| At the ruinous site of what used to be a Buddhist monastery in Shandong, China, stands a stone pagoda called "Longhuta" with relief sculptures covering its four faces and with Four-Directional Buddha statues enshrined inside its cell surmounted on tiers of Sumeru bases, probably of 8th or 9th century. Generically, the monument is a sarira pagoda that would evoke optical wonders in the medieval eyes. Integrated into the monastic precinct as a venue for contemplative meditations and ritual circumambulations, it cued for intense visualization fossilized in the elaborate relief sculptures and the complex interior/exterior structural design. Donated by lay community to the Buddhist monastery to "pursue the deceased with blessedness" and wish for the well-being of the living, the structure hints at imaginary journeys in and around this "chronotope" that evoked a symbolic cosmos. While mapping out a liminal space mediating between this world and the numinous sphere, it also sublimates and stakes out interests and aspirations of different social groups--monks, aristocrats, and plebeians--in the never-never land. The structure also testifies to the medieval craftsmanship displayed in relief sculptures which internalized other forms of cultural expressions. Describing the multifarious implications of the monument as such is tantamount to running an inventory of the polysemy of the period term "transformation" (bian). The term describes the metamorphosis between life and death and among forms of individual identities, evokes the flux of phenomenal world, and suggests interplay among different social forces. It also describes visual experiences ranging from thaumaturgy to choreography and calligraphy. Moreover, it designates a pictorial/sculptural genre current in Tang China (618-906) to which the relief sculptures on the pagoda belong. The term cuts across disparate cultural spheres; the monument unifies them; the monument suggests diverse cultural experiences, the term captures them all. Thus the case study affords us a closer look at what gives a culture a coherence and cohesion, for all its tensions and diversity. In so doing, it cuts both ways on the methodological scale: holistic organism on the one hand and fragmentary deconstruction on the other, depending which side of the fence one leans. |
