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This paper studies a series of sixth-century Buddhist stone inscriptions on the two slopes of a valley on Mount Hongding in East China. Scholars have made endeavors to unpack the religious denotations and to evaluate the calligraphic skills of the carvings, but a successful reading of the site’s overall visual program is still pending. Tackling this issue, I propose the term “calligraphic sculpture” to reveal the nature of the Mount Hongding carvings.
The four groups of carvings on the northern slope of the valley present the complete presence of the Three Treasures: Buddha, the teachings, and the community of monks. With their great variation of scales—from a few centimeters tall to more than one and a half meters tall— the carved characters offer visitors a total experience of reading steles, learning preaching, contemplating images and worshiping the Buddha. Interacting with the characters, visitors would eventually find that their bodies are inside a semi-closed space demarked by the two inscribed slopes. I argue that the Mount Hongding calligraphic sculptures transform the landscape into a sacred space that offers visitors a total experience similar to that of visiting a Buddhist monastery.
No other cultures have created such calligraphic sculptures. It was in China that Buddhists fused the Western colossal-image-making with the indigenous ‘cliff- polishing’ word-inscribing and fashioned their original religious monuments. Whether it is a Buddhist conquest of China or a Chinese conquest of Buddhism is the least relevant, as we now understand more what the region meant in that specific context.
Dongshan Zhang
University of Chicago