By the tenth century CE, Mount Wutai had become a major pilgrimage site
within the emerging culture of a distinctively Chinese Buddhism. Famous
as the abode of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī (known for his habit of riding
around the mountain on a lion), the site in northeastern China's Shanxi
Province was transformed from a wild area, long believed by Daoists to
be sacred, into an elaborate complex of Buddhist monasteries.
In Building a Sacred Mountain, Wei-Cheng Lin traces the confluence of
factors that produced this transformation and argues that monastic
architecture, more than texts, icons, relics, or pilgrimages, was the
key to Mount Wutai's emergence as a sacred site. Departing from
traditional architectural scholarship, Lin's interdisciplinary approach
goes beyond the analysis of forms and structures to show how the built
environment can work in tandem with practices and discourses to provide
a space for encountering the divine.
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