Building a Sacred Mountain: The Buddhist Architecture of China's Mount Wutai

By the tenth century CE, Mount Wutai had become a major pilgrimage site within the emerging culture of a distinctively Chinese Buddhism. Famous as the abode of the bodhisattva Ma ju r (known for his habit of riding around the mountain on a lion), the site in northeastern China s Shanxi Province was transformed from a wild area, long believed by Daoists to be sacred, into an elaborate complex of Buddhist monasteries.

In Building a Sacred Mountain, Wei-Cheng Lin traces the confluence of factors that produced this transformation and argues that monastic architecture, more than texts, icons, relics, or pilgrimages, was the key to Mount Wutai s emergence as a sacred site. Departing from traditional architectural scholarship, Lin s interdisciplinary approach goes beyond the analysis of forms and structures to show how the built environment can work in tandem with practices and discourses to provide a space for encountering the divine.

For more information: http://arthistorypi.org/books/building-a-sacred-mountain