Making Merit in the Tableau: Early Sixth-Century Chinese Stele

To study the religious sculpted-image stelae of China between the 490s and the 550s, I begin by revisiting the previous studies of Chinese stele, covering the scholarship from the Northern Song Dynasty to the twenty-first century, and dedicated the entire first chapter to the writing of a new historiography—the history of the study of sculpted-image stele as Chinese stele. With this historiography, I propose a new framework of interpretation based on the notion of stele-image duality: the making of merit. The remaining chapters continue to reveal the long-ignored ritual connection between Chinese stele and Buddhist icons—that they have both been employed to facilitate merit-making rituals in Chinese history. The second chapter shows that in the studies of Northern Dynasties sculpted-image stele, the stele by itself should be considered the product of a ritual process during which the Buddhist icons could be properly installed, and a stele as such eventually turns into a tableau of merit producing and transferring. The third chapter shows how certain image makers of the Northern Dynasties relied upon the format of stele to meet their ancestral offering needs. It examines a group of stele made during the Eastern Wei period, which demonstrate strong formal and ritual elements of Buddhist sculpted-image stelae as well as clear features of funerary stelae. These materials present different manners of interaction between the coexisting funerary pictorial space and religious pictorial space. The fourth chapter traces the origin of the sculpted-image stele to the Guyang Mode so as to historicize the process through which the stele-image duality came into being. The dissertation ends by arguing that the form of stele was employed in the Guyang Cave because a social competition took place there in a manner highly comparable to those of the Han Dynasty society.