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Willams: Seeing through Images 75
Monastery Stele, which includes revisions to the Japanese edition by the
author and further annotations by P. A. Herbert.
17. On Sengchou’s life and his influence in the sixth and early seventh centuries
see McRae, “The Northern School of Chinese Ch’an Buddhism,” pp. 31–50;
and Chen, Monks and Monarchs, pp. 28–29, 151–154, and 170–179.
18. XGSZ (Taishō, vol. 50, no. 2060, p. 548c.15).
19. On Tanqian and his importance and contributions to the Ten Stages
lineages and the Buddhism of this period, see Chen, Monks and Monarchs.
For a translation of the relevant section of Tanqian’s repentance prayer see
pp. 62–63 of this essay and Chen, Monks and Monarchs, p. 96 n. 25.
20. The soteriological dimension derives from the claim that repentance
rituals eliminated not only karma but kleśa, or defilements, as well. On how
advancement on the Buddhist path to liberation was defined largely in
terms of the kleśas eliminated, see, e.g., Collett Cox, “Attainment through
Abandonment: The Sarvāstivādin Path of Removing Defilements,” in
Paths to Liberation: The Mārga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought,
ed. Robert E. Buswell, Jr. and Robert M. Gimello, Kuroda Institute, Studies
in East Asian Buddhism, no. 7 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
1992), pp. 63–105.
21. Daoxuan, in his biography of Lingyu, refers to this cave temple as
the “Jingang xingli zhuchi Naluoyan ku” (), or
“The Cave of Nārāyana Upholder of the Residence of the Power of the
Adamantine Nature”; see Taishō, vol. 50, no. 2060, p. 497b.11–12.
22. This contrasts, of course, with the practice of circumambulating a
stūpa or central image of a buddha or bodhisattva. Here the practitioner
moves clockwise, thereby showing respect to the buddha or bodhisattva
by keeping his or her right shoulder toward the image.
23. All of the images in the cave are identified in the inscription
written above the entrance on the outside; See Lee Yu-min, “Baoshan
Dazhushengku chutan” (, Preliminary Study of the
Tu-chu-sheng Cave at Mt. Pao), Gugong xueshu jikan () 16,
no. 2 (Winter 1998): p. 8. Photographs of these images (only some of the
thirty-five buddhas are represented) are provided in plates 2–20 in Lee,
“Baoshan Dazhushengku chutan,” pp. 43–52. A transcription of the text
accompanying the images of the twenty-four Indian patriarchs is provided
at Lee, “Baoshan Dazhushengku chutan,” p. 42.
Tokiwa Daijō () and his team were the first modern scholars
to investigate Mt. Bao, its inscriptions, and its structures. After they arrived
there on November 30, 1921 they extensively photographed the site and
took rubbings of every inscription. Transcriptions of many of the more
important rubbings were published in Tokiwa Daijō and Sekino Tadashi,