamless halls are thus often associated with the wish
for longevity and are therefore appropriate for birthday
celebrations. Baoxiang Si’s 1767 stele conirms this purpose, explaining that Qianlong’s primary intention for
re-creating Shuxiang Si at nearby Xiangshan was to
save his elderly mother from the toil of journeys to
Wutai Shan, which is in Shanxi province 200 miles
southwest of Beijing.85 There have been many such surrogate Wutai Shans in the long history of pilgrimages to
that mountain, but perhaps none before that had been
built for a single person.86 As an act of ilial piety toward the empress-dowager, this re-creation was effectively used as such, since Qianlong did not travel to
Wutai Shan between his 1761 visit and 1781, four years
after his mother had passed away. The use of Shuxiang
Si for birthday celebrations, as expressed on the 1767
stele, suggests the use of the temple in a personal and familial context, which also contributed to a strengthened
sense of Manchu imperial kinship and identity. However,
in order to legitimize this re-creation, Qianlong launched
into a lengthy explanation of the location of his newly
created monastery in relation to Wutai Shan, here referred to by its alternate name, Qingliang (Clear and
Cool). On speciically why this re-creation was both necessary and legitimate, the stele records:
Mañjuśrī has long dwelled in this worldly realm,
but has exclusively manifested and preached at
Qingliang, or the Clear and Cool Mountains . . .
Qingliang is located to the west of the capital, and
Xiangshan is also to the west of the capital; in
relation to Qingliang, Xiangshan is still positioned
to its east; in relation to India, Qingliang and
Xiangshan are both in the easterly direction.
Therefore, how can one say these two mountains
are not the same, or that they are different? . . .
WEN-SHING CHOU
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Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
Mañjuśrī can be seen with the rise and fall of
phenomena; he manifests and transforms without
limit . . . So, why would he insist on Qingliang as
his ield of enlightenment, and not know that
Xiangshan can also be? . . . In the past, we have
paid obeisance to Mañjuśrī at Wutai to pray for
[his] blessings. But Qingliang is more than a
thousand li away from the capital. Being carried in
an imperial carriage, I have only made it there three
times. But Xiangshan is only thirty li away from
the capital, so we can go year after year. Therefore
with the aspiration for the lourishing of the Buddhist faith for ten thousand years from this point
on, the temple at Xiangshan was initially built.87
Qianlong, repeatedly acknowledging that Mañjuśrī
is unbounded by place and form, is paradoxically invested in locating and relocating the tangible material
body that can best serve as a receptacle for Mañjuśrī. In
re-creating the image of Mañjuśrī from Shuxiang Si,
Qianlong sought to re-create the entire temple, and by
extension, to replicate the entire mountain range of
Wutai in Xiangshan, just outside the capital for the ease
of frequent veneration. The authenticity of the image, as
a synecdoche for Wutai Shan, rests on two seemingly
contradictory claims: irst, Mañjuśrī is unconined by
ixed notions of place and form; and, second, Mañjuśrī
is rightfully in a speciic place (Xiangshan), and precisely
in a speciic form (the image of Mañjuśrī at Baoxiang Si)
because of its speciic location in relation to India and its
status as a copy in relation to the original.88
It is precisely in the ambiguity caused by these two
claims that Qianlong was able to derive his own identity
as a Mañjuśrī-incarnate and Manchu Buddhist ruler.
Carefully locating his court east of India, closer to Wutai
Shan, and closer yet to replicas of them than the Dalai
Lama in Lhasa, Qianlong asserted explicitly what had
only been a tacit connection for previous Manchu rulers: that the successive Manchu emperors are the wheelturning incarnates of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī. The
inscriptions at Baoxiang Si do not elaborate on this
association, nor do they mention the establishment of a
Manchu Buddhist monastery. But the structure of the
main hall itself hints at the possibility that both Qianlong’s rhetorical wordplay that justiied Baoxiang Si’s eficacy and his bodhisattva-incarnate status were not only
pictorialized but also animated in architectural terms.
If Ding Guanpeng achieves the emperor-as-bodhisattva
portrayal of Qianlong by depicting a royal tantric initiate in the guise of Wutai Shan’s celebrated icon of
Mañjuśrī, at Baoxiang Si, it is the architectural restaging
of the sculpted image that imbues it with the same iden-
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tity. The contemporaneous imperial gazetteer of Beijing,
Qinding Rixia Jiuwen, speciies the structure of the
main hall as square on the outside and round on the inside (waifang neiyuan 外方内圓).89 Designed to house
the famed image of Mañjuśrī, from Wutai Shan, and
therefore as the very structure that Berger suggests is referred to as a “mandala” in the Tibetan inscription90 Baoxiang Si’s main hall likely also evoked in form the
structure of an Indo-Tibetan mandala. After all, none of
the extant beamless halls from before or after Baoxiang
Si is square in plan with symmetrical vaulted openings.
If the main hall of Baoxiang Si were a simple copy of
the beamless hall at Wutai Shan or elsewhere, the concentric square and circular plan would have been unnecessary. This intentional modiication of the original
into a square/circular structure suggests a symbolic signiicance and/or ritual function beyond the usual apparent association of beamless halls with longevity and
birthday celebrations.
Representations of mandalas in the Indo-Tibetan
tradition, which are idealized models of the cosmos with
a principal power or deity residing at its center, are used
for consecration rituals and meditative visualizations.
Therefore, when a temple is designed after a mandala,
it implies the establishment of a ground for consecration.91 Regardless of what the sculpted image looked
like and whether the space indeed served ritual functions, the fact that a mandalic or mandala-like structure
was built to house the sculpted replica of the Mañjuśrī
on a lion traced by Qianlong’s hand underscores the
symbolic potency of the newly re-created sculptural icon.
Furthermore, as noted above, the Tibetan biography of
Rölpé Dorjé recorded that the emperor engaged in many
ritual initiations related to Mañjuśrī at Wutai Shan,
and Qianlong famously occupied the central position
as Mañjuśrī in aforementioned thangka paintings. The
thangkas of Qianlong as Mañjuśrī were compositionally modelled after the refuge ield (Tib. tshogs zhing)
paintings, which were often used as the basis of visualization practices for the devotion to one’s guru. Some
scholars have even proposed that these paintings also
served as tools for visualizing Qianlong as a deity in the
course of meditative training practices.92 Finally, the
Qianlong emperor built Yuhua Ge 雨花閣 (Pavilion of
Rainy Flowers) in the imperial palace as an initiation
hall in 1750 and Pule Si 普樂寺 (Temple of Universal
Joy) in Chengde in 1766–67 as a mandala of the Buddhist deity Samvara. They were designed by Rölpé Dorjé,
who gave Qianlong the tantric initiation into the mandala of Samvara back in 1745. Our knowledge of these
various contemporaneous activities allows a certain degree of speculation about the little-known structure of
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Baoxiang Si: when further evidence becomes available,
it will not be surprising to discover that a three-dimensional, architectural mandala that would symbolically
or ritually enhance and reinforce Qianlong’s Mañjuśrī
status was also embedded in the design of Baoxiang Si’s
main hall.93 In his initial attempts to establish Manchu
Buddhism through the reiication of his bodhisattvahood, Qianlong’s stated emphasis was the re-creation
of Mañjuśrī’s holy abode for reasons of ilial piety. But
his more public and more personal agendas were both
increasingly made known in his subsequent projects.
Shuxiang Si at Chengde: Copying the Copy
In 1774, Qianlong began building a Manchu Buddhist
monastery at Chengde, which he named after the original Shuxiang Si at Wutai Shan (Fig. 25). Completed in
just one year, this architectural replica was designed
from the beginning to facilitate the translation of the
Manchu Buddhist scriptural canon, a monumental project that had commenced the year before.94 Its main
hall, Huicheng Dian 會乘殿, was also designed to house
a copy of the Manchu canon that was inished in 1790.95
The Manchu canon, produced through translation from
and consultation with existing Chinese-, Tibetan-, and
Mongolian-language versions, was in a sense a linguistic
parallel to the Wutai Shan replicas. Though bearing the
name and look of the Tibetan Kangyur, the Manchu
canon was in fact an entirely new compilation based on
a synthesis of Chinese, Tibetan, and Mongolian canons
while following the structure of the Chinese Buddhist
canon, the Tripiṭaka (Three Baskets of Teachings).96
Likewise, it was through the close juxtaposition of Chinese and Tibetan iconographic and scriptural traditions,
architectural styles, and ritual lexicons that a distinctly
Manchu Buddhist culture (with mandatory Manchulanguage recitation) was created. Qianlong, on his 1775
stele inscription commemorating the completion of the
monastery, explains that although the image of Mañjuśrī
was to be made in the same way as the image from Baoxiang Si, the halls and pavilions (diantang louge 殿堂
樓閣) were “roughly” based on the original one at Wutai
Shan—which indicates that not only was Qianlong explicitly aware of the difference between Baoxiang Si at
Fig. 25. Huicheng Dian, Shuxiang Si, Chengde. Photograph by the author.
WEN-SHING CHOU
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Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
Xiangshan and Shuxiang Si at Wutai Shan, but also that
his decision for copying was a calculated one.97 Assuming that the Baoxiang Si sculpture of Mañjuśrī on a lion
was, through the above-mentioned process of replication, transformed into an image of Qianlong-as-bodhisattva, the choice of modelling a new image after the
copy at Baoxiang Si must be read as a way to perpetuate
that identity.
The Shuxiang Si replica at Chengde was built on the
northern slopes beyond the Summer Palace on the western side of Putuo Zongcheng Miao 普陀宗乘廟 (Qianlong’s re-creation of the Potala Palace, erected in 1771
as part of a birthday present to his eighty-year-old
mother). The monastic complex of the Shuxiang Si replica follows the central plan of a Han-Chinese monastery: the gate, the protectors’ chapel (Tianwang Dian
天王殿), and a main prayer hall are laid out on a central
axis, with chapels and monks’ quarters on both sides
(Fig. 26). The third building on the main axis, which is
the main hall of the complex, is set at the top of a series
of steps on a gently sloping hill. Comparing the layout
of this Shuxiang Si with gazetteer depictions of Shuxiang Si at Wutai Shan, some have argued that it is indeed
closely based on the original.98 In fact, the layout of the
Shuxiang Si replica is no different than any centrally
planned Chinese temple. The conscious adoption of a
Han-Chinese temple plan for the building of a Manchu
monastery that nonetheless follows the ritual protocols
of a Tibetan Gelukpa monastery would have appeared
conspicuous in light of the two Tibetan replicas that
Qianlong built on that same hill before and after he
built Shuxiang Si, namely Putuo Zongcheng Miao and
Xumi Fushou zhi Miao 須彌福壽之廟, modelled after
Tashi Lhunpo in 1780. In her study of Chengde, Anne
Chayet speculated that Wutai Shan was perhaps irst and
foremost “a Chinese sacred place” for Qianlong, and
therefore he decided that his evocation of Wutai Shan in
Chengde “had to be purely Chinese.”99 Chayet’s explanation overlooks the various ways in which cultures and
traditions have been simultaneously evoked and juxtaposed in Qianlong’s series of replications. An eighteenthcentury map of Chengde (Fig. 27) shows that faux-Tibetan
style buildings and stupas (similar to the blind walls with
small ornamental windows of the Putuo Zongcheng
Miao), were also built off to the side of the central axis.
In terms of function, the main hall of Shuxiang Si at
Chengde also adapted and incorporated different designs. Huicheng Dian measures seven bays wide and ive
bays deep, and is designed as a prayer and gathering
hall, with images at the far end (Figs. 28 and 29). The
layout of the main prayer hall allows for a lexible use
of space, with enough depth to accommodate both the
163
ritual needs of a Tibetan Buddhist assembly hall (’du
khang), where prayer gatherings are held (in this case
by resident Manchu lamas), and that of a Chinese-style
hall, in which images usually occupy the central space.
The main hall of the original Shuxiang Si at Wutai
Shan is much smaller, measuring ive bays wide and
three bays deep—just enough space to house the central image.100
Therefore, despite the repeated rhetoric that Qianlong’s Baoxiang Si and Shuxiang Si are close replicas of
the halls and pavilions of the original Shuxiang Si at
Wutai Shan, the actual architectural designs of Shuxiang Si’s buildings at Chengde are different. The planning and design of these temples speak much more to
their ritual and symbolic purpose as mandalic architecture, in the case of Baoxiang Si, and their practical
function as a place of monastic assembly, in the case of
the new Shuxiang Si. What distinguished Shuxiang Si
at Chengde was the miraculous image, not the temple
complex; copying the architecture exactly was hardly
necessary when Shuxiang Si can be referenced by a replication of the true image and by the imperial authority
invested in Qianlong’s stele inscriptions.
The image that was modelled after the Mañjuśrī of
Baoxiang Si is housed in an octagonal pavilion called
Baoxiang Ge 寶相閣 (Precious Form Pavilion) atop a
hill behind Shuxiang Si’s main building complex.101 An
artiicial mountain landscape (jiashan 假山) with grottoes and meandering passages leads up to Baoxiang Ge
(Fig. 30).102 The entire garden landscape is reminiscent
of those found at Qing imperial gardens, while the miniature mountain landscape evokes the Wutai Shan range.
Even though the pavilion and the original image are no
longer extant, early photographs allow us to compare
this replica of a replica with the original image at Shuxiang Si and with Ding Guanpeng’s paintings (see Figs.
16 and 17).103 The Chengde Mañjuśrī is in almost exactly the same position as the igure in Ding Guanpeng’s
earlier painting (Fig. 31): the bodhisattva sits in a frontal position with his right knee pointing outward and
foot tucked around the nape of the lion’s head, which is
turned upward to the right; the lion’s feet, stubbier than
the originals at Wutai Shan (due to the transfer from a
three-dimensional image to a two-dimensional one and
back), are also planted on lotus blossoms. Even the low
of the bodhisattva’s garb and locks of hair follow the
same contour. What is added are attendant igures beside the bodhisattva, which suggests that they were not
part of what would have been copied from the array of
original sources. We can therefore deduce that the sculpture was a rather careful three-dimensional replica of
the replica at Baoxiang Si, of the two-dimensional replica
Fig. 26. Idealized Plan of Shuxiang
Si. Copyright The J. Paul Getty Trust,
2009. All rights reserved.
WEN-SHING CHOU
•
Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
165
Fig. 27. Detail of Shuxiang Si, Map of Palaces at Jehol, 18th century. Colored, mounted on silk scroll, 122 × 226 cm. Original map and
image in public domain; digital image provided by the Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.
by Ding Guanpeng, of the sketch by Qianlong, and of
the original image. The imitation was not just a reproduction in name but also in a formal, material technique
designed to transfer, over and over again, the true likeness of Qianlong-as-Mañjuśrī / Mañjuśrī-as-Qianlong,
with each new copy reinforcing and enhancing the notion of the true form. As the deining foci of the recently
instituted Manchu monasteries, these imperially mediated copies modelled after Wutai Shan’s numinous icon
positioned Qianlong at the center of a newly established
tradition that nevertheless traces itself back to one of
Buddhism’s most illustrious bodhisattvas and his earthly
realm.
It should come as no surprise then that travellers to
Shuxiang Si at Chengde noted the similarity between
the face of Mañjuśrī at Baoxiang Ge and that of the
Qianlong emperor, despite the fact that a physiognomic
afinity is not apparent in available photographs of
the image.104 As suggested in Ding Guanpeng’s second
painting, the way in which Qianlong asserted his bodhisattva identity revealed a form of likeness that is deined
through the concept of “true trace” and the visual lexicons of a royal tantric initiate, rather than through the
more familiar technique of modiied chiaroscuro introduced by and demanded of the Jesuits in the Qing court.
Qianlong’s stele inscriptions conirmed his increasing
interest in advancing his bodhisattva identity for the
promotion of Manchu Buddhism. Whereas the earlier
inscriptions at Xiangshan, from 1767, stressed ilial piety, Qianlong himself proclaimed for the irst time in
Shuxiang Si’s commemorative stele in 1775 the urgent
need for Manchu translations of Buddhist scriptures,
and for those who would study and recite them in order
to spread the teachings of the Buddha. Importantly,
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Fig. 28. Main Images of Huicheng Dian, Shuxiang Si, Chengde, ca. 1933. Copyright The J. Paul Getty Trust, 2009. All rights reserved.
Fig. 29. Interior of Huicheng Dian, Shuxiang Si, Chengde.
Copyright The J. Paul Getty Trust, 2009. All rights reserved.
among the twelve sets of Manchu canon that were
carved, many were distributed to non-Manchu monasteries, including the Potala Palace of the Dalai Lamas in
Lhasa, Tashi Lhunpo of the Panchen Lamas in Shigatse,
and Yonghe Gong in Beijing. 105 Their placement in key
monastic establishments of the empire where no one
would be able to read them suggests the performative
aspect of this endeavor—that the emperor has produced
a true and perfected version of the scriptural canon.
Following his remarks on the propagation of the
Manchu canon, he asked, “The Tibetan lamas call me
an emanation of Mañjuśrī based on the near homophone of ‘Manchu’ and ‘Manju,’ but if it were really
true that our names correspond to the reality, wouldn’t
Mañjuśrī laugh at me for that?” Although the rhetorical
question implies Qianlong’s ambivalence toward this
gift of honor, expressed at least in the Chinese language,
a year later, he wrote the following on another tablet at
Shuxiang Si:
The image of Wenshu 文殊 [Mañjuśrī] is nothing shu
殊 [extraordinary]. It’s magniicent as is. The two
peaks [behind Shuxiang Si and behind the Potala]
stand side by side, not more than half a li away from
each other. His dharma body can manifest as a young
boy, or as a tall gentleman. The vermillion edict
[from the Dalai Lama] has been overly enthusiastic
WEN-SHING CHOU
•
Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
Fig. 30. Exterior of Baoxiang Ge, Shuxiang Si, Chengde, ca.
1933. From Sekino Tadashi and Takuichi Takeshima, Jehol: The
Most Glorious and Monumental Relics in Manchoukuo (Tokyo:
The Zauho Press, 1934), Vol. 4, page 11.
in its praise [of me as a Mañjughosa emperor].
Wouldn’t it be laughable if it were true?106
This refrain at Shuxiang Si, which would have been
seen only by close members of the court, is Qianlong’s
closest written acknowledgment of himself as an emanation of Mañjuśrī. It also made apparent that this selfidentiication was deined vis-à-vis Avalokitêśvara (the
bodhisattva of great compassion). Directly adjacent to
Shuxiang Si is Putuo Zongcheng Miao, which had been
built just a few years earlier (in 1771) in homage to the
Dalai Lamas, successive incarnations of whom are considered emanations of Avalokitêśvara. Because Shuxiang Si was known to house objects from Qianlong’s
childhood, and was popularly referred to as Qianlong’s
“family shrine,” and because of the two steles there that
bear Qianlong’s own repeated suggestions of his association with Mañjuśrī, the temple would have been seen
as the very embodiment of a Manchu Imperial Buddhist
identity founded on Qianlong’s connection with Wutai
Shan, and as a direct counterpart to the seat of the Dalai
167
Fig. 31. Interior of Baoxiang Ge, Shuxiang Si, Chengde. From
Sekino Tadashi and Takuichi Takeshima, Jehol: The Most
Glorious and Monumental Relics in Manchoukuo (Tokyo: The
Zauho Press, 1934), Vol. 4, page 14.
Lama as an emanation of Avalokitêśvara.107 Replicating
the Shuxiang Si image was surely a way to unite a celebrated image that encapsulated Wutai Shan’s numinous
history with Mañjuśrī’s other manifestation as Qianlong
himself.
Lives of an Image
Consider, for a moment, the chain of transformations of
that celebrated image (Fig. 32). Based on the miraculous
tale of the eighth-century sculpted image of Mañjuśrī in
Zhenrong Yuan (the temple later renamed Pusa Ding), a
similar tale was established to account for the origin of
the ifteenth-century image of Mañjuśrī in Shuxiang Si,
also at Wutai Shan. The Qianlong emperor, soon after
his pilgrimage to Wutai Shan in 1761, made a sketch
based on the sculptural image of Mañjuśrī in Shuxiang
Si, which was then transferred, in accordance with
Qianlong’s instructions, onto a stone stele. That same
year, he also commissioned court painter Ding Guanpeng to make a large painting from his sketch, which
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Fig. 32. Diagram showing chain of replicas.
was enlarged to about a third the size of the original
sketch, and several other paintings of Mañjuśrī; a wax
model and a textile of the image were also made in conjunction with the paintings. Subsequent copies were
based on all earlier models. The stone stele was erected
in front of Baoxiang Si in Xiangshan, completed in 1767,
which housed a replica of the Mañjuśrī image that was
based on three sources: the sketch, the stele, and Ding
Guanpeng’s paintings. This Baoxiang Si copy of the Shuxiang Si image subsequently became a source for a further
copy, enshrined in an octagonal pavilion at Shuxiang Si
that was named Baoxiang Ge, a sculptural image that can
be traced to the earlier of the two paintings of Mañjuśrī
by Ding Guanpeng. This secondary copy became the
namesake of Shuxiang Si in Chengde, the monastery
that houses Baoxiang Ge.
This chain of copies, as well as the earlier acts of recreating Wutai Shan in Baodi Si, suggests a luid relationship between copy and original: each copy in its
speciic form and medium takes on a life of its own, and
the process of replication makes something more true,
and thus creates something new (in this case, a Manchu
imperial identity). Through a variety of generative acts
of copying—whether the repairing and re-creation of
sets of ritual objects, the mapping and planning of ar-
chitectural spaces, the insertion of the imperial brush
trace in the sketch of the sculptural image, the commitment of the copied form to the authoritative (and longlasting) surface of a stone stele, the creative revision of its
painted versions, or a repeated rhetorical act of achieving
geographical equivalence—the Qianlong emperor enacted his identity as a Mañjuśrī-incarnate. The various
two-dimensional and three-dimensional media, continuously imitating and informing subsequent replicas,
collectively produced a lineage that not only re-created
the pure land of Wutai Shan closer to the capital but
also enhanced, perfected, and resituated it around the
Manchu ruler himself.
Replication, Translation, and the New Geography
of Manchu Imperial Buddhism
The conscious alignment of Manchu imperial identity
with Wutai Shan’s sacred history and power puts into
perspective Qianlong’s subsequent activities in connection with the mountain range, such as the translation of
Mañjuśrī-related texts into Manchu and a new edition
of the Wutai Shan gazetteer. On his 1781 trip to Wutai
Shan, the fourth of his six pilgrimages there, Qianlong copied Dasheng wenshu shili pusa zanfo fashen li
WEN-SHING CHOU
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Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
大聖文殊師利菩薩讚佛法身禮 (The Great Sage Mañjuśrī
Bodhisattva’s Praise of the Dharma Body of the Buddha
Liturgy),108 and translated it into Manchu. Rölpé Dorjé
is said to have selected this text from the Chinese
Tripiṭaka, Chinese being the only language in which the
text survived.109 The text was brought back to the capital, and in addition to its Manchu translation (Amba
enduringge nesuken horonggo fusa. fucihi i nomun i
beye de doroloho maktacun), it was later translated into
Tibetan (Byang chub sems dpa’i ’jam dpal dbyangs kyis
sangs rgyas kyi sku la bstod pa) and Mongolian and incorporated into a quadrilingual edition.110 Qianlong, in
a praise poem that he wrote while visiting Baoxiang Si
in 1782, commented on his own translation of the text
into Manchu, and on his order that the printing house
produce “gold-lettered quadrilingual editions”(jinshu
siti 金書四體) to be offered on Wutai Shan’s ive peaks
as well as at Baoxiang Si in Xiangshan.111 In reality,
many other copies were made, and their circulation was
not limited to Wutai Shan and Xiangshan.112 There are
also single-language translations of the text in Chinese,
Mongolian, or Manchu. That this particular translation
was carried out at Wutai Shan and by Qianlong himself
suggests that the project’s primary importance lay in the
Manchu emperor’s authority in reproducing and disseminating a previously untranslated text on Mañjuśrī.
Qianlong’s virtuoso act of translation makes clear that,
in this case as well as in the case of the monumental task
of compiling a Manchu canon, what mattered more was
not whether the texts were used and consulted for generations to come, but Qianlong’s performance of translation. As the Manchu incarnation of the Bodhisattva
Mañjuśrī making a pilgrimage to his sacred abode,
Qianlong asserted his own agency in translating a scriptural homage to Mañjuśrī and disseminating it throughout the key Buddhist locations of his empire. Even with
a very limited audience, the ultimate aim of Qianlong’s
gesture was, as Pamela Crossley argues, “to make all
true expression, in any language, the property of the emperor.”113 By doing so, he not only declared his authority in the making of Manchu Buddhism, but also linked
himself to Buddhism’s Indic origins. As he noted in the
preface to his translations, this “Homage to Mañjuśrī”
had never before been available in the languages of his Tibetan, Mongolian, or Manchu constituents. Qianlong was
thus the irst to bring them this text—which was originally translated from the Sanskrit by Amoghavajra (705–
774)—and thereby connect himself to early translators
who were responsible for the transmission of Buddhism
to China. As a site that was from the beginning created to
transplant Buddhist India to China, Wutai Shan itself became a source for translation and transplantation.
169
Qianlong’s inal major effort to seal the connection
between himself and Mañjuśrī, and between Wutai Shan
and the capital, reached a much wider audience than did
his previous endeavors. The project began with Qianlong’s province-wide coniscation of all Wutai Shan gazetteers and their printing blocks in order to control the
proliferation of “erroneous” information.114 The motivation for this order was undoubtedly to maintain control
over the history of the mountain range, and moreover,
to make canonical his connection to it, much like Qianlong’s other projects of compiling Buddhist iconographic scriptural and literary canons, and catalogues of
objects in his collection. That the Qing court took such
a step to curtail the popular circulation of such publications also conirmed their popularity among tourists,
pilgrims, and the like. Subsequently, Qianlong issued his
own edition of the mountain gazetteer, the Imperial Record of the Clear and Cool Mountains (Qinding Qingliang shan zhi 欽定清凉山志) in 1785 (reprinted in 1811).
While more than twice the length and the number of volumes (juan) than the previous edition of the Wutai Shan
gazetteer prefaced by the Kangxi Emperor, this new text
reduced and eliminated much of the history of Wutai
Shan to make room for lengthy descriptions of imperial
restorations, steles, and Qianlong’s other writings about
the mountain range. The new guidebook took on the perspective of one pilgrim—the emperor himself—which
presented the mountain range as exclusively imperial.115
It solidiied Qianlong’s connection to the site, not only
through suggestions of his bodhisattva identity, but also
by publicizing his activities as one of the most devoted
imperial sponsors.
Qianlong’s heavy-handed editing, revision, and
translation of Wutai Shan’s history serve as a perfect
textual parallel to the series of replication projects explored in this essay. Seen as part of the micro-universes
that Qianlong created at Xiangshan and Chengde, the
Wutai Shan replicas anchored the Manchu imperial identity within an India-centered cosmography; everything
east of India was considered the domain of Mañjuśrī and
therefore of Qianlong. The replicas that derived their
power from the true image of the bodhisattva emperor
functioned not only symbolically, but also as the fundamental basis for the initiation of Manchu imperial
Buddhist monasticism. The retracing of the steps of replication shows how Qianlong, by combining various
architectural, artistic, ritual, conceptual, and semantic
evocations of Mañjuśrī at Wutai Shan, created what he
saw as a perfected and universal form of Buddhist teaching and practice around himself as the universal emperor,
and in so doing re-created a more perfectly Manchu imperial Wutai Shan.
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ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
Rethinking Universal Emperorship
Having conquered China from outside the Great Wall
in northeast Asia, the Manchu rulers carefully crafted a
multifaceted imperial persona that was absolutely central to their governance of an expanding and increasingly diverse empire. As many scholars of Qing history
and religion have shown, the Manchu rulers’ statecraft
depended heavily on a retelling of their origins and identity, as well as those of the peoples over whom they
sought to rule, projecting themselves as “the ultimate
apotheosis of righteous rulers in the recurring cycles of
history and myth.”116 It was under the Qianlong emperor that the Qing empire reached its greatest territorial
extent and height of power and prosperity. As the fourth
Manchu emperor to rule from China proper, Qianlong
inherited the identity-making enterprise from his forebears, yet a very different reality from each of them.117
Qianlong’s incarnation of the wheel-turning Mañjuśrī,
alongside his zealous cultivation of an imperial Confucian persona, both of which matured through his long
reign of sixty years (1736–1795), attests to his ability to
embody the moral centers of all cultural and religious
traditions under his domain and allowed him to recenter
his imperium upon himself. Just as Qianlong rehearsed
the early Qing ruler’s reenactment of the lama–patron
relationship of the Yuan Mongols and the religious leaders of the Sakya sect of Tibetan Buddhism and re-created
the palaces of the Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas in
Chengde, his act of copying Wutai Shan recentered, reorganized, and reconigured the past, such that his reenactments and reappropriations produced a new imperial
cosmology. Qianlong’s replicas were eventually achieved
through his reenactment of an embodiment of a sacred
icon that was highly venerated across North, East and
Central Asia. His merging of himself with Wutai Shan’s
most celebrated icon, which had ties to Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, and even Central Asian iconography, allowed the message he sought to convey to transcend all
religious, cultural, and linguistic differences.
Of paradoxical importance is that neither the images of Mañjuśrī on a lion Qianlong commissioned and
received, nor the temples he built to enshrine the images,
were accessible to the public, or for that matter put on
display for his multicultural subjects. Moreover, the
Manchu monasteries’ institutional and architectural
ephemerality meant an even smaller audience over time.
A court record from the end of the thirty-fourth year of
the Qianlong reign (1770), twenty years after the initial
construction of Baodi Si—the irst Wutai Shan replica at
Xiangshan—reported that the temple complex was in
urgent need of repair.118 Overall, Qianlong’s monumen-
tal efforts at shaping and preserving a distinct Manchu
imperial Buddhist monastic and scriptural heritage was
not sustained as imperial support of monasteries at
Wutai Shan waned in the latter half of the Qing dynasty.119 By the early twentieth century, with the collapse of most of the ediices at Xiangshan, the Manchu
monasteries fell into obscurity. But even this history of
demise is instructive. Instead of reading it as evidence
of Qianlong’s failed attempt to create a lasting impact,
or attribute the short-lived institution to the inevitability of Sinicization, I argue that Qianlong’s aims were
elsewhere. The sophistication of these building projects
showed that having undertaken the tasks (of perfecting
the teachings and practices of Buddhism in the form of
Manchu Buddhism) in his role as an emperor mattered
more to him than the monasteries’ projected longevity
within a historical timeframe. Far from serving as instruments of political or religious propaganda, Qianlong’s
copies of Wutai Shan display the expansive temporality
of a universal, wheel-turning Sino-Tibetan bodhisattva
emperor, one whose political, religious, cultural, and
artistic engagements were as much about the instrumental governance of his empire as they were aimed at
the manifestation of an ideal, universal kingship, a role
that Qianlong fully identiied with throughout his long
reign. A careful study of the creation of the Manchu
monasteries has allowed us to reconstruct the worldview of the eighteenth-century ruler on his own terms—
a cosmology in which religion and politics were not
separate categories.
Regardless, the imperial promotion of Wutai Shan
was to have long-lasting consequences on religious culture in the Qing empire: it played an important role in
initiating a thriving Sino-Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage
culture at Wutai Shan, supported by visiting Mongols
and Tibetans in the nineteenth century (despite the lack
of imperial support), and laid the groundwork for the development of Wutai Shan as a center of Qing Gelukpa
Buddhist scholasticism and a site of Tibetan Buddhist hagiographical traditions. The articulation of a Manchu imperial Wutai Shan, which synthesized the past and present
in Chinese, Mongolian, and Tibetan imaginations, set the
stage for Tibetan Buddhism to lourish on the mountain.
Wen-shing Chou is assistant professor of art history at
Hunter College. Her articles on maps and wall paintings of
Buddhist sacred sites have appeared in the Art Bulletin, the
Journal of Asian Studies, and the Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies. She is currently completing a book on the transcultural pilgrimage site of Wutai
Shan in late imperial China.
[chouwenshing@gmail.com]
WEN-SHING CHOU
•
Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
Acknowledgments
Parts of this essay were irst presented at the annual conferences of the Association for Asian Studies (2012) and
American Academy of Religion (2014). I thank the participants of both panels for their questions and suggestions. I am especially grateful for insights and help from
Patricia Berger, Isabelle Charleux, Kevin Greenwood,
Johann Elverskog, Ellen Huang, Li Jianhong, Lin ShihHsuan, Wei-cheng Lin, Nancy Lin, Christian Luczanits,
William Ma, Wang Ching-Ling, Wen Wei, and Yang
Hongjiao. I also thank Tara Zanardi, Lynda Klich, Stephen Frankel, Stanley Abe, and the anonymous readers
for their astute editorial comments and suggestions. The
inal version of this essay was completed at the Institute
for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Notes
1. Imperial patronage at Wutai Shan is a topic that has
been well studied and documented in the mountain’s own
mytho-historiography. Emperors of the Northern Wei dynasty (385–534), Northern Qi dynasty (550–577), and Sui
dynasty (581–618) all erected temples at Wutai Shan. Rulers during the Tang dynasty (618–907), whose ancestral
home is located in the vicinity of Wutai Shan in the Taiyuan 太原 region, were especially committed to advancing
Mañjuśrī as the protector of the imperial clan and of the
entire nation. A special temple of Mañjuśrī was built in
Taiyuan at the suggestion of Buddhist translator and tantric master Amoghavajra (705–774). See Raoul Birnbaum,
Studies on the Mysteries of Manjusri (Boulder, CO: Society
for the Study of Chinese Religions, 1983), 32; Stanley
Weinstein, Buddhism Under the T’ang (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 83. The mytho-historiography of the mountain’s origins traces its history of imperial
connection back even further. According to a sixteenthcentury gazetteer compiled by Monk Zhencheng 鎮澄
(1546–1617), Mañjuśrī had irst come to Wutai Shan (from
India) to convert King Mu (r. 1001–947 BCE) during the
Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE), and the deity’s presence
was again recognized during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–
220 CE) through the clairvoyance of two Indian monks,
Kaśyapa Matanga and Dharmaratna, who travelled to
China after Emperor Ming (r. 58–75) had a dream about a
radiant golden igure. See Zhencheng, Qingliang Shan zhi
(Record of the Clear and Cool Mountains), juan 1, reprinted in Zhongguo Fosi shi zhi huikan 中國佛寺史志彙
刊, 2nd series, vol. 29 (Taibei: Minwen shuju, 1980–85),
17, 97–98, 206. Imperial patronage of temples at Wutai
Shan continued through the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties, and was well documented in Ming gazetteers, but it
was not until the Qing dynasty that its Manchu emperors
embraced the project of building Wutai Shan with unprecedented fervor.
171
2. See Pamela Crossley, Translucent Mirror: History
and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 233.
3. David Farquhar’s 1978 study was the irst to draw
attention to the Qing imperial identiication with Mañjuśrī.
According to Farquhar, the Qing emperors’ self-fashioning
represented a blending of the Tibetan Buddhist “theory of
bodhisattva metempsychosis” in identiiable individuals,
especially rulers who spread the Buddhist teachings, and
the Chinese Buddhist understanding of Mañjuśrī’s residence at Wutai Shan. See David Farquhar, “Emperor as
Bodhisattva in the Governance of the Ch’ing Empire,”
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 38, no. 1 (1978): 15.
4. Monguors refer to a group of Mongols who had settled in the northeast Tibetan highlands during the Mongol
Yuan dynasty. During the Qing dynasty, many religious authorities from this group played an important role in mediating the relationship between the Qing court and Central
Tibet.
5. Mark Elliott, Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven,
Man of the World (New York: Longman, 2009), 53.
6. See Nicola Di Cosmo, “Manchu Shamanic Ceremonies at the Qing Court,” in State and Court Ritual in China,
ed. Joseph P. McDermott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 352–98. Di Cosmo observes two separate
strands of developments of Manchu ritual and religion: a
political and ideological one that resulted in the veneration of Wutai Shan and the emperors’ association with
Mañjuśrī, and a social phenomenon rooted in Manchu religious cults that led to the incorporation of Buddhist and
native Chinese deities into Manchu shamanistic rituals. See
Di Cosmo, “Manchu Shamanic Ceremonies,” 375. Manchus were in fact forbidden to take monastic vows until the
reign of the Shunzhi 順治 emperor (1638–1661).
7. For a study of the organization of the Imperial
Household Department, see Preston M. Torbert, The
Ch’ing Imperial Household Department: A Study of Its
Organization and Principal Functions, 1662–1796 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center, 1977).
8. Booi were often inexactly described as bondservants
or slaves. For more on the origins and deinitions of booi,
see Mark Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and
Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2001), 81–84.
9. Ibid., 83.
10. That is, staging Mañjuśrī’s reappearance in a vision.
11. For a recent volume that explores the making of
ethnicity in the Qing, see ed. Pamela Crossley et al., Empire
at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early
Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006); especially Mark Elliot’s contribution “Ethnicity in
the Qing Banners,” 27–57.
12. Patricia Ann Berger, Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), 161–64.
13. Ibid., 126–27.
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14. See, for example, Maria Loh, Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art
(Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007). Loh utilizes
Deleuze’s model of a rhizome, among others, to reconstruct
the interdependent relationship between the original and
the replica, between the imitator and the original author.
15. See Christopher Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction:
Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). For Wood, the processes of substitution and replication are sites for the revelation of “deep
structure of thinking about artifacts and time.” Even more
fundamentally, Whitney Davis argues that to describe the
process or dynamics in replication is to describe cognition,
consciousness, and therefore culture itself. See Whitney Davis, Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis
(University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996), 4.
16. See Thu’u bkwan, Lcang skya rol pa’i rdo rje’i
rnam thar (Biography of Chankya Rölpé Dorjé) (Lanzhou:
Kan su’u mi rig s dpe skrun khang, 1989), 332. Thu’u
bkwan does not mention an exact date for this event between the 1740s and 1750s, but the timing of the institution of the irst Manchu Buddhist monastery is corroborated
both in the archives of the Grand Council (Junjichu 軍機處)
and in Damcho Gyatsho Dharmatāla, Rosary of White
Lotuses: Being the Clear Account of How the Precious
Teaching of Buddha Appeared and Spread in the Great
Hor Country, trans. and annotated by Piotr Klafkowski;
supervised by Nyalo Trulku Jampa Kelzang Rinpoche
(Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1987), 320–21. See Beijing
Number One Archive, documents no. 03-182-2218-15 and
no. 03-182-2218-14, which were originally a single ile. I
thank Lin Shih-Hsuan for helping me piece this together.
Chen Qingying’s attribution of this event to after 1761 is
likely erroneous. See Chen Qingying, “Zhangjia Ruobi duoji
nianpu (II)章嘉若必多吉年谱 (二) (Chronology of Rölpé
Dorjé)” Qinghai minzu yanjiu 2 (1990): 37.
17. Many secondary sources indicate that Rölpé Dorjé
entered retreat consecutively at Wutai Shan beginning in
1750, but from his biography it is obvious that he did not
go there during a two-year trip to Tibet in search of the
Seventh Dalai Lama’s reincarnation between 1757 and
1758.
18. See Huang Hao 黄颢, Zai Beijing de zangzu wenwu
在北京的藏族文物 (Tibetan cultural materials in Beijing)
(Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 1993), 85. Huang speculates
that this monastery was Xiangjie Si, but court and gazetteer records and Thu’u bkwan’s biography Lcang skya rol
pa’i rdo rje’i rnam thar, indicate Baodi Si to be the monastery in question.
19. Dou Guangnai 竇光鼐 (1720–1795), ed., Qinding
rixia jiuwen kao 欽定日下舊聞考 (Imperial Edition of legends of old about the capital) (Beijing: Wuying dian, 1774),
juan 103, 7. Wang Jiapeng noted the number of lamas at
each Manchu monastery recorded in court documents, but
did not provide speciic sources; see Wang Jiapeng, “Qianlong yu Manzu lama siyuan” 乾隆與滿族喇嘛寺院 (Qian-
long and Manchu Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries), Gugong
bowuyuan yuankan 1 (1995): 60. Beginning with Baodi Si,
as many as thirteen Manchu monasteries were built in Beijing, Shengjing, Chengde, and the Western and Eastern
Mausoleums. See Lin Shih-Hsuan 林士鉉, Qingdai menggu
yu manzhou zhengzhi wenhua 清代蒙古與滿洲政治文化
(Mongolia and the Political Culture of the Manchus in the
Qing Dynasty) (Kaohsiung: Fuwen, 2009), 136–38.
20. Awang Pingcuo 阿旺平措,“Qingdai Zangchuan Fojiao zai neidi de chuanbo yu yingxiang 清代藏传佛教在内
地的传播与影响 (The spread and inluence of Tibetan Buddhism in China during the Qing),” Fayin (2012), accessed
September 5, 2014, http://www.fayin.org/luntanjingpin/2012/0823/425.html.
21. There exist a series of such histories of Wutai Shan,
each of them imperially endorsed to a certain degree; each
one is a new compilation by a new editor (or editors), with
illustrations produced from a new carving of woodblocks,
and through the sponsorship of a new patron (or patrons),
based on a selective use of the sources available at the time.
A later history of Wutai Shan is mentioned later in this
essay (Imperial Record of the Clear and Cool Mountains,
published in 1785).
22. The various recensions of this story in connection
with the sacred icon have been the focus of a number of
art-historical studies. See Sun-ah Choi, “Quest for the True
Visage: Sacred Images in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Art
and the Concept of Zhen” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2012), 164–74, and Wei-cheng Lin, Building a Sacred
Mountain: The Buddhist Architecture of China’s Mount
Wutai (Seattle and London: University of Washington
Press, 2014), 89–98. See page 23 and note 65 for Mongolian and Tibetan recensions of the story.
23. For a summary of the history of the Tibetan presence at Wutai Shan, see Karl Debreczeny, “Wutai Shan:
Pilgrimage to Five-Peak Mountain,” Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies 6 (December
2011): 30–39, accessed September 6, 2014, http://www
.thlib.org?tid = T5714.
24. This process of so-called conversion is one that requires further investigation. Even though most secondary
sources speak of the ten monasteries that the Shunzhi emperor converted from Chinese Buddhist to Tibetan Buddhist
temples—as Köhle pointed out in her 2008 article “Why Did
the Kangxi Emperor Go to Wutai Shan?: Patronage, Pilgrimage, and the Place of Tibetan Buddhism at the Early Qing
Court,” Late Imperial China 29, no. 1 (June 2008), 73–
119—none of the literature that makes this statement cites a
primary source, and this process of conversion was probably
a more gradual process, where the Chinese, Tibetan, and
Mongolian traditions coexisted within these institutions. In
Dharmatala’s Rosary of White Lotuses, the conversion is discussed in straightforward terms; it includes a description of
the Shunzhi and Kangxi emperors’ construction of large imperial temples on each of the ive terraces. See Damcho
Gyatsho Dharmatāla, Rosary of White Lotuses, 418–19.
WEN-SHING CHOU
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Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
25. Originally used to describe a series of laws laid
down by Chinggis Khan (1162?–1227), the Mongol term
jasagh was subsequently used among the Manchus to denote
a status of military and administrative rule, and “jasagh
lamas” was used to describe high-ranking imperially appointed lama oficials. See Dorothea Heuschert, “Legal
Pluralism in the Qing Empire: Manchu Legislation for
the Mongols,” The International History Review 20, no.
2 (June 1998): 310–24. For more on Qing administrative
documents concerning imperial sponsorship of jasagh lamas, see Vladimir Uspensky, “The Legislation Relation to
the Tibetan Buddhist Establishments,” paper given at the
“Wutai Shan and Qing Culture” conference at the Rubin
Museum of Art, 2007. See also Jagchid Sechin (Zhaqi
Siqin 札奇斯欽), “Manzhou tongzhi xia menggu shenquan fengjian zhidu de jianli” 满洲统治下蒙古神权封建制
度的建立 (The Establishment of the Manchu-Controlled
Mongolian Feudal System of Incarnation), Gugong wenxian 2, no. 1 (1970): 1–18.
26. See Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists in the Making
of Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press,
2005), 22; and see also Qinding Lifan yuan zeli 欽定理藩
院則例 (Imperially Commissioned Norms and Regulations
of the Board for the Administration of Outlying Regions),
in Gugong Zhenben Congkan 300 (Haikou shi: Hainan
chubanshe, 2000), juan 58, 9. The three earliest jasagh
lamas, Awang Laozang (Ngag dbang blo bzang, 1601–
1687), Laozang Danbei Jiancan (Blo bzang bstan pa’i rgyal
mtshan, 1632–1684), and Laozang danba (Blo bzang bstan
pa, [act late seventeenth–early eighteenth centuries), wrote
prefaces to the imperially sponsored editions of Wutai
Shan gazetteers in Chinese and Manchu and included their
own biographies among the eminent monks of Wutai Shan.
These prefaces are preserved in ed. Gugong bowuyuan 故
宮博物院, Qingliang shan zhi. Qingliang shan xin zhi. Qin
ding Qingliang shan zhi 清凉山志.清凉山新志.欽定清凉山
志 (Record of the Clear and Cool Mountains. New Record
of Clear and Cool Mountains. Imperial Record of the Clear
and Cool Mountains) (Haikou Shi: Hainan Chubanshe,
2001). See also Tuttle, “Tibetan Buddhism at Wutai shan in
the Qing: The Chinese Language Register,” Journal of the
International Association of Tibetan Studies, no. 6 (December 2011): 192–94, at http://www.thlib.org?tid=T5721 (accessed September 5, 2014); Natalie Köhle, “Why Did the
Kangxi Emperor Go to Wutai Shan?,” 78–79; the biographies are included in Qinding Qingliang shan zhi, juan 16,
21a–22b; and Qingliang shan xin zhi, juan 7, 21b–24b. For
a partial English translation of these biographies, see Hoong
Teik Toh, “Tibetan Buddhism in Ming China” (PhD diss.,
Harvard University, 2004), 228–37.
27. Köhle (2008) showed that Pusa Ding was probably
converted into a Tibetan Buddhist temple as early as 1481.
28. The temple was then called Dafutu Si. See Huixiang 慧祥, Gu Qingliang zhuan 古清涼傳 (Ancient History
of the Clear and Cool Mountains) (Tang dynasty), ed.
Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 (1866–1945) and Watanabe
173
Kaikyoku 渡辺海旭 (1872–1932) et al., Taishō shinshū dai
zōkyō 大正新脩大藏經 (Revised version of the canon,
compiled during the Taishō era, 1912–26) (Tokyo: Taishō
Issaikyō Kankōkai, 1924–32 [–1935]), T.2098: 51,
1094a25–b2. Following standard convention, references to
texts in the Taishō canon are indicated by text number (T.),
followed by the volume, page, register (a, b, or c), and,
when appropriate, line numbers. Qianlong was by no
means the irst person to “relocate” Wutai Shan elsewhere
through the re-creation of a monastery at Wutai Shan.
Throughout its long history, Wutai Shan has been a uniquely
popular site of replication in Japan, Korea, Central Asia,
Tibet, and areas close to Beijing, and such re-creations frequently involved the erection of a new temple named after
a monastery at Wutai Shan. On sites in Japan, see for example, Susan Andrews’s paper, “Moving Mountain: Mount
Wutai Traditions at Japan’s Tōnomine,” presented at The
Mountain of Five Plateaus Conference, Wutai Shan, Shanxi,
July 27–August 2, 2015. On sites in the Tangut state, see
Yang Fuxue 楊富學, “Xixia Wutai shan xinyang zhenyi” 西
夏五臺山信仰斟議 (Notes on Wutai shan veneration in the
Xixia dynasty),” Xixia yanjiu 1(2010): 14–22. On sites in
Tibet, see the Tibetan-language guidebook by ’Jam-dbyangs
Mkhyen-brtse’i-dbang-po et al., Guide to the Holy Places of
Central Tibet (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1958), 72; and Andreas Gruschke, The Cultural Monuments of Tibet’s Outer Provinces: Kham
(Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2004), 82. See also Shi Jinbo
史金波, Xixia fojiao shilue 西夏佛教史略 (Survey of Tangut
Buddhist history) (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe,
1988), 118–19 and 156, cited in Robert Gimello, “Wu-t’ai
Shan 五臺山 during the Early Chin Dynasty 金朝: The Testimony of Chu Pien 朱弁,” Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal 7
(1994): 507. A smaller site known as Wutai Shan also exists
in Zhangjiakou west of Beijing. Most recently, a Mountain
of Five Peaks was ritually initiated at the Larung Valley in
eastern Tibet by Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok.
29. Dou Guangnai, ed., Qinding rixia jiuwen kao, juan
103, 7. The original text reads: 地即清凉, 白馬貝書開震
旦, 山仍天竺, 青鴛蘭若近離宮 (This is the very ground
of the Clear and Cool [Wutai Shan] Palm Leaf manuscripts
of the Baima Monastery that opened China [up to Buddhism]. The mountain is still Indian, but the black-tiled
monastery is close to the summer palace.) By inscribing
this statement on the placards, Qianlong essentially asserted that the site is a surrogate of Wutai Shan, which is a
surrogate of India.
30. Poet Zhu Ziqing 朱自清 (1898–1948) documented
in his travelogues the collapse of the gate in the spring of
1932. See Zhu Ziqing, “Songtang Youji” 松堂游记 (Journey to the Pine Pavilion), accessed September 6, 2014,
http://www.xys.org / xys/ebooks / literature / prose / Zhu-Ziq
ing / songtang.txt.
31. Anne Chayet, “Architectural Wonderland: An Empire of Fictions,” in New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde, 49; Li
174
ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
Qianlang, “Beijing Biyun si jingang baota zuo” 北京碧云寺
金刚宝塔座 (The Diamond Throne at Beijing Biyun si),
Zijin cheng 9 (2009): 12–15; Zhang Yuxin, Qingdai lamajiao beiwen 清代喇嘛教碑文 (Stele inscriptions from Qingdynasty Lamaism) (Beijing: Tianjing guji chubanshe, 1987),
132–33; and Isabelle Charleux, “Copies de Bodhgayā en
Asie orientale: Les stupas de type Wuta à Pékin et Kökeqota
(Mongolie-Intérieure),” Arts Asiatiques 61 (2006): 120 – 42.
Signiicantly for the temple’s connection to rulers, this is
where revolutionary and modern China’s founding father
Sun Yat-sen’s body was interred temporarily before his
burial in his mausoleum in Nanjing.
32. Shan Shiyuan 單士元, Qingdai jianzhu nianbiao
清代建築年表 (Beijing: Zijincheng, 2009), 202.
33. Qinding Qingliang shan zhi, juan 10, 1.
34. That monastery was Luohou Si 羅睺寺. See Qinding Qingliang shanzhi, juan 10, 9b. It is the second-largest
Gelukpa Monastery at Wutai Shan, which housed about
two hundred lamas by the end of the nineteenth century.
Isabelle Charleux, Nomads on Pilgrimage, Mongols on
Wutaishan (China), 1800–1940 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 110,
citing Tian Pixu, Wutai Xinzhi (New Gazetteer of Wutai)
([China]: Chongshi shuyuan, 1883).
35. Jiang Xiantong Si Wuliang Dian chicun tangyang
chenglan qin 將顯通寺無量殿尺寸盪樣呈覧欽. See Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, ed., Qinggong Neiwu Fu Zaoban Chu Dang’an Zonghui 清宮內務府造辦處檔案總匯
(The Complete Archive of the Royal Manufactory in the
Imperial Household Department), vol. 17 (Beijing: Remin
Chubanshe, 2005), 275.
36. The back shrine of the irst loor of Yuhua Ge (Pavilion of Rainy Flowers) is also called a Wuliang Dian 無量
殿, referencing the Buddha of Immeasurable Light and the
Buddha of Immeasurable Life. See Wang Jiapeng, “Gugong
Yuhua Ge tanyuan 故宮雨花閣探源 (Inquiry into the origins of the Pavilion of Rainy Flowers),” Gugong bowuyuan
yuankan 47 (1990): 52, 54–55. Located in the northwestern sector of the Forbidden City, Yuhua Ge’s complex
structure was designed by Rölpé Dorjé at Qianlong’s request during the same year of 1750. See Berger, Empire of
Emptiness, 97–104.
37. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, ed., Qinggong
Neiwu Fu Zaoban Chu Dang’an Zonghui, vol. 17, 431.
38. Wang Jiapeng, Cultural Relics of Tibetan Buddhism Collected in the Qing Palace (Qinggong Zangchuan
Fojiao Wenwu 清宫藏传佛教文物) (Beijing: Forbidden
City Press, 1992), 169.
39. Robert Beer, The Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist
Symbols (Boston: Shambhala, 2003), 37–42.
40. In numerous passages from the biography of Qianlong’s guru and Qing imperial preceptor Rölpé Dorjé, he
was said to have copied rituals from Lhasa. See Berger,
Empire of Emptiness, 84, citing Thu’u bkwan, Lcang skya
rol pa’i rdo rje’i rnam thar, 138, 225, 187, and 221. The
prefaces of the Canon of Iconometry, translated into Chinese by Mongol scholar and Qing court translator Göm-
pojab (Tb. Mgon po skyabs; Ch. Gongbu Chabu 工布查布,
1699–1750) state an intention to correct previous HanChinese models, which were thought to be imprecise. See
also Kevin Greenwood, “Yonghegong: Imperial Universalism and the Art and Architecture of Beijing’s ‘Lama Temple’” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2013), 221–27. In
addition to various iconographic pantheons undertaken by
Rölpé Dorjé, his compilation of multilingual dictionaries
that aimed to standardize the process of translation also
served the same need for ritual authenticity. In Empire of
Emptiness, Berger astutely shows how these various linguistic and iconographic projects were harnessed to produce an orthodoxy of form and meaning.
41. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, ed., Qinggong
Neiwu Fu Zaoban Chu Dang’an Zonghui, vol. 17, 431–33.
The Chinese date is the second day of the fourth month.
The commissioning of drawings for sets of Five Sense Offerings and Eight Offerings are listed in great detail. For
example, among the Eight Offerings, the offering of music
has a “gilt bronze vajra bell on purple sandalwood tray
with cloisonné enamel stand.”
42. Berger, Empire of Emptiness, 6.
43. The entourage departed Beijing on the tenth day of
the second month, and returned more than a month later;
Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, ed., Qianlong di qiju
zhu, vol. 20, 42–85.
44. A copy of Bitian Xiaoxia (Glowing Clouds in an
Azure Sky) is in the Gest Library at Princeton University.
See Wu Xiaoling, “Glowing Clouds in an Azure Sky: A
Newly Discovered Royal Pageant,” Gest Library Journal 3
(1989): 46–55. In the genre of tributary dramas, the play
featured “celestial deities on ive-colored clouds,” “gods of
the Five Marchmonts,” and heads of “ten thousand states”
arriving to pay obeisance and offer birthday wishes to the
emperor and empress-dowager.
45. 是像即非像, 文殊特地殊, 亳端寶王剎, 鏡裡焰光珠,
法雨滄桑潤, 梵雲朝暮圖, 高山仰止近, 屏氣步霄衢。謁殊
像寺得句, 因寫滿月容, 以紀其真, 即書於右, 行營促成,
限於方幅, 迴鑾餘暇, 將放展成大圖勒石, 須彌棗葉,
無異無同, 五於此未免著相矣。辛已暮春, 保陽行宮並識.
Translation: “An image and not an image, Mañjuśrī’s
abode is indeed special. The awe of the bejeweled king is at
the tip of the brush, and brilliant laming light in the relection of the mirror. The rain of Buddhist teachings moistens
all worldly sufferings, heavenly clouds at dawn and dusk
make a marvelous sight. I gaze up at the tall mountains;
holding my breath, I approach the high path. When I paid
a visit to Shuxiang Si, these verses came to me. Therefore I
sketch the full-moon countenance [of Mañjuśrī] in order to
document its authenticity, and compose a colophon to its
right. This is hastily executed while still on the road, so its
size is constrained. When there is time after our return, I will
enlarge it and afix it to a rock [i.e., make a relief carving].
Mount Meru and a jujube leaf are neither different nor the
same. If one were to insist on this, it would be attaching oneself to form. Written at Baoyang travelling palace, at the end
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Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
of spring season during the Xinyi year (1761).” It is recorded
in Qinding Midian Zhulin, Shiqu Baoji, xubian 欽定秘殿珠
林, 石渠寳笈, 續編 (Imperially Ordered Beaded Grove of
the Secret Hall and Precious Bookbox of the Stone Drain,
supplement) (Taipei: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, 1971), 42.
Baoyang Palace probably refers to the travelling palace at
Baoding 保定 in Hebei province.
46. For evidence of Qianlong’s own hand inside the
One or Two paintings, see Kristina Kleutghen, “One or
Two, Repictured,” Archives of Asian Art 62 (2012): 37–39.
47. Ibid., 48. The exact term used in the imperial catalogue is fangzhan cheng datu leshi 放展成大圖勒石, i.e.,
enlarge and aix [the sketch] to a rock.
48. According to his biography, Rölpé Dorjé was in
charge of building Baoxiang Si; see Thu’u bkwan, Lcang
skya rol pa’i rdo rje’i rnam thar, 486. One modern-day
blogger has noted seeing a stele at Baoxiang Si with an
image of Mañjuśrī carved on it; however, until further
access is permitted, no study of this stele can be undertaken; accessed May 2, 2014, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s
/blog_512f6d690100fp9s.html.
49. Dou Guangnai, ed., Qinding rixia jiuwen kao, juan
103, 8.
50. Wang Jiapeng, “Qianlong yu Manzu lama siyuan,”
60. Wang cites Neiwufu zouxiaodang 內務府奏銷檔 (Imperial Household Agency archives, Financial accounts volumes), 319 ce. See also Qinding Lifan yuan zeli, juan 58,
16; juan 59, 25.
51. See ed. Zhao Lin’en 趙林恩, Wutai Shan shige
zongji 五台山诗歌总集 (Anthology of Wutai shan poems),
vol. 2 (Beijing: Zongjiao wenhua chubanshe, 2002), 407.
52. Ye shes don grub and A lag sha Ngag dbang bstan
dar, Ri bo dwangs bsil gyi ’jam dpal mtshan ldan gling gi
mtshar sdug sku brnyan gyi lo rgyus bskor tshad dang bcas
pa dad ldan skye bo’i spro bskyod me tog ’phreng mdzes
(A beautiful lower garland to rouse the faithful: the history and environs of the Beautiful statue of the Temple of
Mañjuśrī’s Marks at the Clear and Cool Mountains) (Beijing: Songzhu Si, 1818), in the Collection of the Library of
the Minorities Cultural Palace, Beijing.
53. Thu’u bkwan, Lcang skya rol pa’i rdo rje’i rnam
thar, 615; Chinese translation by Chen Qingying, 294.
54. D. Pokotilov, “Der Wu T’ai Schan und seine
Klöster,” translated from Russian into German by W. A.
Unkrig. Sinica-Sonderausgabe (1935): 79.
55. Judging from available images from Dunhuang,
this triad was later expanded sometime in the ninth century to include the Kashmiri monk Buddhapāli and the
bearded old man. For a study of the Mañjuśrī pentad in
Japan, see Wu Pei-Jung, “The Manjusri Statues and Buddhist Practice of Saidaiji: A Study on Iconography, Interior
Features of Statues, and Rituals Associated with Buddhist Icons” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2002); Sha Wutian, “Dunhuang P.4049 ‘xinyang
Wenshu’ huagao ji xiangguan wenti yanjiu” (A Study of
the Sketch of the “New-Style Mañjuśri” in Dunhuang
175
P.4049 and Related Issues) Dunhuang yanjiu (March 2005):
26–32.
56. This sculptural group is also found at Nanchan Si,
Foguang Si, and Yanshan Si in the Wutai Shan area from
the eighth to the twelfth centuries.
57. Some scholars have argued that this iconography
originated not in Wutai Shan but in Khotan, noting the obvious prominence of the Khotan King. For our present purposes, it matters less where this iconography originally
came from and more that it somehow became associated
with Wutai Shan. See Jiang Li, “Qianxi Dunhuang xinyang
Wenshu zaoxiang chansheng de yuanyuan” (A Primary
Analysis of the Origins of the Production of “New-Style
Mañjuśrī” Images at Dunhuang), Mei yu shidai (January
2010): 67–69.
58. The legend was cited in the carved colophon on a
1608 stele erected by monk Zhencheng, the Ming-dynasty
compiler of Qingliang shan zhi. See ed. Cui Zhengsen and
Wang Zhichao, Wutai Shan beiwen xuanzhu, 289–91. See
also Huanyu, “Shuxiang Si li de chuanshuo gushi” 殊像寺
里的传说故事 (Legends of Shuxiang Si), Wutai Shan yanjiu, 3 (1996): 47–48.
59. In this story, the old abbot of the monastery hosted
a competition for the design of the main image. Dissatisied
with each and every design entry, the old abbot inally accepted the pleas from an extremely skilled sculptor and his
team of artisans, who, having journeyed from afar, vowed
not to return home if their work did not meet the expectations of the abbot. The project began and progressed in
due time, but came to a standstill when the sculptor found
himself stymied by artist’s block in attempting to come up
with the perfect design for Mañjuśrī’s head. After several
days of this, at around lunchtime, clouds suddenly parted,
and an image of the perfect form of Mañjuśrī riding on a
lion appeared in the sky. Witnessing this, all of the artisans
prostrated themselves in amazement. The sculptor immediately got up, ran into the kitchen, grabbed a batch of buckwheat dough prepared for lunch, and sculpted it into the
form of the heavenly apparition. Just as he was inishing it,
the image of Mañjuśrī disappeared. This story of miraculous occurrence spread far and wide, and soon pilgrims
rushed there from all parts of the country to pay homage
to the resulting sculpture. See Ye shes don grub and A lag
sha Ngag dbang bstan dar, Ri bo dwangs bsil gyi ’jam dpal
mtshan ldan gling, 5a.
60. Lcang skya rol pa’i rdo rje, Zhing mchog ri bo rtse
lnga’i gnas bzhad (Xining: Mtsho sngon mi rigs dpe sgrun
khang. 1993), 43.
61. For a recently published Tibetan source, see Ngag
dbang bstan dar, Dwangs bsil ri bo rtse lnga’i gnas bshad
(Pilgrimage Guide to the Clear and Cool Five Peak Mountains) (Beijing: krung go’i bod rig dpe skrun khang, 2007),
58; for Mongolian, see Ye shes don grub and A lag sha
Ngag dbang bstan dar, Ri bo dwangs bsil gyi ’jam dpal mtshan ldan gling, 5b, line 3; the name also appears as an inscription on the late-eighteenth-/early-nineteenth-century
176
ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
map of Wutai Shan at Badgar Coyiling Süme. See Wen-shing
Chou, “The Visionary Landscape of Wutai Shan in Tibetan
Buddhism from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century”
(PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011).
62. Charleux, online appendices to the book Nomads
on Pilgrimage, 59.
63. Charleux notes that the true image was replaced in
1482 by a new golden statue; Charleux, Nomads on Pilgrimage, 310.
64. Diyi lishi dang’an guan ed., Qinggong Neiwu Fu
Zaoban Chu Dang’an Zonghui, vol. 33, 40–41.
65. Ibid., vol. 26, 693. 乾隆二十六年四月十八日: 十八日
接得員外郎安泰押帖一件, 內開本月十七日奉旨著丁觀鵬用
舊宣紙畫文殊菩薩像著色工筆畫, 得時裱掛軸, 欽此。乾隆
二十六年十二月十五日: 十二月十五日接得達色押帖一件,
內開十四日太監胡世傑持來御筆文殊像二幅、丁觀鵬畫文
殊像一副。傳旨著觀鵬仿蠟身樣法身起稿, 仍用舊宣紙另
畫三幅, 其塔門暫且放下, 先畫文殊像, 欽此。I thank
Wang Ching-Ling for irst bringing this reference to my attention.
66. Qinding Midian Zhulin, Shiqu Baoji, xubian 欽定
秘殿珠林, 石渠寳笈, 續編 (Imperially ordered Beaded
Grove of the Secret Hall and Precious Bookbox of the Stone
Drain, supplement) (Taipei: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan,
1971), 357–58.
67. This would date the painting to the eleventh month
of the year, just one month before it was presented to the
emperor as a record in Neiwu fu Ruyi guan’s documents.
This is noted by Wang Ching-Ling in an e-mail to the author, August 13, 2010.
68. Qinding Midian Zhulin, Shiqu Baoji, xubian, 405.
The inscription reads: 臣裘曰脩之母王氏率孫媳等敬繡.
69. I thank Christian Luczanits for this observation.
70. David Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian
Buddhists and their Tibetan Successors (Boston: Shambhala, 2002), 231–70.
71. The immensely informative Tibetan biography of
Rölpé Dorjé by Tuken records the initiations. For an analysis of them, see Wang Xiangyun, “Tibetan Buddhism at
the Court of Qing: The Life and Work of lCang-skya Rolpa’i-rdo-rje (1717–86)” (PhD diss., Harvard University,
1995), 293–96.
72. Zito, Of Body and Brush.
73. James Hevia, “Lamas, Emperors, and Rituals: Political Implications in Qing Imperial Ceremonies.” Journal
of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 16,
no. 2 (1993): 246.
74. I thank Lin Wei-Cheng for pointing this out to me
at the Association for Asian Studies conference in 2012.
75. The complete inscription reads: 乾隆辛已春。上以
祝釐巡幸五臺。瞻禮曼殊寶相。圓光默識。如月印川。回
鑾後。摹寫為圖。水墨莊嚴。妙合清涼真面。復以稿
本。命小臣觀鵬設色。齋盥含毫。積七閱月。雖華鬘珠
珞。猊座蓮臺。殫竭小乘知解。而於師利本來相好。實未
能裨助萬一。竊自念凡庸末技。幸得仰承天筆。擬繪金
容。譬諸匠眾為優填王作旃檀像。雕鐫塗澤。無足名
稱。而濁質鈍根。獲霑香國功德。歡喜信不可思議。臣
丁觀鵬敬識。 Translation: During the spring of 1761, the
emperor toured Wutai to obtain blessings. He visited the
precious image of Mañjuśrī [at Shuxiang Si], which is radiant with the subtle glow of wisdom, like the moon’s seal on
a river. After returning to his palace, he made a sketch after
the image in ink splendor. The sketch wondrously matched
the true countenance of [the sage of] Clear and Cool
[Mañjuśrī]. Then, based on the sketch, he ordered the humble servant Guanpeng to make a colored painting. Observing ritual fasting and cleansing, I diligently held a brush for
seven months. [Even though I was able to paint] the garlands and the beaded pearls, the lion throne and the lotus
pedestal, exhausting all knowledge and understanding of
the smaller vehicle, Mañjuśrī’s primary and secondary
marks are originally excellent, therefore my brush could
not enhance even one-ten-thousandth. I secretly feel my
thoughts are banal and my skill is limited. Fortunately, by
relying on the heavenly brush [of the emperor], I was able
to lay out the golden countenance. Just like the artisans
who carved the sandalwood Buddha for King Udayana, [I
completed it] after much careful chiseling and modiication. It can still hardly deserve to be called anything. Even
though my qualities are impure and roots dull, that I can
still obtain merits of the fragrant land [paradise of Amitabha], I feel blissful beyond measure. Servant Ding Guanpeng respectfully acknowledges [this].
76. For a thorough study of the history of sandalwood
Buddhas in China, see Martha Carter, The Mystery of the
Udayana Buddha (Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale,
1990).
77. Qianlong instructed Ding to paint an image of
Mañjuśrī by “imitating a wax model” (fang lashen yang
fashen 仿蠟身樣法身).
78. See Patricia Berger, “Lineages of Form: Authority
and Representation in the Buddhist Portraits of the Manchu Court,” Tibet Journal 28, nos. 1–2 (2003): 109–46;
and Michael Henss, “The Bodhisattva-Emperor: TibetoChinese Portraits of Sacred and Secular Rule in the Qing
Dynasty,” Oriental Art 3 (2001): 1–16, and 5 (2001): 71–
83.
79. They counter, in Berger’s words, “the apparent immediacy of the imperial face with a patterned, canonical
pantheon of visions.” Berger, Empire of Emptiness, 61.
80. Indeed, Berger credits Ding’s copies of true images
with the integration of these two modes of representation—“while Ding faithfully copied the overall outlines of
archaic vision, in an illusionist’s trick he also leshed them
out, plumped them up, and made them uncannily real.”
Ibid., 166.
81. “Farquhar’s inluential work may also represent
the prevailing tendency to focus exclusively on Tibetan
Buddhist concepts and materials.” Farquhar attributed
Qianlong’s self-promotion to a political need to manage
the allegiance of Mongols and, later, Tibetans, who had become subjects of their expanding empire; and he did this
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Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
by showing how Qianlong employed the same method of
self-identiication as Mongols and Tibetans, who by the
seventeenth century had all become adherents of Tibetan
Buddhism and were subscribing to a growing system of ecclesiastical reincarnations in which occupants of monastic
thrones were considered incarnations of speciic bodhisattvas. That is, the Qing emperors’ parallel self-identiication
would therefore allow them to gain control of Tibet and
Mongolia by raising themselves to the same level of divinity as Tibet and Mongolia’s own bodhisattva incarnates.
Furthermore, Farquhar demonstrated how early Qing rulers irst justiied their claims on Mongol precedence by
tracing their ability to claim this status for themselves to a
history of priest–patron relationships between Chinese emperors and Tibetan lamas that had begun in China during
the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271–1368): the invitation of
the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617–1682) by the Qing dynastic
founder Abahai (1592–1643) to his court in Mukden in
1637 was modeled after previous emperors who invited religious teachers to their court, and especially the lama–patron relationship between Kublai Khan (1215–1294), the
founder of the Yuan dynasty, and his imperial preceptor
the ’Phags pa lama (1235–1280) from Tibet; it was upon
his return to Tibet that the Fifth Dalai Lama, jointly with
the Fourth Panchen Lama (1570–1662), bestowed on Abahai the title of “Mañjuśrī-Great Emperor,” a title that was
maintained and solidiied by and for subsequent Manchu
emperors. This identiication was made indisputable by the
Third Dalai Lama’s prophecy that a great secular incarnation of Mañjuśrī would unite China, Mongolia, and Tibet,
together with the homophonic similarity between the
names “Manchu” and “Mañju.” See David Farquhar, “Emperor as Bodhisattva,” 15–20; the notion that Qianlong
promoted his image as the Mañjughoṣa emperor exclusively toward the Mongols and Tibetans has also been implicitly substantiated by the fact that Qianlong at the same
time supported Confucian state rituals and the preservation of Manchu Shamanistic rituals. For more on Qianlong’s practice of Confucian state rituals and participation
in Shamanistic rituals, see Angela Zito, Of Body and
Brush: Grand Sacriices as Text/Performance in EighteenthCentury China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997), and Di Cosmo, “Manchu Shamanic Ceremonies.”
82. On Tibetan appellation of Qianlong as Mañjuśrī,
the Panchen Lama Blo bzang dpal ldan yes shes composed
a prayer to Qianlong’s previous incarnations on the occasion of the emperor’s seventieth birthday. See Vladimir Uspensky, “The Previous Incarnations of the Qianlong
Emperor According to the Panchen Lama Blo bzang dpal
ltan ye shes,” in Tibet, Past and Present: Proceedings of
the Ninth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, ed. Henk Blezer (Leiden: 2000), 215–28. An
album of thirteen painted leaves featuring Qianlong and
his twelve previous incarnations, now in the Palace Museum Library in Beijing, is based on this incarnation lineage. It is accompanied by quadrilingual inscriptions in
177
Tibetan, Manchu, Mongolian, and Chinese, and situates
Qianlong in a mountainous “pure land” of Wutai Shan. I
thank Lin Shih-Hsuan for bringing this album to my attention.
83. Recent scholarship has come to challenge Farquhar’s claim (that Qing emperors’ Buddhist guise was primarily targeted at Mongols and Tibetans) by focusing on
Chinese language texts that reiterate their Mañjuśrī appellation and spell out their sumptuous imperial donation in
both Chinese and Tibetan monasteries at Wutai Shan. See
Natalie Köhle, “Why Did the Kangxi Emperor Go to Wutai
Shan?; and Gray Tuttle, “Tibetan Buddhism at Wutai Shan
in the Qing: The Chinese-language Register.” Gray Tuttle’s
study of imperially endorsed Chinese-language gazetteers
challenges Farquhar’s assertion that the Manchu emperors’
association with Mañjuśrī was a strategy directed at Tibetan
and Mongolian populations. Tuttle postulates instead that
Han-Chinese adherents of Tibetan Buddhism were a principal recipient of Qing imperial patronage and were the population group especially targeted for the propagation of
Wutai Shan and, in particular, Tibetan Buddhism.
84. Ibid. For the design of the mandalic structure, see
Heather Stoddard, “Dynamic Structures in Buddhist Mandalas: Apradakṣina and Mystic Heat in the Mother Tantra
Section of the Anuttarayoga Tantras,” Artibus Asiae 58,
no. 3–4 (1999): 169–213. Stoddard relates the building of
the Cakrasamvara Mandala at Pule Si in the Qing imperial
summer palace of Jehol to the mandala initiations that
Qianlong undertook at around the same time. The presentday ruins of Baoxiang Si are located inside a closed military compound and are therefore closed to researchers.
85. 歲辛巳, 值聖母皇太后七旬大慶, 爰奉安輿詣五臺,
所以祝釐也。 殊像寺在山之麓, 為瞻禮文殊初地, 妙相莊
嚴, 光耀香界, 默識以歸。即歸則心追手摹, 係以讚而勒之
碑。香山南麓, 曩所規菩薩頂之寶諦寺在焉。迺於寺右度
隙地, 出內府金錢, 飭具庀材, 營構藍若, 視碑摹而像設
之。… 經始於乾隆壬午春, 越今丁亥春蕆工。 See Zhang
Yuxin 張羽新, Qing zhengfu yu lama jiao 清政府與喇嘛教
(The Qing government and Lama Religion) (Lhasa: Xizang
remin chubanshe, 1988), 409–11.
86. See note 38 above.
87. 因記之曰: 文殊師利久住娑婆世界, 而應現說法則
獨在清涼山, 固《華嚴品》所謂東方世界中菩薩者也。夫
清涼在畿輔之西, 而香山亦在京城之西。然以清涼視香山,
則香山為東, 若以竺乾視震旦, 則清涼、香山又皆東也。是
二山者不可言同, 何況云異? 矧陸元暢之答宣律師曰: 文
殊隨緣利見, 應變不窮, 是一是二, 在文殊本不生分別見,
倘必執清涼為道場, 而不知香山之亦可為道場, 則何異鑿井
得泉而謂水專在是哉? 而昔之詣五臺禮文殊, 所以祝釐也,
而清涼距畿輔千餘里, 掖輦行慶, 向惟三至焉。若香山則去
京城三十里而進, 歲可一再至。繼自今憶萬年延洪演乘, 茲
惟其恒, 是則予, 建寺香山之初志也。寺成, 名之曰: 寶
相。See Zhang, Qing zhengfu yu lama jiao, 408.
88. For Qing knowledge of and policy toward India,
see Matthew Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of
178
ARCHIVES OF ASIAN ART
Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
89. Dou Guangnai, ed., Qinding rixia jiuwen kao, juan
103, 8. Concerning the building of Baoxiang Si’s mall hall,
the text reads: 命於寶諦寺旁,建茲寺,肖像其中,殿制
外方內圓,皆甃甓而成,不施木植,四面設甕門.
90. Berger, Empire of Emptiness, 161.
91. David Snellgrove and Hugh Richardson, A Cultural History of Tibet (New York: Frederick A. Praeger,
1968), 115–16.
92. Ishihama, “Study on the Qianlong as Cakravartin,
a Manifestation of Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, Tangka,” Waseda
daigaku Mongol Kekyusyo, 2, no. 24 (March 2004). Qianlong gave at least one painting to Rölpé Dorjé around the
year 1784; see Wang, “Tibetan Buddhism at the Court of
Qing,” 296.
93. Caroline Bodolec, “Uncommon Public Buildings with
Vault with Abutments in the Chinese Landscape of Wooden
Construction (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries),” in Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Construction
History, vol. 1 (Exeter, UK: Short Run Press, 2006), 409–16.
94. The Manchu Buddhist canon took nearly twenty
years and more than ive hundred translators to complete.
A Manchu translation bureau (Qingzi Jingguan 清字經館)
was established in 1772 (the thirty-seventh year of the
Qianlong reign). See Marcus Bingenheimer, “The History
of the Manchu Buddhist Canon and First Steps towards its
Digitization,” Central Asiatic Journal 56 (2012–13): 203–
19; Gao Mingdao (a.k.a. Friedrich Grohmann),“Rulai zhiyin sanmai jing fanyi yanjiu 如來智印三昧經翻譯研究”
(master’s thesis, Taipei: Chinese Culture University, 1983),
1–33, 153–205; Walther Fuchs, “Zum mandjurischen Kandjur,” Asia Major 6 (1930): 388–402; and Hans-Rainer
Kämpfe, “Einige tibetische und mongolische Nachrichten
zur Entstehungsgeschichte des mandjurischen Kanjur,”
Zentralasiatische Studien 9 (1975): 537–46. On the connection with Shuxiang Si in Chengde, see Feng Shudong 馮
術東,“Shuxiang Si yu manwen dazang jing” 殊像寺與滿文
大藏經 (Shuxiang Si and the Manchu Canon), Wenwu
Chunqiu 1 (2005): 41–43.
95. According to Wang, Lifan yuan’s records indicate
sixty-three Manchu lamas resided in Shuxiang Si; see
Wang, “Qianlong yu Manzu lama siyuan,” 62. Wang does
not cite the speciic passage.
96. One exception to the structure of the Chinese
canon is addition of esoteric texts; see Gao Mingdao, “Rulai zhiyin sanmai jing fanyi yanjiu,” 10.
97. 莊校金容, 一如香山之制; 而殿堂樓閣, 略仿五
臺山。 The commemorative stele dates to the fortieth year
of the Qianlong reign (1775); see Zhang, Qing zhengfu yu
lama jiao, 443.
98. Meng Fanxing 孟繁興, “Chengde Shuxiang Si yu
Wutai Shan Shuxiang Si 承德殊像寺與五台山殊像寺,” in
Bishu shanzhuang luncong 避暑山莊論叢 (Collected essays
on the summer palace) (Beijing: Zijincheng chubanshe:
1986), 450–54.
99. Anne Chayet, “Architectural Wonderland: An Empire of Fictions,” in New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde, ed. James A.
Millward et al. (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 49.
100. The current structure is ive bays wide and three
bays deep. According to Qinding Qingliang shan zhi
(1785), the hall measures two bays (three ying 楹) wide;
see Qinding Qingliang shan zhi, juan 10, 10.
101. The name is a variation of Qianlong’s iconographic project, the Baoxiang Lou 寶相樓, located in the
Cining Palace inside the Forbidden City, which was also
constructed in honor of the eightieth birthday of his
mother, the empress-dowager, in 1771.
102. Zhengjue Si, another Manchu monastery that began construction in 1773 near the Yuanming Yuan Summer Palace, also appears to have had an octagonal pavilion
that housed a sculptural image of Mañjuśrī on a lion. See
Zhou Fang, Zhengjue Si li hua jinxi 正觉寺里话今昔
(Speaking of the Past and the Present inside Zhenjue Si),
accessed August 26, 2015, http://www.mzb.com.cn/html/
Home/report/220569-2.htm. This sculptural image is also
referenced in Eugene Pander, Lalitavajra’s Manual of Buddhist Iconography (New Delhi: International Academy of
Indian Culture and Aditya Prakashan, 1994), 40.
103. The Getty Conservation Institute has been engaged in a restoration project at Shuxiang Si since 2002,
and has published old photographs of the monastery for its
extensive conservation report. See Chengde Cultural Heritage Bureau, Hebei Cultural Heritage Bureau, and The
Getty Conservation Institute, Assessment Report on Shuxiang Temple, Chengde, rev. ed. (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2009); accessed April 29, 2011, http://
getty.edu/conservation/publications/pdf_publications
/shuxiang.html.
104. Xiang Si 向斯, Huangdi yu foyuan 皇帝的佛緣
(Emperors and Buddhism) (Hong Kong: Heping tushu,
2005), 297; and Banyou, “Wai ba miao yu qingdai zhengzhi 外八廟與清代政治,” Chengde minzu zhiyie jishu
xueyuan xuebao 承德民族職業技術學院學報, vol. 4
(1996), 47. Sven Hedin noted, “Folk-lore says that the
rider on the lion is the divine representation of the Emperor Ch’ien Lung as Mañjuśrī.” Hedin, History of the Expedition in Asia 1927–1935 (Stockholm: Elanders, 1943),
141; http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/toyobunko/E-290.9-HE01-025/V-2
/page/0149.html.en. See also a similar description of another Mañjuśrī on a lion at Zhenjue Si by Eugene Pander
in Pander, Lalitavajra’s Manual of Buddhist Iconography,
40, cited in Berger, Empire of Emptiness, 226. Berger wonders whether Pander could be referring to another temple
at Wanshuo Shan. Zhenjue Si was also a Manchu Buddhist
monastery built around the same time as Chengde’s Shuxiang Si. It would not be surprising to ind Qianlong’s replicas
of Shuxiang Si’s Mañjuśrī sculpture at other Manchu monasteries as well.
105. I thank Lin Shih-Hsuan for this observation.
WEN-SHING CHOU
•
Imperial Apparitions: Manchu Buddhism and the Cult of Mañjuśrī
106. Qi Jingzhi 齊敬之, Wai ba miao beiwen zhushi
外八廟碑文註釋 (The Eight Outer Temple’s Annotated
Inscriptions) (Beijing: Zijingcheng chubanshe, 1985), 92:
殊像亦非殊,堂堂如是乎。雙峰恆並峙, 半里弗多纖。法爾
現童子,巍然具丈夫。丹書過情頌,笑豈是真吾。
107. These childhood objects include a silver vase, a
golden bowl, ivory pillars, and porcelain plates; see Feng
Shudong, “Shuxiang Si yu manwen dazang jing,” 397.
108. T. 20.1195.
109. For a more detailed study of this translation project and its signiicance, see Lin Shih-Hsuan, “Wutai Shan
yu Qing Qianlong nianjian de manwen fojing fanyi” 五臺山
與清乾隆年間的滿文佛經繙譯 (Wutai Shan and the translation of Manchu Buddhist scriptures during the Qianlong
reign). Paper presented at The Mountain of Five Plateaus
Conference, Wutai Shan, Shanxi, July 27–August 2, 2015.
110. See Lin Shih-Hsuan, Qingdai menggu yu manzhou zhengzhi wenhua, 215, quoting Yuzhi shi siji 御製詩
四集 (Imperial Poems in Four Volumes), juan 89, 19.
111. The original reads: 《大聖文殊師利菩薩讚佛法身
禮經》載漢經中而番藏中乃無。去歲巡幸五臺, 道中因以
國語譯出, 並令經館譯出西番、蒙古, 以金書四體經供奉臺
頂及此寺.
112. A study has yet to be done on how many copies
were made and how widely they were disseminated.
113. Crossley, A Translucent Mirror, 266.
179
114. Beijing Number One Archive, document no. 0401-38-0015-011.
115. For a comparison of the different versions of gazetteers at Wutai Shan, see Chou, “The Visionary Landscape
of Wutai Shan,” 51–53.
116. Johan Elverskog, Our Great Qing: The Mongols,
Buddhism, and the State in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 8.
117. As Stephen Whiteman shows through his study of
the imperial summer retreat in modern-day Chengde during the reign of Qianlong’s grandfather Kangxi, the retreat
constructed under Kangxi displayed a very different vision
of rulership than that of the Qianlong era, despite Qianlong’s employment of a rhetoric of continuation from his
grandfather. The transformations of the summer retreat
that took place between the two reigns relected the fact
that whereas Kangxi faced the “challenges of conquest
and consolidation,” it was only under Qianlong’s reign
that a model of universal emperorship was established.
See Whiteman, “From Upper Camp to Mountain Estate:
recovering historical narratives in Qing imperial landscapes,” in Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed
Landscapes 33, no. 4 (October, 2013): 266.
118. See Shan, Qingdai jianzhu nianbiao, 202.
119. Di Cosmo, “Manchu Shamanic Ceremonies,”
390.