| The dissertation explores Chinese visions of saintliness and cultic practices based on the group of Buddha's eminent disciples, called "arhats" (Ch. luohan), from the seventh through the thirteenth centuries. According to Indian Buddhist legend, the Buddha Sakyamuni, concerned about the fate of the Buddha-Dharma after his final nirvan&dotbelow;a , commanded sixteen of his disciples to prolong their life spans and stay in this world as guardians of faithful Buddhists until the arrival of the next Buddha, Maitreya. When medieval Chinese first learned about this legend, their knowledge of the arhat disciples was limited. Consequently, they recreated new identities for the arhats, based on culturally available paradigms of Chinese sainthood. As a result, in China, the Indian arhats became paragons of Confucian virtue, friends of immortals, compassionate bodhisattvas, eminent monks, and divine bestowers of long life, rain and children.; Instead of treating the cult of the arhats as a quintessentially Buddhist phenomenon, I locate it within the larger Chinese religious landscape, through studying both standard Buddhist sources and materials outside of Buddhism, such as literati writings, local gazetteers, art catalogues, images, maps, miracle tales and ritual texts. Each chapter of the dissertation focuses on a different aspect of the cult of the arhats in medieval China. These include arhat legends in the Buddhist canon, arhat images, sacred mountain sites, religious architecture dedicated to arhats, and the development of the arhat invitation ritual. |
