Nan Ouyang’s Constructing the Divine Abode of Dizang Bodhisattva: Mount Jiuhua in Late Imperial China (14th to 20th Century) examines the establishment of Mount Jiuhua 九華 in Anhui Province as the earthly residence of Dizang 地藏 Bodhisattva. Dizang had long been revered as the Buddhist savior of the dead from hell, but it was not until the Ming dynasty that the bodhisattva gradually began to be linked to Mount Jiuhua through the identification of the historical figure of Jin Dizang 金地藏 (or Jin Qiaojue 金喬覺)—an itinerant prince-turned monk from the Korean Kingdom of Silla who settled on Mount Jiuhua in the eighth century—as the earthly manifestation of Dizang Bodhisattva. It was the proliferation of this identification and of tales about Jin’s activities on Mount Jiuhua that consolidated the mountain’s fame as Dizang’s divine abode.
The book comprises seven chapters, nine appendices, a bibliography and index. An introductory chapter and a conclusion book-end five illuminating chapters on interconnected topics that invariably revolve around the merged identity of Jin with Dizang across the last six centuries: evolving hagiography cementing Jin’s status as Dizang’s manifestation (chapter 2); Mount Jiuhua’s distinctive clerical cult of mummification, which traces back to memories of Jin Dizang’s self-mummification (chapter 3); the ritual and literary devotion to Dizang of Master Ouyi Zhixu 蕅益智旭 (1599–1655) during his pivotal stay on Mount Jiuhua (chapter 4); local drama featuring popular legends of Jin’s life (chapter 5); and pilgrimage activities on the mountain as seen through written and material culture (chapter 6). The conclusion examines Mount Jiuhua’s place within the greater systems of Buddhist and sacred mountains in China, and closes with its twenty-first-century international renown. Collectively, the chapters situate the making of Mount Jiuhua at the intersection of lay and monastic activities, local and imperial patronage, personal and institutional experiences, and vernacular and elite practices, revealing at every turn the porous boundaries between so-called Buddhism and so-called popular religion. The appendices include tabulations of mummies in Song Biographies of Eminent Monks and on Mount Jiuhua, transcriptions and translations of select textual sources, and a critical examination of the designation of Four Great Mountains (sida mingshan 四大名山). By attending to a diverse array of literary, visual, and material sources, the book presents a compelling framework for the study of a sacred mountain. A careful reader of Ouyang’s ample translations of primary source texts and close analyses of a wide range of materials will be rewarded with the rich texture and flavor of Mount Jiuhua’s pilgrimage culture.
The introduction opens with an incident that took place in Xuanzang Monastery in Mount Jiuhua Park in the city of Nanjing in 2022. Spirit tablets bearing the names of Japanese war criminals enshrined at Dizang hall triggered intense public outcry on social media in what the author describes as a clash between the Buddhist devotional practice of the laywoman Wu Aping, who had donated money to the monastery to install the tablets in order to “assuage her anxiety and sorrow for the victims of the war,” and the nationalism of netizens who were also still reeling from the atrocities of the Nanjing Massacre. The author then introduces how the history of Dizang and Mount Jiuhua, both namesakes of the temple and its locale, was implicated in the incident far from the mountain. At this point, the anecdote seems to require elaboration. Dizang’s universal compassion notwithstanding, how might Wu Aping have understood appealing to the bodhisattva’s aid on behalf of the war criminals as alleviating suffering on behalf of the massacred, within principles of Buddhist devotion? How does the practice of erecting spirit tablets function within the religious and economic activities of the monastery and for lay individuals, and does it relate to other activities surrounding the cult of Dizang, both in 2022 and in the past, both on and off the original Mount Jiuhua? When and why were the temple grounds named Mount Jiuhua Park?
The unresolved cross-temporal, cross-medial, and cross-spatial connections between the 2022 incident and the rest of the book reflect both a key strength and weakness of the entire project. Ouyang lays bare the ways in which everyday life is woven into the cult of a sacred mountain by engaging widely with historical and contemporary sources, but fails at times to devote enough attention to the historical contexts behind the creation of the sources so that the reader can critically engage with the materials and grapple with their historicity. In other words, Ouyang often relies on the broad-strokes chronology of Chinese dynastic periodization to assert that objects and stories help to promote the Dizang cult and affirm Mount Jiuhua’s status as Dizang’s divine abode, rather than examining the particular historical moments for the creation and circulation of the objects and stories to illuminate exactly how and why they did so. Zooming out from the mountain, were there competing abodes for or emanations of Dizang elsewhere and at other times through another set of promotional objects and activities, as in the case of Mount Wutai and Mañjuśrī?
Historicity is at the heart of the conflation of Jin with Dizang bodhisattva. In chapter 2, the author culls from a range of sources (biographies, gazetteers, stele inscriptions, folktales, and a widely circulated pictorial album) from the Tang to the Republican periods to reveal the continuously evolving narratives of Jin Dizang. Through translations and thorough textual comparisons, Ouyang shows that while stories of Jin on Mount Jiuhua circulated in the Tang and Song, it was not until the Ming and Qing that Jin became recognized as Dizang Bodhisattva’s manifestation or reincarnation (the two terms are used interchangeably throughout the book); that narrative became “standardized” only in the Republican era through efforts of elite practitioners. The careful comparison of sources reveals what can be best understood as a Ming invention, rather than the recovery of what “fell into oblivion” for seven centuries (11–12, 59, 60) per the author’s repeated characterization. Likewise, if a unified story of Jin only cohered in the 1930s, might the study be reframed as a Republican-era reinvention of Mount Jiuhua built on the authoritative potential of earlier stories and materials? Many of the surviving texts and stele inscriptions examined throughout the book are in fact nineteenth- and twentieth-century compilations or iterations even as they claim to record Ming history; a passing reference in the conclusion of chapter 4 and a footnote in the conclusion cite Yinguang 印光’s 1939 gazetteer as Mount Jiuhua’s first and only gazetteer written from a Buddhist perspective (96, 144), raising further questions about the use of later sources to account for an earlier history.
There is an uncanny parallel between the way history is “remembered” retrospectively and the process by which mummies are “discovered” postmortem on Mount Jiuhua. As the author notes, it is the process of mummification through which monks who were otherwise little-known or anonymous in their lifetime—from Jin Dizang and Wuxia to the later mummies—gained fame and recognition (72). That Jin’s mummy, or memories of it, brought prestige, imperial sponsorship, monastic renovation, and copycat replications means, for the author, that it was the “ordinary clerics” who did the discovering, enshrining, and mummifying that contributed to the fame of the mountain (51, 52, 72). But while Ouyang provides us with a list of mummies in two appendices spanning the 14 centuries from the Tang dynasty to the present day, she does not tell us much about who the ordinary clerics behind the mummies were. Appendix 2 lists the mummy of a nun (Renyi 仁義), which raises questions about the status of female clerics and nunneries on the mountain.
The chapter that offers the most satisfying historical contexts focuses on a single individual within a short span of 2 years. Chapter 4, dedicated to the prolific master Ouyi Zhixu’s 1636–1637 stay at Mount Jiuhua, looks closely at votive prayers, ritual manuals, fundraising petitions, letters, and poetry he composed and compiled on the mountain. Using these sources, Ouyang reconstructs in great detail Zhixu’s devotional practices to Dizang; his interaction with an extensive local network of monastic and lay community during and beyond his sojourn; and his own versatile and transformed relationship to the written word (76). By detailing the activities, Ouyang paints a vivid picture of Zhixu’s lasting legacy.
Still and all, what precisely, besides the proliferation of tales, promotion of Jin’s mummy, and imperial patronage, instigated Mount Jiuhua’s “revival” and attracted Zhixu to it in the first place? Ouyang pinpoints the Wanli reign period (1572/3–1620) as the time when monasteries on Mount Jiuhua first began to flourish, citing a policy proposal written in the 1590s by county magistrate Cai Lisheng 蔡立身. Cai complained of traffic on the mountain, likening pilgrims from “Zhejiang or Huizhou 徽州 in the south or Shanxi and Shaanxi 陝西 in the north” to “swarms of ants” (117–18). Did other factors, such as the rise of Huizhou merchants during the same period, contribute to wealth on the mountain?
Given the author’s focus on the materiality of pilgrimage, the book’s images, such as photographs of key sites, the earthenware vats used for mummification, the assortment of talismans and underworld passes, and a page from Dianshizhai Pictorial showing pilgrimage to Mount Jiuhua, greatly enhance the argumentation. However, it is regrettable that more images are not shown from the photographic archive the author must have amassed through fieldwork. Most sorely missed are pictures from the illustrated album by Master Hongyi 弘一and Lu Shihou 盧世侯 published in 1933, which Ouyang captivatingly describes in an entire section devoted to the album (37–43). In conjunction with the analysis of the album, a closer look at Master Hongyi and Lu Shihou’s collaboration and devotion to Dizang would have illuminated the ways in which Jin Dizang became canonized.
The lack of images and further analyses of them also represent a missed opportunity to delve into the key identifying feature of Jin’s identity as a prince-turned monk from Silla—or mistakenly Siam in later sources, since the similarity of the Chinese names for Silla—Xinluo 新羅—and Siam—Xianluo 暹羅—often caused confusion. In off-handed remarks, Ouyang notes the album’s attempt to accentuate Jin’s foreignness (40), and how Jin’s foreign descent added “credibility to his religious commitment” (105), yet she does not address what it meant for writers, artists, performers, and devotees to imagine Jin as a member of Silla or Siam royalty. Does Jin’s alien (albeit not Indic) origin reflect the exotic allure of an accomplished being from afar, or the sincerity of a far-flung pilgrim? Was Silla considered at any point to be a new locus of Buddhism? Did Jin’s arrival from overseas also signal a claim of Mount Jiuhua’s cosmopolitanism? Did the connection impact religious practice in Silla, or bring Korean pilgrims to Jiuhua before the twenty-first century, when the author notes their prevalence (150)? How does the foreign origin play into the theme of localization that is also central to the book?
Constructing the Divine Abode of Dizang Bodhisattva presents a trove of materials from which readers can explore many more such questions. While the book focuses on the multifaceted promotion of Mount Jiuhua, every chapter brings out a constellation of issues in Buddhism and Chinese religions that reaches beyond the mountain. For Ouyang, to locate Dizang’s abode on Mount Jiuhua is also to resituate the study of Chinese Buddhism and ground it in the lived experience of people from all spectrums of society. The many unexpected discoveries of this book inspire us to think in new ways and look in new places to study sacred geography.
