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Awakening Mountain Monastery (Jue Shan Si 覺山寺)

From the Ground Up: Buddhism & East Asian Religions (FROGBEAR Project)

The Monastery of Awakening Mountain (Jueshan Si 覺山寺) is located in a scenic gorge about twelve kilometers south of the Lingqiu County seat (Lingqiu Xian 靈丘縣). The monastery is authentically ancient, containing a stele recording the visit of a Northern Wei emperor to the valley in 461 CE, as well as a spectacular Liao-dynasty (916-1126 CE) brick pagoda with murals inside. Almost all of the present buildings, however, seem to have reached their current form during the abbotship of a local monk named Long Cheng 龍誠, whose activities in repairing the monastery and reviving the dharma are attested in several steles between 1889 and 1916. (See: Liu Zemin 劉澤民 and Li Yuming 李玉明 eds., Sanjin Shike Daquan: Datong Lingqiu Xian Juan 三晉石刻大全: 大同市靈丘縣卷, Taiyuan 太原: Sanjin chubanshe 三晉出版社 (2009): 120-123, 135-7.) An encomium on the monk Long Cheng written in 1916 by the county magistrate Li Chi 李熾 gives the bones of a biography. Long Cheng was born into poverty and hunger. At the age of twenty, ‘his body was possessed by the noble Buddha, and he was delivered from the world while still a living man’ (gui Fo futi, jishi huoren 貴佛附體, 濟世活人). After this, spirit-possession by the Buddha apparently happened frequently. He took tonsure and ‘learned to read in a rough way’ (cu tong wenzi 粗通文字), such that he could chant Buddhist scriptures. He claimed to have undertaken a begging trip, barefoot and accompanied by a single disciple, through Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan, Jiangsu, and Beijing, ultimately raising enough money to begin the repairs of Jueshan Monastery, which had fallen into ruin. After this point, the project attracted large-scale sponsorship of local elites, as indicated by the magistrate’s glowing description and another donor’s stele. None of the steles give any information about the murals in the monastery, but the style of the painting is consistent with a late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century date. The monastery itself is a warren of narrow, unlit rooms. In 2018, almost all of these were cluttered with altar paraphernalia, storage boxes, metal gantries, etc., making it extremely difficult to get full-wall photographs of any individual mural; the photographs here represent a selection of what seemed interesting and possible to photograph. Consistent with the rather sui-generis career of abbot Long Cheng, the murals are quite unique, such that in many cases it’s difficult to identify their textual source. The Mahāvīra Hall (Daxiong Baodian 大雄寶殿) has murals that resemble ‘Water-and-Land’ (shuilu 水陸) pantheons elsewhere, with dozens of figures arranged in groups beneath identifying banners. Unlike ‘Water-and-Land’ murals, however, the roster of figures does not appear to derive directly from the usual northern ‘Water-and-Land’ text, the ‘Ritual Text of Heaven and Earth, Dark and Light, Water and Land’ (Tiandi Mingyang Shuilu Yiwen 天地冥陽水陸儀文). The roster of labeled banners is as follows, in arbitrary order: West wall, top row, left to right: 十四主天, 三族?祖, ☐☐☐☐, 南斗. Middle row, right to left: 六甲, 天仙聖母, 中八神仙, 十二院教. Bottom row, left to right: 下八神仙, 四大☐☐, 大師, [empty banner], 雷公電母, 五瘟神. East wall, top row, left to right: 福祿☐三星, 天王, 三皇, 關聖帝君, 二十四主天. Middle row, right to left: 五龍聖母, 上八神仙, ☐☐. Bottom row, left to right: ☐☐☐, ☐☐大王, 十殿閻王, 五道土☐, ☐☐. Another relatively well-preserved, interesting, and photograph-able mural is in the Hall of the Monastery Protector (Qielan Dian 伽藍殿), dedicated to Lord Guan 關公. The murals on the rear wall show the life of the Buddha, taking place among palaces depicted in a strikingly Western style, with buildings that recede backward in single-point perspective. The captions read as follows, not in any specific order: Center and lower part: 耶輪應夢, 佛祖降生, 太子演武, 東門☐☐, 路覩死屍, 初啟出家, 夜半踰城; left side of the wall: 金刀落髮, 車匿辭還, 車匿還宮, 勸請迴宮, 六年苦行, 帝釋獻衣, 天人獻草, 調伏二仙, 船師悔責; right side of the wall: 魔眾拽瓶, 龍宮說法, 急流分斷, 調伏醉象, 竹園精舍, 老人出家, 二商奉養, 金鼓懺悔. The side-walls show what are apparently the ‘Eight Terrors’ (ba nan 八難, Skt. aṣtaghora), a canonical set of eight dangers from which Avalokiteśvara-Guanyin 觀音 rescues the faithful. Other monastery halls, photographable only in part, show ‘thousand Buddhas’ (qianfo 千佛) motifs, or life-sized images of the Heavenly Kings (Tianwang 天王, Skt. Devarāja) and bodhisattvas (pusa 菩薩).

Shanxi Sheng (China); Lingqiu Xian (China); 39.369713; 114.3055

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North China Mural Survey

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0406662

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