Patterns of Time: Pagodas and Relic Deposits in the Lower Yangzi, CA. 900–1100
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| Publicado en: | ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (2025) |
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ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
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| Acceso en línea: | Citation/Abstract Full Text - PDF |
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| Resumen: | This dissertation uncovers the close connections between Buddhist relic pagodas and concepts of time during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Its focus is on the Lower Yangzi region surrounding the city Hangzhou, in southeastern China. Throughout this period, Lower Yangzi pagodas were at the center of widespread changes in social life and building practices, as monks and laypeople began to collaborate closely on the construction of pagodas and deposited large collections of offerings inside them. Since the mid-twentieth century, excavations of more than twenty pagodas have uncovered thousands of these offerings—statues, books, mirrors, and jewelry—hundreds of which bear inscriptions. Many of these inscriptions engagingly record the concerns of those involved in the building of pagodas and relic deposits, revealing otherwise unattested concepts of time. In examining these inscriptions, the objects on which they are inscribed, and the architecture of relic pagodas, I argue that relic pagodas became sites where the monks and laypeople of the Lower Yangzi region deployed two distinct “patterns of time”—dynastic and karmic. On one hand, pagodas were understood as sites with histories that overlapped with Chinese dynasties. In this time frame, the building or repair of a pagoda constituted a historical event to be placed in a narrative of dynastic transition. On the other hand, pagodas were also taken as nodes within a system of causes and effects, or karma. In this time frame, people regarded a pagoda not as a dynastic event, but as a point of karmic connection that extended into past and future lives. To acknowledge that these two frames intersected at pagodas, I show, allows us to reconsider these buildings as the temporally dynamic entities that they are known to have been socially. |
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| ISBN: | 9798280760035 |
| Fuente: | ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global |