As its title suggests, Mary Anne Cartelli's The Five-Colored Clouds of Mount Wutai: Poems from Dunhuang is a translation and study of poetry about Mount Wutai 五臺山 (literally, “the Mountain of Five Plateaus”) discovered at Dunhuang 敦煌 at the beginning of the last century. For more than thirteen hundred years, this mountain in today's Shanxi 山西 Province in China has been the object of patronage and pilgrimage. In attempting to understand Mount Wutai's construction as a holy place, scholars have relied heavily on material preserved in gazetteers (shanzhi 山志), as well as canonical scriptures. Cartelli's translation and analysis of poetic traditions celebrating the mountain thus constitute an extremely valuable contribution to the field.Footnote ¹

Cartelli divides her text into six main chapters with an introduction and a conclusion. She devotes four of these to the following poem sets: “Wutai shan quzi” 五臺山曲子 (“Songs of Mount Wutai”), “Wutai shan zan” 五臺山讚 (“Eulogy on Mount Wutai”), “Wutai shan zanwen” 五臺山讚文 (“Eulogy on Mount Wutai”), and “Wutai shan shengjing zan” 五臺山聖境讚 (“Eulogy on the holy regions of Mount Wutai”). Cartelli interprets the poetry she translates through a close reading of a wide range of other textual and visual sources related to the locale. The author's familiarity with the legends about this place compiled between the late seventh century and the early Qing (1644–1911) is impressive. Drawing on materials that both predate and long postdate the poems' compilation and first circulation, Cartelli deftly unpacks each reference in the poems and provides a rich sense of the imagining of the mountain shaping and shaped by the poetry she first examined in her 1999 Columbia University PhD dissertation.

Both the poetry and the better-known accounts of Mount Wutai with which they are connected, according to Cartelli, stress Mount Wutai's status as a territory rendered sacred by the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī's (Wenshupusa 文殊菩薩) residence there. The poems are replete with references to the fragrant incense, unusual light, mysterious bells, and five-colored clouds that purportedly signal the deity's presence on these peaks. These materials, Cartelli shows, frequently allude to historical figures, key places of practice, and well-known legends set at the mountain. The Pure Land cleric Fazhao 法照 (eighth century), for instance, figures prominently in the “Eulogy on Mount Wutai” (pp. 129–54), and the Buddha Radiance Temple (Foguangsi 佛光寺) and Vajra Grotto (Jingangku 金剛窟)—sites mentioned in the first gazetteer devoted to the mountain—are named in the second “Eulogy on Mount Wutai” (p. 98) and “Eulogy on the holy regions of Mount Wutai” (p. 165) respectively. While like “the great variety of styles and language used in the poems,” the range of the poems' subject matter presumably stems in part from the diversity of their authors and audiences (p. 201), reading Cartelli's beautiful translations and commentary one wishes that she might have said a little more about what was at stake in differently representing the territory's significance.Footnote ²

Surrounding these core chapters, The Five-Colored Clouds of Mount Wutai includes an introduction and conclusion, as well as a chapter devoted to Mount Wutai generally, “The Clear and Cold” (chapter 2), and “Word and Image” (chapter 7). The former offers a concise discussion of the site as it is presented in early legends, scripture, and poetry. The latter puts the translated poetry in conversation with visual sources preserved at Dunhuang. While Cartelli might have included more references to the extensive body of secondary scholarship on Mount Wutai in the body of the text, the bibliography—like The Five-Colored Clouds of Mount Wutai itself—is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of Buddhist studies, Tang history, Chinese literature, art history, and sacred place.